Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II

by Laurence Rees

  ’I remember there was no alarm or air raid warning,’ says Yoshiko Hashimoto, then a young mother in Tokyo. ‘But the sky in the west was blazing red, scarlet red, like a bright sunset burning. Usually B-29s flying at high altitude looked small, but these B-29s looked gigantic, looming very close and dispersing their bombs. And it was almost like a heavy evening shower coming down.’

  The fire was so intense that it became obvious to Yoshiko’s father and mother that they and their three daughters had to leave the air raid shelter and seek another place of safety. ‘I knew we had to flee,’ she says, ‘but we had to take some things with us — there was a dire shortage of everything to wear or to sleep on. So my mother and father and sisters went into the house and put the bedding mattress and clothes on a hand cart. And I was told that since I had a baby I had to escape first. Right next to my house there was a big avenue and the fire was coming close by, like a blizzard of fire — yes, a blizzard of fire. We couldn’t keep our eyes open, wind was blowing the debris from the fire all around.’

  Yoshiko picked up her baby and hurried down towards the elevated railway line that ran above the street to wait for the rest of her family. When they arrived her father said the railway might be a target for further bombing so they decided to run in the direction of the river. Around them was pandemonium. ‘There were so many people seeking refuge, moving in various directions. The paths and roads were packed — from the narrow alley to the big road. Everybody was panicked, pushing around. Everybody was trying to call for each other and we heard the children starting to scream.’

  One of Yoshiko’s sisters was running holding a big pot of rice — as precious as gold in those times of starvation — and so could not hold her parents’ hands as she ran. ‘She was pushed around by the crowd and was swaying and faltering. I was very worried about her. I kept on calling to her. But gradually the distance between me and her grew bigger and I lost sight of her. It’s very sad. She was eighteen and had pony tails. Still my youngest sister is eighteen — I lost her.’

  The rest of the Hashimoto family pressed on through the throng until they reached the river. They were surrounded by fire. ‘I saw living people burnt alive,’ says Yoshiko. ‘People one by one were quickly burning to death, struggling and suffering.’ The bedding mattresses that many had saved from their houses proved deadly liabilities as they caught fire and burned amongst the crowd. Across the river warehouses were ablaze. The screams of the victims mingled with the acrid smell of smoke and burning, all lit in a hellish flame-orange glow. ‘I heard a very sharp scream on my back — it was my baby! And I turned around and he was crying with his mouth open so that little powdery pieces of fire got into his mouth. And my mother screamed that I should get him in my arms, get him off my back. So I held him in my arms while my mother and father tried to protect themselves from the raging fire.’ Witnessing the nightmare scenes around him, Yoshiko’s father shouted to his daughter to jump into the river. ‘But in March it was very cold,’ she says, ‘and I didn’t have courage to jump at first. And besides I had my baby in my arms....So I was hesitating, and I kept on hesitating, and my mother also said, “Jump in!” And I was almost scolded. In her eyes they didn’t have any hope of life, but my son was the only hope for her — he was her first grandson. She adored him very much. So I decided to jump into the river with my baby in my arms. When I jumped in I heard the sound of fire in my clothes being extinguished. And the water was extremely cold. Looking around on the surface of the river there were many who had jumped before me.’ On the bank stood her father and mother — neither of them could follow their daughter and grandson into the water. Her father had an injury to his leg and her mother had never learnt to swim. ‘They probably burnt to death there,’ says Yoshiko. ‘Both my mother and father would have caught fire and died. It’s very painful even to think of that.’

  Once she was in the river Yoshiko tried to cling to passing logs but they were slippery and she saw people pushed under the water as the logs turned. Eventually she hung on to a passing raft and managed to put her baby on top of it. She was lucky — other mothers who had jumped in with their babies on their backs, rather than holding them in their arms as she had done, turned round and saw that their children had drowned: ‘The mothers’ heads are above the water but the babies on their backs are under the water — so the babies died without the mothers knowing. These young mothers just lost their minds when they saw what had happened.’

  As she clung to the raft, knowing she could not survive much longer in the cold water, Yoshiko saw a small rowing boat approaching, with two young men pulling at the oars: ‘They passed the raft, and shamelessly I shouted and asked for help — if not for me then just for my son. They rowed close to me and dragged my son and me on to the boat.’ She spent the rest of the night on the small boat as around her Tokyo burned. ‘Everywhere we saw burnt corpses and [heard] the screams and cries of pain and torment.’ In places the surface of the water — covered with wood and oil — had caught fire, but still people jumped in from the banks and the bridges. ‘Everyone jumped in that sea of fire and many were chanting the Buddhist sutra — but you cannot be calm there.’

  The next morning they were able to land upstream, and Yoshiko took her baby to hospital. ‘The doctor gave my son a big sedative shot and at long last he started drinking water. The I realized that my son was alive and that was a tremendous sense of relief. And then I wept.’ Around her, on the way to the hospital, she had been astonished at the destruction. ‘There wasn’t anyone alive — everyone had been burnt to death. Not a living soul. It was beyond belief. And everything was burnt so that you could see all the way, almost to the horizon. The town and community you were born and lived in simply reduced to ashes. I still have this nightmare — the burnt corpses of people looking like withered trees. I saw mothers that died trying to protect their children — I saw them.’That night Yoshiko lost her mother, father and one of her sisters. ‘Many, many civilians were killed,’ she says. ‘The atomic bombs were terrible, but conventional weapons also bring death to many, many people. Fifty years after the war, I met a pilot of a B-29 bomber and I asked him, “As you were raiding Tokyo, dropping bombs, did you ever think that, underneath you, my parents and many others were being killed?” And he said, “It’s a very difficult question to answer.’”

  When the same question was put to Paul Montgomery, who as a member of an American B-29 bomb crew took part in many of the fire-bomb raids of 194S, his answer was simple and straightforward: ‘I didn’t have any feelings at the time. I guess the reason I didn’t was that I wanted to get the war over. I was insensitive to the bombing of the cities. I really was wanting to get the war over and I wanted to get home. And if they told me to go bomb cities, I went and bombed cities.’ Montgomery — in common with the rest of the American air crews — knew that his mission now was not to attack industrial targets but to destroy civilian life, even to the extent of deliberately trying to hinder the work of the firemen who would try and extinguish the blaze: ‘We dropped 100-pound phosphorus bombs, and in that bomb cluster there were anti-firefighting bombs that would go off at unspecified times — upon impact, six hours later, the next day.’ The only time Montgomery felt substantial contact with the people whose lives he was destroying was when he participated in the fire-bombing of Kure, a town in the southwest of the main Japanese island of Honshu: ‘We came in from the inland sea — it’s a coastal town. And I could not find any area that was not already afire — we were one of the last ones in. Kure was burning with such intensity and we were at such low level — we weren’t pressurized — that obnoxious odours from the incineration came up to our airplane. There was such an odour of human waste coming up that I was gagging. I opened the escape hatch to see if the bomb bay was cleared and that odour struck me as an indescribable stench — somewhere between burning urine and human waste. We finally found an area of Kure that wasn’t on fire and we dropped the bombs — but it was a nauseating experience.’ But even
this did not make Montgomery feel compassion for the civilians whose lives he was taking. ‘I felt everything except mercy for the people. I was not obsessed with any feeling of sympathy — I just wasn’t. I was young and I was case-hardened. I had a kind of cast-iron attitude towards war. I had lost my sensitivity, evidently.’

  Crucial to the ability of men like Paul Montgomery to escape feelings of compassion for the women and children they were incinerating was the distancing effect of aerial bombardment: ‘It’s not like I was going out and sticking a bayonet in someone’s belly, okay? You still kill them but you kill them from a distance, and it doesn’t have the demoralizing effect upon you that it did if I went up and stuck a bayonet in someone’s stomach in the course of combat. It’s just different. It’s kind of like conducting war through a video game, if you will.’ But Montgomery and his colleagues were not completely immune from understanding that there was a difference between bombing a military base and bombing a school or hospital. ‘We didn’t talk about bombing the cities — there was just no conversation about it. Mitsubishi — yes, the factories — yes, the naval bases — yes, Yokohama, gasoline refineries — yes. But the cities, there was a kind of deadly silence there. Everybody felt — it was women and children — but it was never spoken. It was just never spoken. Even today when we have a reunion, the bombing of the cities isn’t mentioned. We talk about the military targets but we don’t talk about the bombing of the cities — it’s just kind of off limits.’

  Paul Montgomery was brought up in a deeply religious family, and still today it is obvious that he is a caring, kind man. And that is ultimately what is so disturbing about his testimony. This man who was capable of shedding tears when he saw the grave markers of US marines on Iwo Jima — a sight that still causes him to break down as he describes it today — remains unmoved by his participation in the mass killing of thousands upon thousands of Japanese women and children. His testimony is a powerful reminder of the morally numbing effect of war conducted by modern technological means.

  Emperor Hirohito made a rare trip from his palace in central Tokyo (one of the few buildings that had escaped the firestorm) to tour the sections of the capital devastated by the bombing. His reaction to the destruction and suffering was true to form; he called, yet again, for one last decisive victory that would enable the Japanese to negotiate with the Allies from a position of relative strength.

  In March 1945, the same month as the Tokyo fire-bombing, the suicide missile conceived by Shoichi Ota was ready to be used against the Allied fleet for the first time. Perhaps, military leaders felt, these special kamikazes, named the Jin-rai Butai, the ‘Thunder Gods’, would prove to be the secret weapon that would turn the war for the Japanese. Those who had volunteered to fly Ota’s missile gathered near Tokyo at the Kanaiki training base. Today some of the few survivors of the unit (who most often escaped death because their planes or missiles failed technically before their target was reached) confess that they did not embark on their mission with quite the insouciance presented on the propaganda newsreels. ‘We all brooded constantly on our death,’ says Hachiro Hosokawa. ‘In the Ohka missile death was certain, and we were simply waiting for our time to come. And the waiting seemed to go on for ever. It was like being sentenced to death — as though you were waiting for the electric chair.’ ‘I started to wonder whether when I had volunteered I had been in my right mind,’ says Fujio Hayashi, another of the Thunder Gods. ‘And whether, when the time actually came for us to depart, I would tremble, that my hands would shake. It would have been a disgrace for a Japanese to act like that.’

  That March the first group of Thunder Gods were launched against the Allied fleet south of the home islands of Japan. Eighteen bombers took off and headed out over the sea. With the Ohka missile strapped beneath them, the bombers were slow and vulnerable. When they were still far from their targets, American fighters intercepted them and shot every one down. All these first volunteers were killed without taking any of the enemy with them. Ironically, Shoichi Ota, the inventor of this supposed wonder weapon, was not on the raid. He had not reached the required standard as a pilot. ‘At the base,’ says Fujio Hayashi, ‘Ota came up to me and said, “I’m sorry it’s such a poor weapon. I wasn’t thinking of something like that, but of something which had a much higher capability.” He said again he was very sorry.’

  After this disaster it was clear that the longed-for decisive victory would not be bought by the Thunder Gods. But that spring the emperor and the rest of the Japanese High Command had another straw at which to grasp — the Imperial Army dug in on the island of Okinawa. Once again, the Imperial Army and Navy were ordered to make a heroic stand and win a great victory.

  At first, the defiant way in which the Japanese intended to secure that victory was not evident to the Allies. On 1 April 50,000 US troops landed on beaches on the western side of the island. The Americans expected the Japanese to defend the landing ground, but the marines were virtually unopposed. ‘Everyone was very happy,’ says James Eagleton, then with the US Marine Corps. ‘What happened to the Japanese? We just thought we were luckier than hell. And we were very surprised that there wasn’t cannon fire, mortar fire, small arms fire meeting us. We were very pleased.’

  Similarly, the Allied fleet off Okinawa sailed virtually untroubled until the afternoon of 6 April. Then, suddenly, out of a clear sky came wave upon wave of kamikazes. ‘It was a saturation-type thing,’ says Frank Manson, a US navy communications officer. ‘I mean there was one kamikaze, and then there was two, and then three, and they’d just keep coming.’ For the first time kamikaze pilots were attacking in large groups of over thirty planes at a time, in a tactic known as kikusui or Floating Chrysanthemums. ‘The way we stopped them was just to fill the air with flak,’ says Bill Simmons, another US sailor who endured the kamikaze attacks off Okinawa. ‘And if there was ever an opening in the flak they were on you. And we had a number of them just barely miss us.’ ‘Eventually, of course, we knew they’d get us,’ says Frank Manson, ‘but we hoped, and I think our gunners hoped, that they’d shoot down enough of them that they might pick another target.’

  It was not just American warships that suffered kamikaze attacks off Okinawa. Several British ships were hit as well. ‘I think it was the worst moment of my life,’ says Ronald Hay, a fighter pilot who served on one of the British carriers during the battle. ‘I’d been frightened many times in the war, but that was about the worst time. Sitting there knowing that one kamikaze coming in there could have swept the whole of our complement of aircraft and aircrew into the sea — maybe kill the whole lot. It’s not nice. We wouldn’t have expected to survive if a kamikaze had hit the deck. All of us would have gone up in smoke. There would have been a lot of roasting going on.’

  Hay was lucky — he was able to lead his squadron into the sky before a kamikaze hit them as they lay vulnerable, fuelled and armed, waiting to take off. Once airborne, he and his colleagues found that the kamikaze planes were easy to destroy: ‘You’d only got to do a short burst and these matchwood planes would explode or collapse — very silly little planes, you might think. You should never go to war in those sorts of things — they had no armour plate protection. It wasn’t difficult to shoot them down. Many of them were not really good pilots and they missed everything and plunged straight into the sea — what a waste.’ Hay and his colleagues found little to admire or respect in their adversaries. ‘Because of what we’d heard about what they did in the land fighting we had no compassion for them at all. The only good Japanese were dead ones — that was our philosophy. We thought they were the most outrageously ghastly, horrible people.’

  Despite the poor quality of their aircraft, the massed kamikaze attacks off Okinawa were effective — altogether twenty-four American ships were sunk and around 200 were damaged. And the psychological strain of facing wave upon wave of kamikazes also took its toll: ‘We had one gunner whose 40-millimetre guns had been hit,’ says US navy veteran John Mitchell, ‘and he
just simply got up on his gun and jumped over the side, and someone heard him say, “It’s hot today.” And he jumped right into the water and we never saw or heard from him again.’

  When Ronnie Hay returned from one sortie he found that his ship had been damaged by a kamikaze attack: ‘One of them hit the port forward gun turret and that killed about six people and maybe injured another six. And the second one bounced right off the flight deck aft and that swept a few airplanes into the sea and killed maybe eight people. And all they do is to brush the remains over the side. That’s all they can do. And that’s how we buried our friends — I mean, there were only bits and pieces left.’

  The British ships with their armoured decks were much less susceptible to kamikaze attacks than the American carriers which had wooden ones. If a single kamikaze hit the centre of the flight deck of an American carrier it could penetrate to the decks below and place the ship in extreme danger. So the Americans lived in particular fear of the kamikazes — a fact that helps to place in context the extraordinary actions of Fred Murphy, an engineering officer on one of the US warships, when some weeks after a kamikaze attack he visited one of his ship’s holds to investigate a malfunctioning fuel oil indicator: ‘I was digging through to get to this vertical pipe and I came across what turned out to be this kamikaze pilot’s leg, his right leg. And it had been blown off about halfway up from the knee and of course it was all black, ‘cause it was burnt, and it was about a month and a half later so everything was pretty rotten. And guys were souvenir-happy by that time — anything you could find that was Japanese they’d make souvenirs out of it. So I took this, and of course it still had some meat on it — and as I tell it now it sounds kind of gruesome. And really it’s bad, it sounds bad, but I was young and hardened by the war and it didn’t bother me at all to pick it up and take it up there and say, “Here — make some souvenirs out of it.” The guys actually sliced up the bones into cross-sections. They made necklaces and bones of that pilot.’ Only in ‘recent years’ has it occurred to Fred Murphy that ‘if the parents of that boy — that young airman — knew that we took the leg of their son and did that, it would be terrible.’ But, he feels, ‘at the same time it doesn’t detract from the fact that he was trying to kill us and we were trying to kill him, right? So I didn’t feel guilty — there’s no guilt about it. It’s just a feeling of sadness that men will do things like that, you know.’