Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  Only three B-29s were lost in the March 16-17 raid. One was shot down over the town of Oshibe. Another disappeared at sea. By morning, the Japanese located the wreckage of the third plane that had exploded over Mt. Futatabi.

  You never heard much about the airmen who didn’t make it back. “For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead / Who rarely bothered coming home to die / But simply stayed away out there / In the clean war, the war in the air,” wrote the poet Howard Nemerov, an RAF Coastal Command pilot. Not until several days later did Ed Keyser hear about Z □ 8.

  Known as St. Bernard for coming to the aid of disabled planes, Z □ 8 of the 881st Squadron, 500th Bomb Group had been flying alone at an altitude of 3,300 feet when it was caught in enemy tracers. In the predawn darkness a Tony rammed it from behind. There was a burst of light, a wing fluttered down, and two airmen bailed out before the Superfort went into free fall. The bodies of the other crewmen, said eyewitness Fukada Kaoru, looked as if they had dropped from the aircraft as it disintegrated in the sky.

  Five airmen in the tail assembly of the plane were killed instantly. Four others were found below the Futatabi civilian internment camp. A Japanese flight boot was discovered in the debris belonging to ace fighter pilot Captain Ogata Jun’ichi of the Army’s 56th Sentai, one of the two main intercept groups in the Osaka-Kōbe area. The two survivors were Sergeant Algy S. Augunus, who had a broken leg, and 2nd Lieutenant Robert W. Nelson, a freckle-faced kid from Kansas who walked with such a proud military bearing that it looked, said his friend Ed Keyser, as if his back were in a brace. The body of the twenty-year-old pilot, 2nd Lieutenant Robert E. Copeland, lay near the point of impact. The letter he wrote to his mother remained unsent among his belongings on Saipan.

  The captured fliers were transferred to the Osaka Military Prison in Ishikari, where the Central Army had its headquarters. Their fate had already been decided by the Osaka Kempeitai. A military tribunal found them guilty of the “indiscriminate bombing” of Osaka and Kōbe. The sentence, under the “Enemy Airmen’s Act,” was death. Asked if he had any last words, Sergeant Augunus stated simply: “I don’t hate none of you, because you did your duty as I did my duty, only what I want to say is that this damn war will be over soon and there will be peace forever. That is all.”

  After a botched beheading that the Japanese tried to cover up, the two Americans were shot in the head at point-blank range.

  The winter of 1944-45 was the coldest on record in Japan in more than half a century. Spring arrived with sudden force. Soon it was cherry blossom season, traditionally a time to worship Yama-no-Kami, the mountain deity who was the most powerful god in ancient Japanese cosmology and whose domain was the preserve of mountain cherries (yamazakura). The cherry blossoms (sakura) were believed to augur the size of the autumn rice crop. The longer the blooms lasted, the more bounteous was fall’s reward.

  But at the Kōbe POW Hospital that spring, there was growing anxiety among the Japanese. After the first raid in February, the Japanese behaved as if nothing had happened. Ōhashi had arranged a meeting for the American doctors with Kinosita Ryōjun of the pathology department of Ōsaka University. Kinosita had been educated in England, was married to an Englishwoman, and spoke excellent English. The meeting took place as scheduled in Ōhashi’s office, but there was no mention whatsoever of the B-29 attack that had preceded it. Their silence was, in itself, alarming.

  The March raid was different. The camp administration made the POWs build shelters to protect Japanese personnel and supplies. One was a simple hole dug into the ground, three by four feet, covered with timber and a sheet of tin, and then raked over with soil. Another was built into the side of a terrace and was large enough to stand up in.

  Fred thought such measures were useless and only inflamed fears. Besides, the boys in the B-29s were their friends. The POWs could see the raids over Ōsaka across the bay and pooled their money, placing bets on where the Superforts would strike next. They called it “bombing for yen.” Murray felt somewhat differently: there was no such thing as a friendly bomb.

  Soon Colonel Murata submitted plans to the Chubu-gun chief and the Ministry of the Army for the relocation of POWS from the Kōbe Ōsaka area. The idea was to transfer them to camps in the mountains that were considered safe from the American bombings. The subcamps Chikkō, Kōbe, Naruo, Taishō, Yodogawa, Sakurujima, and Umeda were emptied first. All the officers at Kōbe House, with the exception of the medical officers, were moved. Three groups of Australian POWs from Kōbe House would be transferred to Fukuoka and Hiroshima, until only seventy-six members of the original J Force remained as stevedores. The POWs at Osaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp and the doctors and staff of the Kōbe POW Hospital stayed behind.

  In late March 1945 the Allies could almost taste victory. “The greatest naval armada in history,” as New York Times military editor Hanson Baldwin described it, was bearing down on Okinawa. The central island in the Rykyarchipelago in the East China Sea, Okinawa was the key to an Allied invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Three hundred forty miles from Kysh, Okinawa would serve as an advance naval base and airbase for medium-range bombers. To secure it, the United States committed 1,213 ships—aircraft carriers and submarines, battleships and destroyers, gunboats and oilers—and 170,000 troops in an operation code-named Iceberg.

  The Japanese High Command had anticipated enemy attacks against Okinawa, Formosa, Shanghai, and the southern coast of Korea. The purpose of defending them was to wage a war of attrition. The strategy, as explained in the Outline of Army and Navy Operation, was “to reduce his [the enemy’s] preponderance in ships, aircraft and men, to obstruct the establishment of advance bases, to undermine enemy morale, and thereby to seriously delay the final assault on Japan.”

  Seventy-seven thousand soldiers from the Thirty-second Japanese Army stood ready to defend Okinawa, augmented by 20,000 Okinawan militia, including young men of the Blood and Iron paramilitary unit, high school girls, and even children. Senior staff officer Colonel Yahara Hiromichi was the man who designed the Japanese operational plan for “the inevitable showdown.” It was a plan, he admitted, that was “doomed from the start.”

  In a frantic attempt to destroy the Allied invasion force as it advanced toward Okinawa, Admiral Toyoda launched Operation Ten-go. Bettys from the 5th Air Fleet swept in from Kyshto bomb enemy transports. Kamikaze were unleashed in mass attacks called kikusui or “floating chrysanthemums.” Suicidal pilots were strapped to 4,700-pound rocket-propelled bombs that hurtled through the air at speeds up to 600 mph. The Japanese named them oka, meaning “cherry blossom”; the Americans called them baka, for “screwball.” By month’s end the carriers Franklin, Enterprise, and Yorktown were crippled. The Indianapolis, flagship of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s Fifth Fleet, was struck; the destroyer O’Brien was badly damaged; and the minesweeper Skylark sank after hitting two mines.

  On Sunday, April 1, Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force 58 celebrated Easter by pounding Okinawa with a devastating barrage of rockets and mortars to ease the way for the landings on the island’s southwest coast. Sixty thousand men met suspiciously little resistance and were ashore by nightfall. The Americans quickly secured two airfields to the east. Three marine divisions drove south as the 6th Marines forayed north. By April 4 the newly formed U.S. Tenth Army, under Lieutenant General Simon Buckner, had pushed the back of General Ushijima Mitsuru’s Thirty-second Army up against the southern city of Shuri. Two days later 700 kamikaze came screaming out of bases in Kyshand Formosa to zero in on the U.S. Fifth Fleet, sinking thirteen destroyers. Inland, the Japanese were safely holed up in an extensive network of limestone caves. In spite of stepped-up bombardment, the XXIV Army Corps faced a standoff.

  Five days after the Battle of Okinawa began, Hirohito removed Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki and appointed seventy-eight-year-old retired admiral Suzuki Kantarō, a hard-line imperialist, as head of a new government. On April 8 the Imperial Japanese Army issued Directive No. 2438, �
��Outline of Preparations for the Ketsugō Operation.” In this plan each army—from the First and Second General Armies, to the Air General Army, the China Expeditionary Army, and the Fifth and Seventeenth Area Armies—“will make combat preparations and conduct operations in the overall operation to repel the American invasion of the Homeland, Korea, Karafuto and adjacent waters.” Seven areas of operation were designated, from Chishima and the Northern Military District to the Korea Military District. The Kōbe-Ōsaka region was part of the Central Military District. The task of the Fifteenth Area Army, under the control of the Second General Army, was to defend approaches to the Inland Sea in order to keep shipping lanes open.

  The objective of Ketsugō was simple: “The Imperial Army will rapidly establish a strategic disposition aimed at the ultimate annihilation of the enemy by strengthening its combat preparations and will encounter the American invasion at key areas on the Japanese homeland.” Turning the homeland into a battlefront called for the stockpiling of arms, ammunition, fuel, and—at the expense of the civilian population—food. “Ichioku ichigan,” the slogan went; “one hundred million as one bullet.” Or, as the cockpit manual that accompanied Japanese pilots on their kamikaze missions exhorted: “Transcend life and death. When you eliminate all thoughts about life and death, you will be able to totally disregard your earthly life.” U.S. intelligence estimated that 6,700 Japanese planes would be available for kamikaze pilots to defend the Home Islands. The actual number exceeded 12,700. To the very end, Army Minister Anami Korechika maintained that the chances of a Japanese victory were “considerable.”

  The POWs sensed not only a change of mood in the Japanese but a change in behavior. At the Kōbe POW Hospital, the Japanese began to practice kendō (the way of the sword). One day a guard asked Murray if he wanted to spar. Murray had fenced in high school, and when he saw the armor (bōgu), which consists of a face mask (men), chest protector (dō), hip and groin protector (tare), and padded leather gloves (kote), he figured, why not? He would have to get clobbered to get hurt.

  Fred thought he was crazy. You didn’t challenge the Japanese. During the war with China the Japanese had used Chinese soldiers and civilians for “killing competitions,” bayonet and beheading practice. What was Murray thinking?

  Murray pushed the line between reason and risk, politesse and provocation. He took pleasure in verbal jousting and the game of oneupmanship. He was skilled at psychologically unbalancing others and then analyzing reactions once defenses broke down. There was an element to his behavior at once playful and controlling, and if John saw the humor in it, others were less amused. Perhaps it was simply egotism that made him think he would be okay; perhaps it was a necessary defense against the reality of his present predicament. He had a natural distrust of authority, whereas Fred respected it—indeed, represented it—though he certainly wasn’t afraid to challenge what struck him as bunkum. But Fred had his limits, and Murray’s went beyond them, which made the senior medical officer as uncomfortable as if he were watching a less experienced swimmer stray too far from the beach. As far as Murray was concerned, Fred was overreacting. He’d be just fine.

  The guard held his wooden sword (bokken) with two hands. Murray held it in one hand, as if it were a foil, and went on to explain how points were scored in fencing. When he tapped the guard’s chest with the tip of his bokken, he was met with a look of incomprehension commingled with fear. Surely the guard knew kendō, a requirement for Japanese boys since 1939. But fencing, as it was practiced in Europe and America, was a complete mystery to him. Murray made certain that whatever hybrid sport they were playing in this tournament of East against West, the guard won. He may have been something of a provocateur, but he was nobody’s fool. It would have been a terrible loss of face for the guard, with potentially brutal consequences.

  Ōhashi himself was on edge. He noticed that Fred, always well groomed, had shaved his head. He called Fred into his office. What did he mean by it? Fred worried that he was losing his hair, which was not uncommon on a slow starvation diet. Ōhashi worried that Fred knew of an impending attack because he had cut off his hair just as Kōbe’s citizens had been advised to shear their locks and keep themselves covered during air raids. Fred had had no idea. It was pure coincidence, he replied. Suddenly the ground began to shake. Ohashi looked at Fred with eyes as wide as saucers, and then he jumped out the window. Jishin! Fred followed suit. Kōbe sat on the edge of the Eurasian Plate in an active fault zone. Jishin! It was an earthquake.

  The firebombings forced the Ohashis to move from their house in Osaka to Nishinomiya, northeast of Kōbe, where the Miyazakis had a large family home. Eighteen-year-old Miyazaki Shunya, who had feared Japan couldn’t possibly win a war with America when he first heard the news of the Pearl Harbor attack, had decided to become an engineering student to escape conscription. Shunya suffered from a stubborn case of tuberculosis that resisted Ōhashi’s attempts to treat it. One day Ohashi brought Shunya to the Kōbe POW Hospital, where Page took him on as his patient. Page cured Shunya of his TB, but there was little he could do to improve the food situation in Japan.

  “Today there was a ration of beef,” read the February 25, 1945, diary entry of Hata Sen’ichirō as it appeared in the Kōbe Shimbun. “Happiness. It’s been more than a month. Beef on the black market goes for more than 25 yen for 100 momme [13.2 ounces]. Sugar goes for 70 yen, though the official price is about 1.5 yen.”

  In 1944 the average daily intake for Japanese civilians was 1,900 calories. Wheat and dry noodles—substitutes for rice—accounted for 26 percent of the ration. They were then replaced by soybeans, corn, sorghum, and other rough grains imported from Manchuria. Until March 1945 residents of Osaka consumed 1,920 calories per day, which was virtually unchanged from three years earlier. But once the firebombings began, rations were reduced by 10 percent and the quality of the food declined. At Ōsaka University students lunched on a little rice, half a potato, a salted plum, and twenty or thirty locusts—caught in nearby fields the day before by lower classmen—boiled in soy sauce and sake. The air raids of March 16-17 had destroyed Kōbe’s rationing headquarters, so emergency distribution centers were set up in the western part of the city. By then, rice substitutes constituted 40 percent of the ration, and pumpkin became the staple.

  Whether it was rice or a rice substitute, the food was avidly consumed by the POWs down to the last grain. The Dutch prolonged their dining experience by molding rice balls the size of marbles, which they ate over a period of hours. The POWs paid Ōhashi in yen for seeds, and at Kōbe planted a vegetable garden with eggplant, cucumbers, and tomatoes. The vegetables were fertilized with daiben—night soil—so they were always cooked, never eaten raw. On one occasion Murray saw a recuperating British POW strolling along with a cane and proudly smoking a pipe when there was no tobacco to be found. Back home Murray had been partial to unfiltered Camels, two packs a day.

  “What are you smoking?” he inquired.

  “Cherry blossom petals,” the man replied with more than a whiff of self-satisfaction.

  The cherry trees were nourished just like the vegetables—with night soil.

  Better wait for a cigarette, Murray thought with a smile.

  On April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Vice President Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency of the United States. British and American armies bore down on Germany from the west, and Soviet forces advanced from the east, then converged at the Elbe River on the twenty-fifth. After five years, eight months, and six days, the war in Europe came to a crashing end. German resistance in Italy collapsed, Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans on April 28, and two days later Hitler commited suicide in his Berlin bunker. General Gustav Jodl, the new chief of staff of the German Army, signed an unconditional surrender for Germany that took effect on May 8, which President Truman declared V-E Day, for Victory in Europe.

  The news of the fall of Berlin was covered by Harold King in a Reu
ters dispatch that appeared in Japan’s leading newspaper, Asahi Shimbun (Morning Sun). The Tripartite Pact was in shreds. The swastika at the German embassy in Kōbe flew at half mast. The “Land of the Gods” no longer seemed invincible. No longer was Yamato damashii (the spirit of Japan) sufficient to ensure victory.

  Celebrations broke out across America, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate. “THE WAR IN EUROPE IS ENDED!” exclaimed the headline of The New York Times on May 8, 1945. There were parades, block parties, and prayers of thanksgiving. Car horns blared, and tickertape poured out of Wall Street windows, while across the country shots were fired and church bells chimed in jubilation. Times Square turned into New Year’s Eve at midmorning. But the joy was tempered by those mourning Roosevelt’s death and the realization that, as the battle for Okinawa raged, the road to Tōkyō was fraught with peril.

  The Combined Chiefs of Staff had assumed that Japan’s defeat hinged on an invasion of the Home Islands. At the Anglo-American conference in Yalta in February 1945, they considered the possibility that it might have to be delayed until 1946. In April 1945 the JCS designated MacArthur commander in chief of U.S. Army Forces, Pacific (AFPAC), and in May he was charged with the responsibility for the invasion of Kysh. Nimitz was assigned the “conduct of naval and amphibious phases.” GHQ/AFPAC would be operational in Manila within a month.

  MacArthur’s plan, code-named Operation Downfall, was divided into two ninety-day campaigns: Operation Olympic called for the invasion of Kysh, and Operation Coronet for the assault on Honsh. General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, which had liberated Luzon, would spearhead Olympic on November 1, 1945. Coronet would follow on March 1, 1946. The Eighth and Tenth Armies were to land at Sagami Bay, while the First Army was to establish a beachhead on the Kujkuri coast for a massive assault on the Kantō Plain. Olympic called for 766,700 troops ashore; Coronet required a staggering 1,026,000.