But he had business to take care of, business he knew would be first on his list. Turning up the dirt driveway that ran alongside a post and barbed wire fence, he crackled up the road toward the home of Henry Wheeler, who happened to be outside his barn directing men hauling hay into a loft.
Henry turned toward the stopping car and wiped the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief as Jake, back in civilian clothes, got out and made his way toward him.
“Jake!” Henry said.
“Great to see you, Henry!”
The two shook hands vigorously, both with painfully big smiles. The rest of the farmhands stopped to admire the local hero.
“You’re a celebrity now! And to think you once worked for me!”
“Well, you see, Mr. Wheeler, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Mr. Wheeler winced. “Don’t tell me you need a job! I just put on two ...”
“No, sir. The government’s treated me real good. I got all my back pay and just bought me a car and a newspaper company paid me way too much for my story. But, back when I was working for you, I, well, I wanted to apologize to you for taking, well, for stealing some of your tools, and I’d like to make it right.” Jake pulled an envelope from his pocket and held it out.
Henry looked down at the envelope and held up his hand embarrassingly. “Aw, Jake, you don’t need to ...”
“Yeah, I do. That’ll cover getting new tools and more. I’m real sorry.”
Sighing, Henry slowly grasped the envelope, then looked Jake straight in the eyes and paused. “They say you’re gonna go back to Japan. Is that true, Jake?”
“Yes, sir. When I’m ready.”
Henry tapped the envelope onto his palm a few times while staring at Jake’s face, then slowly gave a grin and gentle nod.
Jake knew that Henry got it. His job here was done, and it felt good.
A few weeks later.
Soft, blue moonlight beaming in from a window blended with the yellow light flooding in through the open door into the Andrus’ master bedroom, lighting the collection of press clippings. In the other room, the sounds of family, laughter, and the lingering aroma of food warmed the home with a joy only those who’ve experienced it can ever comprehend.
The wall of newspaper articles graduated from the headlines of “Mother Fears Son Executed By Japs” and “Mrs. Andrus Has Faith, Says Son Is Still Alive” to the newly posted entries of “Four Doolittle Tokyo Raiders Found by Chute Team in China,” “Oregon Doolittle Flier Comes Home to Mom,” and many others, several featuring Jake biting into a piece of fried chicken.
At the table crowded with all four siblings and their families, his stepfather, and neighbors, Jake spoke while holding a half-eaten cob of corn. “So there I was in New York City at some radio station, and I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me! For one sentence?’” People chewed biscuits and chicken as Mrs. Andrus delivered a dish of baked beans while Jake spouted on. “So I read the sentence over the radio and they paid me four hundred dollars! Four hundred!”
Hoots and hollers rang out with cheers.
After the guests had had their fill of ice cream, pie, and tales from Jake’s world adventures and the last pair of red tail lights coursed away down the driveway, Jake and his mom sat in rockers on the porch in the cool evening air. They quietly swayed under a huge sky of stars and moonlight, the gold-lit windows highlighting their backs.
“I thought, maybe I could serve in Japan,” Jake said, “by being a janitor in a church or something. But I felt like the Lord told me to get in and work for all I’m worth.”
Mrs. Andrus smiled and rocked.
“I don’t quite know what that means or what I could do,” he continued, “but I’m gonna go back to school, Ma, really learn Japanese, get a degree...”
Her chuckles interrupted his little speech. “My, my, my! At thirty-three you’ll be the oldest boy in school!”
Jake hung his head and grinned. “Well, I’m kinda short anyway, so I don’t think too many folks’ll notice.” He looked across the expanse of stars in the sky. “When I was on those planes coming home, I had a lot of time to think, think about where I’ve been, what I’ve done, where I’m going, and where I want to be heading. I told God I’d never smoke another cigarette or drink another drop of alcohol. It’s not like I felt I had to, or that it was some big deal, I just want to live clean, you know, shoot for the best.”
His mom took it all in. She was still in a state of disbelief. Not only had her son come home alive, he was alive in his spirit as well.
Jake gave a single chuckle. “Huh. To think, all those years me and the boys just wanted to get back home. Now all I can think of is getting back to Japan.” He looked his mom in the eyes. “Strange, isn’t it?”
“It is. And all those years we waited, and hoped and prayed for you to come home, and now?” Her eyes sparkled as she reached over and put her hand on top of his. “I’m with you all the way, son. I’m with you all the way.”
Chapter 117
Early December, 1945. Tokyo.
Kneeling beside a charcoal fire heating an iron pot, Haruko folded clothes with Yoshiya and Miyako. Haruko glanced at her son’s face as he slowly folded a shirt. She could see a sadness that a boy of twelve wasn’t allowed to talk about. She stopped. “What’s the matter, Yoshiya?”
His little sister stopped and looked at him as well.
With his head down, he waited a few seconds. “When’s Dad coming back home? Is he working somewhere?”
Haruko forced a smile and finished folding the shirt in front of Yoshiya. “Your father needs some time to be by himself. He’ll be back.”
Yoshiya looked up through his furrowed brow and folded his arms. “When?”
The mountains of Chichibu, 50 miles northwest of Tokyo.
The cold crimson sky closed into night over the dense groves of tall Japanese cedar, cypress, and red pines clinging to the rocky mountainsides. A waterfall hissed in the distance. Fuchida, his hair and beard untrimmed since September, sat warming his soiled hands over a fire. The injured tiger had withdrawn into the dark recesses of the forest. Beside him was his only consolation, his German Shepherd, Lity.
He once clearly knew everything he believed in and where he was going. Now, holed up in an abandoned shack, he wrestled with the voices of the past and echoing questions for which he had no answers. He yanked his overcoat tighter around his neck and exhaled a cloud of vapor as the cold bore down on him.
Everything he’d lived for and led others to die for had come to nothing. Worse than nothing. He didn’t know what he believed any longer.
Picking up a stick, he shoved the burning logs, sending crackling embers into the dark sky. As he stared, he could see the smiling faces at the air base after his raid on Pearl Harbor chanting his name, “Fuchida! Fuchida! Fuchida!” Hero? Now he was the villain, the leader of the attack on a day that will live in infamy. Infamy! The things he’d spent his entire life on had only ruined the nation he loved and helped destroy an entire generation.
Lity muzzled her cold nose against Fuchida’s leg. Looking down at her glimmering brown eyes, he gently ran his hand over her head. “What have I done?” he whispered.
Then the words of The Emperor came to him, “... to establish a peace to last a thousand generations.” But all Fuchida had seen was war and more war. What did the Emperor know of peace?
MacArthur, despite his proud posture and reputation, had surprised Fuchida with his humble, penetrating words, which now lingered in his mind, “... methods for peace have all failed ... We have had our last chance ... Armageddon will be at our door ... The problem is spiritual ...” The problem seemed clear, but what was the solution?
Yamamoto died a noble warrior’s death, and Nagumo took his own life, as many of Fuchida’s own fellow officers had done. Staring distantly into the flaming embers, he almost felt abandoned in life by those who had entered death, left behind to face the life-long shame and torment of defeat. Perhaps, he t
hought, it would be best if he followed them ...
Fuchida lay back against the ground with his hands behind his head. Gazing into the early night sky, watching the smoke drift upwards lit by the flickering flames below, the impassioned plea of the old woman from Hiroshima came to his mind, “Now where will you lead us?! Where do we go now?” He sighed in angry frustration. For the first time in his life, he was completely without direction. Lity pressed her muzzle against him and licked his hand.
Chapter 118
Three weeks later. Yokosuka Naval Base, Tokyo Bay.
Cleaned up and back in the office, Fuchida dressed in civilian clothes since the military was now disbanded. He vigorously made notes on a pad at his desk behind large glass windows separating him from a roomful of desks and busy clerks, all men.
A fellow ex-officer stepped into Fuchida’s office, dropped some folders on the corner of his desk, pulled a cigarette from his mouth, and eased into a chair. “Another war crimes trial?”
Fuchida didn’t look up. “More like a mockery of justice. Rear Admiral Okada.” Fuchida laid his pencil down and glanced up. “He captained the heavy cruiser Tone when we went to Pearl Harbor. Later he was the commander of our naval base at Ambon, which included a prisoner of war camp.” Fuchida angrily tore the page off the pad and inserted it into a folder.
The ex-officer blew smoke and snubbed the butt of his cigarette waiting for the rest of the story.
“He’s been charged with being responsible for the deaths of some prisoners, even though he had nothing to do with it.”
“And you’re being called to testify?”
Fuchida opened another folder. “I don’t know. I have to be there, though, because I know him well.”
A strikingly beautiful woman appeared in the doorway with a tray of handmade confections, startling both of them.
“Sembei? Wagashi?” she said with a smile.
Fuchida raised his hand to wave off the gift. “Oh, I couldn’t.”
She responded with a pretend frown. “But I made them myself for the office.”
Glancing to the other ex-officer, Fuchida nodded. “One of each, then. Thank you so much.”
The other man, likewise, nodded and helped himself to one of each. “Thank you.”
“You let me know if you want some more. Don’t be shy, OK?” She said with a smile.
The two men nodded like boys to their mother as they each took bites and allowed their eyes to follow her outside the office to the desk of another staff member, where she bent over and offered her treats once again.
Fuchida whispered, “Wow!”
“Yeah,” the other man replied, still staring. “That’s what her fiancé said when he first saw her.”
Abruptly shaking his head, Fuchida looked at his watch, then at the ex-officer. “My plane leaves in two days for Rabaul. I need to get back to work.”
The ex-officer stood up. “Sure.”
As Fuchida ran his hand over a sheet in his folder, he looked up again through the glass window at the woman, who glanced back with a smile.
January, 1946. Rabaul, New Britain. The Australian Territory of New Guinea.
A squad of Australian military police cordoned off a weathered, wooden schoolhouse flying an Australian flag under a cloudless, burning sky.
Only 300 miles south of the equator, the school room overflowed with perspiring Australian soldiers at the perimeter, and seated and standing reporters, civilians, witnesses from Japan, journalists, photographers, and diplomats – all present for the trail of Fuchida’s friend, Rear Admiral Okada, now in full swing.
Dressed in a white civilian suit and tie in the front row of the gallery, Fuchida sat waving a fan to ward off the stifling heat and humidity, but unable to cool the intensity of the trial. He came as both as an observer and as a possible witness and shook his head with disapproval as he studied the judges. At the head of the makeshift courtroom on a raised platform sat the head judge, or president, a lieutenant colonel with salt and pepper hair and a waxed mustache. He was flanked by two majors – all wearing translator headphones and seated beneath the British Royal Coat of Arms banner on the wall behind them, crossed by two Australian flags on poles. Fuchida expected no sympathy from them.
The Australian prosecutor paced before the Japanese witness, Captain Shirozu, seated with folded arms behind a wide table strewn with papers. The prosecutor spoke in respectable Japanese. “And the four listed prisoners were guilty of stealing rations and the fifth prisoner of attempting escape, is that correct?”
Shirozu nodded. “That’s right.”
The head judge adjusted his headphones.
The prosecutor leaned on the table with both hands. “And ordered to be executed for these offenses, is that correct?”
“Those were the orders.”
“How were those orders carried out?”
Shirozu paused looking at the floor, then looked up. “Four of the prisoners were bayonetted, the fourth was decapitated.”
The prosecutor glanced to see the expression on the judge’s faces.
“Were those orders given to you in official papers?”
“No, I received them by telephone from Captain Kawasaki.”
Fuchida looked to the ceiling with impatient eyes.
Standing upright, the prosecutor continued. “Did you know that under Japanese law prisoners of war had to be court-martialed before being executed?”
“Yes, I knew that,” Shirozu said matter-of-factly.
“Wasn’t it your duty to send these prisoners to be court-martialed first?”
“It was not my duty.”
“Then, whose duty was it?”
Shirozu turned his head toward a man in a khaki jumpsuit with a large letter “P” stenciled on his shoulders and knees, “P” standing for “prisoner.” “I believe that was the duty of the Commander of the Twenty-Five Naval Base Force.” He looked back to the prosecutor. “Rear Admiral Okada.”
All eyes in the room turned toward Okada.
Fuchida fanned harder. He’d seen this before. Both Shirozu and Kawasaki were clearly involved, had conflicts of interest, and were doing little more than shifting blame upwards until there was nowhere else to shift it. The last man in line got the axe.
The prosecutor studied papers in his hand, then let his arm swing to his side as he addressed Okada, now seated behind the table. “Do you think the execution of a prisoner of war who has committed a crime, without a due trial, is a lawful homicide?”
“No,” Okada said plainly in Japanese. “It is absolutely not lawful.”
“And you agree that all lawful orders from the headquarters originated from you?”
“That is correct.”
“And you always maintained strict discipline and order of the forces under your command?”
“Yes, I maintained a strict chain of command.”
Fuchida was engrossed. Regardless of being in the role of a defeated enemy, he’d seen Japan receive at least an attempt of some form of justice from the military courts, although it always seemed slanted against the Japanese. Okada had been given a capable defense attorney and was allowed to submit a sixteen page plea of innocence to the judge – fully translated and typed in English. Fuchida held out hope that somehow Okada would be vindicated, however distant it seemed.
“Captain Shirozu testified that orders from headquarters were given for the execution of the prisoners through Captain Kawasaki, who is now deceased. Did you give these orders or did you delegate that authority to Captain Shirozu?”
“Neither. I was not consulted in the matter.”
Fuchida sucked air through his teeth. This was the critical point of the trial. Okada swore to him that he never gave an order for the prisoners to be killed, so either someone in the courtroom was lying or Kawasaki lied. Fuchida believed in his friend, granting the fact that it would be extraordinary for Okada to be that far removed from an order for execution.
“So,” the prosecutor said, allowing hims
elf a sarcastic grin, “we are to believe that you knew nothing about a matter of this importance, that you gave no orders, and that subordinates acted on their own, completely contradicting your testimony of strict discipline and chain of command?”
Okada looked directly into the prosecutor’s eyes and thought for a moment. “I should have been consulted, but I was not.”
After a short break in the trial, the judge tapped his gavel as people took their seats and a hush quickly spread across the broiling courtroom. He cleared his throat and looked through his reading glasses at the sheet of paper in his aged hands. Journalists grabbed their pads. Hand-held fans fluttered throughout the room.
Sitting on the edge of his seat, Fuchida leaned forward. He was convinced that no civilian court of law would convict anyone on such insignificant and sometimes contradictory circumstantial evidence. But this was a military court that ruled in the eyes of an angry world who wanted justice for untold bloodshed among thousands of prisoners who were grossly mistreated, left to die, or killed. Justice or maybe revenge. Sympathy for the defeated foe simply wasn’t a consideration.
The judge spoke in his Australian English as Okada listened to a translation via headphones, “In regards to the Australian War Crimes trial number 2963, Rear Admiral Okada Temetsugu and the cases of the five named Australian prisoners of war, this court finds the accused guilty of all charges, of committing war crimes, that is to say murder, and is hereby sentenced to suffer death by shooting.” The judge slammed his gavel as the room immediately burst into chatter and a barrage of camera flashes.
Okada listened over his headphones as the translation was completed and nodded, showing no emotion as he stared at the floor. Then he raised his head, pulled off his headset, and glanced across the murmuring room at Fuchida.
Fuchida felt the pain in his eyes. His blood boiled.
Chapter 119
March, 1946. Seattle Pacific College, Seattle, Washington.
Wounded Tiger Page 35