The Meiji emperor’s “Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors,” issued in 1882, was Japan’s official code of ethics for military personnel. It was one of two founding documents of Imperial Japan. (The other was the “Imperial Rescript on Education,” 1890). It does not go too far to say that the two Meiji rescripts were tantamount to scripture in World War II–era Japan, and the “Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors” was held to be the singular basis of all Japanese military authority. Every man in uniform was required to memorize and recite it. The most famous line, often quoted in Western histories, is: “Duty is heavier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.” More noteworthy, however, is the following passage, included in the Rescript’s third article:
To be incited by mere impetuosity to violent action cannot be called true valor. The soldier and the sailor should have sound discrimination of right and wrong, cultivate self-possession, and form their plans with deliberation. Never to despise an inferior enemy or fear a superior, but to do one’s duty as soldier or sailor—this is true valor. Those who thus appreciate true valor should in their daily intercourse set gentleness first and aim to win the love and esteem of others. If you affect valor and act with violence, the world will in the end detest you and look upon you as wild beasts. Of this you should take heed.56
For four decades, the soldiers and sailors had taken heed. In wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese forces met and often surpassed the standards of discipline and chivalry prevailing in Western armies. When Japan joined an international coalition to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China (1901), neutral journalists documented the professional conduct of Japanese troops, who were reported to be more conscientious than their Western allies in the treatment of civilians. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), civilians in the combat zone feared the Russians more than the Japanese, and the Japanese met exemplary standards in their treatment of Russian prisoners of war—a fact confirmed by International Red Cross observers. Thereafter, within the span of a single generation, for reasons that are still puzzled over and debated by scholars, Japan’s military culture took an abrupt turn toward the barbarous. By the early 1930s, the behavior of Japanese troops was attracting international notoriety, and the trend only grew worse through the end of the Second World War.
Meiji’s warning thus became prophecy. In throwing away their lives like so many feathers, Iwabuchi’s forces in Manila unshouldered the burden of a mountain. Forsaking the “true valor” prescribed in the rescript, possessing no sound discrimination between right and wrong, the soldiers and sailors abandoned themselves to feral violence against defenseless innocents. And in the end, as Hirohito’s grandfather had foretold, the world came to detest them and to look upon them as wild beasts. As one surviving witness to the Manila atrocities commented afterward, “They were like mad, wild dogs. They were not even human beings—they acted like animals.”57
ACROSS MANILA BAY TO THE WEST loomed the green mountains of Bataan and the low gray lump of land that marked the island of Corregidor. XI Corps was responsible for reclaiming those hallowed territories, and their drive down the Bataan Peninsula had kicked off on February 15. Two strong columns attacked southward along the two coasts of the peninsula, quickly overrunning the inferior Japanese forces in the area. Bataan was secured in a week. On heavily fortified Corregidor, a garrison of about 6,000 Japanese troops held out stubbornly under a rain of naval shells and bombs dropped from the air. The 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment dropped on the western heights of the island, on the peak called “Topside,” and joined up with amphibious troops landing on the east coast near the mouth of Malinta Tunnel. The defenders put up a typically desperate to-the-last-man fight, demolishing the tunnels as they retreated further into the interior of “the Rock.” The island was declared secured on February 28, but there remained hundreds of holdouts and stragglers to be hunted down.
On March 2, MacArthur collected a delegation of officers who had left Corregidor with him in March 1942. For the sake of tradition, they crossed Manila Bay in a flotilla of new navy PT-boats. Accompanied by reporters and newsreel crews, they climbed the rock to “Topside” for an emotional flag-raising ceremony. Colonel Jones of the 503rd Parachute Infantry saluted MacArthur and said, “Sir, I present to you Fortress Corregidor.”
Many more months would be required to complete the conquest of Luzon, a large and mountainous island. From his mountain headquarters at Baguio, 150 miles north of the capital, General Yamashita told Japanese press correspondents that the fight for Luzon was still in “merely the initial phase of the operations.” The Americans, he said, had suffered 70,000 casualties. (The actual number at that point was about 22,000.) MacArthur had not yet come to grips with the main strength of his forces on the island. “It was and remains our deliberate strategy to lure the American landing troops into the Central Luzon plains and the Manila area, and then to bleed them from many sides,” Yamashita told the Japanese newsmen. “Thus, the fighting on Luzon is going wholly according to our plans.”58
This was standard-issue propaganda, but it was true that the great bulk of Japanese forces on the island—and throughout the rest of the Philippines—were still at large. Yamashita had avoided a reprise of MacArthur’s strategic blunders of 1941–1942, when the defenders had waged an untenable battle on the plains while failing to make adequate preparations for a siege until it was too late. In the earlier campaign, the American-Filipino army had been forced to surrender Bataan less than four months after the Japanese invasion at Lingayen Gulf. Three years later, when the tables were turned, the core of Yamashita’s Shobo Group held out in Luzon’s northern mountains for more than eight months, until Japan’s official surrender in August 1945.
Krueger’s Sixth Army attacked north and east in three simultaneous offensives—I Corps toward the Cagayan Valley and Yamashita’s redoubt at Baguio, XI Corps to the Sierra Madre range east of Manila, and XIV Corps to the island’s southeast provinces. Pressure on the remaining pockets of Japanese resistance was unrelenting. U.S. forces made full use of their superiority in air power, artillery, tanks, mobility, field engineering, and logistics. Filipino guerilla units provided valuable intelligence concerning the locations, numbers, armament, and even the plans of Japanese forces. Yamashita gradually lost touch with his subordinates in other parts of the island. On May 23, the 25th Division broke through a strategic chokepoint at Balete Pass and poured up the Cagayan Valley.
During those same months, without authorization from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, MacArthur ordered a series of smaller amphibious invasions to recapture islands to the south. On February 28, elements of the Eighth Army landed on Palawan Island, quickly driving the Japanese into inaccessible mountains. A landing on Mindanao followed on April 17, followed by smaller landings on Panay, Cebu, Negros, and smaller islands to the south. Casualties were minimal, as Japanese forces generally retreated into mountainous terrain and then wasted away for lack of provisions and support. Surviving Japanese troops dispersed into the backcountry, roaming around in small bands like jungle hoboes, gradually starving or succumbing to tropical diseases. Native guerillas hunted the stragglers, often torturing them to death and mutilating their corpses. Discipline collapsed. Enlisted soldiers turned against their officers. Men fought over food, even to the point of murder and cannibalism. Takamaro Nishihara recalled that a fellow soldier, dying of disease, invited him to prolong his life by eating his buttocks. The starving Nishihara exclaimed that he could never do such a thing, “but I couldn’t take my eyes off the flesh on his rear.”59
A young naval officer, Kiyofumi Kojima, struggled to keep his little squad together in the mountains of Luzon as starvation culled their numbers. He and his men came to fear their fellow Japanese as much as they feared the Filipinos and Americans. “Weak stragglers became the prey of stronger ones. It was horrible. Surrounded, we just wandered in circles in the jungle in worn-out clothes looking for food. Fighting the enemy was the last
thing on our minds.”60 Kojima finally broached the heretical idea of surrendering to the Americans. At first the idea was shouted down by his men, but the intensity of their resistance gradually abated, and at last the survivors acquiesced to the once-unthinkable disgrace. Eight men managed to evade the ferocious Filipino guerillas on their trek to the American lines, where they were taken prisoner and given cigarettes and canned rations.
Observing his captors, Kojima was astounded by their racial and ethnic diversity: “Blond, silver, black, brown, red hair. Blue, green, brown, black eyes. White, black, skin colors of every variety. I was stunned. I realized then that we’d fought against all the peoples of the world. At the same time, I thought, what a funny country America is, all those different kinds of people fighting in the same uniform!”61
On June 28, MacArthur declared the end to the “major phases of the Luzon campaign,” noting that American forces now occupied all the plains, towns, and strategic passes throughout the island: “The entire island of Luzon, embracing 40,420 square miles and a population of 8,000,000, is now liberated.”62 Luzon had been the first battle of the Pacific War in which the U.S. Army had fought at corps strength, with the ability to maneuver across broad expanses of terrain. In other words, the fight for Luzon had been more like the war in Europe than any other chapter of the Pacific War. It was the largest ground campaign in the Pacific, excepting only the Battle of Okinawa, which it rivaled in size. In some respects, MacArthur’s arguments in favor of Luzon had been vindicated—in particular, his points concerning the terrain advantages to an attacker, and the value of allied guerilla units as scouts, spies, saboteurs, and partisan fighters.
In the end, the Japanese lost the great bulk of their forces on Luzon, with only token resistance remaining at the end of the war. Two hundred thousand Japanese troops died on Luzon; just 9,000 were taken prisoner prior to Tokyo’s surrender in August 1945. Only about 40,000 Japanese troops who fought on the island eventually returned to their homeland after the war. Overall, according to Japanese government statistics, the army suffered cumulative losses of 368,700 dead in the Philippines.63 American forces had destroyed nine of Japan’s elite army divisions and reduced another six to a condition in which they could no longer fight effectively. The campaign had caused, directly or indirectly, the destruction of more than 3,000 Japanese airplanes, and had forced the Japanese to adopt kamikaze suicide tactics as their main aerial tactic for the remainder of the war. American combat losses amounted to about 47,000, of whom 10,380 were killed—but casualties to causes other than combat, especially to diseases, ran to 90,400 American servicemen.
Chapter Eleven
IN JUNE 1944, TWO DAYS BEFORE U.S. FORCES HAD STORMED ASHORE ON Saipan, a new commanding general flew into Iwo Jima. Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi was a stout man of medium height, aged fifty-three, with a small, trim moustache. He was one of the star officers of the Japanese army, having distinguished himself in staff jobs and in the field. While serving as military attaché in Washington in 1928–1929, he had mastered English and traveled widely through the United States. He had commanded a cavalry regiment at Nomonhan, Manchuria, during the undeclared war between Japan and Russia in 1938–1939. After 1941, he had served as chief of staff of the South China Expeditionary Force in Canton. More recently, he had transferred to Tokyo to command the Imperial Guard, a prestigious posting that brought him into direct contact with the emperor. His new command gave him dominion over the 109th Division and the Ogasawara Army Corps, which included all garrison forces in the Bonin Islands. Upon his departure from Tokyo, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo had instructed Kuribayashi to “do something similar to what was done on Attu.”1 That amounted to a suicide order: that Kuribayashi must defend the island to the last man.
Iwo Jima was eight desolate square miles of sulfur-volcanic ash, dusty canefields, and rocky cliffs. It was the largest of the barren little islands of the Volcano archipelago, a sub-group of the Bonin Islands. The pork chop–shaped island lay almost directly on the flight line between Saipan and Tokyo, 625 nautical miles north of Saipan and 660 nautical miles south of Japan. Much of its coastline was steeply angled beaches—but instead of sand, the beaches consisted of volcanic cinder that would not support the weight of heavy vehicles. Mt. Suribachi, a dormant volcano rising to a height of 550 feet, anchored the southern point of the island. On the plain north of Suribachi were two working airstrips, Motoyama Airfields No. 1 and No. 2. A third, No. 3, was under construction. To the north, the island widened as the terrain rose in rocky terraces and alternating ridges and ravines to a dome-shaped rock, 350 feet above sea level, called the Motoyama Plateau. Everywhere on the island, sulfur festered just beneath the ground, and steam vents brought geothermal heat and gases to the surface. It was a dark, desolate, evil-smelling place, but it was the only island in the region with terrain suitable for airfields to accommodate heavy bombers such as the B-29. That made Iwo Jima a prize worth possessing, and Kuribayashi decided to establish his headquarters here, rather than on the more populous and pleasant island of Chichi Jima, which lay 168 miles north.
Immediately upon his arrival, General Kuribayashi toured the island on foot, carrying a wooden walking staff and a canteen slung over his shoulder. At the southern edge of Airfield No. 1, just inland of the beaches, he lay prone on the ground and sighted along his wooden staff, as if it was a rifle. He told his aide-de-camp, Major Yoshitaka Horie, to approach from different directions. Kuribayashi then diagramed the sightlines in a notebook. Within two hours of his arrival, he knew precisely how he would arrange his forces and construct his defenses. Anticipating that the Americans would possess total naval and air supremacy, the general abandoned any hope of meeting and destroying their amphibious force on the beaches. He would concentrate his troops and artillery well inland, in high rocky ground. His army would burrow deep into caves, tunnels, and subterranean bunkers, firing at the enemy through heavy embrasures, blockhouses, and encasements carved into the rock. Mt. Suribachi would be converted into a fortress, and an independent fighting detachment deployed to guard it. The bulk of his forces would be arrayed to the north, in heavily fortified lines bisecting the island from coast to coast—one between Airfields No. 1 and 2, and the second immediately north of Airfield No. 2. At the top of the Motoyama Plateau would be the Fukkaku Jinchi, the “honeycomb defensive position”—Iwo Jima’s supreme citadel.
That summer, U.S. attacks on the island increased in frequency and severity. Task Force 58 carrier planes struck five times in seven weeks. As B-24 bombers began operating from Saipan, they commenced regular “milk runs” over Iwo Jima; eventually, in late 1944, they began visiting the island every day. Japanese cargo ships and troop transports, attempting to bring supplies and reinforcements from the homeland, were intercepted by American submarines. In July, a U.S. cruiser-destroyer task force appeared in the offing and rained 8-inch and 5-inch naval projectiles down on the island. Planes were demolished on the ground; tents were shredded; the headquarters buildings and barracks were leveled. “There was nothing we could do, there was no way in which we could strike back,” recalled a pilot whose Zero was destroyed on the ground. “The men screamed and cursed and shouted, they shook their fists and swore revenge, and too many of them fell to the ground, their threats choking on the blood which bubbled through great gashes in their throats.”2
Kuribayashi was the ranking officer on the island, but army and navy personnel lived in separate camps, and the interservice politics were as contentious as ever. Naval commanders haggled brazenly with Kuribayashi’s headquarters for allocations of food, water, and other supplies. Shortages grew more severe as reinforcements arrived and the size of the garrison swelled. When Kuribayashi arrived in June 1944, there were 6,000 military personnel on the island; nine months later, when the Americans landed, there were almost four times that number. The most pressing issue was water. Digging wells was pointless, because the ground water was salty and sulfurous: the soldiers called it “devil water
” or “death water.”3 Cisterns collected rainwater, but not nearly enough to meet the needs of 20,000 men. Thirsty men drank directly from puddles on the ground, a practice that caused outbreaks of paratyphoid and dysentery. Rationing was strict. Bottles were shipped in from Chichi Jima on wooden barges, and the empty bottles shipped back to be refilled. Kuribayashi set an example for his men by shaving, washing his face, and brushing his teeth with a single cup of water.4
Naval officers on the island, backed by their superiors in Tokyo, argued for a “waterline defense” strategy. They wanted to build a chain of 250 to 300 pillboxes around the perimeter of the No. 1 Airfield, with the hope of repelling an American invasion on the beach. The navy would ship the needed construction materials and weapons from Japan, including cement, steel-reinforcing rods, dynamite, machine guns, and ammunition. The waterline defense scheme was at odds with Kuribayashi’s preferred defense-in-depth strategy, but the general badly wanted the materials and arms, so he hesitated to overrule his navy colleagues. At a command conference in October, he presented his arguments. The Japanese garrison, he said, was solely a ground force. It would be pitted against the enemy’s combined ground forces, air forces, and naval forces. A beach-facing strategy would expose the defenders to overwhelming U.S. naval firepower and aerial bombing, ensuring their early destruction.5 But the naval camp was unmoved. Its offer of construction supplies was contingent on its policy of defending the airfield. If the airfield was not to be defended, the navy would not ship the materials from Japan.
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