The soldiers were required to use condoms to prevent infection. In one year alone, “32.1 million condoms were sent to units stationed outside Japan.” Frank Gibney, an American intelligence officer who later debriefed Japanese POWs, remembered finding a packet of condoms issued by the Japanese army to its soldiers. “On the wrapping of each,” he recalled, “was a picture of a Japanese soldier charging with the bayonet. The caption below read simply Totsugeki—‘Charge!’”
During the Rape of China, every imaginable depravity occurred.
Enomoto-san told me years later:
We ran out of food. We only had these withered seed potatoes. We soaked shoes in water and ate the leather. We could find water, but little food.
We came to an empty village. All the villagers had fled because they were afraid. There was just one woman left in this village. She could speak Japanese. She told me her parents told her to flee. But she told them, “The Japanese people aren’t such bad people.”
This was the enemy zone. And I hadn’t been to a comfort station for three months. So when I saw a woman, the first thing that came to my mind was to rape her. I had no hesitation.
She resisted. But her resistance didn’t affect me. I didn’t listen to her. I didn’t look at her face. I raped her. Then I killed her.
I stabbed her. On television, you see a lot of blood flow out, but that’s not the reality. I’ve cut people with swords, and you’re not covered with blood. It doesn’t splash like you see in movies. If you cut the neck, you see a bit of blood, but it’s not like the films. I don’t know how many people I’ve killed, but I’ve never experienced anything like that. When I killed that woman, I wasn’t covered with blood. There was just a little blood flowing out from her heart.
After I killed her, I thought of eating her. I was thinking of how to feed my soldiers.
I didn’t need much force. It went very smoothly. I used a sharp Chinese kitchen knife. It only took me about ten minutes. I didn’t cut the bones. I just cut where there was a lot of meat—mainly the thighs, bottom, and shoulder. When I cut her up into meat, there wasn’t that much blood.
I took her meat back and gave it to one of my soldiers to cook. If you cut it up into slices, you can’t recognize what sort of meat it is. He didn’t ask where the meat came from. I told them this was a special distribution of food.
We had a barbecue and we ate her meat. There were only a few slices per soldier. There were sixty people in my company. They were happy to have this meat. They said it tasted very good.
CHAPTER SIX
The ABCD Encirclement
Our candid idea at the time was that the Americans, being merchants, would not continue for long with an unprofitable war.
— Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, quoted in Hell in the Pacific
ON Tuesday, September 21, 1937, Japanese airplanes bombed the capital of China, Nanking. Over the next few days, the front-page New York Times headlines reflected the West’s horror:
U.S. SHARP NOTE TO JAPAN “OBJECTS” TO NANKING RAIDS
ATTACKS TERMED ILLEGAL
20 CHINESE CITIES BOMBED; 2,000 CASUALTIES
CIVILIANS VICTIMS
BRITAIN EXPRESSES “HORROR” OF BOMBINGS, TALKS BOYCOTT
LONDON IN PROTEST
ENVOY CITES SLAUGHTER OF NONCOMBATANTS
The accompanying articles denounced Japan’s “campaign of death and terror.” Britain “called the attention of Japan officially to the fact that no nation has a right in law or in morality to bomb crowded cities from the air and so make war indiscriminately upon noncombatants and combatants alike.” For its part, the U.S. State Department dispatched a stiff note to Japan, stating, “This Government holds the view that any general bombing of an extensive area wherein there resides a large populace engaged in peaceful pursuits is unwarranted and contrary to principles of law and of humanity.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull condemned the bombing with these torrid words: “When the methods used in the conduct of these hostilities take the form of ruthless bombing of unfortified localities with the resultant slaughter of civilian populations, and in particular of women and children, public opinion in the US regards such methods as barbarous. Such acts are in violation of the most elementary principles of those standards of humane conduct which have been developed as an essential part of modern civilization.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed the shock of “every civilized man and woman”: “The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women and children, has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.”
In floor debate, senators said the Japanese had committed a “crime against humanity” and were pursuing methods “reminiscent of the cruelties perpetrated by primitive and barbarous nations upon inoffensive people.” A resolution was quickly passed denouncing the “inhuman bombing of civilian populations.”
Soon the entire world, in the form of the League of Nations, had condemned Japan. In a resolution, the League declared that “taking into urgent consideration the question of aerial bombardment by Japanese aircraft of open towns in China, [the League] expresses its profound distress at the loss of life caused to innocent civilians, including great numbers of women and children, as a result of such bombardments, and declares that no excuse can be made for such acts, which have aroused horror and indignation throughout the world, and solemnly condemns them.”
Japan’s reaction was to continue bombing. And why not? The same issues of the New York Times discussing the West’s hand-wringing also revealed that Tokyo was facing all bark and no bite. “What the United States would do if the protest should go unheeded was not revealed,” the Times pointed out. As for the British, “At the moment it is inconceivable that Britain will do more officially than deliver moral protests. Her eyes are firmly fixed on Europe and neither her people nor her government wishes to become embroiled in the Far East.” Intervention was not in the cards. Coincidentally, the American Legion was holding its annual convention in New York. Under the headline “Legion Leaders Draft Program to Keep the Country Out of War,” the Times reported, “While New York took a holiday yesterday to enjoy the spectacle of the American Legion parade, the veterans’ brain-trusters, in hotel rooms far from the rattle of drums and the blare of trumpets, met in little groups to evolve a program to keep the United States out of war and safeguard the democracy they fought to save twenty years ago.” During the preceding April, German planes had shocked the world by bombing and machine-gunning civilians going to market in the historic Basque town of Guernica. Picasso later immortalized the slaughter, but at the time no western power had stepped in. In fact, that same month, one million American college students had shut down campuses across the country in the fourth annual “peace strike” as they recited the American version of the Oxford antiwar oath: “I refuse to support the Government of the United States in any war it may conduct.”
The Japanese agreed that the U.S. didn’t need to conduct war—because through countless slaughters, America had already cobbled together a vast country rich in resources. Now, as proud Hakko Ichiu Spirit Warriors tried to secure additional land and resources for their tiny island country, they resented western carping. Japan felt like a boy who got to the dinner table late only to be told by the gorged adults not to eat so much. League delegate Yosuke Matsuoka admitted that Japan had been “exceedingly annoying” to China. “And what country in its expansion has ever failed to be trying to its neighbors? Ask the American Indian or the Mexican how excruciatingly trying the young United States used to be once upon a time.”
Japan was only trying to escape her “potted-plant” existence and yet, as an exasperated Japanese army general complained, “the U.S., a country two and one-half times as large as Japan prop
er, with a population density of only 31 per square mile to Japan’s 400, was cruelly endeavoring to sever Japan’s roots in order to pursue more fully her own grandiose designs. Why should the U.S., Britain and other powers which had had every opportunity to advance their own vital interests now cry, ‘Thief!’ if Japan even so much as looked at a neighboring territory?”
To the Japanese, the depth of the western Christians’ hypocrisy was breathtaking. Japan was taming her own Wild West as the Americans had theirs: by bringing the light of civilization through divine war against a barbaric enemy. Indeed, even as America criticized Japan, the United States was proudly memorializing the chief ethnic cleansers of its West. As if to mock the defeated natives, Americans were honoring Christian expansion with a memorial carved out of Indian tribal lands. This was Mount Rushmore—a grand tableau honoring white supremacy in the midst of Indian sacred territory, the Black Hills.
The bronze tablet at its base referred to Mount Rushmore as a “pulpit of stone” and proclaimed that the pioneers represented a “new era of civilization brought forth upon this continent.” The Indian holy lands were called “vast wilderness territories,” as if real humans had not been present before the whites arrived. A history of repeated massacres of Indians to steal their lands was sanitized, as the tablet claimed the land was “acquired by treaties . . . where progressive, adventurous Americans spread civilization and Christianity.”
It was a staggering falsehood. In 1868, the U.S. government had judged the Black Hills to be worthless, so they decided this was one place the Indians could live in peace forever. The Treaty of 1868 solemnly promised, “No white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the territory, or without the consent of the Indians to pass through the same.” But within four years, white miners seeking gold were violating the treaty. Rather than enforce the law, the United States sent the army into the Black Hills to make a reconnaissance. This was an armed invasion, and the secretary of war warned of trouble “unless something is done to obtain possession of that section for the white miners who have been strongly attracted there by reports of rich deposits of the precious metal.” Soon the Indians who had been ceded the Black Hills “forever” became “hostile Indians” to the U.S. government and were ordered off their land and into reservations.
In 1876, the federal government told the army to assume control of the Black Hills and to treat all the Indians there as prisoners of war. What, the Indians asked, about the treaty? It was, the government responded, null and void because the Indians had gone to war against the U.S. This was news to the Indians, and Spotted Tail, a Sioux chief, accused the government of broken promises and false words. “This war did not spring up here in our land; this war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land from us without price, and who, in our land, do a great many evil things. . . . This war has come from robbery—from the stealing of our land.”
Teddy Roosevelt disagreed. “The conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind,” he said. “Such conquests are commonly undertaken by . . . a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime, which finds itself face to face with the weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.”
The four presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore had all supported the ethnic cleansing of the Indian. George Washington referred to Indians as “wolves,” Thomas Jefferson had devised the plan to push them over the Rockies, Abraham Lincoln personally took up arms against Indians in Illinois, and Teddy Roosevelt was the top apologist for the rampage. Even the name Mount Rushmore was an affront. Charles Rushmore, a New York lawyer grubbing for mining rights, had put his own name on the sacred hill.
The Japanese knew the earth of America was soaked with Indian blood, the continent haunted by the ghosts of tribes who had been pushed, kicked, raped, and slaughtered. Indeed, the European immigrants had cleansed the continent of Native Americans so efficiently that soon there was no more civilizing left to do. American expansionists then looked to America’s far west, the Pacific. As Teddy Roosevelt’s political mentor New York senator Orville Platt stated, “It is to the oceans that our children must look as we once looked to the boundless west.”
As vice president under William McKinley, then as president in his own right, Teddy Roosevelt had relished the chance to bring Christian civilization to America’s first major colonial possession in the Pacific, the Philippines. “Not one competent witness who has actually known the facts believes the Filipinos capable of self-government at the present,” Roosevelt said. He found it unthinkable to “abandon the Philippines to their own tribes.” To him, the Filipino freedom fighters were “a syndicate of Chinese half-breeds,” and to grant them self-government “would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief.”
Christian intellectuals saw nothing wrong with “helping” Filipinos by denying them freedom. The Literary Digest polled 192 editors of Christian publications and found only three who recommended independence for the Philippines. “Has it ever occurred to you that Jesus was the most imperial of the imperialists?” asked the Missionary Record.
Just three decades before Enomoto-san was taught that the Chinese were beasts, American veterans of the Indian wars sailed off to the Philippines. “We had been taught . . . that the Filipinos were savages no better than our Indians,” an American officer said. When Senator Joseph Burton of Kansas defended the slaughter of Filipinos on the Senate floor as “entirely within the regulations of civilized warfare” by citing earlier massacres of Indians as a precedent, “no one even bothered to respond.”
America would cause the deaths of more than 250,000 Filipinos—men, women, and children—from the beginning of the hostilities on February 4, 1899, to July 4, 1902, when President Roosevelt declared the Philippines “pacified.” That is pretty serious killing. America fought WWII over a period of fifty-six months with approximately 400,000 casualties on all fronts. So Hitler and Tojo combined, with all their mechanized weaponry, killed about the same per month—7,000—as the American “civilizers” did in the Philippines.
The Filipino uprising against their former Spanish masters had been a guerrilla operation, a popular insurgency supported by the civilian population. The brutality of the Spanish response had been one of the American rationales for kicking Spain out in the first place. Now America replaced the oppressor and adopted the same methods—widespread torture, concentration camps, the killing of disarmed prisoners and helpless civilians—but with a ruthlessness that surpassed even that of the Spanish. The majority of Filipinos killed by the American soldiers were civilians. An army circular attempted to assuage any guilt by rationalizing that “it is an inevitable consequence of war that the innocent must generally suffer with the guilty,” and since all natives were treacherous, it was impossible to recognize “the actively bad from only the passively so.”
One American army captain wrote of “one of the prettiest little towns we have passed through”—the people there “desire peace and are friendly to Los Americanos. When we came along this road, the natives that had remained stood along the side of the road, took off their hats, touched their foreheads with their hands. ‘Buenos Dias, Senors’ (means good morning).” The good American boys then proceeded to slaughter the residents and ransack the town.
Anthony Michea of the Third Artillery wrote, “We bombarded a place called Malabon, and then we went in and killed every native we met, men, women and children.” Another soldier described the fun of killing innocent civilians: “This shooting human beings is a ‘hot game,’ and beats rabbit hunting all to pieces. We charged them and such a slaughter you never saw. We killed them like rabbits; hundreds, yes thousands of them. Everyone was crazy.”
“I want no prisoners,” one American general ordered. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will plea
se me.” An officer asked for clarification, “to know the limit of age to respect.” The general replied in writing to kill all those above “ten years of age.”
Corporal Richard O’Brien wrote home about “The Beast of La Nog,” a Captain Fred McDonald who ravished a village by that name. “O’Brien described how his company had gunned down civilians waving white flags because McDonald had ordered ‘take no prisoners.’ Only a beautiful mestizo mother was spared to be repeatedly raped by McDonald and several officers and then turned over to the men for their pleasure.”
Americans back home knew what was happening in the Philippines. Private Joseph Sladen wrote home about a helpless group of enemy fighters his company trapped in the middle of a stream: “‘From then on the fun was fast and furious,’ as dead Filipinos piled up ‘thicker than buffalo chips,’ Sladen recorded. Several western lads informed their dads that ‘picking off niggers in the water’ was ‘more fun than a turkey shoot.’” A soldier from Kingston, New York, wrote his parents a letter that was soon published nationally about the massacre of a thousand civilians in the town of Titatia: “I am probably growing hard-hearted, for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger. Tell all my inquiring friends that I am doing everything I can for Old Glory and for America I love so well.” Letters appeared in American newspapers about American boys “routinely firing on Filipinos carrying white flags.” Soldiers were “ordered to take no prisoners and to kill the wounded.” American soldiers had no qualms about obeying orders to kill POWs. Private Fred Hinchman complained about some newly arrived Yankee soldiers “with about fifty prisoners, who had been taken before they learned how not to take them.”
Killing Filipino POWs was official American policy. Commanders were told that whenever an American soldier was “murdered,” the commander was to “by lot select a POW—preferably one from the village in which the assassination took place—and execute him.” Officers set the example. “Colonel Funston not only ordered the regiment to take no prisoners, but he bragged to reporters that he had personally strung up thirty-five civilians suspected of being insurrectos. Major Edwin Glenn did not even deny the charge that he made forty-seven prisoners kneel and ‘repent of their sins’ before ordering them bayoneted and clubbed to death.”
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