by Rory Marron
Tashiro arched an eyebrow. ‘Enough for a small army, Sir.’
‘Good,’ he replied cheerfully, walking to the open French windows to check the sky. It was unnecessary in the predictable climate of Java but the sailor’s habit was ingrained.
A few minutes later he was taking the salute of his four-man escort. In truth he thought them superfluous and paid them scant attention as he trotted through the open gates. Instead, he guided his horse towards a small group of scruffy, barefoot boys aged nine or ten holding wooden rifles. As he approached, one of them called out in Japanese. ‘Sasage tsutsu!’—Present arms! They saluted and came to a fidgety attention. Ishida returned the salute with mock gravity then reached into the saddlebags for the small twists of paper. At the sight of the sweets the boys rushed forward, shouting and laughing.
Amused by the instant, total collapse of military discipline, Ishida urged his mount on in a walk. Behind him the boys fell in noisily and out of step. The Marine lieutenant in charge of his escort drew up next to Ishida and looked back scornfully at the boys.
‘Excuse me Admiral, but you should not encourage them. It is demeaning to your position.’
‘Is that so? Ishida frowned. ‘Would you rather see unhappy, surly children, Lieutenant? Isn’t it better that these boys remember us fondly? We are nurturing seeds here. The harvest will come later.’
Mumbling an apology the Lieutenant dropped back in line. Ishida sighed, sad that so many officers—Army and Navy alike—were so hostile to the Indonesians when he liked their easy-going ways and was fond of their company.
At the entrance to the park he gave instructions for his escort to follow at a walk. Then he spurred his horse into a brisk canter, relishing the solitude. He was an expert horseman and he rode aggressively, enjoying the motion and strength of the animal, which was soon lathered in sweat.
Ishida was too good a rider to abuse his mount in such heat, so he slowed and then urged it gently up a small hill. It was a favourite spot where he often went to think. From the crest he had a sweeping view of the city below and out beyond the harbour at Tandjong Priok. Small, brightly coloured fishing boats and ferries criss-crossed the water. At anchor and dominating the bay was a minelayer, the Wakataka.
Ishida dismounted and led his horse to shade under some tamarind trees. From the hill the ship looked imposing enough—which was precisely why it was there—yet it had barely enough fuel for four days at sea. Two months ago Wakataka had limped in for repairs at Surabaya, its bow buckled by an enemy mine. Now it was twenty feet shorter.
He thought back to his conversation with Yamagami, wondering if the General had any idea of his real aim. In truth, he was not concerned about the forthcoming defence of Java, or even the inevitable battle for Japan. Months before he had decided that military defeat, though unpalatable, was inescapable. But he saw future political and economic victories that could still be won. In fifty or sixty years Japan would be strong once again. She would need friends in Asia; friendships she could make now… If only those in Tokyo could see the opportunities!
Of course the British, French and Dutch would try to turn back the clock but the Burmese, Malays, Vietnamese and Indonesians would resist the return of their white masters. That much was obvious. Maeda was dedicating what time he had left to the Indonesians, whatever the personal consequences, even if it meant a short-term disadvantage to his own blinkered Government.
What mattered was that the Indonesians had to be able to resist the returning Dutch. Every available weapon had to be given to the militia. Not, as he had proposed to Yamagami, so that they could make a foolhardy stand with the Japanese but for a war of independence. He doubted the Americans would seek a fight with the Indonesians. The Dutch would be on their own and sooner or later they would give up. Then Indonesia would be free and Japan’s great sacrifice in this part of Asia, at least, would not have been in vain.
A clatter of approaching hooves disturbed him. He took a last look at the view then climbed nimbly back on to his horse to re-join his escort.
Chapter Five
Semarang
The Mitchell B-25 bomber was trailing a thick plume of black smoke and quickly losing height. Behind it, two Mitsubishi Zero fighters continued to harry it with short, staccato machine-gun bursts.
Nagumo looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun with his cap. ‘It’s all over. Why don’t they save their ammo?’
Ota did not reply as the stricken plane pitched forward and began a wide spin. He saw a tiny speck tumble from it. Seconds later a parachute billowed like a huge white chrysanthemum in the azure sky. It was dropping very fast.
‘He left it too late,’ said Ota stating the obvious.
‘Hmm. He might get caught in the bamboo grove over there,’ replied Nagumo a little doubtfully.
They watched the B-25, now a fireball; plunge into a rice paddy four hundred yards from them. There was a small explosion and thick black smoke drifted up towards the parachutist who hung limply in his harness. He came down hard in another paddy, his chute smothering him. Men from Ota’s platoon converged on him at the run.
When Ota and Nagumo reached the scene, their men were still searching frantically under the chute, delving into the murky, knee-deep crop.
‘Found him!’ A soldier heaved, bringing the body to the surface and dragging it to the earthen embankment. Ota thought the airman was dead until the soldier turned him over and slapped him on the back. He began to wheeze and cough weakly.
‘Lift him up!’ said Ota. The man moaned and collapsed as he was raised. Both his legs were broken. Ota saw at least one bullet wound in his abdomen. ‘Cut bamboo for splints and stretcher handles,’ Ota ordered pointing to the grove. ‘You two, take off your tunics. Give him some water.’
He watched his men bring lengths of bamboo and slide them inside the buttoned jacket sleeves to make an improvised stretcher. ‘Clean his face.’ Ota was curious to see his enemy.
A soldier tipped a canteen over the airman’s mud-encrusted head to reveal cropped fair hair. His eyes opened slightly and Ota saw they were blue. He guessed they were about the same age. Again the man passed out.
‘I’ll take my platoon to see if there’s anything left of the crew.’ Nagumo said gruffly. As he turned he noticed a black Packard saloon pulling up at the edge of the fields. A half-track with kenpeitai markings was close behind it. ‘You should have left him in the mud,’ he said quietly to Ota, eyeing the approaching military policemen.
Two minutes later Captain Shirai had reached them. His tone was gleeful. ‘Mo hitori kikusaku teki da!’—Here’s another enemy scheduled for Hell! He turned to Ota. ‘Ah, Lt Ota isn’t it? My rival for the kendo championship! You’ve done well!’
Ota saluted and wished the officer a good afternoon. Shirai made no attempt to reply. He was staring exultantly at the captive.
Now Ota understood what Nagumo had meant. Shirai’s intention was clear. The airman had already been sentenced to death. Ota hid his disquiet.
Shirai looked at him challengingly. ‘Perhaps you would like to test the sharpness of your sword, Lieutenant?’ His eyes were glinting, almost toying.
Ota forced a thin smile. ‘He’s dying. His comrades will provide ample opportunity soon enough.’
‘Yes, and they’ll all pay like this one,’ Shirai said almost to himself. ‘We’ll take him now. Really, the stretcher was quite unnecessary.’
Ota remembered the Australian troops at Buitenzorg. Suddenly he heard himself speaking. ‘He was just doing his duty—’
Shirai looked at him with disdain. ‘We are not on the field at Sekigahara.’ The great battle in 1600 had been the last great clash of samurai armies. ‘He’s a foreign dog,’ Shirai continued scathingly, ‘and will die like one!’
Shirai barked an order and two of his men came forward. They hauled the airman off the stretcher and dragged him away. Ota watched them sling their groaning prisoner over the tailgate of the half-track like a sack of rice. He reminded him
self never to be taken alive.
Kate closed her eyes as she tried to shut her mind to the sweltering heat, thankful that she had grabbed her straw bonnet on the way to the sudden roll call. They had been lined up for over an hour when the camp commandant, flanked by more officers than usual, finally appeared. Kenpei and camp guards took up a position every twenty yards around them. Long bayonets were fixed to their rifles.
Kate was one row back. The waiting had taken a heavy toll. Two women in the front row had fainted and lay where they fell. She had heard others collapse behind her but she was afraid to look because the guards were in a savage mood. One woman who had tried to tend to the two at the front had been clubbed back into place with a rifle butt. In the corner of her eye Kate could see she was now swaying groggily.
A corpulent sergeant stepped forward to call them to attention with a bellow that was almost a scream. ‘Kiotsuke!’ The camp commandant’s route took him close to the front row and he and his minions stepped over the prone women with hardly a break in their stride.
Despite their exhaustion, the women forced themselves to straighten. Kate could see the Japanese were unusually tense. Something—smuggling or perhaps the latest war news—had infuriated them. The previous night the BBC had reported large bombing raids on Tokyo around the Imperial Palace. Maybe, thought Kate glumly, the Japs were going to take it out on them once again. Allied victories in the Pacific brought both pleasure and pain. Successes were always secretly cheered but they resulted in cuts in their rations or electricity, sometimes both, for days on end. Their only consolation was the knowledge that the Japanese were taking a beating.
A tremor of unease ran through the women when they recognised Shirai. Since the chief kenpei torturer only appeared to dish out punishments, Kate was sure that someone must have been caught. She hoped desperately that it wasn’t one of her friends.
‘Rei!’ Obediently, the women and children bowed low.
The commandant, on tenterhooks in the presence of the kenpei, saluted. Eagerly, Shirai sprang on to the dais and surveyed his audience with unveiled contempt. He let fly with a tirade then signalled to the camp interpreter, a haughty, middle-aged Javanese woman who was also the commandant’s secretary. ‘White imperialists continue their futile aggression. They do not see that their power is broken and that they will never rule in Asia again. Instead, they now use indiscriminate methods to wage war.’ Her voice was equally strident. Kate had little doubt her hostility was genuine. ‘We will not accept such attacks passively. Since they are your forces you are therefore all guilty.’
Across the compound the cellblock door opened and two camp guards led out two girls by ropes tied around their necks. They had been stripped to their camp-made bras and knickers and their heads shaved. Their wrists and shoulders were lashed to bamboo poles.
A third prisoner, a barely conscious white man also bound to a pole, was dragged out by two kenpei. His clothing was ripped and blood-stained. When he drew near and she saw his injuries, Kate’s stomach turned. His short hair was matted with dried blood and dirt. She wasn’t sure if either of his eyes was open because his face was so badly swollen. Bruises and bloodstains covered his torso and arms. His breathing came in quick, laboured hisses through jagged, bloody stumps that were all that remained of his teeth. She could not tell his age.
Shirai paused again for the interpreter as he indicated the two cowering girls. ‘Last night, these two were caught smuggling. It is a crime against the war effort. They, and you, know the penalty. If any of you look away their punishment will be doubled!’
Kate sighed when she finally recognised the girls from Juliette’s dance classes. They were sisters aged fifteen and seventeen. At Shirai’s signal the guards raised thin, whippy canes. The girls began to sob.
Shirai led the count. ‘Ichi, ni, san.’—One, two, three.
Screams echoed and merged over the courtyard as the guards thrashed the girls powerfully and methodically across their backs and fronts.
‘Yon, go, roku,’ continued Shirai.
Kate counted too, silently, watching the strikes leave a checker of thin, bloody lines.
Wailing, the girls dropped to their knees, squirming to evade the blows but the leverage from the poles enabled the guards to flip them around effortlessly. Piece by piece the girls’ underwear fell away as the threadbare cottons were slashed.
Kate stopped counting at ten.
Shirai did not. ‘Ju-ichi, ju-ni...’
Finally, at fifteen, it ended. ‘Yame!’—Stop.
The guards stepped away leaving the girls whimpering in the dirt. Flies began to settle on the open, bloody welts. Kate pitied them but she knew they were strong enough to recover. She was more concerned about the man. Kate held her breath as Shirai began haranguing them again.
‘Before you is an Australian flyer who attacked Surabaya harbour. It was a hopeless gesture and a doomed mission! Now, my former colonial ladies, I thought you should see for yourselves the fate of Japan’s enemies.’
The interpreter paused as Shirai snapped out another command. The unconscious Australian was dragged forward.
Shirai jumped from the dais and positioned himself to one side of the airman. In a slow, deliberate arc he drew his sword. The women began muttering.
‘Dear God!’—‘Oh, please no!’—‘The rotten bastard!’
Shirai seemed oblivious to the reaction. Carefully he lowered the blade to the back of the airman’s neck, gauging the cut. Kate saw a glazed, distant look in Shirai’s eyes. Amongst the rows of women, hands reached silently for hands. Mothers gathered their children to them to shield their eyes then closed their own.
A prayer began as a whisper and was taken up. ‘…Hallowed be Thy name….’
Kate mouthed the words but could barely speak them. She felt a chill grip her as she saw the sword rise slowly above Shirai’s head. It seemed to hang in the air, glinting in the sunlight. The airman was still unconscious and she was glad for that small mercy. As the blade flashed downwards she closed her eyes and tensed. There was an oddly familiar clink followed by a dull thud. It was the sound of the kitchen, of a cleaver chopping bone.
‘Oh, God!’—‘The poor boy!’—‘Jesus Christ!’—‘Murderer!’
Kate forced herself to look. Shirai stood as if frozen, his arms extended and his sword held just below the severed neck. Arterial blood sprayed over the blade, pooling and frothing on the packed earth. The head had rolled to lie face down near Shirai’s feet. Thick blood oozed from it, staining the dusty ground.
Kate felt faint. To her left a woman vomited, causing Kate to gag. She fought it, determined to keep her eyes on Shirai. His eyes were still glazed and his nostrils flared. Without looking, he sheathed the sword in one quick, fluid motion, then turned and strode toward the camp gate.
General Yamagami had enjoyed the short flight from Djakarta to Semarang’s Kalibanteng airfield. He was looking forward to the company of soldiers rather than, as he saw it, bureaucrats dressed as soldiers. As the twin-engine Mitsubishi Ki-57 army transport touched down and bumped across the cracked tarmac he saw half-a-dozen bombers and fighter-trainers laid out in a dispersed pattern in case of air raids. Dotted along the airfield’s perimeter were the burnt-out shells of Dutch aircraft destroyed during the invasion. He frowned, wondering how much longer he would be able to fly to inspect his men. Once the Allies had a base on Sumatra or Lombok, no Japanese aircraft would be safe from their fast Hellcats and Thunderbolts.
Yamagami pushed the thoughts of the enemy advance to the back of his mind and stepped down on to the tarmac. Major Kudo and the senior officers of the Central Java Command Area were lined up a few yards away.
‘Welcome, General,’ said Kudo warmly as he bowed. He had served under Yamagami as a captain in the China campaigns of the 1930s.
‘Ah, Kudo, it’s good to see an old comrade!’ Yamagami said laughing. He clapped the much younger man on the shoulder. ‘I know I needn’t bother inspecting your men. You’re always
on top of things,’ he said loudly. Then in a whisper to Kudo alone, ‘I needed a break from the pen-pushers!’
Kudo led him to greet the other officers. ‘Your timing is perfect, General,’ he said warmly. ‘Coincidentally, this afternoon is the second annual Central Java Kendo Championship. We should have plenty of time for you to inspect the defences and enjoy a few of the bouts.’
‘Really? I shall look forward to it. What a pleasant surprise!’ Both men knew it was nothing of the sort. The General’s fondness for kendo was no secret and he had planned his itinerary very carefully. ‘By the way,’ he added casually, ‘I hope you’ve scheduled me an hour at that wonderful bathhouse?’
‘How could I forget that, General!’ Kudo grinned. ‘After all, it’s one of Semarang’s greatest attractions. Almost as good as the Lotus Pools at Quin Lo.’
Yamagami clapped Kudo’s arm. ‘Ah, you still remember! What a place!’ He looked slyly at the tense, well-groomed aide beside him. ‘Of course, I was much younger then!’ He looked at Kudo. ‘I heard Mao’s rabble controls that area now. Do you suppose….’
‘I’m sure business is booming!’ Kudo quipped. ‘Please, General, this way.’
As they walked to the cars, Kudo glanced at the carved wooden plaque over the entrance to the airfield offices. Originally it had read ‘Royal Netherlands Indies Air Force, Semarang’ above the outline of an aircraft in Dutch livery. In the aftermath of the Japanese victory, the ‘Royal Netherlands’ had been crossed out and ‘Imperial Nippon’ daubed over it crudely in red paint. A wooden model of a Zero fighter had been nailed above the Dutch aircraft but unnoticed, it had slipped and now hung as though falling.
Yamagami also glanced at the sign.
‘It was amusing in 1942,’ Kudo said quietly, annoyed at the slip-up. His guest said nothing.
Yamagami’s inspection tour lasted two hours. By four o’clock, when he arrived at the barracks, the kendo competition was underway. His party were shown to an open-sided tent that gave protection from the burning sun but not the heat and the dust that, in spite of repeated dousing from watering cans, rose in small clouds in the open arena. Several hundred noisy and enthusiastic soldiers sat on tiered bench seating that was open to the elements.
