By failing to provision their troops the Japanese high command not only displayed a criminal contempt for the value of their soldiers’ lives, they handed the Allies an excruciatingly effective weapon to use against their soldiers. As the Pacific fleet under the command of Admiral Nimitz moved through the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana islands, capturing only those islands of strategic interest, the US navy left the remaining Japanese garrisons to ‘wither on the vine’.122 The islands became floating prison camps and the starving Japanese resorted to eating any living thing: ‘pigs, dogs, possum, mice, bats, kangaroos, snakes, lizards, frogs, leeches, earthworms, centipedes, all sorts of insects (butterflies, caterpillars), maggots (in some cases they even took maggots from the latrines), crocodiles, fish, lobsters, crabs, shells, birds’.123 They dug up any edible vegetable matter, collected wild grasses and ate water lilies and duck weed. Australian soldiers moving into areas that had once been held by the Japanese found that they had completely cleared these regions of food.
The Americans did supply food to those islands which were cut off from supplies but where there were no occupying Japanese. But the term ‘wither on the vine’ was a euphemism worthy of the National Socialists, who spoke of ‘resettlement’ rather than ‘mass murder’. The indigenous islanders ‘withered’ alongside the Japanese, like the Greeks who died as a result of the British blockade of occupied Europe, incidental victims of a wider military strategy. In the Caroline Islands, the Japanese on Kosrae turned into ‘stick men’, and they and many of the 179 labourers who had been brought in from Pohnpei died of malnutrition, unable to survive on potato leaves.124 The last Japanese supply ship reached Ocean Island in 1943. After that a few submarines dropped off bales of food. The islanders ate ren ruku (pawpaw leaves) while the Japanese grew pumpkins in barrels of night soil. The islanders began to die of starvation* and a few were executed for stealing rice. Eventually the Japanese evacuated the survivors to Kusaie where they were set to work growing food for the Japanese while surviving on a diet of soup made from leaves.125 One islander commented, ‘It would be better to be a soldier than a civilian prisoner. Soldiers have weapons and have a chance. We had no chance, we were slaves. We were the same as pigs: we had no human rights.’126
Allied prisoners of war also withered on the vine. Kasayama Yoshikichi was a Korean guard for a prisoner of war camp on an island off the coast of New Guinea where they were supposed to be constructing an airfield. Here the guards, like the prisoners, slept in blankets without shelter. When it rained, guards and prisoners alike caught cold and came down with dysentery.127 ‘Demands for food and medical supplies came from the prisoners, but we didn’t have any “main course” either. We had only rice and the leaves of the tapioca plant. We made some soup with those leaves, a little garlic, salt and a bit of butter. Our superiors were in the same shape. There was nothing to eat and nothing to give. Japanese army regulations specified that we were to feed the Japanese first, then the locals, and what was left was for the prisoners.’128 He described how the prisoners would first become emaciated, then their lips would dry out, their eyesight blur and then they would die. ‘At the end it wasn’t a matter of giving food to the prisoners or not giving it. There wasn’t any food even for the Japanese soldiers.’129 As the guards and prisoners attempted to escape by sailing to Java, they drank water contaminated by corpses and contracted beriberi. Their flesh swelled and their legs became heavy. The guards began to die alongside their prisoners. Only 800 of the original 2,000 prisoners made it back to Java.130
Desperate hunger prevailed throughout the Pacific and south-east Asia. In a letter to the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, the veteran Nishihara Takamaro, then in his seventies, recalled how on Luzon in the Philippines ‘a fellow soldier whose name I didn’t know came crawling over to me. Taking off his clothes, he bared his pointed rear end. It had become dark bluish-green. “Buddy, if I die, go ahead and eat this part,” he said, touching his scrawny rear end with his bony finger. I said, “Idiot, how could I eat a war buddy?” But I couldn’t take my eyes off the flesh on his rear.’ Nishihara claimed that he was saved by the discovery of a dog, which he killed and ate along with some salt he found stored on a dead comrade’s body.131 In Ooka Shohei’s autobiographical novel Fires on the Plain he described how the remnants of Japanese regiments were left wandering the islands looking for something to eat. Ooka’s novel describes how the soldiers descended into cannibalism. His protagonist would occasionally meet another soldier. They would both let out ‘an inhuman cry’ and avoid each other: ‘I was not interested in them; I was on the lookout for immobile people – for fresh corpses that still retained human lineaments.’132
Although they may have descended to an unimaginable level of hunger and misery the majority of Japanese soldiers appear to have clung on to a remnant of their initial fighting spirit. The ethos of bushido taught that when a Japanese soldier went into battle he had two options: to fight and win, or to die fighting. Surrender was not considered an option, and the majority of Japanese soldiers eventually chose to commit suicide or to die of starvation rather than surrender.
BURMA
While the Japanese troops in the Pacific degenerated into starvation, in Burma the military command demonstrated their inability to learn lessons from previous mistakes. In April 1944 Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi Renya launched an attack on India. He had been charged with preventing the Americans from reopening the Burma road and the supply line to Nationalist China. However, he had a much grander vision, supported in Japan by War Minister Tojo Hideki. Mutaguchi was under the illusion that he was about to lead a triumphant march on India which would take the British out of the war and persuade the United States to negotiate with Japan.133 The idea was to capture Imphal, the key logistical town in Assam, and cut off the supply route by capturing Kohima. The Japanese could then move on to Dimapur, a key British supply base in the Brahmaputra river valley.
The route into Assam from Burma was along narrow tracks through thick, hot, steamy, muddy jungle. The only way to move supplies up the line was by pack animal. This was obviously a re-run of the Kokoda Trail: half of the supplies which left the supply base would have been consumed by service personnel before they reached the combat troops.134 Major-General Inada Masazumi, Vice-Chief of General Staff of the Southern Army, expressed his reservations about the feasibility of the plan and was consequently levered out of his position.135 The division commanders for the attack on Kohima were also dubious and thought that it would be impossible to maintain the supply routes. Lieutenant Sato Kotoku was said to have told his staff that they would most probably all starve to death. However, the campaign went ahead and the supply services mustered a herd of 15,000 cows to double as meat on the hoof and pack animals (despite the fact that cows are unsuited to carrying heavy loads). The usual orders were issued to the commanders that they must capture enemy stocks.136
This time the British had no intention of feeding their enemies, and as his regiment approached Kohima Captain Kameyama Shosaku was disappointed to discover ‘the enemy had destroyed all their food and supplies’ as they retreated.137 His regiment was forced to attack enemy positions at night in order to plunder their supplies of ‘rations, bullets and grenades’.138 When Senior Private Wada Manabu’s transport section moved on to the northern ridge at Kohima they found the ‘British had burned their food and supply depots so that not even a grain of rice or a round of ammunition was left for us. The best my comrades and I could do was to find three tins of corned beef in the enemy positions.’139 Not only were the Allies now better at evacuating their positions without leaving presents from Mr Churchill for the Japanese, their supply logistics had advanced considerably by 1944. The Japanese laid siege to British and Indian troops at Kohima, but throughout the seventeen-day siege air supply flew in 3,000 tons of stores, including food, drinking water and ammunition.140 In 1942 an Air Dispatch Depot had been set up at Chaklala in India where pilots were trained how to drop supplies packed into carefully designed
containers attached to special parachutes.141 This enabled the British and Indian troops to keep fighting, albeit on half rations, while the Japanese, unable to supply themselves from Allied food dumps, starved. The British also managed to blockade Japanese communication lines and by April the Japanese were so short of shells that they could only fire at the enemy for a few hours a day. Reduced to boiling ‘vegetable matter’ to stave off ‘our terrible hunger’, they watched the British through their telescopes as they took their afternoon tea break.142
A similar story was played out at Imphal, where the Japanese besieged the British for two months. Unable to get their hands on enemy stores, they could only watch as American Dakotas flew in 40 tons of food and ammunition a day.143 Under orders from their new Supreme Allied Commander, Mountbatten, the British held on, despite the onset of the monsoon.144 In contrast, stuck in their ‘octopus holes’, up to their armpits in water, the Japanese ‘felt [they] had arrived at the very limit of [their] endurance’.145 Despite Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi’s repeated exhortations that the troops should continue fighting, Lieutenant Sato stated to Mutaguchi’s chief of staff that before his men could do anything else ‘first we must eat’ and he decided to withdraw.146 The retreat was a horror of mud and death. The medical orderlies constantly slipped and fell and the wounded on the stretchers groaned and complained. The path was littered with rain-sodden corpses, stinking of decomposition and crawling with maggots.147 Emaciated or crippled soldiers were given hand grenades and encouraged ‘to sort themselves out’.148 The survivors arriving in the field hospitals looked like ‘living skeletons’, in uniforms ‘worn to shreds’. Presented with rice in their mess tins they would pitifully ask Nurse Nagai Hideko, ‘May I eat all of this?’149 The ‘defeated stragglers’ felt great bitterness towards their commanders who, having issued orders for the men to fight on regardless of the fact that they had no ammunition or food, had either committed suicide or escaped.150 The fighting was vicious on both sides. At Kohima and Imphal 17,587 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded. The final death toll on the Japanese side was far higher. More than 60,000 Japanese died during this campaign but almost half of them did not die from injuries incurred in battle but from starvation and associated diseases.151
The key to success in battle in such under-developed areas was technical and logistical superiority. As they pressed on into Burma in 1945 the Allies were in a position to support their troops with 58,725 tons of airborne supplies, move 48,900 personnel into the area by air and evacuate 11,580 casualties by plane.152 The Japanese were still relying on obsolete tactics such as rounding up draught cattle and attempting to capture enemy supplies. In a mirror image of the reversal of fortunes on the eastern front, the British, like the Soviets, were now well equipped and able to command superior logistical techniques. The Japanese, like the Germans, fought on bravely but were utterly lacking in the technical resources to secure victory.
Official figures for exactly how many Japanese soldiers died of starvation do not exist, but a Japanese scholar has produced estimates based on careful examination of the conditions in each battle theatre. He confirms Imamura’s estimate that 15,000 of the 20,000 who died on Guadalcanal starved to death. Only 6 per cent of the 157,646 troops sent to New Guinea survived. Almost all of those who died were killed by starvation and tropical diseases. In the Philippines, where the Japanese retreat was extremely disorganized, he estimates that 400,000 of the 498,000 Japanese deaths were caused by starvation. Altogether it would appear that 60 per cent, or more than 1 million, of the total 1.74 million Japanese military deaths between 1941 and 1945 were caused by starvation and diseases associated with malnutrition.153 The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal did not prosecute the Japanese war leader-ship for crimes against their own people. The men at Imperial Headquarters were never held to account for their decision to abandon the New Guinea garrison and a host of other Japanese soldiers to ‘self-sufficiency’, which by the end of the war had become a euphemism for leaving them to die of starvation.154
HUNGER ON THE HOME ISLANDS
Ordinary Japanese civilians never received clear information about the events of the war. They had to piece together a picture of what was really going on from rumour and obscure and incomplete references in the newspapers and on the radio. Reports of ‘brilliant continental [Chinese] campaigns unknown in the history of war’ were a sure indication that the conflict in the Pacific was going badly. But rumours did filter through to Japan that the blockade was having a terrible impact on the troops fighting on the Pacific islands. In May 1943 the secret diarist Kiyosawa attended a lecture at the Japan Club given by a Commander Akiyama where the fighting on the island of Attu was discussed. He reported that the commander described the Japanese army as ‘falling into isolated helplessness … it is a fact that the destruction en route by submarines is considerable, and the soldiers occupying the island have only the military equipment they brought at the beginning. I sympathize with the desperateness of their fight.’155 In November 1944 Kiyosawa heard ‘a story at the barbershop’ that the soldiers ‘did not have food and ate human flesh … they killed prisoners of war. It is said they were placed in a large cauldron, the oil was skimmed, and they were eaten … They were probably exaggerating, but I think to a certain extent it might be true.’156
While rumours reached the home islands of the hungry plight of the soldiers, for urban civilians the discomforts of war turned into privation. In March 1944 Kiyosawa noted that ‘everywhere one goes, the core of discussion is the inadequacy of food supplies’.157 At his daughter’s school the girls no longer warmed their lunches on the stove. ‘This is because they were immediately stolen.’158 Visiting Hokkaido, he was told by his guide that his family of seven children had nothing to eat but gruel and they had all lost between 6 and 9 kilograms in weight.159 Kiyosawa noted that ‘of late everybody is extremely emaciated. When I encountered Ohata of the Foreign Ministry after an absence of one month, he was completely emaciated. When I met my neighbour Koike on the street he was so thin I didn’t recognize him. It seems that everybody is like this.’160 Between the spring and summer of 1944 Kiyosawa himself lost more than 5 kilograms.161
The Japanese government placed an inordinate amount of faith in food science as a way of overcoming food shortages. During the war ten new training establishments for dieticians were founded, where the students were taught how to maintain a healthy diet despite food shortages. The knowledge was then passed on to the neighbourhood associations.162 However, there were limits to what inventive cookery could achieve without ingredients. The Provisions Friends’ Association which had begun life in the 1920s, spreading the benefits of the cheap and nutritious western dishes advocated by the military, was reduced to publishing posters and pamphlets advertising the benefits of chewing rice more carefully. It also devised a variety of chemical dietary supplements and a sinister-sounding cooking activator, which was advertised as softening fibres and disguising bad smells and thus appeared to promote the consumption of stale and indigestible foods.163 Indeed, many of the substitute foods which the government’s nutritionists invented were fairly indigestible. In A Boy Called H, Senoh Kappa described how a series of articles began appearing in the newspapers in 1943, entitled ‘How to Make Do on “Decisive Battle” Food’. Although H and his schoolfriends were so hungry they ‘manfully tried anything that seemed remotely edible’, they were irritated by the way in which the propaganda tried to divert attention away from the shortcomings of the government. Slogans which declared, ‘Shortages of foodstuffs mean shortage of ingenuity!’ seemed to imply that the fault lay with the general population’s lack of initiative. The cheerful exhortation, ‘Let’s get by on “decisive battle” food!’ encapsulated the government’s helpless response to a failing strategy: the Japanese must try harder. One such article recommended a variety of ‘nourishing’ edible insects, in particular the grubs of bees, dobsonflies, dragonflies and long-horned beetles. It suggested boiling them in soya sauce or roasting them in a
little oil. Another set of suggestions gave substitutes for rice such as the skins of sweet potatoes, pumpkins or mandarin oranges, dried and then ground to make a flour out of which dumplings could be made. The same article emphasized that the straw of the rice plant was also edible and when ground and mixed with powdered hijiki (a type of seaweed) and flour and kneaded into a dough was said to make excellent noodles. ‘H had eaten bee grubs and locusts, but resolved on no account to eat rice straw.’164
Matsumoto Nakako recalled that these kai somen (sea treasure noodles) were on sale in the markets at a very cheap price when she was living in rural Hakata in 1946. At the time there was nothing much else to eat except pumpkin, and her family ate the kai somen in order to ‘feel full’. Her memory of them was of ‘a wonderful food’. In 1970, when she became a professor of food and nutrition, she met a man who had worked as an expert for the government in the wartime agricultural department. He told her they had been made from seaweed mixed with rice straw. They made some for themselves and tried them, and she realized how very hungry she must have been as a child. They tasted horrible.165
By the end of 1944 Kiyosawa reported that the dominant topic of conversation in the cities was no longer food but ‘amateur farming. Everybody is doing this.’166 Government advisers instructed the neighbourhood associations on the cultivation of vegetables, and gardening tips were broadcast on the radio.167 ‘The newspapers talk of nothing but vegetables.’ As usual the government promoted strategies without providing the means to employ them. Kiyosawa was frustrated. ‘We we are told to plant leeks, even I searched everywhere for leek seeds, but in vain. I merely planted what was given to me by a neighbour.’168 He reported the appearance of posters saying ‘Plant more pumpkins at any cost’ but he despaired that this was only propaganda and ‘nothing is done … From this one probably understands how unproductive bureaucratism is.’169
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food Page 37
