The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  Through the Japanese onslaught Alvin Mahaffey played dead in a hole as squads of Banzai attackers charged by. At least three separate squads of Japanese had kicked him or run over him, but Mahaffey’s act was so convincing that no one had thought to bayonet him. Finally Mahaffey could bear it no longer. He up and ran for the closest English speakers he could find, Company B of the 32nd Infantry and Colonel Lawrence Kelley. When Mahaffey saw his fellow Americans, he stopped running, stood up straight, and broke into a giant grin. “Get down!” the men shouted, but Mahaffey continued walking in relief until a bullet dropped him twenty feet from his rescuers. He was shot in the arm, but he rolled into a creek for cover and survived.

  At an aid station for the frostbitten and wounded near the base of what came to be known as Engineer Hill, Japanese pockmarked the tent with a fusillade of bullets, then stormed on to other targets without checking inside. Captain George Buehler gasped. Had he really survived? He surveyed the tent and found that four of the thirteen soldiers inside were still able to move. Only one had been killed—a frostbitten soldier whose skull had been exploded by a bullet. Fearing a return of the Japanese, Buehler dragged the mangled body of the slain American serviceman to the front of the tent, hoping the enemy would see it and conclude that the others inside had been killed as well. The ruse worked. Five successive Japanese patrols pulled back the tent flap, saw the slain soldier sprawled in the doorway, and turned around without further investigation. When his wounded brethren moaned with pain, Buehler had medics inject them with morphine to restore silence. When the doped-up soldiers snored, Buehler jostled them to stop the noise. Hours later they were all rescued. “What a nightmare—a madness of noise and confusion and deadliness,” Buehler said.

  As the banzai charge continued, the Japanese tired. Though still potent, they were too outnumbered to capture the American artillery and ammunition needed to survive. The attack stalled.

  At the top of Engineer Hill, the Army had stationed several platoons of noncombatant support troops—construction engineers, medics, and supply workers. When the Japanese broke through the front lines, General Archibald Arnold quickly organized the rear echelon into a defense force that grabbed any possible weapon. They blocked the Japanese with the few available grenades, then pushed back the attackers with a hand-to-hand fight to the death in a fury of bayonets and rifle butts. On the snowy flanks of Engineer Hill, Colonel Yamasaki was killed with sword in hand by an American bullet.

  Decimated and in disarray, the banzai attack collapsed. The Japanese realized they had lost their chance to seize American artillery and supplies. They knew their training. They knew their obligation. They knew the code of bushido—death before defeat. At the foot of Engineer Hill, as many as 500 Japanese soldiers massed together, pressed grenades to their chests, and, with a relentless series of explosions, committed mass suicide. Afterward one U.S. soldier described the scene as an uprooted graveyard.

  Night fell. Shooting paused. The few Japanese who survived the day crumpled with exhaustion. Laird did, too. He had never seen anything like May 29, 1943, on Attu. He hoped he never would again.

  The next morning the Americans found that the Japanese fighting spirit was all but gone. Troops who had mounted a fearless attack the day before now hid and hunkered down in caves and tunnels. Not all were ready to quit, however.

  Captain Albert Pence led five men in what was supposed to be a mop-up operation on an approach to Chichagof Harbor. As they approached a draw, a Japanese machine gun sprayed, and two of the five in Pence’s patrol fell to the tundra. Andrew Mezei was hit in the hip and lived; Staff Sergeant Harold J. Hunter took a bullet in the forehead and died. Pence was distraught and furious. This was no mop-up. This was still war.

  From the top of the hill the machine gunner fired on Pence, then lobbed a grenade, which bounced off Pence’s side and rolled down the slope. He pushed himself hard enough into the dirt to survive the blast, then he saw two more grenades, including a purloined American device, flying back at him. This time Pence was injured slightly in the face. In retaliation, he hurled two of his own grenades back up at the Japanese. He was not prepared for the result.

  A massive eruption of arms, heads, and boots cascaded down the hill. Astounded, Pence raced to the machine gun nest only to find that his grenades weren’t the cause of the carnage. In a twenty-yard circle around the gun, thirty-six Japanese men had held grenades to their chests and blown themselves up.

  The closer the Americans progressed to the Japanese base at Chichagof Harbor, the more suicides they witnessed. When Pence killed one sniper, two others in the same foxhole detonated themselves. When Sergeant Roger Carpentier wounded another sniper, the Japanese soldier yelled in English, “I’m going to die.” He blew himself up, too. Sergeant Carmen Calabrese rolled one grenade into a cave and heard two blasts in response. He waited a minute, rolled in another grenade, and received two more blasts. The Americans had never seen or heard anything like it.

  What awaited the Americans at the Japanese base on Attu was even worse.

  Inside the field hospital were corpses—hundreds of corpses. Americans had not fired a single shot here.

  Sakae Horiguchi was a Japanese patient who witnessed what had happened. Just before the banzai attack, after Yamasaki’s final orders, the wounded were directed to end their own lives. “I pulled the pin on my grenade,” Horiguchi explained later to a reporter for NBC News. “I tried to commit suicide but the grenade never went off. Had it exploded I wouldn’t be here today.”

  Dozens of others, however, were successful.

  “Everyone had tears in their eyes, especially those who had to burn photos of their wives and children,” Horiguchi said. “Those who weren’t able to walk committed suicide. For those who couldn’t on their own, soldiers helped them go through with it.”

  Of the 2,900 Japanese men stationed on Attu, only 28 survived battle as prisoners of war. The shame of capture was so great that many asked to be taken to America or someplace where they would never see their families or countrymen. The prisoners were unusually cooperative. Japanese soldiers were not trained to resist enemy interrogators because it was presumed they would kill themselves before questioning started. And so many did commit suicide that Laird and the Americans required days to find the Japanese corpses. The United States Army recorded burying 2,351 Japanese, usually eight to a trench, though an exact count was challenging because suicides by hand grenade had left behind so few intact bodies. The piles of casualties were so vast that many burials were carried out by bulldozer.

  The toll on the Americans was horrific as well. There were 549 killed; 1,148 wounded; 1,200 with frostbite, trench foot, and other severe weather-related injuries; 614 with severe illnesses; and 318 with psychological breakdowns, self-inflicted wounds, and accidents. Hundreds of soldiers on Attu required amputations. All this was for a battle that the generals had predicted would require only three days of fighting.

  About one of every four American soldiers became a casualty on Attu. For the United States, it was the worst casualty rate up to that point in the war in the Pacific. (It was exceeded later only at Iwo Jima.) For every 100 Japanese found on the island, 71 Americans were killed or wounded. Few fights in modern warfare had more suffering than the Battle of Attu.

  The Army brass vowed to learn from the lessons of Attu by issuing better equipment for cold weather. The reality, however, was that no place on earth had comparable weather. Other battlefields in World War II offered a strategic location, or natural resources to seize, or a population to protect. Attu had none of these. The island was unknown before the war, and it would be forgotten soon after.

  In Washington, D.C., the military was embarrassed by the initial loss of territory at Attu and the costly, ill-prepared drive to reclaim it. As a result, the War Department saw little reason to publicize the victory. Eventually many Aleutian veterans would return home and be greeted with blank stares when describing how they fought in Alaska. Americans didn’t kno
w about Attu because the brass didn’t want them to know about Attu.

  In Tokyo, the government issued a terse statement on the day after Attu was lost: “It is assumed the entire Japanese force has preferred death to dishonor.” Though Radio Tokyo stressed the heroism and selfless sacrifice that turned Attu into a kind of Japanese Alamo, the reality was that few citizens wanted to hear much about a crushing defeat. Public attention in Japan moved on.

  On the Fourth of July, after a vast new cemetery was dug and the bodies were buried, the United States Army conducted a memorial service. A major read all 549 names of the American dead. A sergeant sang “My Buddy.” Prayers were recited and a salute of gunfire echoed up the valley and onto the mountains. Two buglers played taps. When it came time to dismiss the assembled troops, Captain Robert Foulston called, “Forward,” but a reservoir of despair cracked in his throat and prevented him from finishing with the next word, “march.”

  A soldier sniffled. The shoulders of another rocked. Dick Laird could stand it no longer. He let his tears flow.

  For his valor killing eight Japanese who had wrested control of an American mortar, Laird was awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest commendation for soldiers in battle. He felt no joy and little pride. His conscience was heavy with the friendly fire death of his runner. He had buried too many friends. He also didn’t feel right about the incident that had won him the Silver Star.

  In the hours after the doomed Japanese counterattack, the war diary of Nobuo Tatsuguchi was translated behind battle lines at division headquarters by Army Sergeant Yasuo Sam Umetani, a Nisei, or the America-born son of Japanese American immigrants. The Nisei translator reportedly wept bitterly when he read Tatsuguchi’s final diary entry that bade farewell to his family. At the request of Laird, the translator had returned an English version of the diary to him.

  Laird cradled his mimeographed copy of the diary days after the battle was over. His first reading disappointed him. He had hoped the journal would give away some Japanese code, some secret plan, that would help bring this war to an end. No such luck there.

  But the more he read the diary, the more he considered the man behind it. Laird could not help but imagine himself in the same situation. He had been delivering the bombardment, not taking it. What if Laird were the one facing certain death? Would he maintain the same quiet dignity? Laird did not want to contemplate his own last words. He was a man who talked little, wrote less, and was self-conscious when he did either. The mere idea of writing something permanent, under pressure, that likely would be read by strangers, turned Laird’s stomach.

  He thought of Rose, and he thought of their daughter. They needed him. Surrounded by mud and agony and so many bodies, Laird realized he needed them, too. They gave him reason to push on.

  Then the gravity of the document began to sink in. According to the diary, this writer, this Nobuo Tatsuguchi, had family who depended on him, too. He was a trained surgeon with many years of education. Laird had been forced to quit school for the coal mines at age fourteen. The surgeon was a healer. Laird was a warrior. Pushed forward by their countries, the two men had ended up on the same battlefield. And Laird had killed him.

  Tatsuguchi had concluded his diary with a terse listing of his personal résumé, or, as he called them, “Life Facts.” Two entries, in particular, gnawed at Laird: September 15, 1929, to May 22, 1932, Pacific Union College, Medical Department, Angwin, California. And: September 1, 1933, to June 1937, College of Medical Evangelists, [Loma Linda University]. Received California Medical License September 8, 1938 (USA).

  Laird already carried the dark burden of having killed his own runner in a battlefield friendly fire accident. Now here was a diary describing another man killed by Laird who had attended college in California and earned a California medical license. Had Laird killed a second American as well? The question was almost unbearable.

  Through an almost unbelievable series of coincidences, Laird soon faced his dread.

  After Tatsuguchi was killed and Laird had moved on to the next firefight, other American soldiers recognized the medical bags of a doctor strewn on the tundra. The soldiers brought the bags to their own battalion surgeon, Dr. Lawrence Whitaker, who was startled to find they contained an English-language version of the classic physician’s textbook Gray’s Anatomy.

  Even more shocking—the inside cover of the book held the handwritten name of Ed Lee, a former classmate of Whitaker’s at the College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda University in California. Beneath Lee’s name was handwriting with another name: Paul Tatsuguchi.

  Whitaker had a hard time believing his own eyes. He ventured from his sick bay to the battlefield and identified the body of the man he knew as Tatsy, a fellow graduate of Loma Linda.

  In medical school, Tatsuguchi had bought the used Gray’s Anatomy from his classmate Lee. The guide had served Tatsuguchi at peace in California and at war in Attu. (Amazingly, another Loma Linda classmate, Dr. Joseph Mudry, who had once called Tatsuguchi “quite an American,” was also stationed on Attu. Whitaker showed him the textbook, too.) Whitaker thought the book deserved a better fate than its owner. Years later, after the war, he made it a point to return Tatsuguchi’s book to Lee at his home in Downey, California.

  The surviving classmates could not help but wonder if the world had turned upside down. In a prewar letter months earlier from his Imperial Army base in Hokkaido, Tatsuguchi had joked to his wife that he might soon be reunited with former medical school classmates. In the worst possible way, his prediction had come true.

  The whole notion of a California-trained surgeon slain in battle in a Japanese uniform was fascinating to United States servicemen. The Tatsuguchi diary quickly became a coveted war souvenir. First dozens and then hundreds of copies were circulated among soldiers in the Pacific, then back in the continental United States when transports returned home. Some copies were mimeographed onto thin onion-skin paper and stuffed into rucksacks. Other soldiers created their own versions on typewriters. And still others may have resulted from a subsequent translation.

  All told, at least ten separate versions of Nobuo Tatsuguchi’s diary were eventually distributed. Some versions varied by just a word or two. Others added or deleted whole phrases and sentences. There were typos and mangled words that bore little resemblance to anything in Japanese. Names were misspelled in ways that weren’t even close to phonetic pronunciations. Years later, the differences in the translations of a few words would fuel a vast controversy for the Tatsuguchi family and the Seventh-day Adventist community.

  One controversy was immediate. The Alaska commander, Simon Buckner, was concerned about the diary’s false claim that the United States had deployed gas against the Japanese. Buckner called for the original diary to be pulled out of circulation and sent to his headquarters. He also demanded that souvenir copies of all other translations be confiscated.

  Both orders were botched. Somewhere in transit from Attu to the Alaska headquarters, Tatsuguchi’s handwritten diary was apparently lost, never to be found again. And the confiscation order for translated copies went widely ignored or unenforced.

  The result was that Tatsuguchi’s true handwritten words—and the Army’s first field translation—could never be checked for accuracy. What remained in circulation, however, were hundreds of copies of different versions of conflicting translations.

  For now, Laird and other U.S. servicemen were less concerned with translation errors, but fascinated by the private account of the enemy. They had been told for months that the Japanese were ruthless killers, fanatics with an inhuman thirst for blood and destruction. Seventeen days of furious battle only helped to confirm that stereotype for Laird.

  Tatsuguchi’s diary, however, proved to Laird that the Japanese were human, too. Like U.S. soldiers on Attu, Tatsuguchi was cold and scared and hungry and sick and brave. Most of all, Tatsuguchi had offered a heartfelt confession of love for his wife and their daughters. Regardless of his native count
ry, a long-deployed soldier could not help but be moved by a man bidding farewell to a three-month-old daughter he had never met. They also were struck by the one undisputed truth: Neither the American GI nor the Japanese Army surgeon wanted to be on Attu.

  In the aftermath of the battle, soldiers learned even more about Tatsuguchi and his background. As the Americans sorted through the detritus of war, they found other possessions of the Japanese surgeon that gave them pause.

  The first was Tatsuguchi’s personal Bible. Inscribed with the doctor’s favorite verse, “Choose life,” the recovered scripture made Laird doubt his belief that the enemy in the Pacific was a pagan murderer. Just as in Japan, military brass in the United States did little to discourage racist hatred of the enemy. The realization that a Japanese and American soldier could share the same religion made Laird think twice about exactly who he was trying to kill.

  Second was Tatsuguchi’s address book, which also was found on the battlefield. It was written partially in English, and contained the names and addresses for dozens of his former college and medical school classmates in California and across the United States. Tatsuguchi had more contact information for Americans than Laird. The Tatsuguchi address book made Laird wonder even more about what he had done on Attu. His body had survived war, but his conscience battled on.

  16

  * * *

  Fog

  The Japanese stationed 6,000 troops on Kiska, and the extra manpower allowed them to convert the island into a fortress, with miles of tunnels, an underground mess hall and hospital, an airfield, submarine base, seaplane base, observation tower, and antiaircraft guns around the perimeter. In other words, on Kiska, the Japanese had twice the troop strength of Attu, but with many multiples more weaponry.

  Both the United States and Japan were determined to learn some lessons from the Battle of Attu.