by Toland, John
“If you want to live,” said Omagari, “surrender.” One by one the men excused themselves with formal bows and filed out of the cave. Finally Omagari was left with an old friend, Ensign Kakuta, who was severely wounded.
“What shall we do?” Omagari asked him.
Kakuta was delirious and raved like a madman until Omagari suggested that they die at once together. “I don’t want to die,” Kakuta replied in a flash of sanity.
Neither did Omagari. But he couldn’t turn himself over naked to the enemy. He found a bolt of cotton loincloth material, and taking leave of Kakuta, crept out of the cave, pistol in hand. Half a dozen Americans, grinning broadly, came toward him. A baby-faced first lieutenant stretched out his hand.
“Wait,” Omagari said in Japanese. “I am an officer and must be clothed before I greet you.” He modestly turned his back, ripped off six feet of material and adroitly fashioned himself a loincloth. Then he too extended a hand.
He remained composed until after he had showered, then he broke down. It was the first time he had ever wept. He refused to talk and had no appetite. After supper the other prisoners riotously celebrated their resurrection with bawdy songs. He decried their behavior, and his depression increased to the point where he no longer wanted to live. He vowed that when he returned to the cave in the morning to bring out Kakuta, he would kill himself.
He made the mistake of confiding his plan to a fellow officer, who informed the Americans. Omagari was put under restraint. Like Yasunori Aoki, the kamikaze flier, he bit his tongue to choke on his own blood. He too failed. Then he tried to strangle himself with his bare hands, but each attempt became feebler. It was weeks before he finally accepted the degradation of surrender.
But hundreds of other stragglers on Iwo Jima could not yet bring themselves to consider surrender. Nor could they bring themselves to commit hara-kiri. They continued to hide beneath the crust of the little island, like dead souls on a distant planet. Among them were Ohno’s two men— Yamakage and Matsuda. Six years later they were the last of the Iwo Jima garrison to surrender.‡
* Kamiko and Nakao survived. So, incredibly, did Mayama. Soon after publication of his book, I Did Not Die on Leyte, in 1965, Kamiko encountered Mayama on a street in Tokyo. When Kamiko revealed that another of their group had survived, Mayama recoiled in fright. He said, however, that he had never been afraid of being eaten by Kamiko. “Because,” he explained, “you were a teacher.”
† On November 30, 1946, ashes marked with Ohno’s name were delivered to his father. That same day, Ohno himself arrived home after almost a year and a half of imprisonment in Hawaii. “What a remarkable day!” exclaimed the father as they bowed. “Suddenly I have two sons.”
‡ They held out until 1951. Yamakage returned to Iwo Jima with Stuart Griffin, a historian at Tachikawa Air Base and later columnist for the Mainichi. They had come to find the diary Yamakage insisted he had kept for five years. The two men methodically searched Yamakage’s last cave, and finding nothing, Griffin expressed doubt that there had ever been a diary. That evening Yamakage disappeared to continue the quest for the notebook. In the morning he returned dejected, with torn hands.
Just before their plane was to leave, Griffin and Yamakage were driven to the summit of Mount Suribachi to take pictures. At the crest Yamakage started trotting with eyes on the ground. He paused, turned and slowly walked back. Then he again loped toward the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea. He picked up speed, threw both arms in the air, shouted something and jumped. Griffin ran to the edge of the cliff. There was a drop of twenty yards to a rocky ledge covered with sand, and he saw an indentation as if something had hit it. Out of sight, a hundred yards below on another ledge, lay the body of Yamakage.
He and Matsudo were by no means the last stragglers in the Pacific to surrender. In the next six years men were found all the way from Saipan to Mindoro. Two soldiers on Guam surrendered almost sixteen years after the liberation of that island. Perhaps there are more to come; they have been reported in the Philippines, New Guinea and Guadalcanal.
PART EIGHT
“One Hundred Million Die Together”
31
In Quest of Peace
1.
The American landing on Okinawa coincided with the final convulsions of the Third Reich. While Count Folke Bernadotte risked his life on trips to and from Germany to arrange peace in Europe through Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, other Swedes were endeavoring to bring an end to the war in the Pacific through various channels, some of them spurious.
Widar Bagge, the Swedish minister to Japan, was approached by Mamoru Shigemitsu, foreign minister in the Koiso Cabinet, with a suggestion that Sweden intercede on Japan’s behalf with the United States. It came to nothing because of opposition from Shigemitsu’s successor, Shigenori Togo, who was convinced that a much more influential go-between than Sweden could be found.
A private effort was introduced by another Bernadotte, Prince Carl, grandnephew of the King of Sweden, and Eric Erickson, a shipbroker who had business ties with Japan. The two urged Major General Makoto Onodera, the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, to seek peace through Sweden. On his part Prince Carl would request the King to send “a confidential, friendly letter to the Emperor of Japan suggesting peace be negotiated as soon as possible.”
Prince Carl also informed the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Günther, of the plan. Günther was not at all pleased, since it by-passed the regular channel, Bagge, and he protested to the Japanese minister in Stockholm. Presently General Onodera received a peremptory cable from Tokyo:
JAPAN’S POLICY IS TO FIGHT TO THE END, BUT WE HAVE INFORMATION THAT SOMEONE IS CONDUCTING A PEACE MOVE IN NORTHERN EUROPE. YOU ARE TO INVESTIGATE THE MATTER AND REPORT YOUR FINDINGS.
There were also two peace efforts of a more substantial nature being mounted in Switzerland. Both involved Allen W. Dulles, OSS representative for the area of Germany, southeastern Europe and parts of France and Italy with headquarters in Berne. The first was initiated by a German, Dr. Fritz Hack, a man of mystery who could have come out of a spy novel. He was a friend of Japan who felt it had been “stupid” for Japan to start the war. He enlisted the aid of Commander Yoshiro Fujimura, the naval attaché in Berne, who had come to realize that Japan had no chance of victory and felt that it was his duty to help bring peace no matter what the personal risk. They were joined by two other Japanese—Shigeyoshi Tsuyama, the European representative of the Osaka Shipping Line, and Shintaro Ryu, the European correspondent of the Asahi Shimbun.
The four conspirators held a series of clandestine meetings with representatives of Dulles and convinced them of their own political reliability. Moreover, they had access to a Navy Type 94 code machine with which they could communicate directly with Navy Headquarters in Japan without having to go through diplomatic channels. On May 3 Dr. Hack was informed by the Dulles office that the U. S. State Department authorized the commencement of direct peace negotiations with the Fujimura group.
The self-appointed peacemakers painstakingly composed a message addressed to Navy Minister Yonai and the new Chief of Staff, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, informing them that Dulles had offered to act as mediator and described him as “a leading political figure of America who has long associated with Lippmann and Stettinius, and especially enjoys the confidence of President Roosevelt and is directly connected with the President.” They had confused Dulles with his brother, John Foster, but did accurately state that Dulles had been “guiding the American political warfare for nearly all of Europe with Switzerland as his base, and particularly noteworthy is the fact that it was largely through his efforts that separate peace was effected with North Italy in early May.” Instructions were “requested immediately.”
Near midnight on May 8, the day of Germany’s surrender, Fujimura and Tsuyama cautiously entered the darkened legation building, and with the aid of a flashlight, climbed up to the code room on the third floor. First Tsuyama set the machine for the prop
er date and hour, then he began typing the message in romanized Japanese. The machine automatically transmitted this in code.
In the next eight days, six more telegrams were secretly dispatched reporting Germany’s surrender and the plans to move American and British units from Europe to the Far East, along with the admonition to seek peace before it was too late. After thirteen days of silence from Navy Headquarters, the conspirators sent another telegram to Yonai and Toyoda urgently requesting an early reply to the first message, since the United States was “pressing” them for an answer. It came two days later and was signed by the Naval Affairs Bureau chief:
… THE PRINCIPAL POINT OF YOUR NEGOTIATION WITH MR. DULLES FULLY UNDERSTOOD, BUT THERE ARE CERTAIN POINTS WHICH INDICATE AN ENEMY PLOT, THEREFORE WE ADVISE YOU TO BE VERY CAUTIOUS.
Incredulous, the Fujimura group saw the answer as a subterfuge. They in turn requested concrete evidence of “enemy machinations” and insisted that the Dulles agency was a reliable political organ directly connected with the President.
MR. DULLES AND ALL OTHERS ARE EXPECTING A SINCERE REPLY FROM JAPAN. EVEN IF WE CONCEDE A GREAT DEAL AND ADMIT IT TO BE AN ENEMY PLOT, WOULD IT NOT BE MORE ADVANTAGEOUS TO AVOID THE SAD PLIGHT OF GERMANY WHICH LOST EVERYTHING? ARE THERE ANY MEANS WHICH PROVIDE BETTER CONDITIONS THAN THIS FOR JAPAN AT PRESENT?
Navy Headquarters did not reply. Nor did they so much as acknowledge continued requests for action. They had not ignored the flood of messages from Switzerland. In fact, these had created violent disagreement among the naval leaders. Three men were strongly in favor of accepting the Dulles proposal—the Chief of Operations, the head of the Naval Affairs Bureau, and Admiral Sokichi Takagi (erstwhile plotter to kill Tojo), who offered to fly to Switzerland to open negotiations. But Chief of Staff Toyoda, as well as the rest of his staff, was strongly opposed. The Dulles proposal was either a “trial balloon to sound out Japan’s fighting spirit or a plot to lower morale.”
The lack of response from Tokyo drove Fujimura to extremes. He volunteered to fly to Japan to explain in person the importance of Dulles’ position in establishing a reliable high-level contact between the two belligerents. Dulles, however, feared that such a journey would compromise the negotiations and suggested that the Japanese send a fully authorized representative to Switzerland. America would guarantee safe air transportation. Fujimura transmitted this promising offer directly to Yonai in words so strong that they verged on the insulting.
Yonai was at last spurred to action. He took the proposal to the Foreign Minister. With some trepidation—Togo too knew little about Dulles—he asked Yonai to explore the proposal more thoroughly, and the admiral dispatched a message to Berne that seemed to give approval:
YOUR POINT IS FULLY UNDERSTOOD. THE PAPERS RELATING TO THE AFFAIR HAVE BEEN REFERRED TO THE FOREIGN MINISTER AND YOU ARE REQUESTED TO TAKE PROPER MEASURES IN CLOSE CO-OPERATION WITH THE MINISTER AND OTHER PERSONS CONCERNED AT YOUR PLACE.
Despite the vague phraseology, this was the first encouragement the conspirators had received from Tokyo, although it meant that negotiations were now in the hands of the Foreign Ministry. But their enthusiasm began to dim as days passed without receipt of specific instructions from either Togo or Yonai on how to proceed. This procrastination had a similar effect on the Americans. It seemed increasingly apparent either that the men they were dealing with in Switzerland had little influence or that Tokyo had no interest in pursuing negotiations through Dulles. Togo’s silence, however, was due to another cause. The Navy’s reservations had become too strong; Admiral Toyoda had grown more convinced than ever that Fujimura (“only a commander in the Navy,” at that) was the victim of American duplicity. Moreover, the Japanese leaders were already considering opening a channel to negotiations in a completely different direction.
While Japan searched hesitatingly for peace, her cities were being reduced to ashes. LeMay’s campaign to destroy the homeland’s industrial centers had reached a cataclysmic climax. Nagoya was a ruined city, and 34.2 square miles of Tokyo had been incinerated in four devastating raids, after which the usual greeting between friends was simply, “Not burned out yet?”—nothing else seemed to matter. On May 23, in the afternoon, 562 B-29’s headed back to lay waste the area along the west side of Tokyo harbor that included residential as well as industrial communities. Pilots had been instructed to avoid the Palace, “since the Emperor of Japan is not at present a liability and may later become an asset.” Another five square miles were destroyed that night. Thirty-six hours later 502 Superfortresses returned to hit the heart of Tokyo with 3,262 tons of incendiaries.
Once again a fire storm seared the capital, and by dawn 16.8 square miles of the financial, commercial and government district lay in ruins, including the detention house of Tokyo Army Prison. Among the tens of thousands of incinerated victims were sixty-two imprisoned Allied airmen. The uncontrollable flames reached the Imperial Palace. Flying debris leaped the moat, setting brushwood fires which spread to several buildings, including the Palace itself. Twenty-eight members of the staff died, but the Emperor and Empress were safe in their underground shelter. Because of the bombings, they now resided in the obunko (the imperial library), a long one-story building fronted by a row of imposing pillars half a mile from the Palace in the imperial garden. It was connected by a long tunnel to the obunko annex, an underground complex. Outside the Palace walls, the pavilions of the Dowager Empress, the Crown Prince and other royal personages were completely destroyed, as were the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s official residence, and the Navy Department and Greater East Asia Department buildings.
More than half of the sprawling city was gutted, a wasteland, like Nagoya. Radio Tokyo had often broadcast an overoptimistic ditty, which now seemed more irrelevant than ever:
Why should we be afraid of air raids?
The big sky is protected with iron defenses.
For young and old it is time to stand up;
We are loaded with the honor of defending the homeland.
Come on, enemy planes! Come on many times!
During the attack the Bees had buzzed the skyline of Tokyo with impunity, since the antiaircraft guns had long since ceased to operate, and deafened the ears of the people with their “thundering boom.” This time the incendiaries, descending in “hissing and rattling bundles,” set fire to the Mishimas’ house. It burned slowly because it was filled with books. Poking in the embers, Mrs. Sumie Mishima found “layers upon layers of ashes of different colors. The Chinese books of the Sung and the Ming dynasty, with their softly creamed paper and beautiful wood-printed scripts, had turned into glistening snow-white powder of the finest quality imaginable.… The modern books produced coarse ashes in various shades of dingy gray.” Mrs. Mishima put the white ashes in a broken jar, and her family found them “the cleanest possible toothpowder.”
Four nights later LeMay turned to nearby Yokohama, the nation’s fifth largest city; after the 517 raiders left, 85 percent of the metropolitan area was in flames. With the Tokyo–Yokohama area in ruins, the B-29’s concentrated on Osaka and Kobe, and within two weeks both cities had been eliminated as targets. More than a hundred square miles of the principal cities were obliterated; Phase I of LeMay’s Urban Area Program was accomplished. Two million buildings—almost one third of all construction—were razed, and at least thirteen million people left homeless.
2.
Even before Tokyo’s second catastrophic fire storm, Prime Minister Suzuki had instructed Cabinet Secretary Sakomizu to make a confidential study of Japan’s resources to see whether the nation could possibly continue the war. A special investigatory bureau was set up which included military and civilian experts from the Cabinet Planning Board, the Foreign, Finance and Munitions ministries, and the Army and Navy.
Their findings revealed that the situation was more critical than anyone had realized. Every aspect of Japanese life, civilian as well as military, was affected by the lack of basic raw materials. Steel production was
less than 100,000 tons per month, two thirds below the official estimate. Similarly, aircraft production had dropped to a third of its quota because of shortages in aluminum and bauxite, and lack of coal had curtailed munitions production by 50 percent. Shipping was down to 1,000,000 tons, and the entire transportation system was crippled by fuel shortages and lack of manpower to handle cargo. The Sakomizu report predicted that in weeks there would be no rail transportation between cities, construction of steel ships would end and the chemical industry would collapse.
In a desperate attempt to replenish diminishing oil reserves, ersatz aviation fuel was being made from pine trees,* and since the population was faced with the specter of starvation—the rice harvest was the smallest since 1905—the government devised a plan to convert acorns into food. “The entire people will be called upon to give their aid. Schoolchildren and evacuees in particular will be enjoined to collect the maximum goal of five million koku [5.2 bushels] of acorns.” The official daily food ration—when it could be obtained—had fallen below 1,500 calories, two thirds of the minimum Japanese standard. Those in the cities suffered most, and millions went into the country each Sunday to barter kimonos, jewelry, furniture, anything of value, for sweet potatoes, vegetables and fruit.
The Sakomizu report was released to a newly inaugurated “inner cabinet” officially titled the Supreme Council for the Conduct of the War but commonly called the Big Six, since it was comprised of the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the four military chiefs. The implications of the report were unassailable, and on May 12, at a meeting of the Big Six, Admiral Yonai made a suggestion that could have caused his expulsion a week earlier. He proposed that they ask Russia to mediate a settlement of the war. Togo, who was as anxious to negotiate a peace as anyone else in the room, snapped that Yonai didn’t know much about Russia if he imagined she would really help Japan. Suzuki, however, could see no reason why they shouldn’t at least sound out the Soviets.