The truth, of course, was a lot less appealing. The samurai of old were rough, practical men, more like mercenaries than gallants. Nothing mattered more to an ancient warrior than his military reputation, his personal record of victories and defeats. That record determined a man’s rank and rewards, and he would do almost anything to enhance it and gain advantage—betray a friend, deceive a comrade, switch sides in the middle of a battle, murder a loyal retainer to prove his allegiance to a new employer. And there was no opprobrium attached to any of this. The samurai thought of himself as a professional, and the mores of the day and customs of his profession gave him the license to act as he pleased.25
By the end of the seventeenth century, Japan’s civil wars were over and the last of the fighting samurai were gone. Their descendants, some two million men who held the hereditary title “samurai” and received a samurai’s stipend as well, no longer practiced the profession of arms. Samurai families still trained their sons in the martial arts, a part of their passage and heritage, but the samurai had become “domesticated.” Half of them worked as civil servants doing paperwork, inspecting damaged buildings, directing public works. Some became politicians, others scholars and writers. And it was from the pens of the now sedentary sons of warrior families that the great myth came.26
In essays and broadsides, samurai intellectuals revised the history of their mercenary caste and gave it a set of ideals it never had. Loyalty was everything, the samurai writers said, and for the soldier, the warrior, there was only one true measure of loyalty: his willingness to self-sacrifice. The most famous of the books preaching this new morality, one whose words would echo across the battlefields of World War II, was the Hagakure, a miscellany of advice, anecdote, and instruction, each item intoning the same powerful theme:
Bushido or the way of the [warrior], means death. Whenever you confront a choice between two options, simply choose the one that takes you more directly to death. It is not complicated; just advance to meet it with confidence . . . Every morning, with a calm mind, form a picture in your head of the last moment of your life . . . Every morning, be sure to take time to think of yourself as dead.27
The point was simple: purity of purpose through peace of mind. To daily embrace death was to be free of fear and hesitation, natural impediments to the ideal of self-sacrifice, which, in turn, was the ultimate expression of loyalty.
The political reformers of the nineteenth century borrowed this ideal, the spirit of Bushido or the “way of the warrior,” applied it to Japanese society at large, and made it the way of the good citizen, a zeitgeist of allegiance, obedience, and sacrifice. By the turn of the century the sentiment of duty and loyalty was as strong in the Japanese people as the sentiment of freedom and self-reliance was in Americans.28
Who that is born in this land can be wanting in the spirit of grateful service to it? . . . Fulfil [sic] your essential duty of loyalty, and bear in mind that duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.29
NEARLY NINETY THOUSAND JAPANESE DIED for Dai Nippon in 1904 when Imperial Japan went to war with Imperial Russia. It was flesh-and-blood hurling itself against hot lead as wave after wave of loyal hohei charged up the muddy wastes of Port Arthur apparently oblivious to everything in their path. Against advanced Russian armaments, the Japanese carried single-shot bolt-action rifles, museum pieces that had little effect at long range. No matter, the hohei made themselves nikudan, “human bullets” or “flesh bullets,” and walked point-blank into the Russian guns.
Most Western observers concluded that the Japanese were a people who celebrated self-sacrifice, or in the idiom of the day, they held life cheap. The cognoscenti, of course, knew otherwise.
“There never has been a race of men who really enjoyed sacrificing their lives for their country, or for anything else,” Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of the Times of London wrote.30
And the Japanese soldier was no different. Atara wakai inochi o otosu, “to lose one’s young precious life,” was as great a tragedy in Matsuyama as it was in the streets of Manchester, but the hohei had a feeling for his land and people that was rare among the soldiers of the West. To be Japanese was to be futatsu to nai, “second to none,” an idea instilled in every child. And this feeling of being thoroughbred, along with the sentiment of loyalty and duty, produced a patriotism so powerful it became a weapon.31
Generals in every army take their lessons from history, and the Japanese generals who came to power during World War II preached the “fighting spirit,” the seishin, of Port Arthur. The realists in the army, a handful of moderns unaffected by the slavish jingoism of their brother officers, understood that the West was rapidly developing new weapons that made old tactics—and old attitudes and sentiments—obsolete, if not appallingly prodigal. But the output of Japan’s industries was limited and its natural resources few. The West would always have more assets, more tanks and aircraft, more trucks and guns. In comparison, Japan appeared poor, poor in everything except people.32
Millions of young Nipponjin of military age were available for service. Conscripts were called issen gorin, loosely translated as “penny men,” the cost of the postcard calling them into uniform. And to an army poor in the pocket, penny men were the perfect weapon. All the army had to do was fill a young soldier with seishin and send him forward to skewer the enemy with his bayonet. “Plunge into the field of death willingly,” an army pamphlet, echoing the Hagakure, advised young soldiers marching off to war. “Silently give your all.”33
THE TACTICAL PROBLEM was simple enough.
Bataan was a peninsula and there were only two ways to attack such geography: storm it from the sea or mass at its neck, pushing the defenders from one trench line to the next until they came to the last trench, the last stand.
The backbone of mountains down the center of the peninsula left two approaches. Along the east coast was a relatively wide corridor of land, on the west coast a sliver of shoreline dwarfed by steep cliffs. Homma decided to divide his force in two and launch simultaneous attacks. The main push would come on the east coast by Manila Bay, where the mountains gave way to foothills, then tropical lowlands about a mile wide. On a large-scale map (at that point the only kind of maps the Japanese had), the east coast appeared flat and inviting. “The Plains,” the Japanese labeled this terrain, and they planned to send two regiments down this expanse, chasing the enemy ahead of them. The “plains,” however, were an illusion. The strip of land along the coast soon gave way to an undulating chaparral, jungle midland, then steep foothills. The hills were thick with plants, vines, trees, and tangled undergrowth.
Japanese intelligence had also been wrong about the enemy’s strength. Some 68,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans were ready to defend the peninsula (roughly 47,500 of these men were classified as combat troops; almost all frontline troops were Filipinos). Homma had reinforced the Summer Brigade to 13,000 men, but the Americans had twice that number in front of them on the eastern plain, well dug in and waiting. Counting American and Filipino reserves, the Japanese were outnumbered three to one.
[Japanese 65th Brigade, After Action Report, January 9, 1942] The front line units, which had been waiting tensely for the zero hour, commenced the approach march at 1500 hrs . . . The roar of the artillery of both sides shook the northern portion of the BATAAN Peninsula. The enemy shells fell particularly furiously in the vicinity of [our staging area]. One shell made a direct hit on Artillery HQ, and in an instant the greater part of the Staff was wiped out.34
American artillery fire was withering. The men of Colonel Takeo Imai’s 141st Infantry told their commander that the shells sounded “as if oil drums” were flying though the air, “letting out loud screams” overhead. Those shells, they said, made their blood freeze.
American cannoneers seemed to have every inch of open space—roads, trails, and fields—plotted on their maps. Even the watering holes, the streams and rivers where the Japanese filled their canteens, were in the Americans’ c
rosshairs. “Especially astonishing” to General Nara and his staff was the enemy’s inexhaustible supply of ammunition, enough ordnance to fire “countless shells day and night without ceasing.”35
Nara went to the front to take a look, but “a vast jungle prevented a clear view of the battle area” and “the Brigade Commander . . . could see nothing but the furious enemy barrage in the direction of the coastal road,” the road down which his Summer Brigade was advancing.36
To try to outflank the American line, Nara sent a battalion from the 141st Infantry west into the knotty chaparral and foothills of Mount Natib, but the men quickly became lost. In this group was a thirty-year-old sergeant named Nakamura, a machine gunner. Like many Japanese soldiers with a high school or college education, the sergeant kept a diary, pages composed under fire.
[Nakamura, Diary, January 10, 1942] Our trail becomes stiffer and stiffer as we advance into the mountains. An officer reconnoitering unit was sent out for the third time before night [to try to find the rest of the brigade]. Platoon commander died in action. I recalled my brotherly association with him since the organization of our unit. It is terrible to have to lose a man [on the first day]. I am downhearted . . . Everyone became silent after the death of our leader.37
The next night the two sides faced off in full-scale battle, the Summer Brigade hurling itself against units of the Philippine Army and the highly trained Philippine Scouts. The clash took place an hour before midnight in a sugarcane field south of the Calaguiman River and under a bright moon. The Japanese charged—their favorite tactic—and the Scouts and Philippine Army troops waiting in their fighting holes created a horizontal rain of rifle and point-blank cannon fire.
The first wave of nikudan were cut down, then came another wave of human bullets, then another.
In the morning, the cane field looked like an abattoir. Two hundred, three hundred nikudan lay dead in front of the Filipino positions. Japanese field officers reported that “the enemy positions were impregnable.”38
Just before dawn, Sergeant Nakamura and his machine gun squad ran into the American line.
[Nakamura, Diary] Received artillery shelling and rifle shot rained about. It took the guts out of me.39
Ammunition was short, food stocks dwindled, and “the demand for water was enormous.” The Imperial Army had very few trucks, and the trucks were easy targets. Nara’s men switched to packhorses to traverse the heavy jungle and hills, but the animals could not negotiate the snarled traces or precipitous trails. The terrain was “so thick,” Colonel Imai often felt he was “walking against walls.” He kept running into “banyan trees, mahogany trees, mango trees, and the like, mixed with bamboo and thorns” and “vines of rattan and ivy.” At night “the screams of weird birds shrieking in the dark or cries of the lizard” followed the boys from Fukuyama as they moved into position to continue the attack.40
[Nakamura, Diary, January 12–13] Two men from 4th Squad and one man from 3rd Squad were wounded. PFC Kobata was killed by artillery . . . Our food supply is now low—there are very few dry crackers left. I am [existing on] water only. No supplies can be brought from the rear because of the difficult route. We are getting weaker.41
By day the sun hung high and hot, baking the men in the open and turning the airless jungle into a suffocating shroud. A writer in the Imperial Army’s Propaganda Corps, traveling with attacking units on Bataan, tried to capture the hardship in verse.
Our troops plod wearily
Through a furnace wind.
There is no food,
Our bellies must be filled
With water.
Drops of sweat roll out
From under our helmets.42
By sundown the hohei would be soaked in sweat, then, as the temperature dropped and day gave way to night, their wet uniforms would cling to their skin and make them shiver. And all at once, from somewhere in the dark, would come the order to attack.
Each night they went forward, then attacked again.
“Whaah!” they yelled, charging into the darkness. “Whaah!”
And each morning the fields and jungle floor of Bataan were covered in corpses.
They attacked on January 11 and they attacked on the 12th, but, as they were wont to say, “without a good result.”
“I am thoroughly disappointed,” General Homma wrote in his diary. “Takeuchi [a regimental commander who led a flanking column west into the hills] took the wrong road and [got lost] . . . missing out on a good opportunity. What an incompetent fellow.”43
But it was not incompetence that was killing the Summer Brigade; it was the exigencies of the moment. Without detailed maps, accurate intelligence, and reliable communication with brigade headquarters (their wires were continually cut by enemy shelling), the officers in the field leading the brigade’s columns were left wandering in the dark.
Many led by instinct, which is to say the mindless reflex to storm ahead, and they positioned themselves at the most dangerous spot on the battlefield, the head of the column. Nara was losing so many lieutenants, captains, majors, and colonels that he had to order them to stop their bravado. “A person who cannot lead his men if not in a standing position is not a hero but a fool,” he wrote in a battlefield directive. “There have been actual examples where three persons, the company commander and the platoon leaders [gathered at the head of the column], were killed at the same time.”44
As the casualties mounted, the men in the ranks started to lose their seishin, their fighting spirit. Leading an attack, an officer might stop and turn to urge his men forward only to find himself alone in front of the enemy. “If a charge is to be carried out,” Nara wrote in yet another directive, “it should be the creed of every officer and man in the force to charge en masse into the enemy’s position, even if enemy shells are falling all around.”45
On January 16, Sergeant Nakamura’s unit managed to rout the enemy from a position in the foothills, but enemy artillery had the spot zeroed in and the new occupants soon found themselves under a “continuous rain of artillery shells.”
[Nakamura, Diary] I thought my end was near, so I took out my mother’s photo. Yesterday and today are festival days at home. I wonder what the people are doing. I am praying for the health and happiness of grandma and the others from a fox-hole at the front.46
At last the Japanese changed tactics. Instead of ordering one infantry charge after another, Nara’s officers first sent out infiltrators to probe the enemy strength, intrepid men like Sergeant Hideo Sekihara.
KIRIKOMI-TAI, they called themselves, men who slipped silently through the black and “cut deep” into the enemy’s trenches. In a dangerous profession, kirikomi was the most dangerous of jobs, and Hideo Sekihara, the oke maker from Aoya, was well suited to such work.47
He was a guns now, a senior sergeant in charge of his own five-man squad. An hour or so before dusk, he and his men would gather at the edge of the battlefield, about five hundred yards in front of the enemy’s position, and there, in the fading light, they would look through their binoculars and study the enemy trenches, noting the placement of machine guns and the other strong points on the line.
“Put every feature of the field in your mind so that you can walk it with your eyes closed,” the guns told them.
Then they waited. Kirikomi required “sheer darkness,” the blackest black. To muffle their steps they swaddled their boots in socks or rags. Halfway to the enemy’s lines they would get down on their bellies and, as the guns had instructed them, crawl “like house lizards,” right side, left side . . . right side, left side. Within a hundred yards of their objective they turned into “inchworms,” undulating forward (again as they’d been taught), rising and falling, rising and falling slowly, silently until they reached the edge of the enemy trench line.
At this point, the guns always took the lead. He looked for a soft spot in the lines, a few yards left unmanned where he could slide into a trench unnoticed, then work his way left or right until he came u
pon an enemy on watch, almost always a hapless Filipino. If the man was facing away from him, Hideo Sekihara would reach out in the dark and tap him gently on the shoulder.
“Hi,” he’d say, or sometimes “okay,” or even “magandang gabi” (Tagalog for “good evening”), anything to get the man to turn toward him so he could drive his bayonet into the man’s heart.
Sometimes he would stick the blade between the man’s ribs and rip into a ventricle or slice through a major vein or artery, and sometimes he would stick the man in the diaphragm, or just below it, and thrust upward, as hard as he was able, into the body.
The first time he tapped a man on the shoulder, Hideo Sekihara started to tremble. He thought, “If I do not kill this man, I will be shot immediately.” Kore wa shinu-ka ikiru no mondai desu, This was a question of life or death. After that he did his job without thinking.
Before the kirikomi-tai returned to their own lines, they scoured the enemy trenches for weapons, ammunition, food, clothing—anything to supplement the pitiful provisions of the Imperial Army.
More often than not, Sekihara and his men got away clean, but now and then one of the men would trip an alarm and then, all at once, the enemy trench line would erupt with rifle and machine-gun fire, and the house lizards and inchworms would have to crawl for their lives.
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