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

by Toland, John

  That night Yamashita finally launched a counterattack, a one-division operation designed to give him time to withdraw supplies and men to the north. He would give up the entire Central Plains–Manila Bay area and make his stand in the rugged mountains of North Luzon, where the terrain would give the defenders the advantage. It would be a battle of attrition, far from the Decisive Battle proclaimed so often.

  The Japanese people, however, were told that the enemy had been lured into just such a battle on Luzon. But the reality of the situation was impossible to ignore completely, and on January 21 Prime Minister Koiso was obliged to make a rare admission to the Diet. He acknowledged that “the military developments in the Pacific theater are in a state which does not necessarily admit of optimism. However, the greatly extended supply lines of the enemy on all fronts are exposed to our attacks and in this fact, I believe, is to be found our golden opportunity to grasp victory.

  “Now indeed is the time for us, the one hundred million, to give vent to our flaming ardor, and following in the footsteps of the valiant men of the Special Attack Corps, demonstrate even more spirit of sure victory in the field of production.”

  Imperial Headquarters was still intent on transporting prisoners of war from the Philippines to the homeland despite the sinking of two prison ships. Dr. Bodine, Major Virgil McCollum and the other survivors of Oryoku-maru were at sea again en route to Japan. They had left Lingayen Gulf just after Christmas in two groups—a thousand on a large freighter, Enoura-maru, and 236, including Bodine, on a smaller ship, Brazil-maru.

  Major McCollum was aboard the bigger ship; sixteen prisoners died in the crowded holds on the way to Takao, Formosa—the first leg of the trip to Japan. For days the two ships remained in the harbor. It was getting cold. The threadbare parts of summer uniforms worn during the swim from the sinking Oryoku-maru, or thin cotton shirts and trousers issued to many who had reached shore naked, gave little protection. After a week of seemingly endless misery the men from the smaller ship were loaded onto Enoura-maru.

  McCollum and Bodine were in the afthold with more than seven hundred others. It was seventy feet wide, ninety feet long. Halfway up one side of the vast chamber stretched a balcony. Here the Americans segregated their sick. Urine and feces dripped down from the balcony onto those below. There was little food and almost no water. The death rate rose to over ten a day.

  On January 9—as General Krueger’s troops came ashore at Lingayen Gulf—the prisoners heard the roar of American bombers sweeping in low. A deafening explosion rocked the ship. Bodine saw sparks fly as fragments burst through the hold. His left arm burned and he knew he was hit. He hunkered down as low as he could. At least fifteen were killed by the blast, and scores wounded.

  In the forward hold, Marine Colonel Beecher was putting a spoon of rice to his mouth when slugs of metal whistled past him, burying themselves into a nearby stanchion. Heavy wooden hatch covers and steel beams cascaded onto the prisoners. Holes miraculously appeared in the side of the ship—“it was like a sieve.” Dazed, Beecher shook himself. He felt nothing, then remembered from World War I that one felt no pain at the moment of being wounded. But how could he not be hit? The dead were everywhere. One corner was piled with bodies, mangled and bloody.

  The carnage was indescribable. More than half of the five hundred men in the hold were killed outright. For the wounded, shrieking in pain, there was no medicine, no dressings. Nor was there any answer from topside to pleas for help. In the darkness, panic and hysteria gripped the survivors. Three of the eight field officers were dead, crushed by a single beam. “Van, you and me were not worth living,” one officer remarked to Major van Oosten, “but Bob Roberts got killed. He had so much to live for and so much to do.”

  For two days, with little water or food, and no medical assistance, the survivors existed in a hell none would ever forget. It was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno as wraithlike figures wandered dazed in the dark, stinking hull among the piles of corpses. It was not uncommon to find a man sitting on a body as he ate his pitiful meal. Finally a small Japanese medical party descended into the holds. They treated the minor cases but ignored the seriously wounded, who were “dying like flies.” The dead were removed—some five hundred of them—and barged ashore for cremation.

  On the afternoon of January 13 the prisoners were transferred to Brazil-maru. It sailed at dawn, and the next two weeks seemed to McCollum “an eternity of horror.” The once-a-day ration barely kept the prisoners alive; if they were lucky, four men got a level mess kit of rice, and six men shared a canteen cup of water. The winter cold, as they proceeded north, added to their misery. They tried to keep warm by lying down spoon fashion under straw mats, “hugging each other for BTUs to keep alive.” When the position became too painful a man would yell “Shift!” and the group rolled simultaneously to the other hip. Sometimes a neighbor would not turn—he was dead.

  Snow fell through the open hatches, and scores of men who had survived wounds, dysentery and starvation froze to death. Sometimes life could be bought from the guards—a West Point class ring would bring an empty rice sack as a blanket—but death was becoming commonplace. When the shout “Roll out your dead!” went up in the morning, often thirty or more bodies were collected. The victims all looked alike: macabre mannikins with teeth exposed in a snarl between drawn lips, ribs almost bursting, sunken eyes, pipestem legs and arms.

  In a primal urge to survive, men would jerk mats off those too weak or sick to cling to them; they fought one another like dogs over scraps of food. The prisoners were saved from chaos by the example set by a handful of officers and the three chaplains—a Lutheran, another Protestant named Nagle, and a Catholic, Father Cummings. In the end these three, worn by their exhaustive efforts, sacrificed their lives for the others.

  Hardest to endure was the increasing scarcity of water, sometimes a spoonful or so a day, sometimes none. On January 24 Bodine described in his diary how he and several others stole out of the hold at night to get water condensed in the cylinders of the ship’s deck engines.

  … Finally got a half canteen and drank a cupful but got beaten with gun butt three times. Black as spades and little can be seen. Guard huddles in a little shack. If I’d been alone I’d been OK but others kept drawing his attention to me. It’s a good way to get shot but worth it. Later in AM got kicked around trying to get Irons some snow from dirty deck … Not so many deaths last night. My bowels loosened up and had first movement since Friday. We have lost so much fat that sphincter has nothing to work on and even with formed stools can’t control movements. Amount of filth in and out of clothes indescribable. Snowing rather hard this AM and temperature close to freezing. Keep praying it’s our last day. We do need warmth, water, food and cleanliness.…

  Three days later he wrote:

  … Coldest night we’ve had. No chow now or no water in AM but chow small amount in PM. Suffered agony all night. Soiled pants moderately 2 times. No control due to lost fat. Father Cummings died. Kowalski gone; I am the only one left from my foot locker group. About 40 men died last night not buried. Hope ends soon.…

  Bodine kept dreaming of waterfalls, springs and lemonade, and wakened by the bitter cold, made plans to live on a houseboat or in a house trailer or bungalow and keep a few turkeys and ducks.

  On the night of January 29 the ship docked at Moji, on Kyushu Island in Japan, and the prisoners were given a physical test—the insertion of a rectal thermometer in the anus. At dawn they were lined up topside in the freezing wind and sleet to receive new clothing—shoes, wool trousers, padded jackets, socks and long cotton underwear. Those near the head of the line got the complete issue, but they had to pay a price. They were compelled to strip in the numbing cold, and with icy water from the decks running over their bare feet, they clumsily tried to dress. Guards beat them with sticks to hurry them up.

  Bodine, near the end of the line, got nothing—and his shoes had just been confiscated. As he started off the ship supporting a weak
comrade, both were sprayed with Lysol. They were marched through driving wet snow to an empty, unheated warehouse near the pier, where Bodine traded his broken mess-kit knife for an old pair of shoes, and was able to fill his canteen with ice-cold water from a barrel outside a window. He was issued his first square meal in more than two and a half years: a cup of steamed rice, several spoonfuls of salted fish, a large crawfish, a few slices of salted radishes, a piece of something that was peppery, and fruit that tasted like pineapple.

  Six more prisoners died in the cold warehouse. Of the 1,619 who had left Manila on Oryoku-maru, 450 were left, and at least a hundred of these would soon die. The survivors had got water and one good meal but there was still an overriding question: What next?

  5.

  The same question, but in a larger sense, was about to be asked at Yalta, a seaside resort in the Crimea, where the Big Three would determine the future face not only of Europe but of the Far East as well. On January 23, just before Roosevelt left Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff formally advised him that Russia’s entry into the war against Japan was vital to the interests of the United States. It was Marshall’s opinion, as well as MacArthur’s, that conquest of the 700,000-man elite Kwantung Army in Manchuria without Soviet help would cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.§ A few U. S. naval intelligence experts—Captain Ellis Zacharias and his staff—shrewdly guessed that this Kwantung Army existed primarily on paper, since the cream of the troops had already been transferred to Leyte and other threatened sectors. But they were not heeded.

  Three days later Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden sent Churchill a note from Moscow warning him to beware of the political demands which the Russians would probably make as their price for attacking Manchuria.

  … There may perhaps be little argument about a Russian claim to recover possession of South Sakhalin which was ceded to Japan by the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905. The Americans may look more closely at any claim to take the Kuriles. But a most difficult issue is likely to arise over Manchuria and Korea. We do not yet know what Russia’s requirements are likely to be, but their conformity with the Cairo Declaration, for which we ourselves share responsibility, will be closely scrutinized by the Chinese, the Americans and others; and it is possible that these requirements can only be satisfied at the expense of incessant friction with the Chinese who may receive American support and expect ours also.

  At all events there is here a potential cauldron of international dispute. It seems advisable therefore, at this stage, to go warily and to avoid anything like commitments or encouragement to Russia.

  The conference opened on February 4, and its first concern was postwar Europe. The plenary meetings were lively, often heated, with Roosevelt again playing the mediator between Churchill and Stalin. The British somewhat resented Roosevelt’s self-appointed role as umpire, and a few were outspoken about what they considered his appalling ignorance of the history of eastern Europe. Eden felt that Roosevelt’s wish “to make it plain to Stalin that the United States was not ‘ganging up’ with Britain against Russia” was leading to “some confusion in Anglo-American relations which profited the Russians.” Roosevelt admittedly was a consummate politician who could clearly see an immediate objective, but “his long-range vision was not quite sure.” A. H. Birse, Churchill’s interpreter, thought Roosevelt looked worn out. “The former self-confidence and firmness of tone, so evident at Teheran, seemed to have gone. His voice was that of a man weary in spirit … The good-humoured, benevolent uncle had become a shadow of his former self.”

  The relationship between the President and Churchill remained close, intimate as between two brothers and with the mixed feelings of brothers. Roosevelt had risked his political future to send Lend-Lease aid to Churchill in 1940 when Britain was in mortal peril—but continued to lecture his senior on the immorality of colonialism. “I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire,” Churchill once told him in private. Of this there was no doubt. “The colonial system means war,” Roosevelt had confided to his son Elliott. “Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standard of living, minimum health requirements—all you’re doing is negating the value of a kind of organizational structure for peace before it begins.”

  On February 8 the American Chiefs of Staff were at last to take up their main concern—the war in the Pacific. They met with the Soviet Chiefs of Staff at Prince Yusupov’s palace, where Rasputin was assassinated, to settle military problems in the Far East and in particular to determine what steps Russia should take once war with Japan was declared.

  Six miles away at Livadia Palace, Roosevelt’s headquarters, the President was cautiously approaching the same question with Stalin in the presence of Foreign Commissar Molotov, Averell Harriman and two interpreters. Livadia, built in Italian Renaissance style during Czar Nicholas’ reign, was an imposing structure of honey-colored plaster trimmed with white marble. It stood more than 150 feet above the Black Sea, looking out on both water and precipitous mountains.

  Roosevelt remarked that he favored intensive bombing of Japan by B-29’s, thus obviating actual invasion of the homeland. Stalin interrupted him. “I’d like to discuss,” he said without preamble, “the political conditions under which the U.S.S.R. would enter the war against Japan.”

  Roosevelt had a ready answer. There would be no difficulty, he said, regarding Russia’s getting the southern half of Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands as a quid pro quo. As for giving the Soviets a warm-water port in the Far East, what about leasing Dairen from the Chinese or making it a free port? Stalin was noncommittal. Instead he asked for something more—use of the Manchurian railways. Roosevelt could see no harm in that, and suggested that they be leased under Russian operation or under a joint Russian-Chinese commission.

  This satisfied Stalin but he said a bit threateningly, “If these conditions are not met, it would be difficult for me and Molotov to explain to the Soviet people why Russia was entering a war against Japan, a country with which they had no great trouble.”

  “I haven’t had an opportunity to talk to Marshal Chiang Kai-shek,” said Roosevelt. “One of the difficulties in speaking with the Chinese is that anything said to them is broadcast to the world in twenty-four hours.”

  Stalin agreed that it wasn’t yet necessary to speak to the Chinese. “Regarding the question of a warm-water port, we won’t be difficult; I won’t object to an internationalized free port.”

  They began a candid discussion of China’s internal problems. America, said Roosevelt, had been attempting to keep China alive. “China will remain alive,” Stalin remarked with a little smile, but he thought it strange that the Kuomintang and Communists could not maintain a united front against the Japanese.

  Roosevelt replied that Wedemeyer and Hurley were making better progress than their predecessors in uniting Chungking and Yenan. The blame for the breach lay more with the Kuomintang and Chungking than with the so-called Communists.

  The talk switched to Korea, and Roosevelt confidentially remarked that although he personally felt it wasn’t necessary to invite the British to take part in the trusteeship of that country, they might resent not being asked.

  “They most certainly would be offended,” said Stalin with his feral grin. “In fact, the Prime Minister might kill us.” Then to everyone’s surprise he said agreeably, “I think the British should be invited.”

  The next morning at eleven o’clock the Combined Chiefs discussed their final military report, agreeing that for planning purposes the earliest date to expect the defeat of Germany was July 1, 1945, and the latest, December 31, 1945. The fall of Japan was set at eighteen months after the collapse of Germany.

  That afternoon Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and their principal advisers assembled in the courtyard of Livadia Palace to be photographed. As soon as they returned to the ballroom—the site of all the plen
ary meetings—the new Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, Jr., began reading the plan the three foreign ministers had drawn up that morning for dealing with territorial trusteeships in the United Nations. Before he could finish, Churchill testily cried out that he hadn’t agreed to a single word of the report. “I have not been consulted nor heard the subject until now!” He was so agitated that his horn-rimmed glasses slipped to the end of his nose. “Under no circumstances will I ever consent to the fumbling fingers of forty or fifty nations prying into the life’s existence of the British Empire! As long as I am Prime Minister I shall never yield a scrap of Britain’s heritage!”

  The following afternoon, February 10, Ambassador Harriman met Molotov at Yusupov Palace. The American ambassador was handed an English translation of the U.S.S.R.’s political conditions for going to war with Japan: the status quo was to be preserved in Outer Mongolia, and territory seized by Japan after the war in 1904–5—principally the southern part of Sakhalin Island, Port Arthur and Dairen—must be returned. Stalin also demanded control of the Manchurian railways and the Kurile Islands. In return Russia, besides declaring war on Japan, would conclude a pact of friendship and alliance with Chiang.

  Harriman thought there were three amendments the President “would wish to make before accepting.” Dairen and Port Arthur would have to be free ports, and the Manchurian railways operated by a joint Sino-Soviet commission. “In addition, I feel sure that the President wouldn’t wish to dispose of these two matters in which China is interested, without concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.”