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

by Toland, John

  These prisoners had been forced to eat cats, dogs, baby rats and garbage to remain alive; by now, they had lost an average of fifty-five pounds. In the first year at Cabanatuan, 2,644 of the complement of about 6,500 had died from malaria, dysentery, diphtheria and other diseases. Their deaths, according to Dr. Samuel M. Bloom, a captain, were “directly attributed to the neglect of the Japanese, the result of a deliberate policy of starvation and the withholding of medical supplies.”

  Another diarist, Major Roy L. Bodine, a dentist and a veteran of Bataan, began keeping his clandestine record the day before MacArthur landed on Leyte. It was a day he would never forget; his group was transferred to Manila by truck to Bilibid Prison, where they learned they were simply being staged for shipment to Japan. They dreaded the treatment they might receive in the enemy homeland, but their spirits were lifted by the bombing of the Manila area and the long-awaited news that MacArthur had landed.* On October 28 Dr. Bodine wrote:

  That added to the bombing makes us hope that the Nips won’t be able to get us out of here.

  Every day they have rumors of us leaving in 2 or 3 days, but keep putting it off. We hope and pray constantly that they can’t. Really “Sweating it Out.”

  Bodine’s hopes were never realized. On December 12, all patients were given a cursory examination. The food improved, and soap and toilet paper were issued—sure signs they were about to leave. “If MacArthur gets this close and then lets us go, will really be mad,” wrote Bodine.

  The next morning he and 1,618 other prisoners filed down Quezon Avenue and past the walled city. Filipinos lined the sidewalks to watch the sad procession; many surreptitiously gave the V sign. Luneta Park was crammed with hastily erected barracks but the Gran Luna section, where Bodine had lived as a boy (his father had been an Army dentist), was unchanged. As they approached the dock area he saw the effects of the recent American bombing, and out in the bay were at least forty hulks.

  At Pier 7 the prisoners began filing aboard a 15,000-ton luxury liner built just before the war for the tourist trade, Oryoku-maru.† With grim amusement Major Adrianus J. van Oosten, who had survived a dozen jungle battles on Bataan, watched MacArthur’s shiny Packard, hoisted in a cargo net, careen against the side of a hold, smashing its fenders. Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Beecher, a Marine, who recalled coming alongside the same pier back in 1929 on his return from duty in China, was herded along with seven hundred other prisoners into the dungeonlike forward hold; its previous occupants had been horses. In a few minutes the air was dead and hot and their uniforms became soaked with perspiration.

  The Bodine group—three hundred Army and Navy medics and civilians—was packed amidships, three decks down. Eight buckets of rice and pans of fish were lowered after dark. The liner began to move. It steamed around Bataan into Subic Bay and continued on a northern course. Suddenly, alerted to some danger ahead, it turned back and anchored in the protective waters below Olongapo. The prisoners sat hunched in the dark, their minds churning. A couple of years more in Japan, Bodine thought, or a watery grave from subs and planes.

  The condition of the seven hundred men massed in the forehold was already intolerable. The only ventilation came through a small hatch. A few pails had been tossed down to them for human waste. These were quickly filled and the hold reeked from urine and feces scattered on the deck. From the darkness came a shriek, “Oh, my God!” A man urinated into his canteen and drank the liquid. Colonel Beecher thought of the Black Hole of Calcutta; reading about it had made little impression but now he knew how horrible it must have been. An inhuman noise rose over the sighs and moans, which sounded to Major van Oosten like the gobbling of turkeys. Suddenly the sound was repeated quite close-by; the man next to him began to babble. In the shaft of starlight from the hatch, Van Oosten could see that his neighbor was losing consciousness. His puffed whitish tongue wagged between drooping lips. His eyes were glazed, unseeing. He slumped over. He was dead.

  In the afterhold the other six hundred men were experiencing the same hell. They had been given a skimpy meal of rice and fish but no water. Most of them had unthinkingly emptied their canteens during the hot march through the streets. They began fanning the air in unison with mess kits but it made no difference. The men stripped in the ovenlike heat. In the darkness they shouted for water. But the guards ignored them; their own comrades had come to the Philippines in the same holds, if not as crowded. The prisoners’ exertions slowly exhausted the oxygen from the air. One man, suffocating, toppled over silently with incredible restraint, but others, gasping for breath, thrashed about wildly before collapsing. A dozen, crazed by thirst, went berserk; they slashed at the throats and wrists of companions to suck blood. The panic turned the hold into bedlam. To Major Virgil McCollum, another veteran of Bataan, it was “the most horrible experience imaginable and probably unprecedented in the annals of civilization.” As the dim light of dawn filtered through the hatch, several score bodies lay lifeless—suffocated or murdered.

  From topside the men heard excited shouting. There was the bark of antiaircraft guns, and shards of glass showered through the hatches. Bombs pummeled the ship and machine-gun bullets clattered noisily along the decks above. In the afterhold, prisoners clawed up the ladders, terrified lest they be trapped below, but were driven back by guards firing down into their midst. The bombers returned at half-hour intervals.

  Amidships, Major Bodine and two friends, Captain John Hudgins and Major Bob Nelson, pushed into a little storeroom to escape stray bullets which were ricocheting through the hatch above. It was stifling but a refuge—that is, unless a bomb or torpedo made a direct hit. Bodine was a Catholic, and with death so close he prayed continuously. He said the rosary and repeated all the prayers he knew, and above the deafening clamor of shrapnel and bullets against iron, he heard Hudgins saying over and over, “Jesus save us.” Packed in the little room they found it impossible to stay awake during the lull between attacks. They jerked from sleep whenever a new raid started and began drowsily mumbling another prayer.

  Those in the forward hold faced another night of horror. There were shouts of “Quiet!” and “At ease!” but as the temperature reached 110 degrees, riot again erupted. It was the “worst and most brutal period” of Colonel Beecher’s life. All around him men were going mad. They collided with one another in the dark, slipping and falling in the feces; the sick were trampled; wild, deadly fights erupted. Men dropped to their knees like animals to lap up sewage running in open drains.

  In the rear, Major McCollum forced his way to the hull and licked the steel plates where a little moisture had condensed. The pandemonium was even worse than the first night. “Many men lost their minds,” a colonel later wrote in his official report, “and crawled about in the absolute darkness armed with knives, attempting to kill people in order to drink their blood or armed with canteens filled with urine and swinging them in the dark. The hold was so crowded and everyone so interlocked with one another that the only movement possible was over the heads and bodies of others.”

  At about four o’clock in the morning an interpreter announced to the prisoners amidships that they were going ashore at dawn and could take along pants, shirt, canteen and mess kit—if they wanted shoes they’d have to carry them. The men crammed as much as possible in their pockets, and in the dark pawed through musette bags for their most valuable possessions. Bodine put his wife’s rosary around his neck on top of his own, and slung his shoes over his shoulders. At the last moment he remembered his notebook and shoved it inside his shirt. What he most regretted leaving behind was his dental instruments. He had carried them all through the battles on Bataan, on the Death March and into several camps.

  Shortly after dawn the first twenty-five men, including five wounded, started up the ladder. The interpreter was back in a few minutes calling for another group of twenty-five. As they started up the ladder the interpreter frenziedly waved them back: “Many planes! Many planes!”

  A bomb crashed into the rear of
Oryoku-maru. The blast hurled shrapnel through the afthold. Superstructure tumbled down the hatchway, pinning screaming men. Flames swept through the wreckage. More than a hundred of the trapped prisoners were dead; 150 were dying.

  In the forehold, the strongest scaled the forty-foot ladder and opened the hatch covers. Nearby they discovered sacks of raw sugar and dropped several to those below. Van Oosten wolfed down a handful of sugar. Miraculously he seemed to feel a charge of energy and mounted the ladder, something he was certain he could not have done a moment before. On deck, Japanese killed by the strafing and bombing were shrouded in straw rice sacks and piled in a long row five bodies high. Van Oosten leaped over the side. The cool water was invigorating and he swam toward shore. The exercise, after two cramped days, abruptly loosed his bowels.

  A guard shouted down to the Bodine group, “All go home, speedo!” Topside Bodine saw a beach a quarter of a mile away—Olongapo. Hundreds of men, Japanese and Americans, were already in the water, struggling to reach land. There were shouts to those standing indecisively at the rails that the ship was going down. Bodine tossed a piece of four-by-four overboard and jumped after it. Halfway, he looked back. The luxury liner looked like a scrap heap. Four American planes came in low. One peeled off as if to strafe, but the men in the water waved frantically and with a waggle of the wings it zoomed off. Bodine decided to swim back to help the others. He noticed a dangling rope ladder and impulsively started to climb up to get the clothes he had discarded on deck. He didn’t realize how weak he was until he began pulling himself up. On deck he made a bundle of his shirt, an old Filipino hat and a pair of shoes. He tied it to a 3-inch-shell crate, which he threw over the side, and jumped again.

  The 1,300 surviving prisoners were shepherded to a fenced-in tennis court, where they huddled on the concrete in the sun.

  3.

  That morning, December 15, MacArthur took a long stride toward Luzon. At seven-thirty two of his regimental combat teams landed without opposition on Mindoro, a few miles below Luzon, and by late afternoon had pushed seven miles inland.

  General Yamashita had no intention of wasting troops on the defense of Mindoro—the garrison numbered only a thousand—nor did he intend to dispatch any more reinforcements to Leyte. On December 22 he radioed his decision to Suzuki’s headquarters at Cebu City:

  REDEPLOY YOUR TROOPS TO FIGHT EXTENDED HOLDING ACTION IN AREAS OF YOUR CHOICE. SELECT AREAS SUCH AS BACALOD ON NEGROS WHICH ARE HIGHLY SUITABLE FOR SELF-SUSTAINING ACTION. THIS MESSAGE RELIEVES YOU OF YOUR ASSIGNED MISSION.

  The message would not reach Suzuki himself until three days later, but he had already ordered the remnants of the 35th Army to assemble near Palompon.

  Besides Suzuki, the individual most distraught by the abandonment of Leyte was perhaps Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso. On November 8 he had publicly committed his government to victory on Leyte. In a radio broadcast to the nation he compared Leyte with the Battle of Tennozan in 1582, which had decided the issue of who was to rule Japan. Koiso had in effect guaranteed that if Japan won on Leyte, she would win the war. He learned of the decision to abandon Leyte at a particularly awkward moment—when he was on his way to an audience with the Emperor. His Majesty asked immediately how the Prime Minister was going to explain the loss of Leyte to the people after equating it with the Battle of Tennozan. Unstrung, Koiso mumbled that he would make the best of the situation, but he knew that only some miracle could save his cabinet.

  Suzuki’s order to congregate in the Palompon area was thwarted by a surprise move by General Bruce’s force on Christmas morning, which forced Suzuki and his staff to flee up the west coast of Leyte toward the mountains near San Isidro. They evacuated Palompon just before a reinforced battalion of the U. S. 77th Division approached the port itself from the sea in amphtracs and LCM’s (landing craft, mechanized). The area was bombarded by 155-mm. guns located a dozen miles inland, and a barrage by mortar boats preceded the landing itself. At seven-twenty the first wave reached shore without opposition and had seized the town by noon. General Bruce radioed his corps commander:

  THE 77TH INFANTRY DIVISION’S CHRISTMAS CONTRIBUTION TO THE LEYTE CAMPAIGN IS THE CAPTURE OF PALOMPON, THE LAST MAIN PORT OF THE ENEMY. WE ARE ALL GRATEFUL TO THE ALMIGHTY ON THIS BIRTHDAY OF THE SON AND ON THE SEASON OF THE FEAST OF LIGHTS.

  In the afternoon MacArthur announced that the Leyte campaign was over “except for minor mopping-up operations.” He turned over this last phase to Eighth Army so that Krueger’s Sixth Army could prepare for the invasion of Luzon.

  • • •

  On Christmas night Kiyoshi Kamiko and three companions reached a beach a few miles from Suzuki’s temporary headquarters. As the sounds of battle in Palompon subsided, they heard incongruous paeans of “Peace on earth, good will to men.” GI’s were playing Christmas carols in the hills above.

  Kamiko and his comrades had fought their way to the coast through marauding bands of guerrillas and over almost impassable terrain, ranging from quicksand and swamps to precipitous ravines. (Aoki and Sergeant Hirano had become separated from the group, which at times comprised as many as fifty.) More than once their resolve to escape the island had wavered. Only hours earlier, conscience-stricken at the thought of desertion, they had left one of their party who was wounded and started down the beach toward Palompon to help defend the city. They were intercepted by a retreating Japanese officer who turned them around and ordered them to follow his unit. As they neared the coconut grove where their wounded comrade, Tokoro, lay hidden, Kamiko and his group fell behind, determined once more to escape.

  In the dark they found a banca and rigged it with a sail they made from a tent. They loaded the little outrigger with rifles, canteens and coconuts, and clambered in.

  “What about Tokoro?” someone asked under his breath.

  Nakamura, a fisherman on whom they depended for navigation, warned that five would be too many, but Kamiko was against abandoning the wounded man. A voice interrupted their whispered argument: “Group Leader, I’m staying here.” Tokoro was sitting on the beach a few yards away. “It’s best for me.”

  “Group Leader, I’m staying too.” Nakamura jumped out of the boat. Another man followed.

  Kamiko wearily beached the stern of the banca and joined the others who were sitting silently with Tokoro. Finally Tokoro said he was sorry for all the trouble he had caused and hobbled off.

  “The boat is too small even for the four of us,” Nakamura muttered. “We can’t reach another island in this thing.”

  “You knew that from the beginning!” Kamiko shouted. “You say you want to die on land and you don’t want to die at sea! It doesn’t matter where you die. The question is which choice offers the best chance of survival.”

  The others remained hunched in a tight circle on the sand, staring at the slender banca, which was tossing in the waves.

  There was a shot. It was Tokoro. “What a pity,” someone said, and another, “It’s better he did that than drown.”

  This pushed Kamiko over the edge. He grabbed a grenade from his knapsack. “Let’s follow Tokoro!” he cried. “We can’t live until tomorrow. So, as you say, let’s die on land. We’ve lived together, let’s all die together! Everybody bring heads close!” He activated the grenade. In four seconds it would explode.

  Nakamura lurched back. “I’ll go!” he shouted.

  Kamiko tossed the grenade back over his shoulder just before it detonated. He leaped to his feet. “Well, let’s go!”

  The banca sailed slowly out of the inlet in the moonlight. Nakamura, so reluctant on shore, was a new man as he deftly guided the boat toward Cebu. Abruptly the moonlight was cut off and something cold slapped his cheek. Rain. Dark clouds swirled ominously. Nakamura looked up, then said, “Let’s return.”

  “We’re at sea, Nakamura, and determined to die,” said Kamiko. “So keep going.”

  The fragile outrigger tossed erratically. Nakamura clung stony-faced to the tiller as the others bailed with the
ir canteens. A dark shape materialized in front of them with a roar—it must be a speedboat transporting 35th Army headquarters to Cebu. They shouted and waved but the craft droned past. It was an American PT boat.

  Just before dawn the rain stopped and the sun rose on a calmed sea. All around them were small, bare rock islets. To the south, out of the morning light, emerged the vague outline of a large island. It had to be Cebu, their first goal. Nakamura changed course, and with the wind behind it, the little banca cut through the water as fast as a bicycle at top speed.

  Kamiko began to sing his favorite song, one he had taught his pupils:

  “From a far-off island whose name I don’t know

  A coconut comes floating.

  How many months have you been tossing on the waves

  Far from the shores of your native island?

  I think about tides far away

  And wonder when I will return to my native land.”

  4.

  General Suzuki had chosen to concentrate the remnants of his forces, more than ten thousand troops, on a rugged, heavily forested 1,200-foot mountain on the west coast between Palompon and San Isidro called Canguipot. Its eastern and western slopes were rocky, making it a natural fortress. Every day stragglers from the 1st Division and 68th Brigade arrived exhausted at Mount Canguipot, but those left of the 16th and 26th divisions were pinned down near Highway 2.

  Many of these men had no intention of trying to reach Suzuki’s position even if they could disengage themselves. Like Kamiko, they could not avoid the logic that it was senseless to die on Leyte in such circumstances. In the mountains north of Ormoc between Highway 2 and the west coast Lieutenant General Shimpei Fukue, on his own, was planning to escape from the island with his depleted 102nd Division, which had played an insignificant role in the fighting. Already fifty of his men had left by boat.