So Sad to Fall in Battle

by Kumiko Kakehashi

  Putting to one side the question of whether or not Kuribayashi was “pro-American,” one thing is crystal clear. Despite knowing very well that the whole war was reckless and ill-advised, he was still determined to do his utmost to defend the island for as long as he could.

  IT WAS ON JULY 7, 1944, exactly a month after Kuribayashi had arrived on Iwo Jima to take up his post, and, by happenstance, Kuriba-yashi’s fifty-third birthday, that Saipan fell after sending out a “farewell telegram” that read: “We will meet an honorable death serving as a bulwark of the Pacific.” But even at this early stage, Kuribayashi had already formed a firm idea of how to prepare for the American attack and how to fight them once they landed.

  After much deliberation, he selected a method that was completely contrary to the traditions of the Japanese army. And it was because of Kuribayashi’s choice of method—a choice that was derided as rash and that aroused universal opposition at the time—that the name Iwo Jima ended up being etched so deeply into the histories of both Japan and the United States.

  *From “Iô-Jima Kaisô no Ki” (“A Nostalgic Record of Iwo Jima”) in Ogasawara Heidan no Saigo (The End of the Ogasawara Army Corps) by Ogasawara Senyûkai Hen. Nogi Maresuke (1849–1912) was a Japanese general who took part in the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, in which he bore the loss of his two officer sons with stoic acceptance. He and his wife committed suicide on the eve of the funeral of the Emperor Meiji, and Nogi became a symbol of loyalty and self-sacrifice.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE STRATEGY

  —

  SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE DEFEAT AT IWO JIMA, IN 1952, andô Tomiji, an employee in the Iwo Jima field office of the Takano Kensetsu construction company, made a stunning discovery. Deep within a cave in the interior of the island, among the scattered bones and personal effects of its defenders, he found an army notebook. In it was written the following list.

  1. We shall defend this place with all our strength to the end.

  2. We shall fling ourselves against the enemy tanks clutching explosives to destroy them.

  3. We shall slaughter the enemy, dashing in among them to kill them.

  4. Every one of our shots shall be on target and kill the enemy.

  5. We shall not die until we have killed ten of the enemy.

  6. We shall continue to harass the enemy with guerrilla tactics even if only one of us remains alive.

  These six fervent statements constitute the “Courageous Battle Vows” that Kuribayashi composed and distributed to all his men. The vows are basically a collection of slogans outlining a soldier’s proper state of mind in which to face battle.

  The same vows were found in other notebooks discovered on the island. According to a field diary discovered after the war, the soldiers used to recite the vows together at morning assemblies and other occasions.

  The text and Japanese ideograms in the vows I quote from differ slightly from the “Courageous Battle Vows” in the official history. This is probably because each unit received a mimeographed copy from which the soldiers copied the six clauses into their own notebooks.

  Andô worked hard collecting the bones and possessions of the dead from Iwo Jima while it was still occupied by the United States. He later said in his memoirs that the soldiers probably “regarded the vows as an article of faith, and, even after their bodies had rotted, were still reluctant to let go of them.”

  Bill D. Ross, who took part in the invasion of Iwo Jima as a marine sergeant combat correspondent, comments in his book Iwo Jima: Legacy of Valor on how many of the Japanese soldiers had copies of the slogans: “Marines found copies in the first destroyed bunkers on the beaches, and they would find others in caves, tunnels, pillboxes and other bunkers—and on the bodies of the enemy dead—everywhere on the island.”

  Over the eight months leading up to the landing of the U.S. forces, the Japanese soldiers read the vows over and over to imprint them in their minds. Kuribayashi urged his men to fling themselves against the enemy tanks clutching bombs, to charge into the enemy lines and kill them, to work on their shooting skills and shoot the enemy dead. You must not die, he said, until you have killed ten people, and you must keep fighting even if all your brothers have been wiped out.

  This was not an order or a directive. It was an oath.

  Kuribayashi did not say “Every soldier must;” he used the expression “We shall.” The soldiers, in other words, were not being forced to do anything: When they fought to the death, they did so of their own volition. By implanting determination and pride through the vows, Kuribayashi was trying to sustain the fighting spirit of his soldiers, who were already worn out by their defense-building duties.

  Looking ahead, the more than twenty thousand Japanese soldiers on the island clearly did fight the battle in accordance with the “Courageous Battle Vows.” Their method of fighting was ruthless—incredibly so—and it terrified the Americans.

  Even when the organized fighting was over and there were no officers left to give orders, the surviving soldiers evolved into guerrillas hiding out in caves. The last two Japanese soldiers didn’t actually surrender until January 6, 1949—three and a half years after the end of the war, and almost four years after the fall of Iwo Jima itself.

  KURIBAYASHI WAS A COMMANDER who “overflowed with warmth;” he was a commander who refused to eat any of the precious fresh vegetables brought over from the mainland, preferring instead to distribute them among his men. Yet this same Kuribayashi created slogans that seem almost too gruesome for our modern-day sensibilities. At the same time, they do show how Kuribayashi saw his role, and what sort of battle he was planning to fight. He knew the battle for Iwo Jima would not allow anyone the luxury of “fighting bravely and perishing heroically.”

  A single reading of the “Courageous Battle Vows” makes one thing clear: “achieving victory” was not the aim; it was “not to be defeated” for as long as possible. That was the goal for which everyone was to shed their blood down to the very last drop. Not being defeated was what the battle of Iwo Jima was all about.

  Kuribayashi chose guerrilla warfare as his method—hiding underground, waiting for the enemy, and then launching surprise attacks; staying alive by any means possible in order to kill just one more of the enemy. His men would need extraordinary reserves of mental strength to execute this strategy. The “Courageous Battle Vows” were designed to foster that mental strength and reinforce their determination.

  The battle of Iwo Jima was distinguished by appalling suffering. One soldier who survived commented in his memoirs: “There is a saying that ‘the way of the warrior is to die’ and we so wanted it to be a battle based on that ethos.” To die a heroic death may have been the proper thing for a samurai, but Kuribayashi would not allow either his men or himself to indulge in that kind of ritualistic behavior.

  He strictly forbade so-called banzai charges, those all-out attacks on enemy lines that ended in the annihilation of the attackers, and his men faithfully obeyed his orders.

  Bill D. Ross describes the way the Japanese soldiers fought on Iwo Jima in the following passage of his book.

  Each attack was organized—not the screaming bedlam of banzais of other invasions, but missions with a purpose. Kuriba-yashi’s troops were adhering to his “courageous battle vows” to harass the Americans “until we are destroyed to the last man.”

  During the merciless battle, the thought of bringing it all to an end with one final charge rather than fighting on through wounds, hunger, and thirst was tempting. On Iwo Jima, after all, victory or survival were not options. It was even thought that indulging the men in their final hope and letting them go out in a blaze of glory was a way for the commander to show the “compassion of the Samurai.” But Kuribayashi was resolute: on this island not a single soldier was to be allowed to die in vain.

  This decision was not based on any sort of humanism, but on hard-headed calculation.

  Kuribayashi knew that he and his men were going to
die, but he had calculated how to extract the maximum benefit from his life and those of his soldiers. Their role was to save the lives of the civilians back on the mainland, and to save as many of them as possible.

  In the letters Kuribayashi wrote to his family, he repeatedly emphasized that were Iwo Jima to fall to the enemy, Tokyo would be subjected to intense air raids. At this stage, the air raids on the mainland were still only targeting facilities and factories connected to the military, but Kuribayashi warned them that if Iwo Jima were captured after Saipan, where B-29s were already being stationed, the cities of Japan would all have large-scale air raids visited on them.

  In a letter dated September 27, 1944, to his son, Tarô, and his eldest daughter, Yôko, he said:

  Tokyo is not experiencing air raids now, but if the island that I am now defending ends up getting captured by the enemy, then it’s sure to start being bombed around the clock. (Just as the place I’m now in started getting raids right after the capture of Saipan.)

  The enemy counterattack is becoming fiercer and fiercer recently. It’s only a matter of time before they come and attack the place where I am. When that happens, if we can’t hold out, the next stage will be air raids on Tokyo.

  The awfulness, damage, and chaos of air raids are inexpressible and beyond the imagination of people living peaceful lives in Tokyo.

  To his wife, Yoshii, on January 21, 1945:

  There are now 140 or 150 B-29 planes based on Saipan. By around April, that number will be 240 or 250, and by year-end it’s likely to rise to about 500 planes—meaning that there will be that many more air raids than now. On top of that, if the island I’m on gets captured, there’ll be an increase of several hundred enemy planes, and the air raids on the homeland will be many times more savage than now. In the worst case, the enemy may land on the beaches of Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures and penetrate near to To k yo.

  It was the desire to delay the B-29 raids and the resulting civilian casualties for as long as he could that made Kuribayashi opt for a war of attrition, no matter what the cost.

  He also seems to have hoped that the army command would proceed with negotiations to bring the war to an end while he kept the Americans pinned down and played for time.

  Funazaka Hiroshi, a survivor of Angaur, another island where the Japanese forces were defeated, has written numerous nonfiction works about the battles of the Pacific islands. In Iô-Jima Aa! Kuribayashi Heidan (Iwo Jima: Alas, Kuribayashi’s Army Corps!) he includes the following anecdote:

  At the same time as making his defensive preparations stronger, Lieutenant General Kuribayashi had something else in mind. He had been in America from 1928, and Canada from 1931, for military study, and he understood their fearful industrial power. When Major General Sanada and Rear Admiral Nakazawa were leaving the island, he asked them to deliver a detailed report that he had written to the Imperial General Headquarters.

  The report urged them to “urgently appraise the fighting power of the American forces, and the economic strength of the United States, and make efforts to conclude peace after the fall of Saipan.”

  Typically for staff officers of the time, they did nothing more than exchange looks of astonishment. Worried that Kuriba-yashi’s report would sap the fighting spirit of the unit, they kept it to themselves and never breathed a word about it to anybody else even after getting back to the mainland.

  Major General Sanada and Rear Admiral Nakazawa were the operations chiefs of the Army and Navy General Staffs, respectively, who flew over from Imperial General Headquarters in August 1944 to inspect Iwo Jima.

  Naturally enough, this episode does not appear in the official history. But in the course of interviewing many different people about the incident, I was told that a soldier had seen Kuribayashi discreetly slipping a letter to Major General Sanada as he was leaving with the words, “This is what I really think.” The soldier in question survived the battle but is now dead. He is said to have worked near Kuribayashi in the staff officer section at headquarters.

  At this late stage, it is almost impossible to confirm whether this furtively handled report really existed or not. What is certain is that Kuribayashi did believe that “exacting the maximum bloodshed from the U.S. forces on Iwo Jima would work to Japan’s advantage in negotiating an end to the war.”

  THE JAPANESE COMBINED fleet suffered an overwhelming defeat in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and when Saipan fell on July 7, it was clear that Japan had no chance of winning the war. By August, when the operations chiefs came to Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi was convinced that Japan was doomed to defeat. Even some of the army leadership were starting to wonder how they could bring the war to an end.

  A letter that Kuribayashi wrote to his wife on August 25, 1944, shows that he believed Japan’s defeat was inevitable: “Henceforth our fearful destiny is to lose this war and there’s no way of knowing what’s going to happen. It is crucial that, woman though you are, you be strong—strong so you can live through it all.” And on October 19, 1944, he wrote:

  I am past caring about myself and am ready, no matter what. But if we are defeated and the Americans invade via the Kantô Plain, Japan will fall into unimaginable chaos. What will happen to you, a mother with children? It’s agony for me to think about it. Even if something awful like this happens, don’t give up, be strong, be positive, and live through it all.

  Normally, such a letter would not get through the censors, and it reached his family only because he was the commander in chief. Interestingly enough, the censor’s mark stamped on Kuribayashi’s letters from Iwo Jima reads “Fujita”—probably Kuribayashi’s adjutant, First Lieutenant Fujita Masayoshi.

  Either way, Kuribayashi knew that the day of Japan’s defeat was not far off. We do not know if he sent a report to his superiors at Imperial General Headquarters urging an early end to the war, but we do know that it was for the civilians who would experience the “fearful destiny” of defeat that he devised his strategy of how to fight most effectively on Iwo Jima

  “KURIBAYASHI WAS AWARE of American public opinion when he chose to wage a bloody war of attrition. He wanted to make the American people sick of the war by drawing out the battle and inflicting heavy casualties on the Americans.” So James Bradley told me. Bradley is the author of the bestselling book Flags of Our Fathers, which was published in 2000 in the United States. James’s father, John Bradley, went to Iwo Jima as a twenty-one-year-old medical corpsman and survived. There is a picture widely seen as the most famous war photograph in the world. It shows six soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes on a mountaintop that is strewn with shrapnel. The man in the center of the group is James Bradley’s father.

  The place where this photograph—later awarded the Pulitzer Prize—was taken: Mount Suribachi in Iwo Jima.

  The act of raising a flag on enemy territory signifies victory and conquest. The American people already knew every detail of the dreadful battle on Iwo Jima from news reports, but when they saw this photograph they became passionate about a victory earned through so much loss and sacrifice. The photograph became a kind of icon; it was turned into a postage stamp, and, after the war, an enormous bronze statue in Arlington National Cemetery.

  After his father, a national hero, died, Bradley retraced his experiences. As a result, he knows everything there is to know about the battle of Iwo Jima. On reading his book, I was struck by the fact that, while few present-day Japanese are familiar with Iwo Jima, in America the story of the battle continues to be handed down from generation to generation, and Kuribayashi is greatly respected by military men in the United States. And thus it was that I went to visit Bradley in Rye, New York, in the fall of 2004.

  Bradley sees Kuribayashi as “the man America respected the most, because he made them suffer the most,” and during my visit he explained his favorite theory to me: that Kuribayashi had developed his strategy based on his awareness of the fickle tides of public opinion in the United States.

  “Americans have always taken
casualties very seriously. When the number of casualties is too high, public opinion will boil up and condemn an operation as a failure, even if we get the upper hand militarily. Kuriba-yashi had lived in America. He knew our national character. That’s why he deliberately chose to fight in a way that would relentlessly drive up the number of casualties. I think he hoped American public opinion would shift toward wanting to bring the war with Japan to a rapid end.”

  American civilians were certainly following every detail of the progress of the battle on Iwo Jima with bated breath. The volume of news they received, and the speed at which they received it, were unimaginable by the standards of Japan at that time.

  The New York Times ran no less than sixty articles on Iwo Jima between February (when the invasion started) and March. Articles sent from correspondents at the front would be churning out of the presses only twenty-four hours later. And while it took two days for photographs from Iwo Jima to get to the continental United States, their quantity and their quality were superior to any other battle in World War II.

  The staff of the broadcast networks had also come out to the war front, and radio reporters made live commentaries from aboard the battleships anchored off the island, and from the beaches where the American forces had landed.