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

by Toland, John

  Three privates atop the bunker attached the flag to an eighty-foot pole, and as a bugler sounded Colors, raised it. There was little conversation after the ceremony. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, his eyes glistening, turned to his aide: “This was the toughest yet.” In the past twenty-four days, seven Marines had won the Medal of Honor by throwing themselves on grenades to save their comrades. “Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island,” Nimitz later wrote, “uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

  Deep underground, not far away, there was another flag ceremony. General Kuribayashi ordered the banner of the 145th Regiment burned to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. Two days later the regiment no longer existed, neither did the 2nd Mixed Brigade. At 5:35 P.M. Kuribayashi radioed Tokyo what he once more thought would be his farewell message:

  THE BATTLE IS APPROACHING ITS END.

  SINCE THE ENEMY’S LANDING, EVEN THE GODS WOULD WEEP AT THE BRAVERY OF THE OFFICERS AND MEN UNDER MY COMMAND.

  IN PARTICULAR, I AM PLEASED THAT OUR TROOPS WITH EMPTY HANDS CARRIED OUT A SERIES OF DESPERATE FIGHTS AGAINST AN ENEMY POSSESSING OVERWHELMING MATERIAL SUPERIORITY ON LAND, SEA AND AIR.

  HOWEVER, MY MEN DIED ONE BY ONE AND I REGRET VERY MUCH THAT I HAVE ALLOWED THE ENEMY TO OCCUPY A PIECE OF JAPANESE TERRITORY.

  NOW THERE IS NO MORE AMMUNITION, NO MORE WATER. ALL THE SURVIVORS WILL ENGAGE IN A GENERAL ATTACK.

  AS I THINK OF MY DEBT OF GRATITUDE TO MY COUNTRY, I HAVE NO REGRETS.

  UNLESS THIS ISLAND IS RETAKEN, I BELIEVE JAPAN CAN NEVER BE SAFE. I SINCERELY HOPE MY SOUL WILL SPEARHEAD A FUTURE ATTACK.

  PRAYING TO GOD FOR THE FINAL VICTORY AND SAFETY OF OUR MOTHERLAND, LET ME SAY “SAYONARA” EVERLASTINGLY.…

  He ended with three of his poems:

  WITHOUT AMMUNITION

  IT IS SAD FOR ME TO LEAVE THIS WORLD,

  HAVING FAILED TO ACHIEVE MY IMPORTANT MISSION

  FOR THE MOTHERLAND.

  I COULD NEVER ROT IN THE FIELDS

  UNLESS MY SOUL TOOK VENGEANCE

  MAY I TAKE UP ARMS, EVFN UNTO THE SEVENTH LIFE.

  I WORRY OVER WHAT JAPAN’S FUTURE WILL BE WHEN WEEDS COVER THIS ISLAND.

  It seemed that Kuribayashi was ready, at last, for the general attack. His final order was simple:

  1. The battle is approaching its ultimate phase.

  2. Our garrison will make a general attack against the enemy tonight. Starting time will be 0001 hours, 18 March, 1945.

  3. … Everyone will fight to the death. No man will be concerned about his life.

  4. I will always be at the head of our troops.

  During the day code books and other secret documents were burned in the Navy headquarters cave. Just before dusk Admiral Ichimaru summoned his able-bodied men, about sixty at the most, to a large chamber sixty-five yards beneath the surface. “To date,” he said, “you have overcome any and all difficulties, obeyed my orders and fought gallantly against an enemy with overwhelming supplies. The loss of this island means that Yankee military boots will soon tread on our motherland. However, you are warriors of Japan. Don’t be too anxious to die. Live in high spirits, kill as many enemies as possible and fight for your seventh life. Thank you.”

  His senior staff officer, Commander Takeji Mase, stepped forward and in a loud voice read a letter from the admiral to President Roosevelt. It charged Roosevelt with vilifying Japan by calling her “a yellow peril, a bloodthirsty nation, and a protoplasm of the military clique.” America was responsible for starting the war, not Japan. “Judging from your actions, the white races—especially you Anglo-Saxons—are monopolizing the fruits of the world at the expense of the colored races.… Why is it that you, an already flourishing nation, nip in the bud the movement for freedom of the suppressed nations of the East? All we want is for you to return to the East that which belongs to the East.” Nor could the admiral comprehend how Roosevelt dared criticize Hitler’s program while co-operating with the Soviet Union, whose principal aim was the socialization of the world. “If only brute force decides who rules the world, war will go on endlessly and there will never be universal peace or happiness. When you achieve your barbaric world monopoly, remember the failure of your predecessor, President Wilson, at the height of his power.”

  The letter was placed in the stomach band of the communications officer, and an English version§ was entrusted to Lieutenant Commander Kunio Akada.

  Half an hour before midnight Admiral Ichimaru, leaving almost a hundred wounded behind, went out of the cave with his sixty men. They were immediately overwhelmed by a maelstrom of American artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire.

  Kuribayashi left his cave about the same time with almost five hundred troops. But most of them had no weapons and he had no intention of leading a final charge. He merely moved a short distance to the north to a safer cave. They were joined just before dawn by a dozen survivors of the futile Navy assault. Among them was Admiral Ichimaru.

  Colonel Nishi had never received the general-attack order, nor did he know the assault had never amounted to anything. As far as he was concerned the battle was not over, and the following night he started north to attack Marines positioned near a large rock overlooking the beach. He carried a whip, the one he had used in the Olympics, and in his breast pocket was a lock of Uranus’ mane. At the foot of the rock Nishi and two hundred men, including Omagari, were pinned down by heavy fire. Dawn exposed them to a devastating rain of grenades. In the uproar Omagari heard Nishi call “Assemble!” and crept toward his position with forty others. Nishi said they were in a “hornet’s nest,” and they would have to find refuge in the caves along the beach.

  On Chichi Jima, Major Horie had been unable to make radio contact with Iwo since the night of Kuribayashi’s transfer to the new cave. On the morning of March 23, after five days, the silence was broken by a flood of messages. The operator on Iwo Jima was inexplicably on the air again with a backlog of terminal reports which came through without pause. Horie read them choked with emotion. Kuribayashi described the fighting; enemy invitations to surrender (by loudspeaker) were greated with derision; they continued the assault despite the fact that they had been out of food and water for five days.

  … BUT OUR FIGHTING SPIRIT STILL RUNS HIGH.

  WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT RESOLUTELY TO THE END.

  There was silence. It was Kuribayashi’s last dispatch, but just before dusk, after almost twenty minutes’ silence, the radio crackled again with the operator’s final message. This time it was in the clear.

  ALL OFFICERS AND MEN OF CHICHI JIMA, FAREWELL.

  It was all over except for a final banzai charge three days later by a group of approximately 350 Army and Navy men, including 40 battotai (a group carrying swords). Out of the rocky gorges on the northwestern tip of the island they crawled half naked, like cavemen, to sweep down in a frenzy over anything in their path. Their wild assault surprised an Air Force and Seabee encampment. A Marine pioneer battalion, hastily summoned, drove into the melee, but it took an entire day of fierce hand-to-hand fighting before two-thirds were slaughtered and the rest dispersed.

  Early the next morning, March 27, General Kuribayashi, who had been wounded while moving to another refuge, came to the mouth of his cave with a staff officer, Colonel Kaneji Nakane. Kuribayashi faced north toward the Imperial Palace, knelt and solemnly bowed three times. He stabbed himself in the abdomen and bowed his head. Nakane raised his sword and brought it down on the general’s neck. He buried the body with the help of a sergeant and crawled back into the cave to inform Colonel Tadashi Takaishi, Kuribayashi’s chief of staff, and Admiral Ichimaru what had happened; then he returned with Takaishi to the scene of Kuribayashi’s death. The two men shot themselves.

  That evening just before eleven o’clock Ichimaru, followed by ten men, also emerged into the open. A volley of machine-gun fire cut down the admiral and two officers behind him.

  The Battle of Iwo Jima had cost the lives of 4,554 Marines and 363 Navy men, the greatest American toll in
World War II, considering the length of the battle and the number of men involved. Of the 21,000 defenders, little more than 3,000 were alive. Of these, 216 had become prisoners of war. The others remained huddled in their sweltering, sulphuric caves like hunted animals—hungry, thirsty, desperate and bewildered. For all but a few, the only prospect ahead was death.

  * Admiral Turner was never nicknamed “Alligator.” The Japanese apparently got the name from the V Amphibious Corps shoulder patch.

  † Three of the six Marines in the picture were to die on Iwo Jima. The others were brought back to America to help spur the Seventh War Loan Drive. One, an Indian named Ira Hayes, could not cope with the publicity. “He was a helluva good fighting man, but he wasn’t the kind of guy you send on a bond tour,” wrote Technical Sergeant Keyes Beech, who accompanied the three men on the tour. “He was terribly, terribly shy and ill at ease. As a defense against his own insecurity, he drank like a fish whenever he could sneak away. Maybe Hayes would have been a lush without the bond tour—but the bond tour helped. If we ever get into another war I’m going to campaign against bond tours.… What we used to ask ourselves, in the few minutes of privacy we had on tour, was why the hell it was necessary for us to go around on a vaudeville act to persuade a bunch of fat cats who had grown rich in the war to invest in a sure thing.…” During the tour Hayes made one speech from the heart. This was to the National Congress of American Indians. With tears in his eyes he told them that good things were coming out of the war and that “white men are gonna understand Indians better, and it’s gonna be a better world.” He died an alcoholic in 1955.

  ‡ Stanley P. Lovell of the Office of Strategic Services was sent to Pearl Harbor in late June 1944 to discuss the matter with Admiral Nimitz. When Lovell returned to Washington he learned that the proposal had been disapproved by the White House: “All prior endorsements denied—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Commander-in-Chief.” Unexpected opposition had also come from London. The British, who had at first recommended the utilization of gas against certain objectives, now resolutely disfavored its use against Germany; they feared Hitler would retaliate against England. The quote from Admiral Nimitz came in an interview shortly before his death. It concluded with a rueful, “It lost many fine Marines.”

  § It was found by the Americans and is now in the museum of the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. The complete text is reproduced in the Notes.

  27

  The Flowers of Edo

  1.

  About a year before Pearl Harbor the Japanese government had ordered the civilian population to form groups of “neighborhood societies” for the purpose of controlling the rationing and air-defense programs. Each unit comprised about a dozen families, and by now the system had wrought a drastic change in the traditional Japanese family structure. Hardship had forced families to depend more on neighbors than on close relatives, who might live miles away. Everyone, whether high born or low, took part in community air-raid drills, relaying water pails and carrying stretchers, lumber and sand. Democracy extended to food and other rationed necessities, such as clothing: women wore mompei (loose baggy slacks), and all men the drab khaki “national uniform.” Children had taken naturally to the idea of sharing everything alike, and grownups were learning that only through co-operation could they survive.

  There was a slogan, “We are all equals,” which took on a new significance late in 1944 when the bombing intensified. Night raids, usually aimed at residential sections, invoked more fear than the daytime attacks. On a food-buying trip in the country, Mrs. Sumie Seo Mishima could even stop and admire the spectacle of the approaching Bees—the popular name for Superfortresses: “In the eastern sky loomed a flight, another flight and yet another of B-29’s … Trailing white streamers of exhaust gas, they sailed in perfect formation through the blue-gold sky … like shawls of pearly fish riding through the seas of the universe.” This esthetic meditation was quickly shattered when the graceful-looking fish dropped their eggs. “The process of splashing the earth with showers of incendiary bullets in rhythmic rumbles of ocean breakers, and hurling heavy bombs, each pounding with a fatal thud into the depths of the globe, was repeated by each flight of planes. On almost every raid, it seemed to us, the American planes brought over new kinds of bombs and shells, which behaved differently in sound effects from those used the last time. The unaccustomed noises intensified the terrors and thrills of each new invasion.”

  It was an unusually cold winter and some homes had to suffer broken water pipes for months before they were repaired. The novelist Jun Takami noted in his diary that in some homes “where the upstairs toilet pipes had burst and the water poured downstairs, the people had to use umbrellas in the house, and when the water froze on the floor they were able to ice-skate on it.”

  Fear gave birth to new superstitions: if you ate rice balls with scallions inside, and cooked with red beans, you would never be hit by a bomb. Better yet, if you ate only scallions for breakfast you were sure not to be hit, but after a while there was an added fillip: you had to let someone else know about this trick—along the lines of the chain-letter principle—otherwise it wouldn’t work. Another superstition originated when a couple who miraculously survived a close bomb hit found two dead goldfish nearby. They thought the goldfish had died for them, so they put the fish in their family Buddhist shrine and worshiped them. When word of what had happened spread and people found it difficult to obtain live goldfish, porcelain goldfish were manufactured in quantity and sold at exorbitant prices.

  Although the bombing raids had wrought drastic changes in the lives of the people in the Japanese homeland, their primary purpose—to obliterate all production facilities—had not been achieved. “This outfit has been getting a lot of publicity without having really accomplished a hell of a lot in bombing results,” Curtis LeMay complained to Lieutenant Colonel St. Clair McKelway, his public relations officer, on March 6. LeMay had taken over B-29 operations in the Marianas six weeks earlier. He was glad to be out of China, with its insuperable problem of supply, but continued to be plagued by operational failures and mediocre results. The strategic bombing program, principally utilizing high explosives, which had devastated Germany with its concentrated industrial complexes, had done little to slow production in Japan, where two thirds of the industry was dispersed in homes and small factories manned by thirty workers or less.

  LeMay hit upon a radical scheme for his planes: to go in low at night, stripped of most armament to increase the payload, and scatter incendiary bombs onto the tinderbox targets over a wide area. Two days later, without consulting Washington, he had field orders cut for a strike of B-29’s. At briefing the following morning, March 9, the crews were informed they would attack Tokyo that night at low altitudes—from 5,000 to 8,000 feet. Their reaction of protest was audible. All guns except tail cannons would be removed; the announcement shocked the men to silence. It was suicide.

  At 5:36 P.M. the first B-29 rolled down the runway of North Field on Guam and thundered into the sultry air. Fifty seconds later another was airborne, and another and another. One plane couldn’t get up enough speed; its brakes were frozen and couldn’t be released. Friction turned the landing gear white-hot and the brake fluid burst into flame. When the wheels melted, the gear collapsed. In a shower of sparks the huge craft slithered on its belly, careened off the runway and smashed into the coral beyond with a fearsome explosion.

  At 6:15 P.M., B-29’s from Tinian and Saipan began joining the elephantine procession in the air. The 333 bombers droned northward. Up ahead against the dark horizon an eruption of explosions appeared—Iwo Jima, where General Senda was about to lead the remnants of the 2nd Mixed Brigade and assorted naval units in his futile general attack. The big planes bounced in the low-level turbulence, but as they neared Tokyo the weather improved. The men, like knights getting into armor, pulled on bulky flak suits and heavy steel helmets, then peered ahead for the glow of fires to be set momentarily by the pathfinders.

&nbs
p; Back on Guam, General LeMay paced the floor. If the raid worked the way he hoped, the war could be shortened. He would immediately inaugurate a series of similar raids all over Japan. The slaughter of civilians would be unprecedented, but Japan’s industry had to be destroyed. If not, it would take an invasion to end the conflict and that might cost the lives of half a million Americans, perhaps a million.

  A new moon cast a dim light but stars shone brightly over Tokyo. At midnight the pathfinders located their aiming points and prepared to mark out the heart of Tokyo with napalm-filled M47 bombs. This three-by-four-mile downtown section was once the gayest, liveliest area in the Orient, but now there was little traffic and most of the shops and theaters were boarded up. Nevertheless, 750,000 low-income workers existed in this congested city-within-a-city that was never asleep. Thousands of home factories were in constant operation.

  With its profusion of wooden buildings Tokyo had continually been victim of massive fires from the time it was called Edo. These conflagrations became such an integral part of city life that they were given the poetic name “Flowers of Edo.” Despite eventual modernization of the fire-fighting system, there was no guard against disaster by fire. In 1923, following the great earthquake, fire razed most of the city. Two years later Tokyo was devastated again, as it was a third time in 1932.

  There were now 8,100 trained firemen and 1,117 pieces of equipment scattered throughout the city, with static water tanks for emergency use. Still, this army of firefighters was not adequate to cover the 213 square miles of the metropolitan area, particularly in time of war. The downtown section remained the most vulnerable. Few fire lanes had been cut through its crowded buildings; they would be ready in a year or two, city officials had promised.