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

by Toland, John

  Lieutenant Iki’s nine planes drew near. Iki dropped below the clouds to 1,300 feet. Pompom bursts blossomed on both sides. His instinct was to pull up but he had to get in much closer. He skimmed 125 feet above the water into a wall of fire from Repulse. Eighteen hundred feet from the ship he yanked his release. He had her broadside!

  Flak peppered his wings as he banked sharply to the left. Momentarily parallel with the ship, he could distinguish sailors in raincoats lying flat on the deck. The plane behind him, piloted by Chief Petty Officer Toshimitsu Momoi, became a ball of fire. The next, First Class Petty Officer Yoshikazu Taue’s, exploded and the wreckage pinwheeled clumsily into the sea. At the bow of the battle cruiser, there were two rapid explosions. As Iki climbed to wait for his six remaining planes, he watched another torpedo drive home.

  Repulse veered crazily. One torpedo had smashed into the starboard, two into the port. The fourth, Iki’s, did the most immediate damage; it hit near the gun room, jamming the rudder. The battle cruiser was doomed and Captain Tennant coolly announced over the loudspeaker, “Prepare to abandon ship.” He congratulated the men for fighting the ship so well and added, “God be with you.” The list increased to 70 degrees. “Well, gentlemen, you had better get out of it now,” he told his staff, but he himself remained rooted to the bridge. Several officers laid hands on him. He struggled but was bodily carried off.

  The men formed orderly lines to abandon ship. One young sailor tried to push ahead until a second lieutenant calmly remarked, “Now, now, we are all going the same way too.” As the ship took on more and more water, her bow lifted and those still in the superstructure felt giddy from the sway. A man dived from the defense control tower into the sea 170 feet below, but the next one smashed into the deck and a third hurtled into the funnel. At the stern a group of marines jumped off—and were sucked into the churning propellers.

  At 12:33 P.M. the battle cruiser rolled over, then with ponderous majesty slid stern first, her bow sticking up “like a church steeple,” underplates a gruesome red. From 5,000 feet, Iki looked down incredulous at the bow pointing straight at him. Repulse plunged out of sight. It was not possible. Planes couldn’t sink a battleship so easily. “Banzai, banzai!” he shouted and threw up his hands. The bomber, with no hands on the controls, dipped.

  The crew was also shouting in frenzy. They drank a sake toast. Below, Iki could make out hundreds of dots in the water. Two destroyers were picking up the survivors. It never occurred to Iki to strafe them. The British had fought gallantly, in the tradition of bushido. He had yet to learn that an enemy spared today may kill you tomorrow.

  Mortally wounded by five torpedoes, Prince of Wales was barely under way as nine high-level bombers approached. At 12:44 P.M. bombs careened down. Only one struck home but it staggered the 35,000-ton battleship and she began to founder. Her beams were almost awash. Captain Leach ordered all hands to abandon ship, while he and Admiral Phillips stood together on the bridge and waved to their departing men. “Good-bye,” Leach called to them. “Thank you. Good luck. God bless you.” At 1:19 the battleship—nicknamed “H.M.S. Unsinkable”—keeled heavily over to port like a stricken hippopotamus and within a minute sank from sight, taking with her the little admiral and Captain Leach.

  The six lumbering Buffalos from Singapore arrived to find a sky empty of Japanese planes. Flight Lieutenant T. A. Vigors peered down in shock at masses of men struggling in the water. They waved and held up their thumbs.

  Takahashi, who had failed to release his torpedo, was halfway home. Upon hearing that Prince of Wales and Repulse were doomed he felt a strange sympathy—the British Navy was like a big brother. He fought the impulse, but tears blurred his goggles. Lieutenant Iki thought with sadness of Momoi and Taue. He knew his own torpedo had hit Repulse first but reported that the initial two hits had been made by his two dead comrades. It was the least thing, the last thing he could do for them. As Iki’s squadron landed, exuberant mechanics crowded around each plane. The crews were dragged out, tossed into the air. After he escaped the friendly pummeling, one of Iki’s pilots told him, “As we dived for the attack, I didn’t want to launch my torpedo. It was such a beautiful ship, such a beautiful ship.”

  At naval headquarters in Tokyo, the senior officers found it difficult to accept that battleships in the open sea could have been sunk by planes. It meant the end of their concept of naval warfare. The airmen were exultant. What they had been preaching for the past decade was proved. The third and final deterrent to victory in Southeast Asia had been eliminated at the cost of four planes.

  The next dawn Iki flew over the graves of Repulse and Prince of Wales. As he skimmed over the sunken ships he dropped bunches of flowers.

  3.

  About the time Force Z turned back toward Singapore, Adolf Hitler finally arrived in Berlin from the eastern front. He was doubly concerned—by a mammoth Soviet counteroffensive in front of Moscow and the news from the Pacific. In a flash Pearl Harbor had freed his chief adversary from worry over attack from the east; Stalin could now transfer almost all his strength in Asia against Germany. For months the Führer had been urging Japan to fight Russia and avoid war with America; at the same time Tokyo pressed Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima to get written assurances that Hitler would attack America if war started, while withholding any promise to assault Russia in return.

  Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told Hitler that General Oshima was demanding an immediate declaration of war against America but reminded him that according to the terms of the Tripartite Pact, Germany was bound to assist Japan only in case she was directly attacked.

  “If we don’t stand on the side of Japan, the pact is politically dead,” Hitler said. “But that is not the main reason. The chief reason is that the United States already is shooting at our ships. They have been a forceful factor in this war and through their actions have already created a situation of war.”

  Ribbentrop must have been confounded. This was a startling reversal of Hitler’s own insistence on keeping America out of the European war at all costs, and for months the Führer had shown remarkable restraint in view of the U. S. Navy’s provocative actions against U-boats in the Atlantic. Now all at once Hitler seemed to welcome a clean break. Perhaps it was a result of his frustration over the reversals in Russia and his wish to ride the crest of Japanese victories, or perhaps his almost psychotic hatred of Roosevelt had taken over. Whatever the reason, it would be folly, a major psychological blunder, and would only solve another of Roosevelt’s domestic problems. The President would not have to declare war on Germany and risk opposition from a substantial segment of America. National unity, so unexpectedly won at Pearl Harbor, would remain intact.

  Hitler began to indulge in a frenzy of wishful thinking. How could a country like America—“half Judaized, half Negrified” and “built on the dollar”—hope to hold together? Besides, Pearl Harbor couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. Russia was counterattacking and “everybody in Germany was oppressed by the certainty that sooner or later the United States would enter the conflict.”

  Later in the day, after ordering Hans Thomsen, the chargé d’affaires in Washington, to burn his codes and confidential papers, Ribbentrop received an estimate from Thomsen that “within twenty-four hours the United States will declare war on Germany or at least break off diplomatic relations.”

  Ribbentrop knew Hitler was set on getting in his own declaration first “for the sake of prestige,” and warned Thomsen to have no dealings with the State Department. “We wish to avoid under all circumstances that the Government there beats us to such a step.”

  On December 11 Hitler convoked the Reichstag. “We will always strike first!” he thundered. “We will always deal the first blow!” Roosevelt was as “mad” as Woodrow Wilson. “First he incited war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack.…
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  “I think you have all found it a relief now that, at last, one nation has been the first to take the step of protesting against this historically unique and shameless ill treatment of truth and of right.… The fact that the Japanese government, which has been negotiating for years with this man, has at last become tired of being mocked by him in such an unworthy way, fills us all, the German people, and I think, all other decent people in the world, with deep satisfaction.…

  “I have therefore arranged for passports to be handed to the American chargé d’affaires today, and the following—” His words were drowned in a bedlam of cheers.

  “The Reich Government therefore breaks off all diplomatic relations with the United States and declares that under these circumstances, brought about by President Roosevelt, Germany too considers herself to be at war with the United States, as from today.” Later that day Germany, Italy and Japan signed another tripartite pact asserting their “unshakable determination not to lay down arms until the joint war against the United States and England reaches a successful conclusion,” and pledging under no circumstances to conclude a separate peace.

  Three days later, at the presentation to Oshima of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit, Hitler said, “You gave the right declaration of war.” It was certainly proper to negotiate as long as possible, but “if one sees that the antagonist is interested only in putting one off, in shaming and humiliating one, and is not willing to come to an agreement, then one should strike—indeed, as hard as possible—and not waste time declaring war.” Japan had shown “angelical patience toward that ruffian Roosevelt,” he said and quoted a German proverb: “The most amicable man can’t live in peace if his quarrelsome neighbor wants to fight.”

  Oshima spread out a map to brief Hitler on the war situation throughout the Pacific. “After the capture of Singapore, Japan must turn toward India,” he said and suggested that Germany synchronize operations with Japan. “When Japan attacks India from the east, it will be most advantageous if German troops threaten India from the west.” Hitler refused to commit himself but did promise to drive over the Caucasus as far as Iraq and Iran. He wanted their oil.

  The day Hitler declared war on America, reports reached Manila of a tremendous Allied victory in Lingayen Gulf the previous night. The 21st Division of the Philippine Army had repelled a major Japanese landing. Most of the invasion vessels had been sunk and the beaches were strewn with Japanese bodies.

  Life photographer Carl Mydans couldn’t find one casualty along Lingayen Gulf. Except for Filipino soldiers lolling beside their weapons, the beaches were empty. An amused American major explained that a single unidentified boat at the mouth of the Agno River had touched off a furious barrage of every gun in the area, from 155-mm. guns to pistols. (Their target, a Japanese motorboat on reconnaissance, escaped unharmed to report that the main landing, to come eleven days hence, should be made at the northern end of the gulf, some thirty miles away, where there were almost no beach defenses.)

  Major LeGrande A. Diller, MacArthur’s press chief, released a statement on how the enemy landing had been thwarted. While other reporters were wiring their papers and magazines. Mydans buttonholed Diller. “Pic,” he said, “I’ve just been to Lingayen and there’s no battle there.”

  Diller jabbed a finger at his communiqué. “It says so here.”

  The story of “the Battle of Lingayen Gulf” brought a welcome surge of pride and relief to Americans. The New York Times banner headline that Sunday read: JAPANESE FORCES WIPED OUT IN WESTERN LUZON. Lingayen Gulf had been retaken from the Japanese in sensational fashion. United Press went further: there had been a fierce three-day fight at Lingayen Beach; 154 enemy boats were sunk without, miracle of miracles, a single enemy reaching shore alive.

  The morning after the Lingayen Gulf communiqué, another announced a second triumph in the Philippines: Captain Colin P. Kelly, Jr., had “successfully attacked the battleship Haruna, putting that ship out of commission.” The crew of Kelly’s Flying Fortress had sighted a large warship just off the north coast of Luzon and the bombardier, Corporal Meyer Levin, released three 600-lb. bombs. Two missed but one appeared to go down the smokestack and when dark clouds of smoke erupted, the crew of the B-17 was certain the ship had been mortally damaged.

  On the way back to Clark Field, Kelly’s plane was pounced by a Zero—it’s pilot was Saburo Sakai, already an ace. The Fortress burst into flames and Kelly ordered his men to bail out. The ship exploded with Kelly aboard and plummeted into a dirt road at the foot of Mount Arayat. Kelly had sacrificed his life so his crew could live, and America had her first super hero of World War II. Kelly’s gallantry deserved the posthumous D.S.C. he was awarded, but he had not sunk Haruna, which was fifteen hundred miles away in the Gulf of Siam. There had not been a battleship near the Philippines. Nothing in the area had been sunk or, for that matter, badly damaged, but the facts became even more distorted with each telling. The most popular version, the one many Americans still retain, was that Kelly won the Medal of Honor (which he did not) by diving his plane into Haruna’s smokestack to become the first suicide pilot of the war.

  At the same time the public was being lulled into overconfidence by dispatches from Clark Lee, the Associated Press correspondent in Manila, which derided the ability of the Japanese fighting man and the quality of his equipment. A competent newsman, Lee was merely repeating what he had been told by American military men: “The Japanese Army is an ill-uniformed, untrained mass of young boys between fifteen and eighteen years old, equipped with small-caliber guns and driven forward by desperate determination to advance or die.” Their .25-caliber rifle and machine-gun bullets could not even kill a man. “They’re no damned good on the ground,” he quoted one cavalry colonel. “We licked the pants off them three times and were beaten only by their tanks and planes. When our tanks and planes go into action we’ll chase them back to the sea. These Charlies—we call them Charlies—can’t shoot. Somebody gets hit about every 5,000 shots.”

  MacArthur himself knew this was ridiculous. In 1905 he had studied voluminous reports of the Russo-Japanese War by American military observers, including General John J. Pershing: “Intelligence, patriotism, abstemiousness, obedience to, and inborn respect for, legally constituted authority go far toward achieving victory. When to these we add physical strength, a love of nature and of manly sports, modern organization, armament, equipment, and careful military training we have an army that will give a good account of itself. All of these were found in the Japanese army.”

  One observer noted that Japanese casualties were “curiously active in spite of their wounds, men shot through the head, neck, body, arms and legs being observed walking around or hopping around, as the case might be, cheerful and lively and indifferent to their wounds. They showed extraordinary vitality, with a noticeably less amount of nervous shock from wounds than I have observed in American soldiers whom I have seen similarly wounded in the Spanish war and the Philippine insurrection.”

  The initial phase of the Japanese master plan was working as neatly in the field as it had in tabletop maneuvers. The confusion in Malaya was short-lived and General Yamashita was driving steadily down the peninsula toward Singapore. Far to the north, at Hong Kong, the last Indian, Scotch and Canadian troops on the mainland of China were evacuated across the narrow bay to the island itself. The arrival of these defeated soldiers caused a near-panic, for it emphasized how desperate the British military position was in reality.

  Out in the Pacific, the American island of Guam had fallen after a brief struggle in which seventeen American and Guamanians and one Japanese were killed. But at Wake Island, two thousand miles from Honolulu, American resistance was savage. Rear Admiral Sadamichi Kajioka’s Wake Island Invasion Force—a light cruiser, six destroyers, two transports and a landing party of 560 infantry-trained sailors—was thrown back on the morning of December 11 by the small garrison under Marine Major James Devereux. Kajioka regrouped, got surface reinforcements f
rom Kido Butai returning to Japan, and made a second assault early on the morning of December 23 with 830 men.

  On the beach Devereux had 250 Marines, 100 civilian volunteers and no more than a few rounds of ammunition. The defenders fought desperately to the last bullet, but at eight-thirty Devereux was forced to walk out of his battered command post with a white rag on a swab handle and surrender to a Japanese officer who offered Devereux a cigarette and said he had attended the San Francisco Fair in 1939. That afternoon Admiral Kajioka, wearing spotless whites, medals and dress sword, came ashore to take formal possession of the two and a half square miles of coral rubble. It was renamed Bird Island.

  Japan welcomed home the heroes of Pearl Harbor with celebrations and flowery congratulatory speeches but Yamamoto sounded a note of caution, warning his men to beware of smugness: “There are many more battles ahead.”

  Vice Admiral Nagumo was ordered to Tokyo along with the commanders of the two waves, Mitsuo Fuchida and Shigekazu Shimazaki, to report to the Throne. The Imperial Household had submitted a series of questions the Emperor would ask, and Kusaka had written down word for word the answers so Nagumo would not slip into the earthy phrases of his native Aizu. All went well at the audience until the Emperor began asking impromptu questions. While his two junior officers sweated in embarrassment, blunt little Nagumo reverted to colloquial terms, referring to American admirals as aitsu (that guy) and koitsu (this guy). The replies so fascinated the Emperor that the fifteen-minute audience stretched on for another half-hour. He asked Fuchida if any hospital ships had been hit or civilian or training planes knocked down. Instead of answering through an imperial aide, Fuchida became so flustered that he replied directly that no noncombatants had been attacked. It was a miserable moment for Fuchida—a worse ordeal, he thought, than the raid itself.