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

by Toland, John

  There were no mortars to lob shells over the ridge at the approaching Americans, so Yahiro ordered his men to direct steady fire on the crest line of the shrouded ridge. The strategy worked; the display of fire power discouraged the enemy from coming over the top. The defenders regained confidence, but their sense of security was short-lived. To the rear they heard an eerie grinding, thumping noise. An American tank had come around the bend of Highway 2, churning through the morass of mud, its gun spitting out shells. They were surrounded!

  Two men scrambled down the hill toward the road, carrying a heavy satchel charge. The men in the takotsubo turned and watched the little drama as from an amphitheater until they heard shouts in English near the top of the ridge. “Use grenades!” cried Kamiko and started up the hill followed by his depleted platoon. They tossed grenades over the crest and ran back for more. Three times they scrambled up the slope. With the enemy out of sight, they returned to their holes.

  But the Americans returned, as they always did. Kamiko heard something hissing at the rim of his takotsubo. An enemy grenade had rolled down the hill and was caught in a tent stake. He looked at Ogura and both shrugged. It was the end. But the grenade fizzled out. Others bounded over the dugouts but exploded after they were past.

  On the crest above, a GI leveled his rifle at Kamiko. He crouched in his takotsubo, then popped up and fired. The GI fell to the ground, but in his excitement Kamiko pumped three more shells into him. A rifle barrel rose and disappeared like a periscope. It belonged to another GI who was trying to rescue his fallen comrade. Kamiko ran up to the crest and shot him, too; then sprinted back to his hole.

  Pfc. Saiji Saito in the next hole leaped forward, following Kamiko’s example. At the crest he, too, fired. But instead of retreating, he disappeared on the other side. Why had Saito sacrificed himself so needlessly? Kamiko wondered. Then Saito reappeared like a jack-in-the-box. He swore breathlessly as he leaped into Kamiko’s hole, “I hated him so much I had to kick his head off!” Had Saito—a mild youngster who didn’t smoke or drink—gone mad? Was this the frenzy of the battlefield Kamiko had read about? And yet, hadn’t he himself come close to doing the same thing?

  To the rear the American tank—a medium—still moved freely on the road, raking the takotsubo from behind with its machine gun and cannon. The two men with the satchel charge sprang out of the ditch and flung the explosive under the tank’s tracks. As they leaped back to safety, there was a dull detonation and the tank shuddered. It turned laboriously, however, and retreated around the bend.

  Without the tank the American attack faltered and once more the GI’s gave up Yahiro Hill. Without hesitation the Japanese clambered up the muddy slope to reoccupy their positions along the crest. This time Kamiko felt no sense of victory. The enemy, who made retreat a tactic, would come back again and again. What did the remnants of Yahiro Company have left to stop them?

  Several hundred yards to Kamiko’s right on the next hill in the ridge, Sergeant Yoshio Noguchi’s platoon had been hurt as badly as Kamiko’s by the deadly mortar barrage along the crest. He had two 7.7-mm. machine guns left—his and the one in the next takotsubo—but only a few rounds of ammunition.

  Crouched in the numbing water up to his waist, Noguchi heard a cry of anguish and the operator of the second gun crawled feebly toward him. Noguchi pulled him in. His right thigh was like “a beehive” gushing blood. His face was pale, drained. The crawling man had attracted steady enemy machine-gun fire. The cogon grass all around Nogushi’s takotsubo was mowed flat. He cautiously checked on both sides. There was no activity. Apparently he was the last one of his platoon. He was a hardy, experienced soldier, a farm boy who had volunteered for service in 1938. Surrender was out of the question. He put the barrel of his pistol to his temple. He pulled the trigger, but the mechanism was jammed from the mud.

  Not twenty-five yards away, Americans in greenish uniforms were coming down his line of takotsubo. At each hole they paused with rifles at the ready while two of their number machine-gunned the dead or wounded occupants. The firing grew closer and Noguchi again put pistol to head. Jammed. There was a stuttering rattle of fire a few yards away and Noguchi knew he was next. A branch of palm leaves had been blown by a mortar round to the edge of his hole. With a stick he deftly pulled the palm over the mouth of the takotsubo. He pressed flat against the back of his dugout, water up to chin, legs outspread, then pulled the body of the lifeless machine-gun operator in front of him.

  The voices were directly overhead. A shiny barrel poked between the leaves. He thought, How well they take care of their weapons. As he plugged his ears with his middle fingers he prayed the bullets would somehow miss him. He felt the concussion from a deafening series of explosions, and scores of bullets churned the water between his legs. The opposite side of the hole collapsed. Noguchi closed his eyes as mud began covering him up to the neck. The palm branch, cut in two, dropped on his head.

  The voices moved away and there was a burst of fire in the next hole. Stunned almost beyond thinking, Noguchi felt no pain. Carefully he scraped the mud from his face and opened his eyes. The water in the hole was tinged red. But it was the blood of his human shield.

  At last the firing stopped. What were the Americans doing now? With infinite caution he pushed his dead comrade aside and looked out, expecting to see them digging foxholes. They were building something he had never seen before—shallow, rectangular rock forts with canvas roofs.

  Noguchi huddled for hours in the bloody water, afraid to make another move until well after dark. At last he painfully got to his feet. All around him were the strange squat shelters; each glowed from a dim light within. He could hear the Americans joking and eating. Cigarette smoke curled invitingly out of the cozy little structures. What kind of soldiers would have lights in the middle of a battlefield?

  The lights began going out one by one, and near midnight it started to rain again. Noguchi hoisted himself out of his hole and started crawling away from the one GI he could see was on guard. He came to a wire which seemed to surround the encampment. Some kind of warning device? He crawled under without touching it, and down a steep incline. His legs were so weak and unco-ordinated he had to hold on to vines to keep from falling. At the bottom he found a small stream. He drank on all fours, like a dog. Except for rain, it was the first water he had tasted in days. In the gloom he barely made out scores of bodies—comrades, canteen in hand, had met their death looking for water. In the darkness and rain he could not determine where he was. The battalion command post should be two hundred yards away, but he crawled up and down the draws for more than a mile without finding it. Exhausted, he curled up behind a bush and fell asleep.

  He was wakened by voices. Through the brush he saw Americans eating breakfast. In the night he had circled around and around the knob only to climb back up to his starting place. Two GI’s headed directly for him. He ducked his head, hoping they wouldn’t notice him in the underbrush. Then he felt a stream of fluid splashing against his helmet. One of the Americans was urinating on him. When he looked up, the GI was adjusting his trousers as he ran after his comrades who were already marching off.

  Most of Breakneck Ridge, however, still remained in Japanese hands. That morning, after heavy artillery preparation, two soaked battalions of the 24th Division resumed the attack in the driving rain. They advanced but were thrown back by a fresh Japanese battalion. Rain had become as much of a problem to the Americans as the enemy. Their supply route, Highway 2, was a swamp, and engineers were carting up loads of heavy gravel to try to make it passable. Already the GI’s were suffering from “immersion foot,” similar to the trench foot of Europe: the skin peeled away, leaving raw sores.

  The Japanese, too, were afflicted by the endless rain. Using trenching spades, they tried in vain to bail out their takotsubo. Kamiko remembered that American knapsacks were waterproof and decided to use one as a bucket. He crawled over to the enemy side of the ridge, found a dead GI—as usual lying face up, mouth
open—and took his knapsack. He and Ogura scooped out the water in their hole and passed the knapsack to the next takotsubo. Drenched to the skin and cold, they cut off the rubber tubes of gas masks and set them on fire. The smell was nauseating but there was some heat.

  Kamiko awoke to another dark dawn—it was November 10. It was nonsense to try to determine one’s own deathday, yet he kept doing it. Still he had no fear at all. “Mei fa tzu!” he exclaimed—a popular Chinese expression meaning “It is Fate” (similar to “Que será será”). There was nothing to do now except enjoy life to its last moment.

  The rain increased as American shells plowed into the crest line above them. Under the constant trembling of the earth, the sides of the takotsubo began to crumble. It reminded Kamiko of the terrifying earthquake in 1923, which he had never been able to forget. The barrage lifted.

  “First platoon, take positions on the ridge line!” Kamiko shouted and charged up the hill, an unrecognizable mass of shell holes. At the top he saw swarms of enemy soldiers halfway up the other side. They seemed numberless (they were two full battalions of the 1st Cavalry Division) and there were only a handful left in Yahiro Company to stop them. He frantically gestured to his men to return to the relative safety of their takotsubo down below. He called out a warning as he sped by Yahiro’s dugout. He leaped into his hole a moment before bullets swept down the slope. Grenades followed, skipping down into their positions. To the right there was shouting in English. Had the 2nd Platoon been overrun?

  Saito yelled, “Out of ammunition!” “Me, too!” another man called. Someone tossed them a few clips in an attempt to divide the remaining ammunition, but it was useless. Driven by anger and frustration, Kamiko plunged out of his takotsubo, and followed by three men, churned almost to the top of the hill before lobbing a grenade at the crest. Impulsively—perhaps to frighten the enemy—he shouted in English, “Charge, charge!”

  The result was startling. An American rushed over the crest with fixed bayonet and found himself facing Kamiko. The two stared open-mouthed at each other. Neither fired. Then the GI, realizing the order had come from the wrong side, dived back over the crest.

  “Company, tenshin!” It was the voice of Yahiro’s assistant. The word meant literally “turn around and advance” and was a euphemism for “retreat.” Yahiro himself repeated the word, then shouted as if in apology, “We will advance later!”

  The men of the platoon next to Kamiko’s, the 2nd, had never heard the expression before—it had been created recently to cope realistically with the changing tide of war—but the urgency of the command forced them out of their holes, ready to launch the last attack.

  “Tenshin! Tenshin!” Yahiro, American carbine in hand, ran out of his takotsubo to turn them around.

  Kamiko knew the word but had never expected to hear it in battle. Paralyzed, he watched the Americans concentrate their fire on the exposed 2nd Platoon. Yahiro was firing his carbine from the hip. One GI fell. Yahiro picked off another, then was sent spinning to the ground himself. Kamiko helped drag him to a shell hole. Blood spurted from his throat. “Company Commander!” Kamiko pleaded. They held a canteen to Yahiro’s mouth. He gulped once, then his head fell lifeless to the side.

  Now the fate of the few men left in Yahiro Company was in Kamiko’s hands. Retreat was disgraceful; in all their years of training it had been forbidden. They were going to die anyway and should take as many enemy with them as possible. “Throw all the grenades you have left!” he shouted and started up toward the crest, with five men right on his heels. Their unexpected attack caught the Americans momentarily off-guard. They fell back under the rain of grenades. We could win with one machine gun! thought Kamiko. The absurdity of that hope jerked him back to reality. He was leading his men to a meaningless death. “Follow me!” he cried and dodged back down the hill toward Highway 2 with the few survivors of the 2nd Platoon and his own men. He jumped into the ditch by the road, then looked back. Helmeted heads were poking up all along the crest.

  There were eleven in the ditch and Kamiko began to lead them down the highway toward Ormoc—along the same stretch of road he had so recently led the entire Gem Division—but the shame of retreat still gnawed at his conscience. Yahiro had ordered them to fall back, yet this withdrawal was his own responsibility—and he had abandoned the body of his commander. He had valued his own life above honor, and the thought tormented him with every step he took to the rear. Then he began to feel defiant: Why die needlessly? It wouldn’t help the nation.

  He began to feel almost “light of heart.” But his euphoria was shattered by the blast of a grenade. It had come from the west, or valley, side of Highway 2. No one was hurt and they broke into a run. How had the enemy outflanked them so fast in such rough terrain? Perhaps it might not even be possible to rejoin the main force.

  A few hundred yards down the road they came to a culvert; a stream was running underneath. Mei fa tzu! Kamiko reminded himself. The only thing was to do one’s best and not worry about the future. They were still alive. They stripped off their foul uniforms. With leggings removed, their bare legs were sickly white, like bean curd. As they scrubbed their clothes in the stream they began teasing and pushing one another as if they were back in Manchuria; then, clad only in loincloths, lay down unconcerned and before long were asleep.

  They were awakened by an ominous staccato. Kamiko jumped up. Above them on the crest of the ridge he could see GI’s manning a machine gun. He grabbed his rifle, and while the others snatched up what clothes they could on the run, he emptied his last clips before following them. They were chased by a few mortar rounds which detonated on contact with foliage overhead. Deep within the woods they paused to put on the clothing they had managed to salvage, and circled back to the road.

  At a regimental supply depot, Kamiko checked in and the young officer in charge congratulated them for the “great victory” of their battalion. Kamiko stared at him. On the ridge they had been waiting day after day for substantial reinforcements while the 3rd Battalion was being annihilated. Didn’t anyone back here at Regiment know what was going on up front?

  2.

  In Manila, General Yamashita knew at least that Suzuki’s troops had encountered stiff opposition at the ridge. He ordered the main thrust diverted from Carigara; instead, Suzuki should turn east off Highway 2 below Limon and strike overland directly across the island to Tacloban. It was a perfunctory order. General Yamashita still questioned the advisability of waging the Decisive Battle on Leyte. It was foolhardy to drain off men and supplies that would be needed so desperately in the battle for Luzon. Moreover, he had reason to believe things were not going too well for Suzuki at Leyte. And had American air and naval power really been crippled at Formosa and Leyte?

  Field Marshal Terauchi, however, remained unimpressed by these arguments. “We have heard the opinions of Fourteenth Area Army,” he said, “but the Leyte operation will continue.”

  “I fully understand your intention,” Yamashita replied. “I will carry it out to a successful end.”

  Terauchi’s confidence came in part from the relative ease with which he had just landed 13,000 men (12,000 of them from the 26th Division) at Ormoc. Moreover, another convoy, carrying 10,000 troops, was approaching Leyte escorted by four destroyers, a minesweeper and a submarine chaser, and screened by three other destroyers.

  Early the next morning, November 11, the convoy turned into Ormoc Bay. But at this point Yamashita’s suspicion that American air and naval power had not been destroyed was dramatically borne out. Almost two hundred carrier planes from Task Force 38 caught the creeping convoy before it reached the harbor. This first wave concentrated on the six transports, which were hit again and again. The second wave went after the destroyers, and the third swept in, bombing the burning hulks and strafing the men struggling in the water. The slaughter was frightful. At the cost of nine American planes, every transport and four of the destroyers were sunk. Only a few of the 10,000 troops aboard—almost an entire di
vision—managed to swim ashore through the crimson sea.

  The catastrophe left Terauchi unchanged, at least outwardly, but it strengthened Yamashita’s conviction that Leyte was a lost cause. At the same time he was under orders from Terauchi to continue the operation with vigor. His reservations were reflected in a radio message he sent Suzuki on November 15, which came close to predicting the abandonment of Leyte:

  THE THIRTY-FIFTH ARMY WILL ENDEAVOR TO ACCOMPLISH THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ENEMY ON LEYTE, SETTING AS ITS MINIMUM OBJECTIVE THE DISRUPTION OF THE ENEMY’S USE OF AIR BASES … IN THE EVENT THAT FURTHER TROOP SHIPMENTS CANNOT BE SENT, LUZON WILL BECOME THE MAIN THEATER OF FUTURE OPERATIONS IN THE PHILIPPINES.

  Suzuki, understandably, was confused. Did it mean that the order to launch the main attack across the mountains toward Tacloban was rescinded? He knew the ridge had to be held or the Americans would pour down Highway 2 toward Ormoc. He therefore ordered Kataoka to counterattack. This would hold the ridge line, and moreover, distract American attention from his own drive over the mountains.

  U. S. tanks roamed the corkscrew road almost at will. Infantry closed in from three sides, and after bitter hand-to-hand fighting, overran the ridge except for a few spurs at the southeastern end still held by the rearguard of the 57th Regiment of Gem Division. The rest of the regiment withdrew south at night, the weary men keeping together by following the glow of phosphorescent insects rubbed on the back of the man ahead. These men were turned around, and at Suzuki’s order, marched back to retake ground they had just abandoned.

  Kamiko found himself back on the ridge—this time at the southern end. He and Aoki had been sent as replacements to Yasuda Company, which was dug in near the top of a rise about the size of Yahiro Hill. Lieutenant Tatsuhide Yasuda was a mild man. “I’m glad you arrived up here safely,” he said through tight lips. “The company has been reduced to less than one fourth, so getting you two makes us feel we’ve got a million on our side.” Kamiko was given the 3rd Squad. “We’ve just dug in and they haven’t attacked us yet. But they will come soon. We are glad you are going to die with us.”