The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  Nagumo, Igeta and Saito took no part in the argument, which lasted through the night. At dawn, July 6, the shelling and bombing resumed, and a sentry at the mouth of the cave reported that an enemy tank was “peering over” the edge of the cliff above.

  Saito, who had been quietly conferring with Nagumo and Igeta, beckoned to Hirakushi. He said the three of them had decided to die at ten o’clock. “Excuse us for going first.”

  “Do you plan to do it here?”

  “Yes, here.”

  Hirakushi said it would be better to commit suicide privately in a smaller cave nearby. The major left to prepare the new cave while Saito read aloud a farewell message that he wanted conveyed to all Army troops:

  “… Our comrades have fallen one after another. Despite the bitterness of defeat, we pledge, ‘Seven lives to repay our country.’

  … Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. We must utilize this opportunity to exalt true Japanese manhood. I will advance with those who remain to deliver still another blow to the American devils, and leave my bones on Saipan as a bulwark of the Pacific.

  As it says in the Senjinkun [Battle Ethics]: ‘I will never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive,’ and ‘I will offer up the courage of my soul and calmly rejoice in living by the eternal principle.’

  Here I pray with you for the eternal life of the Emperor and the welfare of the country and I advance to seek out the enemy.

  Follow me.”

  Hirakushi led the three commanders to the new cave. “What means are you going to use?” he asked.

  “We will go through the first step of seppuku [cutting open the stomach],” said Saito. “But seppuku will take too long, so have an officer stand behind each of us and shoot us in the back of the head.” Saito selected Hirakushi. Nagumo requested a naval officer; Igeta didn’t express any preference.

  Hirakushi returned to the main cave and asked for someone from the Navy to “assist Admiral Nagumo with his suicide.” No one answered. Finally a young Army aide said, “Let me do the job.” Another Army aide volunteered to shoot Igeta, and the three started back to the suicide cave.

  The commanders, all wearing khaki fatigue uniforms, were sitting cross-legged near the mouth of the cave with the diminutive Nagumo in the middle. Hirakushi turned to find some water to wash their faces when he heard a Navy officer call out that his group was heading north alone. Hirakushi started forward to stop them. Behind there were three sharp reports. He spun around. The three commanders were lying sprawled on the ground. Behind the bodies stood the two young aides, smoking pistols in hand. The commanders, impatient, had gone ahead without him.

  All Hirakushi could do now was burn the bodies and regimental flags. He rounded up men to help, but other officers stopped him—smoke would attract the enemy. Hirakushi agreed to wait until after midnight, just before launching the last attack. The ordeal of the past few days finally took its toll. He collapsed on the floor of the command cave into deep sleep.

  It was dark when he woke up. Soldiers and sailors in nondescript uniforms, and armed with rifles, swords and bamboo spears, were assembling outside. They were haphazardly divided into groups and in the moonlight officers began to shepherd them toward the beach. All along the ridge men were filtering down to the narrow coastal plain. At zero hour they would charge independently toward American positions around Tanapag. To Hirakushi the men looked like “spiritless sheep being led to the slaughter,” and the officers “guides to the Gates of Hell.” Before he left, the major ordered two men to burn the regimental flags and the bodies of the three commanders, then silently led his group, a dozen men, down the steep slope.

  More than three thousand Japanese—including civilians like Shizuko’s brother-in-law—emerged onto the coastal plain. They left the slope behind littered with thousands upon thousands of empty sake and beer bottles.a

  Hirakushi and his men reached the shore at four o’clock in the morning on July 7. He stripped and waded into the tepid water to bathe. Rapt, he stared out at the barrier reef, a ghostly shimmering line in the moonlight. Overhead a thick cloud reminded him of a Japanese mother in quilted kimono carrying a baby on her back. As the cloud pulled apart, he conjured up in the lightening sky images of his mother, his wife, his friends. He shook himself free of this fantasy and returned to shore to dress. It felt good to be clean. He was ready to die.

  Distant voices were shouting “Wah! Wah!—a Japanese battle cry. There was a crackle of rifle fire from the ridge. The signal to attack! Without waiting for him, his men took off headlong down the beach toward Tanapag. Pistol in one hand (a Taisho with a clip of six shells) and sword in the other, he started after them. He was enveloped by an explosion and felt as if he were floating right into a huge column of bursting fire. I’m dead, he thought just before the world went black.

  At Tanapag the 27th Division had been warned by Holland Smith to expect “an all-out banzai attack” along the coast before dawn.b The Japanese swarmed on Tanapag. In the lead half a dozen men held aloft a great red flag, like the vanguard in a dramatic pageant. Behind pressed the fighting troops and then—the most incredible sight of all—hundreds of men with bandaged heads, on crutches, scarcely armed, limping and hobbling.

  They swept down the narrow tracks of the sugar-cane railway that skirted the beach and smashed against the 1st and 2nd battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment like a human tidal wave. It reminded the commander of the 2nd Battalion, Major Edward McCarthy, of a “stampede staged in the old Wild West movies.” The Japanese “just kept coming and didn’t stop. If you shot one, five more would take his place.” They “ran right over” the Americans.

  The commander of the 1st Battalion, another Irishman, Lieutenant Colonel William J. O’Brien, stood his ground, an example to his men, a pistol in each hand. Seriously wounded, he fired until his clips were empty, then manned a .50-caliber machine gun until he was killed. The Japanese surged over the two steadfast battalions of GI’s (the same ones accused of advancing too slowly up Death Valley), killing or wounding more than 650 of them.

  To their right another group of raiders funneled through a winding canyon—soon to be known as “Hara-kiri Gulch”—and hit the 3rd Battalion but these troops were too well emplaced above the gulch and could not be dislodged.

  Yeoman Noda, who had served both Yamamoto and Nagumo to the end, was with the large group that overran the Americans on the beach. Shrieking and frenzied, this was hardly a military formation. Suddenly Noda felt as if he had been clouted in the hip with a baseball bat—but there was no pain. He staggered, tried to keep moving but fell—he had been hit by a machine-gun slug. American bodies lay on all sides.c Noda picked up a GI canteen and drank deeply. He tried to struggle to his feet but his right shoe was like lead.

  Unable to bend forward to unlace the shoe, he found an American bayonet and wrenched a stick from the grasp of a dead Japanese. He tied the bayonet to the stick and laboriously hacked at his shoelaces until he could push off the shoe. He still couldn’t stand and decided his trouser legs were holding him back. He cut them off but remained as helpless as ever.

  He sank back on the sand, resigned. Now the time has come to die, he told himself. In the light of dawn he saw a pool of blood in the sand. To his amazement—his own blood. A few yards away four wounded Japanese were lying on their backs, smoking calmly, as if it were a beach in Japan.

  “We’re about to die,” one of them observed casually and flipped Noda a pack of Hikaris. Noda stretched out on the sand, smoking the cigarette, his mind a blank. He was roused by the soldier who had given him the cigarettes. “Hey, Navy man,” he said, “we are about to die. Will you join us?”

  Noda held up a grenade. “I have one.”

  “Excuse us for preceding you.”

  Noda huddled to avoid grenade shrapnel and shut his eyes. There was a detonation. He looked up and saw four sprawled bodies. How terrible to die by grenade, he thought and was aga
in attracted by the stream of blood flowing from his own body. He considered a tourniquet but changed his mind. It would be better to bleed to death.

  He was growing weaker. I’m only twenty-seven and why should I die here? Whether I live or die won’t bring about Japanese victory. He began remembering things in the past—his school days, catching dojo (mudfish). He fainted. The next thing he heard was the chirping of a bird. The landscape was devastated, not a palm tree or bush. Only bodies and ugly craters of sand. If there was no tree, how could it be a bird? What was happening?

  There was a mutter of voices speaking a strange language. He felt a kick in the side. He groaned and two Marine corpsmen loaded him onto a stretcher. He saw medics kicking other bodies, Americans as well as Japanese, and just before passing out again he congratulated himself: If I hadn’t been wakened by that bird I would be dead.

  Ahead in Tanapag, Major McCarthy and his surviving officers and noncoms had finally managed to form a perimeter within the village itself. All morning they were pressed slowly back in a vicious house-to-house battle until a platoon of medium tanks rumbled in. Other reinforcements arrived and by late afternoon only isolated little groups of Japanese were alive. The last attack was over.

  Just offshore on a white hospital ship, Major Hirakushi was opening his left eye. All he could see was a clean white wall. I am alive! I have a second life! He was naked, covered with a blanket. It took some time before he realized his left hand was handcuffed to the bed and that he had been wounded in the head and shoulder. He was so exhausted that it didn’t occur to him until later that he, an officer, had disgraced himself by surviving the last assault. All he could think was: I am alive! I am alive!

  At the new field hospital in the Valley of Hell, Shizuko had crouched in her foxhole throughout the night. In the waxing daylight she noticed movement on the heights above. Dark faces peered through the undergrowth. They were Negro GI’s. In her panic she imagined they were gorillas coming down the incline. So the fantastic rumor was true! Americans were using them in battle.

  All around her, wounded men had emerged from their dugouts, and turning north, bowed low toward the Imperial Palace. Suddenly strange, raucous music blared from an amplifier—she had never before heard such noise. Its wild, disturbing rhythm echoed throughout the entire valley (it was American jazz). The unreality of the scene robbed her of the resolve to kill herself.

  The chief surgeon ordered her to give herself up by waving a white handkerchief. She hesitated; the Americans would rape her. “Save yourself!” his assistant, the lieutenant, urged her. As she stood paralyzed at the rim of the foxhole, the Negroes charged forward, lobbing grenades and shouting. All Shizuko could see were their teeth and eyes. The chief surgeon put a pistol to his throat and pulled the trigger. The lieutenant slashed his neck three times with a knife and collapsed over Shizuko. Warm blood flowed onto her legs. She picked up a hand grenade. She felt cold. Now I am going to die. She tried to cry “Mother” but nothing came out. She pulled the safety pin, rapped the grenade against a rock to activate it and threw herself on top of it.

  Shizuko heard voices but could not understand them. Cautiously opening her eyes, she discovered that she was in a house. She tried to rise but a young American officer said in Japanese, “You are wounded—don’t move.”

  Shizuko couldn’t believe Japanese was coming out of an enemy. Why hadn’t she died? She asked for water but the young captain told her she couldn’t have any. He poured something out of a can. She tried to drink it but had to spit it out. It was tomato juice and she couldn’t stand the taste. He ordered her to finish it and she did. It wasn’t death that terrified her, but the Americans. She asked what had happened to the men in the Valley of Hell.

  “All died except you,” said the officer, an interpreter. He told her that he had studied at a Japanese university and wanted to help her countrymen. “We believe in humanity, even in war.” He assured her that many Japanese civilians had survived and were in an internment camp near Charan Kanoa. She didn’t believe him. Everybody knew the American devils tore Japanese prisoners apart with tanks. She blurted out that she feared Americans, especially the black ones.

  He laughed. “It was Negroes who saved you.”

  She pleaded with the captain to let her die with her compatriots, and he got permission to take her by truck to Charan Kanoa. As they drove along the coast road in the bright starlight he told her there were many bodies of civilians in the sea. He asked if she wanted to see them. He ordered the vehicle stopped. With the help of two Negroes he carried her to a cliff. Below, floating bodies clustered the water’s edge. One woman had two children lashed to her.

  Almost to himself the young officer asked, “Why do Japanese kill themselves like this?” Tears flowed down his cheeks.

  Just past midnight they entered Charan Kanoa. To her surprise it was bright with electric lights. Tents sprouted all over. It was a different world. The captain told her this was the camp for Japanese, but she knew it was a trick. She was going to be shot here. Then she saw Japanese children clinging to a wire fence surrounding the tent city. She insisted on getting out, though the captain argued that she should continue to the hospital. “Do you have acquaintances out there? Is that it?”

  “There’s my mother!” she lied.

  She was lifted out of the truck on a stretcher. She insisted on walking and staggered through the gate before she fell. Many friendly hands lifted her up. She was back with her own.

  On July 9 at 4:15 P.M., Admiral Turner announced that Saipan was officially secured, and attention turned to neighboring Tinian and Guam. Marines who had once glumly predicted “Golden Gate in ‘48” were now saying “Home Alive in ‘45.” The battle on Saipan had ended but there remained the onerous and dangerous job of mopping up several thousand stragglers who were hiding in caves. “It means,” one cynical Marine commented, “that if you get shot now, you were hit in your own rear areas.”

  A different but equally difficult task confronted the Americans at the northern tip of the island. There thousands of civilians had gathered and were committing mass suicide rather than surrender. Interpreters and captured Japanese, using public address sytems, pleaded with crowds at Marpi Point, which dropped off spectacularly more than a hundred feet to rocky shallows. The fighting was over; safety and food were waiting; the names of those who had already surrendered were read off. Still men threw their children from the cliff and jumped after them; and mothers with babies on their backs would leap into the boiling surf.

  There were so many floating bodies that “naval small craft were unable to steer a course without running over them.” Lieutenant Emery Cleaves of the minesweeper Chief saw the corpse of a nude woman, drowned while giving birth. “The baby’s head had entered this world, but that was all of him.” Nearby “a small boy of four or five had drowned with his arm firmly clenched around the neck of a Jap soldier; the two bodies rocked crazily in the waves.”

  Elsewhere on the island families remained hidden from the new conquerors day after day. The Okuyamas—father, mother and four children—found a cave. On the morning of July 17 they were sunbathing on the ledge overlooking the rugged northeast coast, when a soldier from a nearby cave shouted “Enemy!” and pointed above them to the top of the cliff. Fourteen-year-old Ryoko Okuyama, the eldest child, glanced up at four or five big red-faced Americans in camouflage uniforms. They looked so different from the much smaller Japanese soldiers.

  The Japanese fired his rifle and the Americans began dropping grenades. The Okuyamas braced themselves against a depression, kicking them off the ledge, but when the missiles continued to fall, the father—a tailor—herded his family down to the bottom of the cliff to another cave. Inside they found a sergeant, an exhausted correspondent from the Asahi Shimbun, and an abandoned newborn baby which cried until Mrs. Okuyama picked it up. As the loud American voices came nearer and the sound of gunfire intensified, the baby began to scream. “Quiet it,” the sergeant whispered. “Any way!”<
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  Mrs. Okuyama, an attractive woman of thirty-four, tried to nurse the baby but it kept crying. In desperation she put the hem of her jacket over the baby’s mouth, and finally stifled the noise. The baby was dead. The sound of machine-gun fire echoed violently in the cave. The voices were just outside. The sergeant handed Okuyama a grenade, held another himself.

  Ryoko looked at her father in farewell. Pale and tense, he nodded slightly. The sergeant removed the safety pin of his grenade, so did Okuyama. “We are all going to a nice place together,” the mother told four-year-old Yoshitada, the youngest child. He smiled as if it were a game. The two men struck the grenades simultaneously against rocks at their feet. As the fuses hissed, Ryoko thought in rapid succession: Am I going to be a Buddha? Do human beings really have souls? Is there really another world? She felt the cave shake—the concussion had thrown her against the rock wall. Dazed, she heard her little brother give a feeble groan, and she fainted.

  She didn’t know how long she had remained unconscious. First she saw a vague brightness of red, and as it came into focus she realized it was the open abdomen of the sergeant who was sitting before her, legs crossed, as if asleep. The huge wound was so neat that it reminded her of the human-body exhibit in biology class. The organs, all in place, were “beautiful.”

  She herself was covered with blood and raw flesh. Appalled, she moved her arms and legs—no pain. She twisted. Still not much pain. Her nine-year-old brother’s shirt was blown off. Pieces of shrapnel were sticking in his bare chest, leaving black, burned spots. He was dead. So were her father, little Yoshitada and her six-year-old sister. The flesh had been blown from her sister’s head, revealing a skull the color and texture of a transparent candle. Ryoko had a horrifying feeling of loneliness. She was the only one alive. Then she felt something touch her left shoulder.