by Toland, John
Civilians and soldiers alike faced extermination in the hundreds of caves that honeycombed the southern tip of the island. Two miles west of Ushijima’s headquarters a group of Okinawan student nurses—turned out of their hospital when it was disbanded—had found refuge with scores of civilians in an underground cave. Nobuko Yamashiro was only seventeen. She was trying desperately to save her dying sister, Yoshiko, also a nurse. But there was no food or water in the cave and she was afraid to venture outside. The nurses had been driven from cave to cave, and on the evening of the eighteenth were ordered by soldiers to move once again—to find “a safer refuge” farther south.
Resentful and weary, the nurses started up the ladder leading to the cave opening. A shout of “Enemy attack!” was cut off by the rattle of firing. Blue sparks showered those on the ladder. Gas! Acrid smoke billowed into the cave. Choking and blinded, the occupants groped toward the ladder. Nobuko gagged as if something clutched her throat. She cried out painfully for her sister. Hell must be like this, she thought. Grenades exploded thunderously. Then there was silence.
“Now we are all going to die,” said a calm masculine voice. “Let us sing ‘Umi Yukaba.” ’ As they tried to sing their favorite patriotic song Nobuko fainted. She came to with a strange sense of euphoria; never before had she wakened with such a wonderful feeling of well-being. She struggled to get up from the floor, but her body weighed too much. Why? People were moaning all around her; she must be wounded too. Her left thigh and neck began to throb, and she discovered that she had been hit by shrapnel.
She tried again and again to rise. Where was her sister? Fighting an overpowering desire to sleep, she commanded herself to stay awake; she knew she would die if she succumbed. She pulled up her legs, and in a fetal position rolled over on her knees. Crawling among the bodies sprawled on the cave floor, she began examining them carefully one by one. At the foot of the ladder she looked up. An American soldier stood silhouetted against a startlingly blue sky. She stifled a cough and crept back into the blackness to continue the agonizing search. When she found her sister at the rear of the cave she was dead.
Amplified pleas to surrender from tanks and from boats cruising offshore were far more effective than they had been at Saipan and Iwo Jima. Masses of civilians and a substantial number of soldiers abandoned their subterranean hiding places. Before nightfall more than four thousand Okinawans and eight hundred military had surrendered. The soldiers came out, as they had been instructed, stripped to their loincloths. One marched up to the lines of the 7th Infantry Division, saber in hand. He stood stiffly at attention, saluted and handed over his weapon to Sergeant Alvin Hannah. Another carried two small dictionaries—one English–Japanese, the other Japanese–English. After a bit of sampling he exclaimed cheerfully, “Me vanquished, miserable, dishonorable, depraved.”
As Ushijima radioed his farewell message to Imperial Headquarters on the evening of June 21, Cho was composing one of his own which he hoped could be delivered by hand. “Our strategy, tactics and methods were all utilized to the utmost and we fought valiantly, but they had little effect against the superior material strength of the enemy,” he wrote, adding that he was departing this life “without regret, fear, shame or obligations.”
Their last duties completed, the two generals now readied themselves for death. A grim-faced Colonel Yahara asked Ushijima for permission to commit suicide. The general gently but firmly refused the request. “If you die there will be no one left who knows the truth about the battle of Okinawa. Bear the temporary shame but endure it. This is an order of your Army commander.”
Soon after sunrise on June 22 Ushijima asked Higa to give him the final ritual haircut. His sense of humor had not deserted him. As the barber revolved him from side to side, Ushijima joked, “I’m a human rotary machine.” By noon the Americans had occupied the upper part of the cave. After a few hours the general opened a can of pineapple—the last food in the cave—and shared it with anyone, soldier or civilian, who happened to pass by.
Late in the afternoon Ushijima and Cho kneeled ceremoniously side by side. Cho deliberately lowered his head so as to expose his neck. Captain Sakaguchi, a fifth-grade kendo expert, brought down his sword, but his injured right hand wavered and the blade did not go deeply enough. Sergeant Kyushu Fujita seized the sword and severed the spinal column.
“The Okinawans must resent me,” Ushijima said regretfully as he bared his abdomen and stoically cut himself. His spinal cord was severed and seven of his staff, using pistols, committed mass suicide.
The same day at Tenth Army headquarters near the Kadena airfield, representatives of Tenth Army, the two corps and the divisions stood at attention as the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The color guard raised the Stars and Stripes, denoting that the island of Okinawa was secure.
But for thousands of Japanese soldiers and civilians, still hiding from the Americans, the ordeal was far from over. Thirteen-year-old Shigeru Kinjo crept out of the cave where his family had found shelter and got his first close glimpse of the enemy. They were naked from the waist up, hairy like animals. It is the end, thought Shigeru. He discredited the enemy leaflets claiming that no prisoners would be killed; they would have their noses and ears cut off. Back in the cave he rejoined the family, which sat huddled in a close circle. Someone activated a grenade against a rock and threw it in their midst. Shigeru thought the world had exploded. He heard his sister mutter something, then her death rattle.
“I’m not dead,” said a voice and then, pleadingly, “Explode another!”
A second detonation rocked the little cave. Pieces of flesh struck Shigeru. Still a few survived but no one suggested a third grenade. Someone did propose that they cut their arteries and bleed to death, but no one acted. They remained apathetically in the cave all night. In the morning a voice shouted in English, “Come out!” Almost immediately a can tumbled into the cave spewing white smoke. Two more tear gas canisters exploded. Suffocating, Shigeru crawled out into the open, both legs bleeding profusely. He felt himself being lifted onto a soldier’s back. At the village of Makabe the enemy soldier (a Marine) lowered Shigeru and opened a can of clams. It had a Japanese label but the boy was certain the clams were poisoned and refused to eat them. The soldier said something, then cut Shigeru two bamboo canes, and as the youngster hobbled toward a collecting station he wondered, When will the murdering begin?
A mile to the northwest the Americans had been trying to clear a multilevel labyrinthian cave with smoke bombs for more than a week. At least three hundred soldiers and eight hundred civilians were bottled inside. Petty Officer Shikichi Miyagi had escaped from Oroku Peninsula after Admiral Ota’s death to find his wife Betty, a Hawaiian, and had succeeded. Now the smoke became so suffocating that Miyagi—one of the most celebrated karate experts in Okinawa, the home of karate—toted his unconscious wife piggyback deep into the cave through hip-high mud.
The mud became a stream and soon water was up to Miyagi’s shoulders. The water revived Betty, and when Miyagi could no longer touch bottom he gave her the glowing candle that was guiding them and swam through the water with the collar of her dress in his teeth. Every few yards he lowered his feet to rest but they sank into gummy mud and he flailed frantically to keep head above water. The nightmare seemed endless—he had no idea how long—until his feet touched solid ground and he could relieve his tortured muscles. Together the Miyagis pulled themselves onto a bank. Then they noticed a cold breeze—there had to be an entrance nearby—and saw a light ahead. It was a candle in the center of half a dozen civilians.
The ordeal left them with one conviction: they would rather die on the surface in the sunlight than smother in the dark. At the entrance they heard American voices. Betty shouted “Hello!” and said that she was from Hawaii and that her older brother was with her.
“We’ve come to save you,” someone shouted back. “Come out!”
They emerged from the cave and found themselves in a cul-de-sac, twenty fee
t deep. Above them a circle of rifles rimmed its lips. Ropes tumbled down, followed by a dozen Marines hand over hand. Instead of being killed the Miyagis were hauled swiftly to the top. They could scarcely believe what was happening. Americans, smiling broadly, pressed K rations, water and cigarettes on them. A lieutenant pumped Miyagi’s hand. Marines embraced them, rubbed cheeks with them, and then began bringing cans of gasoline to the cave mouth. Miyagi tried to stop them. Gesturing excitedly, he explained that the burning gasoline would kill not only the Japanese soldiers in the higher lateral but the civilians in the lower level as well. He volunteered to go back into the cave and bring out the civilians. Clad in brand-new Marine fatigues, he fought his way into the cave past armed Japanese guards, and persuaded all eight hundred civilians to surrender.
Farther south, at the very end of the island in thorny brush near the shoreline, thirteen Okinawan student nurses led by Seizen Nakasone, an instructor at the Normal School, were preparing for suicide that night—thousands of civilians had already killed themselves with grenades, motivated in equal proportion by a desire to die as true Japanese and by fear of the enemy. The girls sat in a circle singing “Sayonara,” a haunting song composed by their young music teacher. In a turmoil Nakasone went off by himself to sort out his thoughts. How futile to die with nobody knowing anything about it! The dew on the trees shone in the moonlight, beautiful and mysterious.
At dawn he noticed Americans in green fatigues stealthily approaching. These were the Anglo-Saxon devils, yet he no longer feared them. Why should he and the girls kill themselves? He hastened to his students and found them huddling in a tight circle.
“Nakasone-sensei, is it all right to die now?” asked one who held a grenade. From the first she had urged suicide.
Nakasone asked them to wait—he was hoping to stall them until the Americans arrived. Two of the youngest girls whimpered for their mothers and were allowed to leave the circle. Again the girl with the grenade asked if the time had come. Again Nakasone said to wait. He started toward the beach to intercept the enemy. One GI wrote “Food—Water” on a piece of paper. Nakasone, followed by the GI’s, returned to the girls arid tried to convince them that the Americans, who began to close in, wouldn’t harm them in any way. But they remained terrified of the “foreign devils” until they noticed one soldier cradling a rifle in one arm and a baby in the other and crooning repeatedly, “Don’t cry, baby.” One by one the girls left the circle—all except the resolute girl with the grenade. Nakasone wrenched it from her hand. She raced to the beach and flung herself into the water. Soldiers dragged her out, bleeding from coral cuts and still struggling. Nakasone, imagining he was the only Okinawan man who had surrendered, stifled his sense of shame. At least he had saved his students.
But Nakasone was far from alone. In the next week at least 3,000 soldiers and labor troops heeded the pleas of Petty Officer Miyagi and other Japanese volunteers like him who time and again went deep into the earth to save their comrades. Those who refused were trapped in their caves by flamethrowers and demolitions, and during the same period, 9,000 military were exterminated.
On July 2 the Okinawan campaign was officially declared ended. In almost exactly three months Americans had lost 12,520 GI’s, Marines and sailors, dead or missing. It was their greatest toll in the Pacific.
The Japanese lost 110,000 troops. In addition, civilian casualties reached unprecedented proportions. Caught between two armies, approximately 75,000 innocent men, women and children died. And their sacrifice was in vain. Japan had lost the last major battle she could fight outside the homeland itself.
* Today a monument marks the place. It reads: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.” “More than any other man,” President Truman eulogized, “he became the spokesman of the ordinary American in arms doing so many extraordinary things.”
† When Aoki returned to Japan in late 1946, he was greeted by his uncle, a lieutenant general, with joy and understanding—and for the first time Aoki was glad to be alive. “I’ve had two lives,” he later said. “Now every moment is precious.”
30
The Stragglers
1.
Even with the mainland threatened, millions of troops continued to occupy large segments of the crumbling Japanese Empire. The bastion at Rabaul, long by-passed, still stood, and the horde of soldiers in China controlled most of that country. But the men in Burma, the Philippines and the leapfrogged islands of the Pacific were lost to Japan. Few would ever return to the homeland. Those who did not commit hara-kiri or die in a last suicidal charge were abandoned, sick and starving, living from day to day, driven by the will to survive.
Corporal Kiyoshi Kamiko, the former schoolteacher, was one of these. Since sailing away from Leyte in a banca, he had escaped capture and death a dozen times. By April he had reached Negros, the large island west of Cebu, but before he could resume his voyage to freedom, he was conscripted by an Army unit and forced to help man a defense against the Americans who had recently landed. Kamiko, however, had not given up his dream of a new life on Borneo and persuaded six others to desert and come with him. He promoted himself to sergeant, and on the morning of April 30 led the way into the dense jungle toward the southwest coast. But each rugged mountain was succeeded by another, and for a month they had no food other than snails and crabs. There was little relief from poisonous insects except urine applied to the swollen areas, and when they were asleep, leeches crept into their eyeballs and began sucking blood. They stuck painfully until, big as marbles and black with blood, they fell off. The men ate them; nothing went to waste in the jungle.
Food became an obsession, and they remembered a story about a cook serving his unit soup made from an executed Filipino. “The thought of eating human flesh is disgusting,” someone remarked. “But I understand it tastes very good as long as you don’t know it.”
“When a man is really starving,” said a recruit named Yabuki, “he’ll eat anything.” Had Yabuki ever eaten human flesh? “No, I haven’t, but I worked in a crematorium on Hokkaido and there a man soon lost the feeling that he was handling human flesh. If you’re squeamish you can’t be a cremator. One day an ordinary fellow came to me secretly and asked for burned brains.” What for? “I understand they’re very beneficial if you’re sick.”
The conversation repelled Kamiko and he feared Yabuki might get the idea of eating Mayama, a tubercular recruit who was so thin that his puttees kept slipping down his legs. One night Kamiko overheard Yabuki whisper, “Anyway, he’ll soon die,” and on wakening discovered that both Yabuki’s and Mayama’s beds of leaves were empty. Kamiko found them at a stream. Mayama was drying his skeleton frame after a bath while Yabuki, crouched behind a rock with drawn sword, watched him like a hunter would his prey. Kamiko shouted a warning and the commotion brought the others. Yabuki, his eyes gleaming strangely, dropped his sword and exclaimed, “Forgive me!” Kamiko beat him savagely until his hands were raw. Yabuki submitted docilely, finally toppling back, his face covered with blood.
On their continued march Yabuki tried to rationalize what he had done. Mayama, he argued, was dying from tuberculosis but could not kill himself. “It would not be murder if I killed him. I would only be helping him to die sooner.” Then he added, “What nonsense just to let his body rot! It would please the spirit of Mayama that his body was used to save his hungry comrades.”
That night Kamiko dreamed he was attending a funeral on a warm spring day with larks flying in the sky. “Do you want to bury him or cremate him?” asked a young man wearing montsuki, a ceremonial garment. It was Usui, a pale, poetic recruit.
“Please let me do it if you are going to cremate him,” said a man in work clothes—Yabuki.
“The enemy will discover us by the fire,” warned the head of the village—another member of the group, Nakao. A middle-aged woman, attended by girls, said, “Let us now prepare the meal.” They made a soup that tasted like satsuma-jiru (a soy bean
soup with pork and vegetables). “Very good,” said the woman.
“Yes, of course,” said one of the girls, “the meat is Mayama.”
“So? This is Mayama?” asked another girl and laughed merrily. “How nice.”
It was all so pleasant and natural that in the morning Kamiko felt happier than he had since landing on Negros. He wondered why, until he vaguely remembered having had a delightful dream. Even after he realized that he had dreamed of eating Mayama, the sense of well-being continued. He felt no distaste, not the slightest sense of guilt, and in the days to follow he found himself muttering as he marched, “I want to eat Mayama. I want to eat Mayama.”
They crossed another mountain. At the foot they forded a swollen river. The feeble Mayama was swept away, but clung to a rock with his last strength and was saved by the others. They encountered an insane Japanese soldier lurking near ten dead comrades. Beyond were empty U. S. foxholes filled with abandoned equipment. They put on American uniforms and shoes, and retrieved a box of K rations, “a gift of the gods.” They also found four kinds of cigarettes—Camel, Lucky Strike, Chesterfield and Philip Morris—proof, thought Kamiko, that they had “rejoined the human race.”
Within a mile they came to a village where they were ambushed by guerrillas—fourteen thousand Filipinos under Lieutenant Colonel Salvador Abcede had controlled two thirds of the island since the beginning of the year. The Japanese were backed up against a river. Cornered, they leaped into the rushing water. Mayama struggled weakly in the current until his head finally disappeared. Downstream Kamiko and the others emerged on the opposite bank and scrambled up a steep hill. Behind them almost three hundred guerrillas fanned out in pursuit. But at the top of the hill the Japanese were trapped again. Filipinos astride buffaloes closed in on them from another rise, shooting and shouting. There was a burst of machine-pistol fire. Three men fell and two of them begged Kamiko—who had the only rifle—to kill them. They didn’t want to die at the hands of the enemy.