Nigel Cawthorne
Page 28
The next day, 29 April, was the emperor’s birthday.
Many are convinced that on the emperor’s birthday we shall resume the offensive and begin an advance on Manila, but right now it seems to me to be an empty dream. It appears unlikely that our aircraft are coming. The word is that we are nearly out of rations and no one knows how long this may continue … Each man must survive on a daily ration of about 200 grams, but after no great number of days one must expect that even this will dwindle down to nothing … Day by day, not only provisions grow less, but also the number of our men diminishes by ones and twos. This is warfare bitter in the extreme.
The supply position made Obara reflective.
How many days, I wonder, will I begin making the battlefield jottings? How many times have I thought, today is the last! That I have been able, in spite of all, to go this far with these notes is to me a matter for grateful wonder. Yet, in all honesty, what good is it to continue such a thing as this? I realize I will probably never be able to take it home, and I don’t know how often it has occurred to me to give it up. I must confess it seems strange even to myself that I have kept on and even now go on jotting down one thing after another. If fate is kind, perhaps someone will come along who will find this diary and take it to my home; otherwise, I suppose it will in the end just rot away here in the depths of a Philippine mountain forest. Well, whatever the reason, although I probably should put it aside and forget it, I go on writing. Bullets rain down all around me and still I go on writing. It cannot claim to be literature, so it must be because this diary has become like a child to me. In any case, this journal records the names of my men who, having fallen, have gone to join the pantheon of spirits guarding the nation. Crude though it may be, when I think of these men, it is precious to me.
The emperor’s birthday dawned, not with an advance on Manila or the arrival of Japanese planes, but with ‘an artillery bombardment such as to seem to turn day back into darkness again’. It ended with a thunderstorm that rivalled the intensity of the artillery bombardment. Then the month changed with no sign of an offensive and there were other things to worry about.
The sun of May beats down upon the battlefield, and as the atmosphere grows ever more oppressive, the sweat begins to flow so fast, it drips … The men are being disabled in rapid succession by the high fever that accompanies malaria. In a critical situation such as this, this problem is an especially perplexing one. I note with anguish that, not only are our remaining medicines inadequate for our present needs, but supplies such as syringes are completely exhausted. Yet these are men who will pour out their last drop of strength in the effort to destroy the enemy. Standing guard day and night with 40°C fevers, a fever high enough to blind them, still they managed to maintain battle readiness even under the broiling sun. It is painful to witness.
The general good order of the Imperial Army was also affected:
Our hair and beards are growing thick and long, so that we begin to look like wild men, but we will put up with anything until at last every one of the enemy has been destroyed.
NUMB WITH GRIEF
On 2 May, the enemy attacked with tanks. ‘After nine hours of bitter fighting, we succeeded in repelling them with heavy losses.’ But there was also a cost to Japanese morale.
Our military strength is now so diminished, I hardly have the heart to write about it. Pen and paper are too frail to convey what it was like to receive the enemy’s main attack full in the face … Numb with grief, I write the names of my fallen men. And while I write in this frail, tattered notebook, I, too, step by step approach the abyss of a depth so blue it shades into black. Pain will follow pain until fallen, until the last man, and a single … banzai!
Even so, the following day another attack was repelled, at great cost to the Americans.
In relation to the enemy’s losses, ours are perhaps only one to their ten. Still, each one is a priceless sacrifice. Will tomorrow bring the tenth enemy attack? Well, whether the tenth or the 100th, we will continue to hold this ground and let them fell the strength of the Imperial Army until at last they have had enough! Flying our banners in the name of Akita Danjiro [‘the youth of Akita’ – a city in northwest Honshu], we shall endow them with a glory that will make them shine forth all the more gloriously. In this way we shall perform the ultimate service for our country.
Boy’s Festival Day, 5 May, was celebrated with good news: ‘Fifty of our aircraft are in action in the air over Marikina.’
We have so long wished to be able once again to look up and see wings emblazoned with the crimson sun. Just hearing of this report brings such a look of relief to the faces of the men. If only we could see them with our own eyes, hear them with our own ears, how much the more joyful would be these faces.
Then the Army newspaper turned up for the first time in a long while.
There are articles on the American populace in crisis, the strong resistance put up by the Germans …
(but Berlin had already fallen and Germany was two days from surrender)
…and news from Okinawa as recent as 17 April describing our great victories there. The enemy lost all of 390 ships sunk or damaged. A minimum estimate of their losses in men is 800,000, of which 210,000 were killed. Our Shimbu Group battle results also appear. We are 56,000 strong. Just a little while longer, the time for a general offensive is perhaps at hand.
On 7 May, while under attack in something like ‘a shooting contest’, news came that: ‘The enemy on the island of Okinawa is annihilated (confirmed by the Army).’ In fact, General Ushijima, defending Okinawa, had made one last attack, which failed at the cost of 5,000 men. ‘Now you see the fix you are in,’ wrote Obara, addressing the Americans. ‘We have been concerned for the homeland, but this news has relieved our minds.’
Somewhere far from this charred mountain exists the spirit of Corporal Asano, who fell in the defence of the homeland and who must have been greatly concerned over its welfare. May he find heart’s ease in this news. He was denied the joy of hearing this news in his lifetime, and we are powerless to tell it to him now.
Asano had been sent back to the front line even though he had a shell fragment in his leg.
One cannot remember him without a sense of regret. To men generally, it is a matter of concern where one may meet his death, but for the soldier, neither the place nor the manner in which death may come should occupy his mind. Yet all our men who have fallen have died splendidly … May those of us who remain hope for a splendid death.
The opportunity was soon at hand.
8 May: Today is Imperial Rescript Day … at last the great order of the offensive is received!! The date for X-Day is imminent. How we have waited for this, the order for a general offensive! The order that we have exhausted our patience waiting for ever since we first heard of the enemy landings! And now this order has been received. X-Day!! X-Day!! … It is now no longer a dream, we will be coming back, and with flags flying … I feel tears unconsciously welling up. I don’t know how I keep from weeping. The men are similarly affected.
Plans were laid to retake Manila.
‘Can it be coming true at last?’ is the thought that goes through my mind. We have waited so long for this order, day after day, clinging grimly to this crumbling mountain while being blanketed by a deluge of shells. No matter how impetuous our spirit, all we were able to do was to grit our teeth and swallow our tears and hold on … Now this is dispelled and my heart is light. I feel I cannot remain quiet – I want to sing. I look up at the sky and I see the gleaming of machine-gun bullets as they stream over our heads. I lean back and gaze through them at the clear bright sky, and feel my heart as clear and bright as the sky while I watch the white clouds silently passing over the violence of the battlefield … Beasts, pour on the shells and bombs as much as you can! You have just a little longer to shoot and die – X-Day is coming. Night has ended.
What actually happened was a redoubling of the American shelling.
I stuff my ear
s with rags, but even so it seems any moment my eardrums will be broken. The violence of the explosions is such that with each explosion my palpitating heart seems to skip a beat. I crawl into the side-hole of my command bunker, but the concussions follow me there and continue to shake my whole frame. The roof seems about to cave in. It is a terrific shelling. It is as if they will not be satisfied until they have fired in one day all the shells their trucks had spent the whole day in hauling up. They blast away at random like madmen. These mountains are now altered beyond recognition from what they had once been. If you were to tell a visitor now that these mountains had formerly been covered with forests so thick it was dark even in broad daylight, who could believe you? … As shells continue to fall around my command bunker, I curse and cling to the wall, worrying whether the enemy is now advancing, and whether I should stick my head out, and almost sweating blood as I stay there and take it. I feel as if blood would flow from my hair-roots if I rubbed my skin.
Listening to the shell bursts, it sounds as if the worst of the shelling is falling on the positions of the men further down. I wonder how they are making out, and who may have caught it, and will the rest be buried in their dugouts.
Spontaneously, I begin to pray, ‘Oh, gods, protect us.’
Soldiers under shelling often unconsciously touch with one hand the good-luck banner they have wrapped around the belly, and naturally they may also touch and make sure their talisman is on them where it belongs. Then when the shelling subsides, and they assemble in a dugout and greet one another, their faces are a blend of laughter and soberness, and their words will be casual and simple, yet to me somehow noble.
A SOLDIER OF THE EMPEROR
Unfortunately, Obara had forgotten to put on his talisman and the good-luck banner given to him by the people of his home town. Instead he comforted himself with the thought: ‘Forget the gods, rely on yourself’ and ‘He whose time it is to die, will die; he whose time it is to live, will live.’ Afterwards he grew pensive.
When I gaze around our raked, harrowed and ruined position, it comes to me, what a strange place for me to be. Soldier by the grace of the Emperor, yet also a living human being, feeling instinctively like any man the desire to live. Somehow I have been able through all this to repress these impulses to weakness. Because I am a man? No. Because I am a soldier? No. It is because I am Japanese, a son of Japan, a soldier of the Emperor.
He took advantage of an intermission in the shelling to poke his head out of the command bunker and look over at the enemy.
There, as if to mock us, more and more men are perching on the northern slope of Shimbu Hill. I curse them as mongrel curs, but for the moment all I can do is grind my teeth. It is unbearably bitter. Thinking of my men being opposed by these beasts, any anger rises. But we shall soon see! We will destroy you. In the end not even one of you will be left.
Sudden downpours indicated that the rainy season was about to begin. The rain brought with it new life:
Here and there on the burned and blasted surface of the mountain, grass has sprouted. Growing serenely in the little spaces between one shell hole and another, it has reached in places heights of seven or eight inches. But then, having with great persistence achieved this growth, it is in the end blown up by a shell or cut down by a shell fragment.
But Obara was more concerned with hatred and death.
For the past two or three nights, searchlights have been frequently observed probing the sky over towards Manila. I wonder if it could be that our aircraft have been making night raids. May they blow Manila to hell! Whenever we find Americans or Filipinos now, we must simply destroy them. In plain language, even those who surrender cannot be kept alive. How could we have overlooked the fact that these are beasts worse than the great predators?
There was more shelling and more American attacks, again repelled with heavy casualties on both sides. Finally on 12 May, X-Day arrived. But no Japanese aircraft turned up. Without air support, the Japanese were forced to endure another day’s shelling as usual.
The mountains endure and the clouds drift by. We remained clinging to our positions, yet the tears one by one trickle and fall.
On 17 May, the enemy infiltrated their positions, but ‘we used our mortars to give them a blood-letting’. Obara heard that, after the victory off Okinawa, the Imperial Navy had gone on the offensive. In fact, what was left of it did not have enough fuel to sail. He was also convinced that the Japanese counteroffensive was progressing elsewhere and that, somehow, the enemy was in difficulties.
The enemy must be short of men. They are now pressing Filipino women into the front lines. We hear reports that women soldiers account for about one-third of the total.
And of course, Filipino women would be no match for the men of the Imperial Army.
But is the counteroffensive succeeding? This bombing and shelling is so excessively intense that I wonder if it is not just a question of time before these positions and the mountain with them will not simply crumble away … I cannot bear to think so. I will continue the fight and I will resist even if I should be the last survivor, and yet … When the counteroffensive shall have prevailed, then we will leave these positions and pounce upon the enemy! Ah, ah! I cannot wait.
They were short of rations and ammunition, but there was still hope.
An M-4 type medium tank overturned with a loud explosion and burst of fire. ‘We got him! We got him!’ I said to myself, and felt from the bottom of my heart a sudden thrill of triumph. It looked like an A-T close attack – leaping the boundary between life and death, a son of the divine land, a sacrifice to the nation! An explosion was perhaps this message – this is a soldier giving his life. Ah, ah! How like a god, that soldier! Come then, enemy tanks! We shall all of us turn into human bombs, and all of you will be destroyed.
However, he had noted that his men were becoming less and less talkative.
‘Hold on, it will be just a little longer,’ I say to encourage them. ‘I hear the Navy is now in pursuit off Okinawa!’ Eyes fixed on a point in the distance, they fall silent my men.
Fukuzo Obara’s diary ends on 19 May 1945. A US naval analyst noted:
Despite the firestorm that Obara described, it was estimated that 60 to 70 per cent of casualties on the Philippines were caused by disease rather than injury. Lieutenant Colonel Shigeo Kawai of the 2nd Tank Division reckoned they lost 95 per cent of their infantry – ‘At times during the fighting along the mountain ridge of Salacsac, we lost a total of 180 men a day.’
A STARVATION DIET
It was now clear that no amount of Bushido could win the Greater East Asia War. Lieutenant General Tadasu Kataoka, commanding the 1st Division on the Philippines, recalled:
We received orders from the 35th Army headquarters that we were to resist until the very end, even if it took two or three generations … Once, during a lull at the front lines, men of the 57th Regiment, which had been fighting up front for days, were brought back to the rear area divisional headquarters for a short period of rest. To show them our gratitude for their efforts, we fed them rice, which had been carefully nurtured and grown by our field hospital patients. However, these men had been on a starvation diet so long that their stomachs could not handle all the food and consequently, there were a great number of vomiting cases … Later, as the intensity of the fighting grew, our food supply became so low that dead horses were a welcome addition to our diet. My personal horse, which was used by my adjutant to maintain liaison between our troops and divisional headquarters, was one of the last horses to be killed. He was fatally wounded by enemy artillery fire and his carcass passed around to our men.
Morale had already suffered a crippling blow. According to Major Chuji Kaneko, a junior staff officer with the 102nd Division on the Philippines:
In our unit, the morale was exceptionally good until after the Leyte operation. The men in our division at the time were sure that our troops on Okinawa and other areas would repel the enemy and turn the tide of battle.
The morale at this time was astonishingly high. However, after the fall of Okinawa, our morale wavered to its lowest ebb and few men remained who were confident of victory.
By then the homeland was in peril. On 27 March 1945, American B-29s began mining the Shimonoseki Strait, which connected the Sea of Japan to the Inland Sea. This was used by ships carrying food and raw materials from mainland Asia, and handled 40 per cent of all Japan’s maritime traffic. Some 1,250,000 tons of shipping a month were funnelled through a waterway less than 750m (half a mile) wide. Over the next four months, 12,000 mines were dropped. Captain Minami of the 7th Fleet explained the disastrous effects:
Due to the fact that the United States did not use mines extensively during the first years of the war, the Japanese allowed their research efforts to relax and consequently were in no way prepared for the saturation type of attack that was delivered in Japanese waters in the spring of 1945 … Frantic efforts were made to counter the mining of the Skimonoseki Strait … [but] at times the traffic in the straits became so jammed that it was necessary to force ships through regardless of losses.
According to Commander Tadenuma, a staff officer of the Kure Mine Squadron, which was responsible for sweeping mines from the Inland Sea:
Large warships did not attempt to use the Shimonoseki Strait after 27 March 1945 and were forced to use the Bungo Strait.
There they were vulnerable to attack by Allied submarines. Captain Tamura, head of the Mine Sweeping Section of the Japanese Navy, told his captors:
The result of the mining by B-29s was so effective against shipping that it eventually starved the country. I think you could have shortened the war by beginning earlier.