One Man's Justice

by Akira Yoshimura

  Anti-aircraft batteries and searchlight units along the Kanmon Strait coastline had been reinforced in late May, and reports were now coming in that these units were engaging the Superfortresses dropping mines in shipping channels. Two hours after the initial sightings, these bombers seemed to have finished dropping their mines and had turned back south. Around the same time, reports began to come in that the force that had targeted Fukuoka had started to move in a southerly direction. The Superfortresses had clearly completed their mission and were heading back.

  One by one, red lamps went out as the smaller force of intruders headed south from the Kanmon Strait, then joined up again over Hita city with the main force which had ravaged Fukuoka, and changed to a course directly south-east. A short time later the aircraft were detected crossing the line between Hosojima in Miyazaki prefecture and Sukumo in Kochi prefecture. Similar reports followed from the listening-points covering the line between Aojima farther down the Miyazaki coastline and Sukumo over in Shikoku, confirming that the bombers were about to disappear across the Hyuga Sea, heading back toward Saipan.

  Orders were issued to give the ‘all clear’ for all areas of the Kyushu region, and only then was Takuya at last able to leave his desk. The enemy planes were officially recorded as having left Japanese airspace at 3.37 a.m., seven hours and forty minutes after the original intrusion.

  Takuya wanted to see for himself what the situation was outside the confines of the operations room, and the lack of incoming reports meant in effect that he was finished for the night, so there was no reason not to slip away for a short time.

  Delegating the remaining duties to his subordinates, Takuya hurried out of the room and down the dimly lit corridor. The moment he opened the double steel doors he was consumed by a deafening roar. Each breath of the superheated air seemed to scorch the inside of his lungs. Everything on the outside – the trees, the headquarters building, the ground – was bright red. Powerful gusts of wind lashed the branches of trees, and singed leaves danced across the ground.

  Takuya stepped away from the doors and ran a few paces to the edge of the backyard, where he stopped, riveted by the terrifying scene before his eyes. Huge swirling towers of flames reached skyward from a seething conflagration covering an almost endless expanse below him. One thunderous roar followed another, resounding like waves crashing into a cliff, hurling sheets of fire and angry streams of sparks into the night sky. The barracks just to the west of where Takuya stood had been razed, and a frenzied swarm of soldiers were using hoses and buckets to throw water on to the headquarters building. The men were all tinged red, like everything else in this inferno.

  Takuya had heard reports of cities being devastated by incendiaries, but the destruction he was witnessing far surpassed anything he had ever imagined. Like masses of towering whitecaps soaring up from a tempestuous sea, myriad flames pressed upward from the heart of the blaze. His face felt as if it was on fire, and billows of smoke stung his eyes.

  The city contained no military installations or munitions factories, so the purpose of the fire raid could only have been to kill and maim civilians and reduce their dwellings to ashes. The thought flashed through his mind that the scene he was witnessing had been repeated time and again in other cities and towns all over Japan, with innumerable non-combatants sent to their deaths.

  The strength of interceptor fighter units in Kyushu had been dramatically reduced by US bombing attacks on air force facilities in the area, and that night, too, there were no reports of Superfortresses being shot down by fighters, so the anti-aircraft batteries had more or less been left to defend the island’s skies themselves.

  Takuya blinked in pain as he gazed into the sea of flames.

  Dawn came, and reports flooded into the tactical operations centre, outlining the damage in Fukuoka city. The fires had been extinguished by around 6 a.m., but apart from the Tenjin-machi and Hakozaki-machi areas, the entire city centre had been burnt to the ground, with an estimated ten thousand dwellings destroyed in the fires. Early accounts suggested that the death toll would be extremely high.

  Subsequent reports described citizens who had fled during the night returning that morning to survey the smouldering embers of what had been their homes. Later several dozen people had gathered around the front gate of the headquarters complex, clamouring for the execution of the captive airmen. There were said to be a large number of women among the crowd, and some of them had been weeping as they screamed for the crewmen to be killed. No doubt they were infuriated at the thought that the Americans were still alive, safe from the blaze thanks to the fire-fighting efforts of the garrison. While the prisoners might have been afraid of being burnt alive, they also might have felt some kind of satisfaction in knowing that it was their compatriots who were raining death and destruction on the city below.

  Takuya had little difficulty understanding the thinking of the people who had gathered in front of the main gate. The prisoners not only had burnt to death thousands of defenceless old men, women and children, but were now being kept alive with a steady supply of food that the average person in the street could only dream about. Surely there was no reason to let them live any longer.

  ‘What the hell are they up to at headquarters? They should execute them as soon as possible,’ muttered Takuya to himself.

  Medical Officer Haruki’s name was on the list of dead. In conjunction with his work as deputy head doctor at the military hospital adjacent to the headquarters building, he had been given the honorary rank of lieutenant, and he was attending a doctors’ meeting when the air raid started the previous evening. Evidently he had been unable to make it to safety when their building caught fire. The casualty reports also listed the names of several non-commissioned officers and numerous enlisted men and civilian employees working at headquarters. Word also came in of family members of headquarters staff killed in the firestorms that had ravaged the city’s residential areas.

  Takuya could hear all this news being reported as he worked at his tasks as anti-aircraft intelligence officer. A deterioration in the weather meant that raids were unlikely from Saipan-based aircraft, but all the same, as the possibility of more short-range attacks by bombers flying up the line of the Nansei Islands from bases in Okinawa could not be ruled out, Takuya paid particular attention to reports coming in from the southern Kyushu region.

  He had just finished eating a late lunch of sorghum with barley rice and a piece of salted salmon when a staff officer from headquarters briskly entered his room, stepped up to Takuya’s desk and announced in an impassioned voice, ‘It’s on.’

  At Takuya’s puzzled look, the lieutenant blurted out that eight of the prisoners in the holding-cells were to be executed, and that this was to be carried out immediately in the courtyard of what used to be a girls’ high school, immediately behind the headquarters complex. Takuya was told that the prisoners were to be decapitated, and that headquarters staff with considerable experience in kendo had already been selected. Takuya was to arrange for two of his subordinates to be made available to participate in the executions.

  Takuya nodded his understanding and beckoned the two sergeant-majors sitting on the other side of the room to come over to his desk. When he told them they would be taking part in the executions the colour drained from their faces and a look of trepidation came into their eyes.

  ‘One good clean blow. Don’t let us down,’ growled Takuya.

  The two men stood stiffly at attention as they barked their reply.

  They were men with much longer service records than his, including combat experience at the front, and Takuya could not comprehend how they had the gall to show even a trace of apprehension at the mention of the executions. A rumour that one of the men had reputedly succeeded in beheading two Chinese prisoners with successive blows made their attitude all the more enraging. Possibly their stint at office work on the home front had dulled the mental hardness they would have honed on the battlefield.

  Takuya watc
hed as they put on their service caps, picked up their swords and left the room. By now a weather report that rain had started to fall in southern Kyushu had arrived. No sightings of any enemy aircraft were reported. Takuya’s subordinates worked away collating the mountain of damage reports received from the city.

  Around two o’clock the door opened and the two sergeant-majors walked in, one after the other. Takuya searched their faces for a hint of emotion. They were both pale but there was a strangely radiant look in their eyes. Their brows glistened with sweat as though they had come from vigorous exercise, and a tangible heat emanated from their bodies.

  They stepped toward Takuya’s desk and in an animated voice one reported, ‘Duties completed, sir.’

  ‘How was it? Did all go well?’ asked Takuya.

  ‘Yes, sir. We each executed one prisoner,’ replied one of them, exhilaration lingering in his eyes.

  ‘Well done,’ said Takuya, nodding his approval. The two soldiers returned to their desks and wiped their brows with handkerchiefs.

  Takuya heard that four regular officers and three noncommissioned officers had taken part in the executions that day, including Lieutenant Howa Kotaro of the accounts department, the only man who had volunteered. A graduate of Tokyo University, Howa was a mild-mannered man known for writing beautiful tanka poetry. That morning he had hurried down through the smouldering ruins of the Koojiya-machi area of Fukuoka to the house where his mother lived. It had burnt to the ground, so he waited for his mother to return from wherever she might have sheltered during the air raid. Casting his eyes over the sheets of roofing iron scattered across the ruins at the end of the little alleyway, he saw a black object resembling a scorched piece of timber. When he looked more closely and saw the gold-capped teeth showing from the gaping, burnt hole that had once been a mouth, he realised that this was the charred corpse of his mother. He wrapped her body in a piece of singed straw matting and asked a neighbour to look after it until he could come back to give her a proper funeral. Howa returned to headquarters and began working silently on his mother’s coffin. Those attached to the tactical operations centre were in charge of organising the executions, but when Howa heard that the American airmen were to be killed, the request he made to the staff officer in charge of the operations room to be allowed to take part was so compelling that his name was added to the list. A member of the kendo club during his university days, Howa was the only man among the executioners to decapitate two of the prisoners.

  While these executions temporarily relieved the frustration Takuya felt, each time he stepped outside the operations room and caught the horrific sight of a city razed to the ground, irrepressible anger and pain welled up inside him. According to reports issued by the municipal office, the death toll was over one thousand, with over fifty thousand families losing their homes and untold thousands of people injured in the firestorm. Everywhere there were dazed people sifting through the ashes of the scorched ruins. Here and there groups of men, women and children sat listlessly on the side of the road. Viewing such scenes, and contemplating the fact that these people were destitute because of the B-29 raids, he thought it an injustice that the remaining prisoners were still safe inside the headquarters building.

  The day after the incendiary attack on Fukuoka city the key members of the headquarters staff moved to caves near Yamae village in the Tsukushi area, leaving behind only those who worked in anti-aircraft intelligence. After the attack on Fukuoka, the US Army Air Force started saturation bombing raids on other main cities and towns in Kyushu. First, on the twenty-ninth of June, a force of ten B-29s bombed Nobeoka in Miyazaki prefecture, and then Kanoya in Kagoshima prefecture. Beginning in July, attacks were made on cities and towns including Kurume, Yatsushiro, Nagasaki, Kumamoto, Oita, Omuta and Miyazaki.

  Among those left to work on anti-aircraft intelligence, tension mounted as preparations were accelerated to meet the expected American landings on Kyushu. Defensive earthworks were being constructed everywhere, artillery pieces were placed in caves facing the sea, and special kamikaze attack aircraft were hidden in underground shelters.

  Plans were also being made to strengthen the mobile reserve, the Thirty-sixth Army, by redeploying three infantry divisions from the Chugoku and Kinki areas, and by moving the pride of the mainland defensive forces – two elite armoured divisions and six reserve divisions – from the Kanto region to meet the enemy in Kyushu.

  With such crucial forces being readied, Takuya began to sense that the last decisive moments of the war were close at hand. If the remaining armies played their part in the grand defensive strategy prepared by Imperial Headquarters, it would be possible for Japan to deal the American forces a body blow. There was no doubting Japan’s advantage in terms of supply lines and the willingness of the ten million inhabitants of Kyushu to do their utmost to contribute to the success of the defensive effort. Though Takuya did not doubt that Japan would be victorious in the coming battles, he had a premonition that he himself would not live through the titanic struggle about to unfold. At least, he hoped, he would succumb knowing that he had inflicted the greatest damage possible on the enemy.

  That summer was much hotter than average. The steel doors were usually pushed wide open, but because the tactical operations centre was encased in a thick layer of reinforced concrete it was oppressively hot inside the building, the lone fan sending a stream of hot air across the desks. Sweat dripping from their brows, Takuya and his colleagues went on processing incoming information and preparing the anti-aircraft defences for the next bombing raid.

  Toward the end of July there was a dramatic increase in the number of enemy aircraft participating in each attack. On the twenty-eighth, a total of three thousand two hundred and ten planes attacked targets in the Kanto, Tokai and Kinki regions, while around six hundred and fifty carrier-borne planes made bombing and strafing sorties over Kyushu, some of the latter aircraft even going so far as to attack targets in the Korea Strait and the southern region of the Korean peninsula. The following day a force of three hundred and sixty-one carrier-borne bombers and fighters attacked targets in central and southern Kyushu. The same areas were attacked by three hundred and seventy-nine aircraft on the thirtieth, one hundred and forty-eight on the first of August, and another two hundred and twenty on the fifth of August. The fact that these attacks were concentrated on military and coastal installations was judged to be an indication that the American invasion of Kyushu was imminent, and Western Command headquarters was on constant alert for news that the invasion fleet had been sighted.

  Near-windless days with clear blue skies continued, and the morning temperatures on the sixth of August presaged another sweltering day. Forecasting another large-scale attack that day, the tactical operations centre issued orders for no relaxation of the full-alert conditions in all areas of Kyushu.

  Just after eight in the morning Takuya looked up from his desk, his attention caught by something distant, yet quite audible. It was a strange, almost rending sound, as if a huge piece of paper had been violently ripped in two. Seconds later a palpable shock wave jolted the air. His subordinates all sat stock-still, looking bewildered. No enemy planes had been reported in Kyushu airspace, and the sound they had just heard was clearly different from anything they had yet experienced. Takuya thought it might have been a distant peal of thunder.

  Later that day, as expected, a combined force of a hundred and eighty bombers and fighters from bases in Okinawa attacked targets in southern Kyushu. Takuya was busy processing incoming reports and issuing orders to anti-aircraft defence units in that region.

  That afternoon a communique´ from Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo notified them of the truth about the ominous sound and shock wave they had felt that morning. The message stated that at 8.15 a.m. two B-29s had intruded into Japanese airspace on a flight path over the Bungo Channel before sweeping north-east toward Hiroshima, where one of them had dropped a special new bomb which had caused extensive damage. It went on to advise tha
t on no account was the extreme state of alert to be relaxed.

  Western Command staff tried in vain to contact Central Regional Command headquarters in Hiroshima by telephone, but before long they received an updated report from Imperial Command in Tokyo to the effect that Hiroshima had been completely devastated, and tens of thousands of people killed or wounded. Considering that the sound and shock wave from the explosion had carried a full two hundred kilometres from Hiroshima to Fukuoka, Takuya and his colleagues realised that this bomb must possess a fearsome destructive power, far exceeding that of normal bomb technology.

  Over the next several hours, a range of reports came in about the new bomb. Evidently, after being dropped it had descended attached to a parachute and had exploded several hundred metres above the ground, unleashing a blinding white flash of light, and punching a turbulent yellowish-white mushroom-shaped cloud up to ten or twenty thousand metres into the sky.

  On the next day, the seventh, Imperial Command made a brief announcement on the radio regarding the bombing of Hiroshima. It stated that Hiroshima had been attacked by a small number of enemy B-29 aircraft and had suffered extensive damage, and that surveys were under way to establish the nature of the new weapon that had been used in this attack. Though reports from Imperial Command had mentioned nothing that specific, information had now been received to the effect that this new weapon was probably what was being called an ‘atomic bomb’. The term itself was new to Takuya and his staff, but from the incoming reports it was clear that the weapon’s destructive power was something completely unprecedented.