Vengeance: Hatred and Honor

by Brett Ashton

  The order to lower the liberty ladder to the deck of the Japanese submarine was given. Her crew was still immobile and resolute on her deck. I could see the expressions on their faces from my place on the bridge and could tell they obviously were not taking the circumstances lightly.

  The major’s crew was crossing the liberty ladder to the Japanese sub. As expected, they executed their task with the brave professionalism and due diligence I had come to expect from the corps.

  From my vantage point, I could see the major take several marines below, providing each other cover while numerous other marines stayed above deck guarding the sub’s crew. It would take awhile for the major to secure the sub and make sure it wasn’t somehow rigged.

  The major gave no signals indicating a trap. Meanwhile, most of the sub’s crew was still in their place, at attention, on the deck of their ship. Several Japanese officers had been asked by the major to go below decks with him.

  I tried to avoid tapping nervously on the pearl grips of my Colt forty-five as I rested my hand on it and waited for the signal from the major that either all was well, or it was time to fight. As the captain in a potential combat situation, you don’t have the luxury of letting the crew know how nervous you really are.

  The seconds turned to minutes, and I waited.

  After awhile, the major came back above deck and gave a hand signal that everything was well. I watched another marine come out of the hatch on the conning tower behind the major and climb down the ladder, cross the deck and head for the liberty ladder back to my ship. A few seconds later, I was facing a slightly out-of-breath marine sergeant who handed me a hand written note.

  Thanking the sergeant and dismissing him, I read the note:

  Have secured enemy sub. Fuel supply extremely low. Batteries the same. No detectable hidden purpose yet but still involved in searching the sub. Japanese captain and officers cooperating in every way. Captain speaks English well, attended University of Chicago. Expect ten more minutes to finish.

  University of Chicago? I just couldn’t believe my eyes. Apparently everything good the Japs ever learned came from America. And those slant-eyed sons-of-bitches turned around and used it to bomb us. “Isn’t that about right?” I said out loud, no longer able to contain myself.

  “Sir?” the officer of the deck replied.

  “Major Johnson tells me the Jap bastard captain of that sub went to the University of Chicago.”

  “Really?” replied the lieutenant.

  “Yes, apparently so. We should have just shot him when we had him the first time, don’t you think, Lieutenant?”

  “Would have been a good idea, sir,” he said with a grin. “We could have saved all of those American war bond holders a lot of money on perfectly good ammunition since.”

  “No doubt,” I replied, ending the conversation.

  And the seconds once again turned into minutes. I gently tapped the grip of my holstered Colt forty-five.

  After a short time, the marine sergeant returned to the bridge bearing another note from the major. I took it from him and told him to stand by while I read it.

  Enemy sub secured. All weapons disabled and inert. The Japanese captain respectfully requests to come aboard and formally surrender.

  “Sergeant,” I said, “run ahead and inform the major I will be on the quarter deck at the top of the liberty ladder in two minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the marine; then, he departed the bridge.

  I picked up the sound-powered phones that connected the bridge to the executive officer’s battle station, put them on, and keyed the microphone. “XO,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” came the usual acknowledgement of Commander Thompson’s voice.

  “I’m leaving the bridge to go accept the sub captain’s surrender. You have the conn. Look sharp and keep your eyes peeled. I don’t trust these bastards.”

  “Understood,” the executive officer said.

  “Officer of the deck, XO has the conn. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  “Yes, sir. The captain’s off the bridge.”

  I turned, stepped through the hatch, then down the ladder and for the first time in weeks left the bridge area of my ship.

  I arrived at the top of the ladder down to the sub just before the major and a Japanese officer with a samurai sword stepped onto it and began to climb up the steps.

  Then they were at the top of the ladder. Ten feet in front of me. Five. Then three.

  The Japanese officer reached for his sword. I shot a quick glance at Major Johnson as I felt the snap on the strap of the holster that held my Colt forty-five pop loose against my index finger. Ever so slightly, the major shook his head at me, his eyes slightly widening, as if reading my mind.

  The Japanese captain unhooked the sword from his belt, still sheathed, bowed and holding it horizontally, offered it to me.

  This was the first time in more than four years I had seen a Jap surrender without shooting at him first.

  So as my sworn enemy stood in front of me, defeated and offering his sword, and me with my hand still on my forty-five, I began to feel I was missing something, something vague yet very important. I had planned and hoped for this day for some time now, and yet when the moment finally arrived, it seemed hollow somehow.

  A nebulous idea began to form in my thoughts, small at first but growing, very rapidly, gaining energy like an avalanche, until it totally wiped out any concept of the things I had previously assumed were true. I found my mind suddenly racing backwards across time, looking through all of the events of the war that had led me to this point…

  Until finally, in my mind, I found the old chief from the day I visited the dead hulk of the battleship Oklahoma. For a moment, it was almost as if he was standing there with us, looking at me, asking the question which had unexpectedly burned to the very core of my soul. “What are you looking for, captain?” And like a flash, the answer to his question finally came to me: “Peace, chief. I’m looking for peace.”

  And as I took the sword from the Japanese captain’s outstretched hands, I began to wonder if maybe it was as much me shooting at them which made me hate them, as it was them shooting at me.

  All Things Considered

  About seventy to seventy-five years ago, I was in the prime of my life. I was a United States naval officer. I was a young and handsome man chasing the pretty skirts around Hawaii. Your American tax dollars hard at work! (The admiral added a wink and a grin at this point.) It was a lot of fun being a sailor in paradise in the thirties. I almost got into a bit of trouble from time to time, but overall, I kept my nose clean and my mind was mostly on my career, then later my family. But I was also brash and arrogant, which was normal enough for a young sailor of those days. It was in every way an unspoiled paradise for me.

  And then came the Japanese.

  I was on three ships during the war and commanded one of them.

  All three of those ships combined got struck by no less than twelve torpedoes, one which sank with a third of the crew still on board.

  Torpedoes were among the most incredibly violent devices you could possibly imagine at the time. Most smaller ships that were hit by them amidships blew right in half. Even the smaller aerial-launched ones could almost lift a ten thousand-ton cruiser like the Buffalo out of the water. Each one sprays thousands of sharp jagged pieces of metal everywhere that will cut through the human body like a bullet through butter. It doesn’t take that many torpedoes to get your attention and set you to wondering how this could keep happening to you.

  The tricky thing about it is if you’re not careful enough to keep your wits about you, your life will change for the worse, and you won’t even notice until it’s too late. You will be too busy thinking that you’re right, they’re wrong, and won’t see the truth, even when it bites you in the ass.

  As a part of military life, you are trained to be ready for anything at any time. You are always in preparation for some unseen enemy, just over the horizon,
just out of your reach, waiting for the chance to attack you and kill you if possible. “What would you do if we were attacked right now?” is the total mode of operation and way of life.

  You think about it and drill for it, all the time. And at the same time, you don’t think about it because somehow it just seems too terrible and unreal of a thing to do to other human beings. But you continue doing it because they are the enemy and orders are orders. They are different than you, and sooner or later, they will attack you.

  Their beliefs are different, their customs are different, and they think differently. They are aggressive. Their skin is yellow, their eyes are slanted. Even “they are all myopic and thus cannot be good fighter or bomber pilots.” What a load of crap that one turned out to be!

  So you keep drilling and thinking about how to prepare for an attack by the aggressors or how you are possibly going to attack them before they have the chance to attack you.

  The concept really comes into play in an old Hindu philosophical doctrine that basically states, “As you think, so shall it be.” And I wonder. I wonder if you keep thinking that way long and hard enough and you keep preparing for it, if sooner or later, you will actually find somebody to do it. Then sometimes, if they don’t attack, you go ahead and attack them to prevent you from being attacked by them.

  And sometimes they do attack you first, probably thinking you were going to attack them if they didn’t, and they want the strategic advantage of striking the first blow. And so it goes, round and round.

  Many times you hear of the greatness and glory of battle. I never saw any glory in it—just misery and death. George Patton, for example, really was a great general. He fought in many so-called glorious battles against the Germans.

  As a man who has been in combat more times than I can count, I can personally tell you most of the people who glorify combat have never been in it and have some twisted reason to try to convince others that they need to keep fighting.

  Greatness doesn’t come from fighting; it comes from knowing when not to fight.

  And when you are in combat and fighting for your life, it’s easy to kill someone. The hard part, for most people, is living with yourself afterwards.

  During the war, I met a most interesting person. We were in Pearl for repairs, and I had some time off, so I ended up at the officer’s club for a beer. This guy kind of stood out among the rest of us, not only for his wits, which he had plenty of, but he had the reddest hair that you ever saw. He said he was the skipper on one of the smaller escorts or sub hunters, or something like that.

  There was a certain indefinable quality about him that made him hard to forget, even to this day. The other officers around were making a case against him that some day time would heal all of the damage done to us in this war. He was holding his own against several others and forwarding the concept that time “is a great charlatan” and cures nothing.

  I don’t know; to this day, I can still see the image of Joe Fitzgerald’s mangled body in my mind like it was yesterday. There just has to be a better way to be able to move on.

  The venerable Rush Limbaugh says in one of his “undeniable truths of life” that “Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.” It postulates that people have to be aggressive and forceful to rule a country or world, or to handle a country or people who have gone insane. The problem is that with the right propaganda machines in place, who would be able to tell the difference between Hirohito, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, or Churchill? For example, if you look at the history of Germany during the time that Hitler was on the rise, a large part of the population thought he was a savior of some sort. Statement after statement can be found that he was “enlightened” and “brilliant” and would lead the world into a brighter future.

  As long as this is true for this world, we will end up blindly slinging bombs at each other, both sides thinking that they are right and the other side wrong, and neither knowing the truth. I guess I would just rather sit and watch Sponge Bob Square Pants with my great-great-grandchildren on my knees than have another battleship shot out from under me.

  I don’t deny this datum is true. When you look at it, you have to admit the arguments for it are undeniable. The evidence is all around us. I just wonder if it has to be true, because if you take the time to look at it a little closer, you begin to see a faint glimmer of hope for something else.

  About twenty years ago, I heard the story of a man who had one of these Japanese samurai swords like the one on the wall behind me. He had gotten it as a souvenir after the surrender. After all of those years, he decided to see if the officer he had gotten it from was still alive. After an extensive search, he found him and went all of the way to Japan to return the sword.

  Shortly afterwards, I decided maybe I should do the same for the officer who had surrendered his ship to me. I didn’t even bother to get his name at the time he surrendered, but it wasn’t hard for a retired admiral to pull in some favors and find the name of the officer in command of the I-57 at the end of the war. After a couple of months searching, I discovered that he had died shortly after the war.

  From what I could find, after we towed his sub in to the base on Okinawa, he was released from the Japanese navy and went to find his family. He was from Hiroshima. His wife, his family, and his home were all gone in the first of the two blasts that ended the war. Nothing was left for him. Not even his honor. Shortly after that, he died, just as surely as if I had put my own Colt against his head and pulled the trigger.

  In 1986, four of the former crewmen of the Japanese I-19 met with some of the former crewmen of the North Carolina to solve one of the war’s great mysteries. The United States Navy never found out who torpedoed the Showboat in 1942. The I-19 was the only Japanese submarine in the area that fired torpedoes that day but it was thought the Showboat was too far from the I-19 when the attack was launched. And the crew of the submarine never claimed to have attacked the North Carolina or the O’Brien.

  After forty-four years, these men from both sides of the war sat down with each other and retraced their steps to find out that their attack, which sank the Wasp, also yielded the sinking of a destroyer and the damaging of a battleship. This was something they didn’t even know before. All from a single spread of six torpedoes, three of which missed their intended targets, only to be lucky enough to find two more targets by pure accident.

  After all of those years, these men got together and found a way to become friends. The North Carolina crew members even presented a framed fragment of the torpedo that the I-19 had fired, which was retrieved from the hull of the Showboat, “with apologies for damage done to it when we hit it.”

  My former crewmates and those of the I-19 are and should be an inspiration to all of us to be more human to each other.

  In a war, people tend to have their attention hung up on the hardware, the ships, the torpedoes, the bombs, airplanes, generals, admirals, emperors, presidents, soldiers, sailors, and marines, whether they are ours or theirs. Just think of the victories, defeats, glory, heroism, rubble, fire and destruction, victims, deaths, refugees, genocides, starvation, cruelty, death marches, pestilence, and all of those brilliant big explosions created by brilliant men fighting for their country. As if all the world’s problems could be solved with a suitable application of high explosives. If we can only make a big enough boom, well, then things would be okay. All I’ve ever seen it do is scatter the very same problems over a larger area.

  And these things are important. Believe me, nothing, and I do mean nothing, is more demanding of your attention than when a volley of torpedoes strikes the hull of the ship you happen to be eating your breakfast on. But these things only serve to draw your attention off of the more important subtleties, which seem to hide so well among the chaos of war, from humanity’s attention.

  The real trick of it is to realize that none of these things are the real enemy.

  The moment my hands took the sword from that Japanese officer surrende
ring his ship to me, I began to realize I was missing something. Some basic consideration hiding just below my level of attention was, for the first time, beginning to show itself.

  For years, I could not get my attention off of that man whom, just a few short minutes before, I had wanted to kill in the most brutal fashion I could conceive. And with all of the grace and dignity that could possibly be instilled into an officer, this man, on the deck of my own ship, handed me the sword that you see hung on the wall behind me, thus surrendering his ship and his honor and placing himself at my mercy. This was an officer. This was a captain. This was an equal. This was a human being.

  And my life changed.

  All I wanted to believe during the war was the Japs were something different. They were animals. They were cruel. They were the aggressors. Killers, every one of them. They were something very separate and different from us and below us. And history shows it’s true in many ways. The Japanese, in every measurable way, were just as brutal over their conquered territories as the Nazis were in Europe. And they bombed Pearl Harbor.

  In return we firebombed Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were incinerated, just like that. Old, young, women, children, sick, well, innocent, or guilty—it didn’t matter who they were. They all died horrible deaths at our hands. That’s the problem in handling things with anger; it doesn’t discriminate. So what does that make us?

  Just like Ahab and the great white whale tied together, revenge has a way of taking you down along with the subject of your anger.

  Now it’s true that, from time to time, people, for whatever reason, go insane. And for whatever reason, that insanity sometimes seems to spread into a society to the degree that the whole culture or country goes insane. Then you have war. You have to understand when this happens people are going to act very badly.