Flyboys

by James Bradley

  The Spirit Warriors had hoped that the Pearl Harbor attack would dishearten the American merchants. But the opposite was true: Pearl Harbor gave America a sense of moral ferocity no government propaganda could come close to matching. American rage bordered on the genocidal. Signs appeared in store windows proclaiming “Open Season on Japs.” (Amid the World War II memorabilia on display in my hometown library in Antigo, Wisconsin, I recently found a “Jap-Hunting License.”) Admiral Halsey vowed that by the end of the war, Japanese would be spoken only in hell. The admiral’s slogan became “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.”

  American soldiers who had little enthusiasm for killing other western Christians often jumped at the chance to kill Japanese. One U.S. army infantry regiment “was asked ‘How would you feel about killing a German soldier?’ Just 7 percent gave the answer ‘I would really like to’ from a list of possible answers. When the word Japanese was inserted into the question, the percentage really wanting to kill the soldier jumped to 44 percent.”

  Marine George Petio recalled the instructions broadcast by loudspeaker to men in the first assault waves attacking Peleliu: “When we came aboard the LSTs [landing ship tanks] there was a message come through from our colonel, and the word was that we were to take no prisoners.” American soldiers were not shinmin/ subjects of a god-king, forced to obey all orders. They were citizens of a democracy. They were taught that there was such a thing as an illegal order. But few protested orders to kill Japanese prisoners.

  Marine Eugene Sledge was removing a bayonet from a dead Japanese on Peleliu when he noticed another Marine nearby:

  He wasn’t in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn’t dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn’t move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath.

  The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knifepoint glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.

  During the war, a picture of a pretty blonde appeared in an issue of Life magazine. She was seated at a table writing a letter, paper in front of her. Pen to her lips, she gazed at an ornament on her desk as if for inspiration. The ornament was a Japanese skull. The caption read, “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Japanese skull he sent her.” Later in the war, President Roosevelt announced that he had refused to accept a letter opener made of the bone of a Japanese. It’s hard to believe this gruesome trophy hunting would have been tolerated if the skulls and bones were German or Italian.

  Soldier Dennis Warner recalled standing near a group of Japanese prisoners with upstretched hands. A general ordered the defenseless POWs shot. “But sir, they are wounded and want to surrender,” a colonel protested. “You heard me, Colonel,” the general replied. “I want no prisoners. Shoot them all.”

  Army private Nelson Peery recalled that in New Guinea, “We all saw the brutality and in some instances just plain savagery against Japanese soldiers who were trying to surrender, or who had surrendered, who were shot or clubbed. They were pretty brutally treated.”

  Parachuting Japanese pilots were routinely shot out of the sky. “A few Japs parachuted when they were hit,” a young seaman wrote in his diary late in 1943. “But a few sailors and Marines on the 20mm opened up on the ones in the chutes and when they hit the water they were nothing but a piece of meat cut to ribbons.”

  In January 1943, Commander Dudley Walker Morton, a Naval Academy graduate and commander of the submarine Wahoo, sank a Japanese transport ship off New Guinea. He then surfaced and ordered his men to shoot the helpless survivors in the water with deck guns. For over an hour, American submariners killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Japanese boys who could not defend themselves. “One of the officers on the Wahoo, recalling the occasion, spoke of the commander’s ‘overwhelming biological hatred of the enemy.’” Many were repulsed by this cold-blooded murder, but Commander Morton’s superiors tacitly condoned the action by awarding him a Navy Cross. General MacArthur awarded him a Distinguished Cross. The navy even named a ship in his honor.

  On March 4, 1943, after the three-day Battle of the Bismarck Sea, allied Flyboys strafed Japanese survivors in their rafts. A U.S. major reported, “It was rather a sloppy job and some of the boys got sick. But that is something you have to learn. The enemy is out to kill you and you are out to kill the enemy. You can’t be sporting in war.” One might expect Geneva convention-honoring Americans to hide cockpit film footage of the machine-gunning of terrified Japanese boys in their life rafts. Instead it was proudly shown in movie theaters in the United States. Civilized American audiences munched their popcorn and loudly applauded this war crime. As chunks of Japanese flesh flew into the air, the commentator intoned:

  . . . the fun begins . . . The lads will do a great shooting-up job on ships and barges crammed with Jap soldiers seeking escape. . . . There’s trouble brewing for Tojo today, all right. . . . The Nips have had this coming to them for a long, long time. There they are! Those American bomber boys certainly know their stuff. Let ’em have it, buddy! This is it, boys, give her the gun. Here we go! . . . The convoy carried fifteen thousand Jap troops. . . . There’s plenty of them left in barges and lifeboats dotted over the sea. There’s a boat! Tiny speck, center screen . . . Miss! One tiny boat on a wide sea isn’t so easy to hit! Bull’s-eye! And more Japs meet their ancestors. The show’s over, boys.

  When U.S. prisoners were killed, it was “murder in flagrant disregard of the Geneva Conventions.” But when Americans murdered Others, “they had it coming to them.”

  The battle for the island of Attu in the Aleutians illustrated yet another great divide between America and Japan. In May of 1943, after two weeks of fighting, only eight hundred Japanese troops remained. These troops had no ammunition left, and there was nothing they could do militarily. Troops of any other nation would have surrendered. On the night of May 29, 1943, the surviving troops were ordered to attack. Fewer than thirty survived.

  To Americans, what happened on Attu was inexplicable. Time’s war correspondent Robert Sherrod wrote: “The results of the Jap fanaticism stagger the imagination. The very violence of the scene is incomprehensible to the western mind. Here groups of men . . . met their self-imposed obligation to die rather than accept capture, by blowing themselves to bits. . . . The ordinary, unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing on Attu indicates it.”

  In Japan, however, the fact that the battle was lost and Japanese boys were needlessly sacrificed didn’t matter to the heartless Spirit Warriors. What was important was that Japanese troops had demonstrated Yamato damashii by not surrendering. The Warriors presented Attu as heroic, and shinmin were reminded that Japanese spirit, like the ancient kamikaze, would somehow vanquish the American devils. The desk generals in Tokyo even invented a euphemism to glorify the army’s defeats. Losing battles and having everyone slaughtered wasn’t something to worry about. It was something to be proud of, for it demonstrated “gyokusai.”

  In the Japanese language, the term gyokusai consists of two ideograms. One means “jewel” and the other “smashed.” The meaning came from a classic Chinese tale about a morally superior man who, rather than compromise his principles, destroyed his precious possessions. So now dead Japanese boys were admirable “smashed jewels�
� as the Spirit Warriors converted their military defeats into moral victories.

  After all, the dead shinmin would become military gods to be revered through the ages. What better way to go than to be remembered as loyal to the emperor?

  Far too many Japanese boys would be forced to become gyokusai because their Tokyo superiors lacked a realistic strategy. Instead, Japanese generals just scattered their issen gorin willy-nilly throughout the Pacific with little hope either of supporting them in battle or evacuating them in defeat. For example, the Spirit boys dispatched more than 150,000 Japanese soldiers to New Guinea, but when they realized they could not support forces there, the army generals simply abandoned them. Sergeant Masatsugu Ogawa’s unit landed on New Guinea with seven thousand men. “Only sixty-seven survived,” he recalled. He and countless others desperately roamed the difficult terrain of New Guinea “like an army of mud dolls” as “the dead bodies became road markers.” When a Kempetei officer on the side of the road asked where his buddy was, Ogawa replied that he had fallen behind. “Why didn’t you kill him, then?” the Kempetei officer demanded. “You can’t get out of these mountains if you wait for stragglers. It’s all right to kill them. One or two of you doesn’t mean anything.”

  Tamotsu Ogawa was a medic in the South Pacific. He later described himself as being “young and simpleminded. I really believed it my duty to serve as a Japanese soldier—one of His Majesty’s children.” But he soon learned that the emperor’s compassion did not extend to the wounded. As esteemed historian Sabura Ienaga has written, “The wounded were an impediment to military operations because attempts to save them often resulted in more casualties or diverted manpower. A battlefield morality of ‘not becoming a burden to others’ prevailed. The wounded were forced to kill themselves or they were shot, depending on circumstances. Hardened combat veterans used to say, ‘On the battlefield ruthlessness is sometimes a virtue.’”

  Medical officers in most armies are there to save lives. But in the shattered-jewel army, they were to end them. As Tamotsu Ogawa recalled:

  I became a murderer. I killed men who didn’t resist, couldn’t resist. I killed men who only sought medicine, comrades I was supposed to help. Naturally the fucking officers didn’t do it themselves. They left it to the orderlies. We did it under orders from the company commander, then covered the bodies with coconut palm leaves and left them there.

  I think to myself: I deserve a death sentence. I didn’t kill just one or two. Only war allows this—these torments I have to bear until I die. My war will continue until that moment. I’m alive. What a pity I can’t do anything but weep. I know tears don’t erase my sin.

  A captured Japanese officer observed American doctors tending to the broken bodies of wounded Japanese soldiers. He expressed surprise at the resources being expended upon these men, who were too badly injured to fight again. “What would you do with these men?” a Marine officer asked him. “We’d give each a grenade,” was his answer. “And if they didn’t use it, we’d cut their jugular vein.”

  Incredibly, Allied bullets accounted for only one third of all Japanese troop fatalities in the Pacific war. The Spirit Warriors’ lack of strategy and planning accounted for most deaths. Indeed, when the Americans island-hopped toward Tokyo they simply bypassed these pitiful abandoned troops, leaving them to “wither on the vine,” in the U.S. phrase. “On Jaluit, Mili, Wotje and Nauru, the Japanese tried to stay alive by farming and fishing. More than one-third died of sickness and starvation. On Wolwei, a force of over 7,000 men numbered fewer than 2,000 by the war’s end. One bypassed island, Manus, was even used for training. Raw [Japanese] troops would be sent there to be toughened up, by practicing on the Japanese stragglers living in central and eastern parts of the island.”

  The “fanatic” Japanese willingness to die astonished Americans. On Guadalcanal, Marine commander Alexander Vandergrift wrote: “I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting. These people refuse to surrender. The wounded wait until men come up to examine them . . . and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade.”

  On the fetid and swampy New Guinea coast, a contingent of waterlogged Japanese boys fought on in horrible conditions, knowing they were trapped and would die. Hopelessness filled the air as buddies died from Allied artillery barrages. They could not bury their own dead in the swamps. Soon there were piles of swollen corpses. The searing equatorial sun roasted the corpses until they rotted and burst. Billions of maggots oozed out of dead mouths and nostrils. The stench was overpowering. “We wondered,” said an Allied combat reporter, “how the live Japs had borne it until we discovered they were wearing gas masks as protection against their own dead.”

  Soon the Spirit Warriors were racking up a number of gyokusai “victories,” which the Americans considered Japanese defeats. On Attu, 2,350 Japanese soldiers fought to the end and just 29 became prisoners of war, a fatality rate of 98.8 percent. In November of 1943 at Tarawa, 99.7 percent of the imperial navy’s force of 2,571 men stood in front of the Marines’ bullets rather than surrender; only eight Japanese were captured alive. On Makin, the next island over from Tarawa, one out of more than three hundred survived the battle. “At the Marshalls in February 1944, on Roi-Namur the Japanese lost 3,472 and only 51 were captured, a fatality rate of 98.5 percent. At Kwajalein, the Japanese garrison lost 4,938, with only 79 taken prisoner, a fatality rate of 98.4 percent.”

  The debacles at Makin and Tarawa opened the central Pacific up to American advances. Rational military minds might have advised broaching peace talks. Yet chief Spirit Warrior Tojo told the Diet on December 27, 1943, “The real war is starting now.”

  But even Tojo didn’t know how bad the situation really was. Communication within the euphemism-ridden, spiritually motivated military establishment was—predictably—poor. The navy “conducted no post-mortem analysis on the influence its Midway losses might have on future operations” and never bothered to tell the army about the debacle. Only Hirohito was informed, and he kept the truth to himself. Thus, even the prime minister of Japan was unaware of his country’s disaster at Midway. And when General Sugiyama informed Hirohito that everything in the South Pacific was in peril, the Boy Sailor petulantly cried, “Isn’t there someplace where we can strike the United States? When and where on earth are you [people] ever going to put up a good fight? And when are you ever going to fight a decisive battle?” Of course, the public was not told of the useless waste of Japanese boys.

  Saipan, an island fifteen hundred miles from Tokyo, was the “crown jewel” among the islands Germany had ceded to Japan as a result of WWI. The Japanese government had steadily developed Saipan until its civilian population reached a prewar peak of 29,000. Tojo declared it to be a “bastion of the Pacific.” For the Americans, Saipan and the other Mariana Islands were needed as bases for the B-29s to bomb Japan.

  The Spirit Warriors never imagined the war would come so close to home and, until it was reinforced in February of 1944, only a light garrison guarded Saipan. After the reinforcement, approximately forty thousand naval and army forces defended the island. There were also approximately twenty thousand Japanese civilians. But the defenders of Saipan never had a chance against the overwhelming power America threw at them, and the Spirit Warriors in Tokyo knew it. Realizing its soldiers and civilians were hopelessly trapped, military leaders decided that everyone—soldiers and civilians alike—should die. The “Imperial General Headquarters Army Section Confidential War Diary” for June 24, 1944, contains the following entry: “The Saipan defense force should carry out gyokusai. It is not possible to conduct the hoped-for direction of the battle. The only thing left is to wait for the enemy to abandon their will to fight because of the ‘Gyokusai of the One Hundred Million.’”

  “Gyokusai of the One Hundred Million” referred to the shattered-jewel death of the entire population of Japan. So now the Spirit boys were signaling that more than just combatants should offer their lives in Spirit War. They were rea
dy to shatter every Japanese man-, woman-, and child-jewel on earth as part of their impossible dream.

  Back on Saipan, the Japanese commanders—Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (who led the attack against Pearl Harbor) and Generals Yoshitsugu Saito and Keiji Igeta—met on July 5, 1944, to consider the gyokusai order from Tokyo. They ordered a final assault by all the troops, then the three commanders killed themselves. How the suicides of leaders would help the war effort was left unexplained—real samurai didn’t kill themselves before battle. Perhaps they believed that their departed spirits would protect the Japanese soldiers, sailors, and civilians they abandoned to their fate. General Igeta’s final radio message demonstrated more practical logic: “There can be no victory without control of the air. I strongly hope [you] will increase aircraft production.” Over the next few weeks, American Marines crushed Japanese resistance on Saipan.

  The final “banzai charge” of the three thousand Japanese survivors came three weeks after the Americans first waded ashore. Reporters from the New York Times described the onrushing, suicidal Japanese soldiers “like crowds swarming onto a field after a football game. Some were armed only with bayonets lashed to bamboo sticks, some were unarmed, but all were screaming ‘Banzai!’ and ‘Shichisei Hokoku!’ [“Seven Lives for the Fatherland!”].” One Marine exclaimed, “These Japs just kept coming and coming and didn’t stop. It didn’t make any difference if you shot one, five more would take his place.”