Like the other recruits, he took his lumps, the daily cuff on the ear or crack in the mouth or open hand on the side of the face. “Private sanctions,” the conscripts called this hazing, the bullying behind the barracks doors. None of them complained. No one ever did. Not openly. (Though some offered the public protest of suicide, slipping silently into the latrine at night to hang themselves.) Once in a while, a rare while, a strong-willed recruit, usually someone with an education and always someone with backbone, would offer some resistance. He wouldn’t go against the grain, exactly. That would land a man in prison. Instead, he’d just stand up for himself.
One Sunday after their evening meal, the recruits (as was their duty) were cleaning up after the senior privates. Each recruit had a different job. Kiyoshi Kinoshita was collecting the mess kits and returning them to each man’s cupboard, and in the rush, he apparently put one soldier’s kit in the wrong place.
“My cupboard’s on the second row,” the senior private said. “You looked right at the shelf. Didn’t you see it?”
Kiyoshi Kinoshita should have answered, “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir,” because senior privates were always right, which is to say, recruits were always wrong. But Kiyoshi Kinoshita refused to offer the required obsequity.
He had just returned from a few hours’ leave—he’d walked to the town, had a good meal, cleared the army out of his head.
“No,” he told the senior private, somewhat dryly, “I didn’t see it.”
And just like that the man slapped him, slapped him harder than he had ever been slapped before, so hard his ears started to ring.
The unreasonable had turned into the intolerable, and Kiyoshi Kinoshita rushed his assailant, grabbed him by the legs, turned him upside down, and dangled him out a second-story window. He was going to drop the man on his head when he felt someone grabbing at him, pulling him, and as he turned to see who was interfering, he found himself facing a circle of senior privates.
In an instant he was on the ground. At first the kicks and punches stung, then it was just one dull thud after another. Pretty soon his eyes began to swell and his ears began to bleed.
When the “punishment” was over, the other first-year men picked him up and helped him to his cot. They soaked towels in cold water and applied them to the cuts, welts, and contusions on his face. The next day his platoon commander excused him from duty.
At first he was humiliated. He’d never felt so helpless, so powerless. Later, after he healed, a quiet rage took hold of him, and one morning toward the end of training when his company commander called him into the office and said, “You went far in school and you should take the test to become an officer,” he answered courteously, “No, thank you, sir,” because he had come to hate the army and everything about it.
To keep his sanity, his tsuriai, or sense of balance, he adopted a mindset common to most recruits. Instead of the iniquities of the army, Kiyoshi Kinoshita focused on his duty, his obligation to his country.
“To protect one’s own country is something like protecting one’s own family,” he told himself. “It’s something I have to do, just like obeying my father.”
Several months later he still hated the army, but he was a senior private himself now, and with war approaching he had begun to feel a connection with his fellow hohei, that complicated transaction called comradeship.
They all ate their rice from the same pot. They all shouldered the same heavy load. Soon they would be watching one another’s backs. After that they would be carrying home one another’s ashes.
FOR FIVE DAYS at Quinauan Point, Colonel Tsunehiro’s men fought the enemy to a standstill, even advanced a bit, a few more yards of ground. Then on January 28, the enemy apparently brought in fresh troops, regular infantry from the look of them (in fact, the crack Philippine Scouts), and the battle for Quinauan Point turned desperate.
The enemy attacked in the morning behind a whirlwind of gunfire. Colonel Tsunehiro’s men hunkered down and dug deeper, dug furiously. The gunfire was so intense it shredded the screen of leaves and vines and kicked up clouds of dust and detritus from the jungle floor.
The colonel’s men stayed low in their holes, waiting, then, with the enemy almost on top of them, they too let loose a volley of fire, then another and another. And so it went, back and forth, back and forth, almost till dark.
Late the next afternoon, following another day of frenzied fighting, Colonel Tsunehiro wrote a message to General Kimura at division headquarters.
Each company is fighting bravely, but there is no apparent promise of our completing our duty. [We are] surrounded by a superior enemy . . . The dead and wounded continue to mount, and our fighting strength is conspicuously declining. We are in a position of danger . . . We are already lacking in munitions and food. However, we are still fighting hard.55
Thereupon he added a poignant postscript.
“I pray for the success of Your Excellency’s strenuous fight,” he said, a doomed officer telling his commander he was grateful that the army was doing all it could to reach him. Then he signed off with, Tenno Heika banzai! (Long live the emperor!), a valediction that, under the circumstances, could be taken only as a dying declaration.
On the eighth day of battle, the enemy began its attack with a barrage of mortar and artillery rounds. The high-trajectory missiles came crashing down through the canopy and exploded on the hohei in their holes, then the barrage lifted, and behind a loud rattle of rifle fire the enemy advanced.
The Sixth Company was on the right side of the arc now, and Kiyoshi Kinoshita spent the day crawling back and forth with messages. He had to keep low, creep carefully under the heavy wooden lianas and across the green thorns and thistles that tore at his uniform and ripped into his skin. Sometimes, to catch his breath, he hunkered down for a moment in a depression in the ground or tucked himself into a nook between two finlike tree roots. The jungle soil was cool, the only relief from the smothering heat, but he had to keep moving.
He was thirsty—they all were. Some of the men had discovered a small spring in a ravine leading down to the beach, but it took a long time for a man to fill his canteen there, especially under fire. And the heat and dust and smoke and fear left their throats tight and their mouths as dry as rice paper and bitter as vinegar. They were hungry too, down to dry biscuits and bits of candy now. There was little forage on Quinauan Point, a few roots perhaps, some leaves and grasses they boiled to a sour tea. And they were so low on ammunition they often waited until an enemy was almost on top of them to fire. One officer, defending himself only with his sword, cut off his enemy’s right hand before his enemy shot and killed him with the other.
After a week of such savagery, bodies, limbs, hunks of flesh, and viscera fouled the jungle floor. When they were able, the colonel’s men dragged their dead comrades down a ravine to a natural cave in the face of the cliff, where, after picking the pockets of the dead for food and ammunition, they stacked the corpses in neat clusters, like cords of wood. Mostly, however, a man lay where he fell, or where a comrade could drag him. In such heat, of course, the remains began to rot, and the smell, the reek of decaying flesh, left the survivors retching.
So many men were wounded that the battalion surgeon had long since exhausted his kit. Those with severe wounds—men shot in the chest or stomach, men with burned or flayed flesh or splintered bones—tried to be stoic, to endure the consuming pain that settles in after the shock wears off, pain that left them bleary-eyed and breathless, but they could not keep up the pretense, the reserve that was always expected of a Japanese man. Sometimes, crawling past a hole on his way to a command post, Kiyoshi Kinoshita was arrested by the sound of suffering. “O itai” (oh-ee-tie-ee), a wounded comrade would yell to him, “How it hurts! How it hurts me!” Oh-ee-tie-ee.
He never stopped. The yelling of the wounded always drew more fire, and the Samaritans who answered the sorrowful cries and entreaties usually ended up casualties themselves or stacked in the cave at the b
ottom of the cliff. So he kept going, kept pulling himself through the creepers and ferns and across the moss beds and tangles of thorns.
On the ninth day the enemy began to push the battalion back, and the arc started to collapse on itself. Kiyoshi Kinoshita was with Colonel Tsunehiro in the center.
“Go to the Sixth Company and tell them they have to hold,” the colonel said. “Tell the Sixth they have to fight until help comes.”
The colonel knew by now that no relief would reach him; the division would never be able to break through the enemy’s main line and drive down the peninsula in time to rescue what was left of the trapped battalion. And his men doubtless knew that, too. Their mission had failed. They were exhausted, outnumbered, and outgunned. Still, they would fight. The colonel knew they would fight. They were hohei.
LAPCADIO HEARN, the thoughtful Victorian who wandered Japan for fourteen years trying to get a sense of the place, thought loyalty a “religion” in Japan, a transcendent form of “affection.” Loyalty, the government proclaimed in 1937, “is the basis of our national morality . . . In loyalty do we obtain life.”56
To the soldier, “duty” was loyalty in practice, and to those who did their duty in time of war the government promised martyrdom. It built the Yasukuni Shrine on Kudan Hill in Tokyo, where the souls of all those killed in battle were installed as kami, soldier gods on perpetual duty protecting the fatherland. There was no greater glory, the government said, no better way for a man to bring honor to his family (and fulfill his filial piety) than to have his name inscribed on the rolls of the immortals on Kudan Hill.57
If self-sacrifice was the apotheosis of loyalty, then surrender was its apostasy. “Retreat and surrender are not permissible in our Army,” General Sadao Araki told an American professor teaching in Japan before the war. “To become captive of the enemy by surrendering after doing their best is regarded by foreign soldiers as acceptable conduct. But according to our traditional Bushido, retreat and surrender constitute the greatest disgrace and are actions unbecoming to a Japanese soldier.”58
Araki and his fellow ideologues were determined to create an army of human bullets and, like the Meiji politicians and strongmen before them, they too regularly hijacked history to do it. They took Bushido, that loose canon of moral instructions purporting to be the samurai code of behavior and belief, and created a code for the modern soldier, the Senjinkun, a pamphlet that served as a manual of battlefield morals. “Fight faithfully to the last,” it reminded the soldier. “Even if it means dying on the battlefield, never give in to the enemy . . . Do what is expected of you, remembering that what you do will reflect on the honor of your home.”59
Thus a man who surrendered, or was captured, betrayed not only his country but all those who had ever shared his name, living and dead. And the shame of that was more than most Japanese were willing to carry.60
“GO TO THE SIXTH COMPANY and tell them they have to hold,” Colonel Tsunehiro told Kiyoshi Kinoshita. “Tell the Sixth they have to fight until help comes.”61
He kept low, crept slowly. Any movement, a rustling of leaves, a swaying of vines, would set off a storm of fire. So he inched along, zen-dosuru, “like a worm,” first to the right and down the line, then forward toward the command post of the Sixth Company. Already the day was stifling. No breeze beneath the canopy to carry away the decay and rot.
From time to time the enemy fired bursts in his general direction. From time to time his comrades returned the fire. He stayed below it all, on the jungle floor, hugging the ground—“seeking cover,” infantrymen called it—as if the reddish brown soil, the sweet earth, could enfold a man and keep him safe.
The command post was just ahead, but a tree felled by enemy artillery blocked his path, so he lifted himself up just a little to peek over the top, then, by degrees, he started to slide across the log and down the other side. And just then he felt a dull, heavy thud on his back, below his left shoulder, then an intense pressure, as if someone had poked him hard from behind and knocked him to the ground. Itai! He’d been hit.
The bullet mauled him. In an instant a sweet-smelling serum began to well up in the wound and spill down his back. The pain took his breath away, made his heart pound, soaked his body in sweat.
His left arm hung limp and heavy at his side. He fished a large white handkerchief from his pocket and tried to stuff it into the wound to stem the flow—
The message! He had to get to the Sixth Company and deliver the message.
The gunfire was more intense now as the enemy advanced. He started to crawl forward, dragging himself with just his right arm.
At the edge of the command post he encountered the company staff sergeant and made his report.
“The battalion commander says you should stand still until the help comes, until the relief comes,” he said. “And—” He didn’t get to finish because the sergeant was shot dead in front of him.
He crawled on, finally reached the captain, delivered his message, then turned around and began the long trip back along the line to the colonel’s command post in the center.
He could sense he was seriously hurt. “This is a real miserable situation,” he thought, but if he could make it back, crawl to the colonel’s position, the doctor there could treat him. A bandage, some medicine, a drink of water, and a little rest, and he would be fine.
He dragged himself a few feet at a time. When he reached the command post, the doctor examined his shoulder.
“There is no way to treat such a big and serious wound,” the doctor said. “The only thing you can do is wash it with seawater.”
ON FEBRUARY 2, the eleventh day of the battle for Quinauan Point, the enemy brought in tanks. The Americans attacked twice that day, their tank cannon firing point-blank while their artillery and mortar rounds rained down on the hohei foxholes.
The battlefield was a wasteland—the denuded jungle, the brown dust and black smoke, the rotting corpses—and with the rumble of explosions, the unrelenting heat and thirst and cries of the wounded, Quinauan Point became kono-yo no jigoku, “a kind of hell.”
Kiyoshi Kinoshita made his way to the edge of the point, stumbled down the ravine to the beach, and washed his wound with seawater, a remedy that brought him nothing but more pain. He was relieved of all duty now, save to survive.
One day passed, two. He grew weaker, more helpless. The blood vessels and nerves in his shoulder had been shattered, and the damaged muscles in his rotator cuff had left his shoulder, arm, and hand dead weight. His wound, still spilling fluid and blood, was suppurating, and he could smell the rot on his back. The foul emanation drew flies, swarms of them, a black blanket on the wound.
Dizzy and faint, he set himself down at the base of a large tree atop the point where many other seriously wounded men had gathered. The tree was near a steep ravine that led from edge of the cliff down to the beach. In the ravine was a natural spring where, during breaks in the battle, the men still able to fight went to fill their canteens. As they passed by his tree, Kiyoshi Kinoshita would beg them for water and ask for news of his comrades in the Sixth Company, still trying to hold the line.
The battalion’s arc was slowly contracting, and the defenders were being squeezed into a pocket. From time to time Kiyoshi Kinoshita could hear the colonel yelling encouragement to the men in the foxholes.
Gambare! Gambare! he would shout. Keep going, men! Hold on! Hold on!
Every time he yelled, the enemy answered with more fire.
Now the dead lay where they fell, grotesques, tongues hanging, eyes bulging. The gas and sewage from the black and bloated bodies left the air rank and the men gagging.
Kiyoshi Kinoshita lost track of time. The sun rose, the sun set. It was light, it was dark. He started to think he was dying.
Gambare!
The colony of wounded around the palm tree had grown to more than a dozen now. Gut shot, many of them, others holding a mangled arm or leg. Now and then a man unwilling to face the shame of capture or
so miserable in his suffering he no longer thought his life precious enough to preserve, would place the muzzle of his rifle under his chin and reach down and pull the trigger.
Kiyoshi Kinoshita thought, “This is the end now.”
He passed out, came to, passed out again. When he awoke it seemed to him that the volume of fire had decreased. No one came by for water now, and he was so desperate for a drink he drank his own urine.
He thought he heard someone say that the colonel was dead. At all events he did not hear his beloved commander yelling anymore. He did not hear anything at all.
VARIOUS AMERICAN and Filipino units had attacked repeatedly during those last days. Their tanks blasted the Japanese out of their holes or kept rolling and crushed them where they stood. The evening of February 4 the Philippine Scouts leading the attack reported that they had forced the Japanese into a pocket roughly a hundred yards across and fifty yards deep. The Scouts could see the edge of the cliff and, beyond, the water. Alongside the Scouts were American airmen-turned-infantry, led by pilot William E. Dyess. “At fifty yards [from the edge] we could see [the Japanese] plainly,” Dyess wrote later. Then, “suddenly, above the noise of the gunfire, we could hear shrieks and high-pitched yelling.” Some of the Japanese were “tearing off their uniforms and leaping off the cliffs.”62
Several score Japanese held out in the ravines and beach caves for another three days. They refused all offers of surrender, so on February 8 the Americans collapsed the caves with dynamite and called in gunboats to shell the last of the holdouts. A handful of Japanese, unconscious but still alive, were taken prisoner. Some six hundred hohei were killed at Quinauan Point and two hundred more at another landing. In effect, the 2nd Battalion, 20th Infantry was wiped out, the first Japanese unit in World War II to suffer a total defeat. Later in the fighting in the Pacific this kind of mass sacrifice became so regular the Japanese gave it a special name, gyokusai, “honorable death,” and gyokusai suru, “to die but never surrender,” became a rallying cry. But in those first days of the war, when such a large loss still shocked the Imperial General Staff, the Nipponjin used another word to describe the bloodletting at Quinauan Point. Zenmetsu, they called it. Colonel Tsunehiro and his men had been “annihilated.”
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