Devastating fires had been a recurring horror in Japanese cities since time immemorial. The worst of all was the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake and fire, which had destroyed 700,000 buildings and killed more than 100,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama—but there had been several others only marginally less severe in the years leading up to the Pacific War. Like every other big Japanese city, Tokyo was a tinderbox. Commercial buildings and factories were surrounded by densely built residential districts. Houses were built of wood, paper, and thin plaster walls, with floors covered by straw mats. Many were still lit by kerosene lamps and paper lanterns, and cooking was done over open charcoal fires. Flammable gas was piped through shallow and easily disrupted gas mains, and electricity was transmitted through low-slung power lines. For all of that, Japanese firefighting brigades were undermanned and ill-equipped, and organized into sclerotic local outfits. The war had further weakened them by drafting the fittest and youngest men out of their ranks. Most firefighters still on the job in 1945 were older men, past their prime, and their numbers were far short of what would be needed in a major emergency.
With B-29s appearing regularly in Japanese airspace, the authorities redoubled their emphasis on civil defense preparations. Citizens were required to take solemn oaths promising to “follow orders, refrain from selfish conduct, and cooperate with one another in air defense.”20 All were required to carry gas masks and padded cloth hoods to protect them against sparks and falling debris. Every household was obliged to keep a steel bucket of sand, a ladder, two shovels, tanks of water, mops, and wet blankets. Community councils organized efforts to dig trenches and backyard bomb shelters. Inspections and drills could occur at any time, even in the middle of the night. The director of Ueno Park Zoo ordered that lions, tigers, and other large predators be euthanized, lest an air raid destroy their enclosures and set them loose in the streets of Tokyo. Students drilled in their schoolyards. Younger children learned the routines by singing and clapping with their teachers:
Air Raid. Air raid. Here comes an air raid! Red! Red! Incendiary bomb!
Run! Run! Get mattress and sand!
Air Raid. Air raid. Here comes an air raid! Black! Black! Here come the bombs!
Cover your ears! Close your eyes!21
Resentment grew as drills and inspections become more frequent and intrusive. Civil defense routines sapped people’s energy at a time when many were not getting enough to eat. A disgusted Japanese woman said, “Running uphill with pails of water seemed to me a silly and tedious way to fight a war.”22 Every third or fourth night, air-raid sirens called them out of their futon beds to sit in dank, subterranean air-raid shelters. The shelters, dug by civilians wielding picks and shovels, were cramped and poorly constructed, often without lighting or even seating. If there was any rain at all, they flooded. False alarms were common, and when the sirens and wooden clackers started up, people were inclined to pull a pillow over their heads and ignore them. Noncompliance spread even as the threat of air raids grew.
In late 1943, the regime had begun promoting the idea that noncombatants and nonessential workers should evacuate the cities. Mass evacuation was a partial solution to the danger of air raids, but also a means to relieve pressures on mass transit, and to ease the logistical problem of importing food from rural areas. The campaign began with public service messages encouraging the very old, the very young, the pregnant, and the physically infirm—anyone who was not actively contributing to the war effort—to move in with their country cousins. According to the Cabinet Board of Information, in an official statement of December 1943: “Urban evacuation does not mean only fleeing and dispersion from the city,” but was a “positive contribution toward strengthening our fighting power.”23 Those working in munitions factories or other jobs deemed essential to the war effort were not permitted to go, unless entire factories were relocated, in which case workers were compelled to move with their employers and fellow employees. Special “evacuation trains” were run out of Tokyo, full of morose-looking urbanites carrying whatever worldly goods they could manage and leaving everything else behind.
Children were evacuated from cities on a voluntary basis beginning in early 1943, but in December 1943, the Japanese Ministry of Education stepped up pressure on urban schools and parents to send all primary school students to rural areas. On June 30, 1944, as the Americans invaded Saipan, the government announced the compulsory evacuation of 350,000 children from a dozen of the nation’s largest cities. They were resettled in country inns, meeting halls, Buddhist monasteries, and abandoned resorts.24 As the B-29 raids began in November, entire schools left the cities under the supervision of their teachers, on trains bedecked with Rising Sun flags, while their parents bid good-bye from the platforms. Arriving at their destinations, the children were quartered in overcrowded dormitories, with twenty-four-hour-a-day communal living and working arrangements. Allotted rations were often insufficient, and the children grew emaciated and malnourished. A teacher who accompanied her students from Tokyo to Nagano recalled, “It was pitiful to see the children lament when they took off the covers of their lunch boxes, to find them only half full.”25 To supplement their meager diet, they were sent out to forage for wild food, much of it barely edible: weeds and bracken ferns, dandelion greens, bamboo shoots, bog rhubarb, persimmons, chickweed, mugwort, and dropwort. They hunted frogs and snakes to be skinned and roasted. They fished local streams for freshwater shrimp, carp, and loaches. They ate grasshoppers, sparrows, snails, and beetles sautéed in oil. By the end of the war, according to a government medical report, evacuated children were consuming an average of 1,000 calories per day, far short of their minimal dietary requirements.26
The daily routines were strictly regimented, with classroom instruction and hours of hard physical labor. Students wore military uniforms and marched in ranks behind their teachers. Those of lower “rank” were required to salute their superiors, and all could be promoted or demoted according to their performance, attitude, personal bearing, and obedience to orders. They attended send-off ceremonies for departing servicemen and kamikaze pilots, sent letters and “comfort” packages to servicemen overseas, and greeted the returning ashes of fallen Japanese soldiers and sailors.
As the war progressed, evacuated children spent less time in the classrooms and more contributing to the war effort. In September 1944, Prime Minister Koiso announced a total mobilization of the population: “Facing this grave situation, we cannot permit even one idle person or one spectator within the country regardless of age and sex. . . . Every Japanese is a soldier.”27 An edict issued by the regime ruled that work in the factories was “equal to education,” but by 1945 the factory managers were beset with absenteeism, and demanded that their child workers spend more hours on the job. Children as young as eight were put to work in munitions factories. Others were detached as farmhands to help harvest crops. In forested areas, legions of children went out to gather pine cones for the improbable purpose of converting pine oil to aviation fuel. By the end of the war, some 3.4 million students had been mobilized, and many were getting no more than an hour of traditional classroom study per day.28 “We no longer had many classes at school,” recalled Hideo Sato, an evacuated sixth grader in Ibaragi Prefecture. “The main thing we did was dig an antitank ditch in the corner of the schoolyard.” It was an onerous task, especially for children, who did not have the strength to haul much earth. “It took three days to hollow out a single foxhole deep enough so that when the teacher jumped in, it would be over his head. We were assigned the task in groups, and each group was responsible for completing theirs.”29
In this isolated and confined rural environment, the children were told only what the Ministry of Education decreed that they should be told. Teachers were monitored for any sign of defeatism. In late 1944, a new “National Defense Thought Drive” aimed to ensure that “those entrusted with the mission of education have resolved that they will firmly maintain a conviction of certain victory and devote them
selves to bolstering the fighting spirit.”30 Evacuated children were required to keep diaries, both to practice their writing skills and to record their innermost thoughts and feelings. The diaries were submitted to the teachers, who graded them based upon conventional measures of grammar, diction, calligraphy, and writing style, but also upon the sincerity and ardor of their sentiments. Mihoko Nakane, a nine-year-old girl whose entire primary school was evacuated from Tokyo to Toyama Prefecture in 1945, often expressed a wholehearted desire to learn, to improve, and to please her teachers. In her diary she pledged to be a “good child,” or an “even better good child,” and to do her best to “become a splendid citizen.” Mihoko’s enthusiasm was irrepressible, whether she was gathering firewood, completing a “fun” training march, foraging for wild mugwort, seeing off new army recruits, singing war songs, or honoring the spirits of returning war dead: “It was a truly sad affair. . . . I really feel grateful to them.” She recorded her obligatory hostility toward the enemy: “Hateful, hateful Americans and English! How hateful the Americans and English are! That’s what I thought.” Mihoko never complained about her meager rations, even when they were infested with weevils, and often recorded that her lunch or dinner was “really delicious.” When she was promoted to the rank of squad leader, she was mindful of her grave duty: “Because of this, I want all the more to be a good child and to act like a squad leader.”31
Innocent, trusting, and adaptable by nature, children tended to maintain their zeal for the war even as their parents and teachers grew disillusioned. They did not expect to eat well because they could not remember a time when they had not been hungry. They did not mind working in munitions plants because the experience was a novelty, and provided a relief from tedious classroom routines. Producing weapons for the war effort made them feel important. Gathering pine cones for aviation fuel gave them the sense that they were personally helping to lift the Japanese warplanes that flew overhead. Those who worked in the balloon bomb factories were told enthralling stories of how their creations would soar around the earth to smite the demonic Americans. They enjoyed the pageantry of the war, the singing and marching, the invitation to trample and spit on American and British flags, the monthly reading of the Imperial Rescript on Education, and the group calisthenics each morning, when they all stripped to the waist (girls included) and chanted: “Annihilate America and England! One-Two-Three-Four! Annihilate America and England! One-Two-Three-Four!”32 They were the last to suspect that the glorious victories reported on the radio were fabrications.
“I was born in war,” Hideo Sato explained in an oral history recorded half a century later. “Boys like war. War can become the material for play. . . . It almost becomes a sport. It’s just an extension of naughty games they all play anyway.” He was eleven years old when his class was evacuated to Ibaragi Prefecture. They were put to work on an airfield that was repeatedly attacked by American carrier planes. Hideo and his classmates were thrilled whenever the Hellcats and Corsairs arrived, and tried to prove their courage by standing erect without flinching for as long as they could stand it:
If you were watching, you might be able to roll away and escape at the last moment. The plane comes in low, a cannon on each wing, right toward you, at enormous speed, but still it takes time. You can tell if they’re aiming at you. Then you see sparks fly. The sound comes afterwards. You learn to judge from experience the angle of the sparks. When they flash at forty-five degrees, they’re most dangerous. Then you closed your eyes instinctively. They often called it strafing, but it wasn’t with machine guns. They were machine cannons, twenty millimeters, and they had explosives in each shell. It wasn’t like in the movies, when you see those little puffs of smoke. Across the rice paddies the dirt flew up, and at the root sparks shot up, and explosions went off, “Boom!-boom!-boom! boom!-boom!”
The instant you knew they’d missed, you’d stand up and start running. They were so low that the pilot sometimes opened his cockpit window and leaned out—American pilots, looking out at us, wearing airplane goggles. I even waved at them. This happened to me more than ten times.33
In line with Prime Minister Koiso’s national policy to “Arm the 100 Million,” evacuated children were trained in hand-to-hand combat, so that they could do their part in the looming battle for the homeland. Mihoko Nakane, the nine-year-old evacuee in Toyama, described this “spiritual training” with her usual brio: “It was lots and lots of fun.” Her class trained with spears, wooden swords, and mock grenades. The drills were interspersed with their ordinary recreational routines, such as dodgeball, piggyback rides, war songs, and scavenger hunts. The children stripped to their underwear and put on Rising Sun headbands. In a “hand grenade-throwing class,” they threw small balls at a large ball, which was said to represent an enemy soldier’s head. Then they trained with wooden swords: “We faked to the left and faked to the right.” While Mihoko practiced thrusting with a bamboo spear, her teacher shouted, “Spear them! Spear them!” Later she told her diary: “It was really fun. I was tired, but I realized that even one person can kill a lot of the enemy.”34
EIGHT MONTHS AFTER ITS RECAPTURE, Guam was home to 200,000 American servicemen, 24,000 Guamian civilians, and untold hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Japanese stragglers hiding out in the jungle. A list of major construction projects underway in February and March 1945 filled six pages of small print in the Guam Island Commander’s war diary.35 Seabees of the Fifth Naval Construction Brigade were widening and extending the roads, improving the seaport, and installing a power, water, and sanitation infrastructure worthy of a major American city. Apra Harbor had been expanded with pontoon jetties, breakwaters, and a 3,900-foot-long causeway, and was now able to handle 265 cargo ships per month—a tenfold increase over its prewar capacity. A new four-lane asphalt highway, the backbone of the island’s road network, ran between Sumay and Agana. Sixteen thousand civilians (mostly Chamorros) were living in three refugee camps along the island’s west coast. The civil affairs department intended to return them to their farms and villages as soon as possible, but a certain amount of rebuilding was required, and Japanese stragglers still posed a security threat in outlying areas.
Guam was nicknamed the “Pacific Supermarket,” and the nickname was well earned. Describing the cavernous arch-ribbed warehouses he found on Orote peninsula, the war correspondent Ernie Pyle had observed: “You could take your pick of K rations or lumber or bombs, and you’d find enough there to feed a city, build one, or blow it up.”36
Most of the U.S. troops on Guam were idle, pending their deployment in forthcoming campaigns, and considerable efforts were made to keep them occupied and entertained. During the month of March 1945, for example, 64 servicemen’s baseball teams played a total of 256 games, and 50 basketball teams played 220 games. The sporting leagues were slickly organized, with professional umpires and referees, colorful uniforms, large wooden scoreboards, and bleachers for spectators. Movies were projected on four hundred different screens each night, to an estimated nightly audience of 80,000. A newspaper, the Island Command Daily Press News, was circulated to more than 100,000 readers. Station WXLI of the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) was on the air nine-and-a-half hours per day. An estimated 30,000 spectators watched a series of exhibition boxing matches between two former middleweight champions, Georgie Abrams and Fred Apostoli. About a dozen USO musical variety troupes were touring the island at any one time; the smash hit Girl Crazy was performed twice a day between March 12 and March 30. Four beaches had been set aside for recreational swimming, with dressing tents and lifeguards; they were visited by an average 4,000 swimmers per day. Major league baseball stars, flown in from the United States, played four exhibition games attended by an estimated 40,000 troops. According to the Red Cross field headquarters, “plans were made for the construction and operation of an 8-operator beauty shop for service women on the island, and four to five bowling establishments for military personnel.”37
In January, after long disc
ussion and study, Admiral Nimitz had approved the expansion of the B-29 airbase development program on Guam. Work was advancing on two enormous airfields on Guam’s rugged northern plateau, North and Northwest Fields, each with two runways and ground facilities for two bombardment wings. By the first week of February, one runway at North Field was in operation, serving 180 Superfortresses of the 314th Bombardment Wing. The second runway had been cleared and partly graded, but was only 50 percent surfaced. Northwest Field was not yet in operation, but bulldozers, steam shovels, concrete mixers, and graders were working around the clock.
The war correspondent John Dos Passos, touring Guam that month, visited a stadium-sized coral pit where steam shovels were loading crushed stone into dump trucks. The workers wore masks against the fine white dust kicked up by the machinery. One told Dos Passos: “They used to load a truck every forty seconds, now it’s every twenty seconds.”38 The seemingly endless column of trucks descended a winding road to the Sumay-Agana highway, drove 4 miles north, and then ascended a series of switchback roads to the “muddy tableland” of Northwest Field. It was well after dark when Dos Passos and his driver arrived, but they found the work proceeding at a vigorous pace. The trucks dumped their loads of crushed rock directly onto the runway bed, and bulldozers immediately began spreading it out. “Scrapers, graders, sheepsfoot rollers, machines we didn’t know the names of, moved evenly behind them. The glistening bodies of the men, dark from the tanning sun, were highlighted with streaks of white dust in the glare of the floodlights.”39
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