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

by Toland, John

  At a resting place a few miles to the north, Corporal Roy Castleberry watched two civilians dig a hole and lay a delirious American captain in it. The captain suddenly began a desperate struggle to escape his grave. A guard ordered the Filipinos to hit the American with their shovels. They refused until the Japanese raised his rifle menacingly. Faces twisted in agony, they beat the captain back into the hole and buried him alive. Horrified, Castleberry saw a hand feebly, hopelessly, claw in the air above the grave.

  As the prisoners finally left Bataan and turned east toward Lubao, they faced a brutal stretch of completely unshaded road. Thirst had become intolerable for some and they risked their lives to sneak into adjoining fields for the meager moisture in sugar cane. Those unwilling to take the chance scrambled for the chewed cane dropped by their bolder comrades. Most of them were so dehydrated that they could not urinate, and those who did winced in agony as if hot irons had been shoved up their penises. Even so, it brought unspeakable relief.

  At Lubao, a sprawling city of thirty thousand, the streets were lined with weeping people. They tried to throw the prisoners boiled eggs, fried chicken wrapped in banana leaves or pieces of panocha (hard brown sugar), but the surlier guards kept the crowds back with swinging rifle butts. Every so often an old woman swathed from crown to ankle would pull some staggering prisoner from the line and stand over him with her long skirts.

  At the far edge of town the Japanese began herding the vanguard of marchers into a large corrugated-tin building, a rice mill, until several thousand men were packed inside. There was a single water spigot. The remaining prisoners were grouped outside the mill. They too had only one faucet. At the rice mill brutality was routine. Prisoners were slashed with sabers for minor insubordinations and beaten to death for no apparent reason.

  The final lap to San Fernando, the rail center, was the second shortest, only nine miles, but the crudest. The asphalt road, churned by tanks and trucks, was molten from the sun’s rays, and to barefoot marchers whose soles were already raw it was like walking over hot coals. The last mile seemed endless to the dehydrated, starving men. At the outskirts of town they passed between parked lines of trucks, which formed a gantlet, and soldiers in the trucks swung their rifle butts at the Filipinos and American floundering through. In the town itself hordes of civilians from all over Luzon were looking for loved ones. The crowd moaned and wept as the skeleton army dragged by.

  Here at last part of Kawane’s plan was carried out with some measure of efficiency: the prisoners got rice balls, water and medical treatment. They were imprisoned in makeshift places—a pottery shed, the Blue Moon dance hall, empty lots, old factories, school buildings and yards, and the large circular cockfight arena near the railroad station.

  Lieutenant Aquino’s group was locked up in a decrepit vinegar factory. He dropped exhausted on a straw mat. Fourteen hours later he was wakened and escorted to a Japanese barracks where he found his father with a Japanese colonel. Father and son embraced.

  “Mr. Aquino is a good friend of Japan,” said the colonel, a kempei commander, in a British accent, and told young Aquino he could go home. But the lieutenant could not desert his men. He requested more food and medicine for all the prisoners.

  “Your father was right,” the colonel remarked. “He said you would refuse. Please accept my apologies for the way you all have been treated.”

  Once alone with his son, Benigno Aquino revealed that President Quezon had ordered Laurel and himself to pretend to collaborate with the Japanese; the first step would be to press for the early release of all Filipinos from prison camp.

  “Hurry, Papa, we are dying like flies.”

  The men were herded into boxcars, similar to the French 40 and 8 of World War I. Over one hundred were jammed into each small car. Those with dysentery were unable to control themselves; others vomited on their comrades. The stench became almost unbearable as the trains slowly headed north on the three-hour trip to Capas. Some of the men died in the crush but were held erect by the pressing mob. There was momentary relief at the few stops; each time friendly guards opened the locked doors. The fresh air was like elixir. Filipinos were always on hand to pass out bottles of water, tomatoes, bananas, rice, eggs, coffee, sugar cane. Americans with a low opinion of Filipinos began to appreciate their courage and humanity.

  At Capas the trains were unloaded. There was still an eight-mile march over a shadeless, dusty road to Camp O’Donnell, but anything was better than the cramped boxcars. At last the prisoners came to a maze of tumble-down buildings spread out on a vast plain. Guards herded them through a gate flanked by towers spiked with machine guns and up a hill to a building flying the Japanese flag. They sat in the sun for an hour before an officer, the commandant of the camp, strode out the door. He faced the prisoners and announced in a belligerent voice, through an interpreter, that the United States was his greatest enemy and that the Japanese were going to whip the Americans if it took a hundred years.

  “Captain, he say you are not prisoners of war,” the interpreter told Captain Ed Dyess’s group. “You will be treated like captives. He say you do not act like soldiers. You got no discipline. You do not stand to attention while he talk. Captain, he say you will have trouble from him.”

  Two days after the first group plodded into Camp O’Donnell, the Manila Sunday Tribune published pictures of the march, along with a Japanese-inspired story:

  The task of making observations upon the tragic aspect of marching war prisoners from the Bataan front, where they surrendered on April 9, to San Fernando, Pampanga, previous to their entrainment to their permanent concentration camp is a sad one; hence, our effort to avoid details about the whole episode.

  So the public would not get the wrong impression from such an enigmatic remark, however, we make it plain that the Imperial Japanese Forces, whose business is clearly to prosecute the present war to its successful termination, are going well out of their way to feed and help 50,000 men who once were their enemies beyond most reasonable men’s expectations.

  If, in spite of the humane treatment the Japanese are giving these prisoners, the latter are too weak to reach their destinations, we have only the high command of the American forces to blame for surrendering when many of their men had already been terribly weakened by lack of food and by diseases.

  Homma was so absorbed with mounting the assault on Corregidor that it was two months before he learned that more Fil-Americans had died on the march than on the battlefields of Bataan. Only 54,000 men reached Camp O’Donnell, but many escaped and no one will ever know the exact death toll. Between 7,000 and 10,000 died on the march from malaria, starvation, beatings or execution. Of these, approximately 2,330 were Americans.

  Most of the survivors were certain that the march was a cruel plan of the Japanese high command. But the cruelty was not systematic. The prisoners lucky enough to ride in trucks from Balanga to San Fernando suffered little, and a number of those who marched were adequately fed and encountered not a single brutality. Yet comrades a mile behind were starved, beaten and murdered.

  Brutality to the Japanese soldier was a way of life. He took the slaps and beatings of his officers as a normal kind of reprimand, and in turn slapped and beat those under him. When prisoners failed to understand his orders or were too weak to follow them, he often, out of impulse or frustration at their apparent disobedience, resorted to violence and even murder. To the Japanese soldier, moreover, there was no such thing as surrender. He fought to the death. If taken prisoner while wounded or unconscious, he was forever disgraced. He was dead to his own family and his name was removed from the village or ward register. His soldier’s manual read: “Bear in mind the fact that to be captured means not only disgracing the Army but your parents and family will never be able to hold up their heads again. Always save the last round for yourself.”

  Such training and background were responsible for much of the brutality but additional murders resulted directly from the unauthorized, oral order em
anating from Colonel Tsuji. General Ikuta and Colonel Imai undoubtedly were not alone in refusing to follow this order; but others had obeyed it in full or in part, since they had been conditioned from childhood to carry out a command swiftly, without question. The average Japanese found it easier to follow than take the initiative and, in the Army particularly, was a slave to conformity in every aspect of life—he accepted without question, for example, that at inspections his penis had to be on the left side.

  Nor was Colonel Tsuji the only one calling for vengeance against the whites and their dark-skinned collaborators. On April 24 the Japan Times & Advertiser printed an article which publicly echoed Tsuji’s demands that no mercy be shown to prisoners of war.

  … They [the Allies] surrender after sacrificing all the lives they can, except their own, for a cause which they know well is futile; they surrender merely to save their own skins …

  They have shown themselves to be utterly selfish throughout all the campaigns, and they cannot be treated as ordinary prisoners of war. They have broken the commandments of God, and their defeat is their punishment.

  To show them mercy is to prolong the war. Their motto has been, “Absolute unscrupulousness.” They have not cared what means they employed in their operations. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The Japanese Forces are crusaders in a holy war. Hesitation is uncalled for, and the wrongdoers must be wiped out.

  The atrocities unleashed by such fanaticism inevitably became a focal point of hate and revenge to the Allies.

  * Someone overheard an enlisted man remark that the mattress he’d put aboard the MacArthur plane was heavy and started a rumor that it was filled with gold pesos. The following day a few men were willing to swear that they had seen chests of drawers as well as a large refrigerator loaded. This fiction was built into a whispering campaign against MacArthur that still persists. Of a score of people interviewed, one alone maintained that he helped load the refrigerator and mattress full of pesos. The others declared categorically that the MacArthurs took the prescribed thirty-five pounds of luggage.

  † Homma remained ignorant of this order to his death. His chief of staff learned about it only after the war.

  12

  “But Not in Shame”

  1.

  The succession of brilliant and unexpectedly easy victories in the Pacific had brought dissension rather than unity to the Japanese Supreme Command. The original war plan called for the seizure of raw materials in Southeast Asia; the conquered territory would be fortified into a strategic web of bases for long-range naval operations. The Army still felt the only sensible course was to make the web so strong that America would be forced eventually to make some sort of peace. But the Navy had experienced such exhilarating triumphs that it was no longer willing to accept such a limited, defensive role. Why not operations against Australia, Hawaii and India? These would generate great naval battles, and as in the Battle of the Java Sea, the enemy would be destroyed. So far less than 25,000 tons of shipping had been lost in conquering all of Southeast Asia, and the biggest warship sunk had been a destroyer.

  The Navy began pressing upon the Army a series of plans reaching far beyond the original goals. One was to destroy the British fleet in the Indian Ocean and join up with the Germans. There was a more ambitious plan, aimed at America—cut the supply line between the United States and Australia. If the American fleet dared sortie to break this blockade, the result would be the long-dreamed-of Decisive Battle for the supremacy of the Pacific.

  The Navy envisaged invasion of Australia itself with five Army divisions. This daring operation was drawn up by Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka of the Navy General Staff. At a joint operational meeting his opposite number in the Army, Colonel Takushiro Hattori, ridiculed the idea. Australia was twice the area of occupied China and its conquest would require not only the main body of the Combined Fleet but a dozen infantry divisions as well. The shipping for the Army alone would run to 1,500,000 tons. Tomioka suggested that they use the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, which was on garrison duty along the Soviet border. Hattori was against using so many troops on what would essentially be a diversionary effort; every man in uniform would be needed in the protracted struggle with the West. Seeing that Tomioka remained unshaken, Hattori picked up a cup. “The tea in this cup represents our total strength,” he said and spilled it on the floor. “you see it goes just so far. If your plan is approved I will resign.”

  On March 7 a liaison conference brought their differences into the open. Echoing Hattori, General Moritake Tanabe argued that the Army’s main objective was to build “a political and military structure capable of withstanding a long war.” Neutralization forays in certain areas were practical, but only as long as they were on a modest scale. From now on the enemy should be forced into fighting far from his own bases on Japanese terms. Before Pearl Harbor they had all agreed on this strategic concept. Why improvise now? It would lead to catastrophe.

  The Navy insisted that it was vital to keep the enemy on the defensive—anything else would invite disaster. Admiral Takasumi Oka wanted to destroy enemy sea power and wipe out any key bases that might be used for a counterattack “by the positive employment of forces in the Australian and Hawaiian areas.”

  The unresolved debate carried over into heated meetings at the Army and Navy Club which at times came close to physical violence. It was two weeks before a compromise could be reached: the Australian invasion was scrapped but the Army agreed to less enterprising projects such as an amphibious assault on Port Moresby, a town four hundred miles north of Australia, on the east coast of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world.

  Hattori and Tomioka met informally and came to further accord. The latter agreed to abandon the plan to meet Hitler in the Indian Ocean, while Hattori approved the conquest of three island groups off the northeast coast of Australia—Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia. This would cut the supply line between Australia and America at minimum cost.

  On March 13 Tojo and the two Chiefs of Staff went to the Palace to submit a joint report to the Emperor on the new war policy: “It will not only be most difficult to defeat the United States and Britain in a short period, but the war cannot be brought to an end through surrender. It is essential to further expand the political and military advantages achieved through glorious victories since the opening of hostilities, by utilizing the present war situation to establish a political and strategic structure capable of withstanding a protracted war. We must take every possible step, within the limits of our national capabilities, to force the United States and Britain to remain on the defensive. Any definite measure of vital significance to be effected in this connection will be given thorough study and will be presented to His Majesty for approval each time.”

  The hard-won compromise was accepted by everyone but the most influential man in the Navy. Spurred by his gambler’s instinct, Admiral Yamamoto was set upon launching another audacious attack on American territory—an invasion of Midway, an atoll comprising two small islands, less than thirteen hundred miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. This alone would protect the homeland from a direct surprise attack by the Pacific Fleet.

  Yamamoto’s plan found few adherents in the Navy General Staff, and he sent his favorite chess partner, Commander Yasuji Watanabe, to Tokyo to win support. But Captain Tomioka and Commander Kazunari Miyo, the aviation operations officer, were not impressed by his advocacy. How could Midway be held, let alone supplied, assuming it was taken? Moreover, it offered few rewards. On the other hand, seizure of the three island groups near Australia would surely lure the U. S. fleet to the Decisive Battle in an area where Japan could get support from the neighboring Solomon Islands.

  The argument was settled not by reason but by threat. Watanabe took Yamamoto’s case to their superior, Admiral Shigeru Fukudome. Miyo persisted in his arguments, and Watanabe went off to telephone Yamamoto. He brought back an ultimatum: it was either the Midway operation or Yamamoto’s resignation. Navy Chief of Staff Nag
ano ruled: “In that case, we might as well let him try his plan.”

  This was April 5. Eleven days later a directive was issued to invade Midway and the Aleutians. Tomioka and Miyo were “mortified,” but had no choice but to end all resistance. No specific date, however, was set by Tokyo, despite Yamamoto’s insistent requests. The Navy General Staff saw no need for haste. It took an American named Doolittle to spur them into action.

  2.

  Shortly after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had remarked that he would like to bomb the enemy mainland as soon as possible to avenge in small part the “sneak” attack. The distance involved made it seem like wishful thinking until it occurred to the operations officer on Admiral King’s staff that long-range Army bombers might be launched from a carrier’s deck. The idea intrigued King and the Army Air Corps, and by the beginning of March, twenty-four crews were at Eglin Field, Florida, learning how to lift off a modified twin-engine B-25 bomber from a 500-foot runway. Their commander was a remarkable combination—an aeronautical scientist and a daring pilot with several speed records to his credit. Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle was the first man to fly across the United States in twelve hours; the first to do the impossible, the outside loop; and the first to land a plane blind.