Conduct Under Fire Read online

  Once casualties made it to Hospitals Nos. 1 and 2, they awaited treatment in open-air nipa and bamboo sheds, in litters on sawhorses, or on the ground. Most wounds were from shrapnel or small arms fire. Many were abdominal and inflicted by the 1905 Arisaka rifle (Model 38) or the 1937 Arisaka sniper’s rifle (Model 97), both of which took a .255-caliber bullet. Later models used a heavier .303-caliber bullet that would have drastically increased the mortality rate. Remarkably, out of 15,000 admissions to Hospital No. 2, there were only 303 recorded deaths.

  One thing the Americans on the front and in the rear understood well: they had encountered a foe unlike any other. Demeaned for their short stature, their nearsightedness, their thick, round glasses, and their comical buckteeth—in a word, for being “yellow”—the Japanese had proven themselves to be ruthless and fearless warriors. They were willing to fight to the death.

  8

  Never Surrender

  BEFORE GOING INTO COMBAT, Japanese infantrymen were armed with a copy of the Field Service Code, or Senjinkun. A few pages in length, it was the modern soldier’s handbook, published and distributed on January 8, 1941, by order of General Tōjō Hideki “so that those in the zone of combat may wholly abide to the Imperial Rescript to enhance the moral virtues of the Imperial Army.”

  The Senjinkun was prepared by the Ministry of the Army and codified by the inspector general of the Department of Education, Yamada Otsuzō. Yamada had solicited opinions of university professors in Tōkyō and Kyōto—even the poet Doi Bansui—in its composition. The Senjinkun was intended to prevent a recurrence of massacres such as the Rape of Nanking, but it served instead as a primer of Japanese militarism.

  It was the foot soldier’s duty, said the Senjinkun, “to spread kōdō [the Imperial Way] far and wide so that the enemy may look up in awe to the august virtues of His Majesty.” The Imperial Way combined “valour tempered by benevolence” even though war demanded “a crushing blow” to the enemy. That meant calmly facing death, “rejoicing in the hope of living in the eternal cause of which you serve.”13

  Bound by the honor of his name, a soldier should never “suffer the disgrace of becoming a prisoner.” Privation was his lot, which depended on integrity, austerity, and the triumph of duty over desire. While a soldier was “always prepared to expose his corpse in the field,” there was “nothing more to be regretted than to fall a victim to disease.” Discipline, obedience, self-sacrifice, and cooperation were characterisitic of the soldier’s spirit. But on the battlefield aggressiveness, determination, and perseverance came to the fore. “Always retain the spirit of attack and always maintain freedom of action,” admonished the Senjinkun. “Never give up a position but rather die.”

  One stricture in the Senjinkun can be traced to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. In September 1894 General Yamagata Aritomo arrived in Seoul and issued a “written appeal to the officers” that concluded: “Should it be desperate fighting, under no circumstances may you be captured alive. You should rather die bravely and without reluctance, and maintain the honor of the Japanese warriors.”

  Yamagata’s directive appears to be the first that specifically prohibited Japanese soldiers and officers from becoming prisoners of war. It became known as gyokusai (a death of honorable annihilation), which means, literally, “the shattering of crystal.”

  Ritual suicide itself dated back to the early years of the shogunate, when samurai warriors committed seppuku on the death of a daimyō, or master. As Yamamoto Tsunetomo wrote in the Hagakure (Book of the Samurai):Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from a thousand foot cliff, dying of disease, or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

  The Hagakure was used by Japanese militarists in the 1920s and 1930s to revive the tradition of the samurai warrior, elements of which were incorporated and deliberately distorted in the Senjinkun. But by the time the Hagakure appeared in the eighteenth century, seppuku had actually been long outlawed. Which was why the author, instead of killing himself after his daimyō Nabeshima Mitsushige died in 1700, as had been the custom, became a Buddhist priest instead.

  Historically the emperor was removed from politics. For centuries martial matters were handled by the samurai, often in spite of the wishes of the imperial family. By the early nineteenth century the power of the shogunate was substantially diminished. Japan had no navy; she had no adequate coastal defenses; she saw the Indian subcontinent subjugated by European maritime powers, and an unequal treaty system imposed on China. After U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry and his four “black ships” appeared in Edo Bay in 1853, Japan had little recourse but to acquiesce in trade with the West in a treaty negotiated by the American consul, Townsend Harris. Her humiliation at the hands of the bakufu, the shogun’s government in Edo, led to calls for a stronger state.

  In 1868 the imperial institution was restored in the person of the fifteen-year-old Meiji emperor. But it was Japan’s ministers who ruled, and “Rich country, strong military” (fukoku kyohei) became the slogan of the day. Japan learned from her adversaries, turning to the West for lessons in parliamentary government, finance, education, and technology, while justifying the restoration of the emperor system with the heft of its mythical past.

  In the Nihon Shoki, one of the earliest surviving records of Japan, Jimmu was the first emperor, who promised in 660 B.C. to “extend the line of the Imperial descendants and foster rightmindedness.”

  The capital was to be expanded “so as to embrace all of the six cardinal points [of the compass] and the eight cords may be covered so as to form a roof.” This was the policy known as hakkō ichiu, meaning “Eight Corners of the World Under One Roof,” and it was the first expression of Japanese polity, popularly referred to during the Meiji period as kokutai.

  The early Japanese believed in Shintō, or “the way of the gods,” which was distinct from Buddhism, a Chinese import. The gods were kami—natural phenomena, mythological creatures, or real men who inspired awe. Emperors were “distant kami,” worthy of reverence by the common people, wrote Norinaga Motoori, a celebrated student of Shintō in the late eighteenth century.

  In 1889 the divine status of the emperor was formalized by the Imperial Constitution, which declared the sovereign “sacred and inviolate.” It also gave him “the supreme commmand of the Army and Navy,” with the powers to declare war and peace and to conclude treaties. But in reality the emperor’s role was largely symbolic, a source of national unity reinforced by Shintōism, which became Japan’s “national faith.”

  Seven years earlier the emperor had presented Army Minister Oyama Iwao with the Imperial Rescript for Military Men (Gunjin Chokuyu), which stated in its first article that the primary responsibility of the military was to the country. The military man’s loyalty to his nation was “heavier than the mountains,” but death was “lighter than a feather.” Japanese militarists believed that they alone understood the “imperial will” and intentionally misinterpreted this directive as a call for blind faith in the emperor instead of loyalty to the state. With the military independent of political control, the soldier became its puppet.

  In the four decades after Matthew Perry’s four armed ships entered Edo Bay, Japan remained the “hungry guest” at the table of nations, suffering under an inequitable treaty system. She was smaller than the state of Texas, strapped for raw materials, and saddled with the demands of a growing population. Japan was at a crossroads: expansion or collapse. After adopting the European model of colonialism in Asia and the Western Pacific, Japan emerged as the only non-Western empire in modern history.

  Japan’s prize for defeating China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 was Formo
sa and the Pescadores. With her victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, she won world power status. Peace with the Russians was formalized in the Treaty of Portsmouth, which was deftly negotiated by President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War William Howard Taft. Japan was granted the Liaotung Peninsula in Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, and dominance over Korea in exchange for American control of the Philippines. In addition to controlling the South Manchurian Railway, she claimed the best naval base at Port Arthur and one of the most coveted ice-free ports in northeast Asia at Dairen. Such victories “naturally paved the way,” wrote Kase Toshikazu, “for the gradual ascendance of the military.”

  Coupled with the economic success of the issei (immigrant generation) in California and an influx of Japanese who fell on hard times in a postwar depression, they also stoked fears in the United States of the “Yellow Peril.” In October 1906, the Oriental Exclusion League arm-twisted the San Francisco Board of Education into removing all Japanese students and transferring them to a segregated school for the Chinese.

  Anti-American rioting erupted in Japan. Roosevelt intervened to reverse the school board’s decision, and ultimately persuaded Tōkyō to restrict immigration to the United States. But there was simmering resentment in Japan over the Portsmouth Treaty, which gave the Japanese only limited control over Manchuria. Meanwhile, exclusionist fervor boiled over into rioting in the United States in the spring of 1907, and the press fanned a “war scare.”

  Privately Roosevelt admitted in a letter to his son that Japan’s victory over Russia played into American interests. The United States could now curb both Russian and Japanese expansion in Asia, if necessary. While the president refused to believe that yellow journalism and nativist prejudice could provoke hostilities between nations, relations between America and Japan were tense enough by 1907 for strategists at the Naval War College to formulate the Orange Plan, which envisioned war with the empire.

  Japan developed her own defense plans. A key feature of her strategy was to add eight battleships and eight cruisers to her fleet, and to protect herself with an ever-expanding ring of buffers and new bases. In 1910 Japan formally annexed Korea and renamed the country Chōsen; its capital, Seoul, became Keijō. In 1914 Japan seized the German South Sea islands—the Marianas, Carolines, and Marshalls. By 1921 almost half of Japan’s budget was allocated to the military, much of it spent on naval armaments. The five-power disarmament treaty that evolved from the Washington Conference of 1921 was negotiated by America and Japan allegedly to equalize naval strength in the western Pacific for a period of fifteen years. In reality, the United States sought to restrain Japan’s advances into China. Economically, Japan could not sustain an arms race and had little choice but to submit to arms limitations. The Washington Conference granted the United States parity with Great Britain in terms of capital ship tonnage and 40 percent superiority over Japan to account for distance and refueling. But a “nonfortification clause” prohibited further improvement of naval bases or seacoast defenses belonging to the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan west of Midway Island. The London Treaty of 1930 placed additional limitations on the numbers and types of cruisers that could be built by the United States, Great Britain, and Japan.

  On the heels of the Harding administration’s austerity and Hoover’s budget cuts during the Depression, the effect in America was a reduction in naval personnel and combat strength. The trend would be reversed only when a former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, assumed the presidency, but not before he trimmed an already meager 140,000-man army.

  In Japan, militarists who had harbored resentment since the Washington Conference assumed control of foreign policy. In 1931 the Japanese sabotaged the South Manchurian Railway at Liutiaoko outside of Mukden, blamed the Chinese, and their Kwantung Army occupied Manchuria, a territory historically disputed by China, Japan, and Russia. Manchukuo (as it was renamed) was the booty, a puppet state of some 34 million financed with the profits of an opium cartel and “ruled” by the charismatic twenty-seven-year-old emperor Henry P’u Yi, though it was the Kwantung Army that pulled the strings. Said Nishi Haruhiko, deputy foreign minister at the time, “The Ministry could do nothing but give in gradually to the pressures of the military.”

  Six years before the Russo-Japanese War began, Nitobe Inazō published in English Bushidō: The Soul of Japan. A Quaker who worked on behalf of the League of Nations, Nitobe glorified the samurai code, but he was a champion of peace. He translated bushidō—the way of the warrior—as chivalry, and chivalry was the “leaven among the masses” that would prevent Japan from sliding into the morass of Western materialism. It was, he wrote, “a flower no less indigenous to Japan than its emblem, the cherry blossom.” Bushidō was the most widely read book of the Meiji era outside Japan. Theodore Roosevelt was so impressed with it that he purchased sixty copies for his friends.

  Nitobe saw himself as a “bridge of transpacific understanding.” But he vowed never again to set foot in the United States until the repeal of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which was designed to limit the numbers of Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews entering America and that closed the door entirely on the Japanese.

  By then Japan depended on the United States for a full 45 percent of its export market, 60 percent of which was in raw silk. Its fortunes were so closely linked to its rival across the Pacific that it was said, “When America sneezes, Japan comes down with the flu.” Japanese silk reelers zealously watched U.S. Steel stock prices as indicators of broader market moves on Wall Street. But the introduction of rayon followed by the Depression delivered twin blows to Japan’s economy, from which she would not recover prior to the Pacific War.

  After the invasion of Manchuria, Nitobe broke his vow and decided to return to the United States in an attempt to explain Japanese policy. Before embarking, he confessed: “I left on each of my earlier trips to America full of hope and optimism. This time there is little hope.” His American friends vilified him as an apologist for pan-Asianism, while in Japan he was branded a traitor for criticizing the militarists. Far from being a stabilizing influence, bushidō was the tinder that fueled ultra-nationalism in Japan.

  In 1933 Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, and in 1937 she launched a war in North China after the so-called Marco Polo Bridge incident, twenty miles south of Peking. Her colonial conquests lent credence to the belief fostered by militarists: Japan had a divine destiny. And that destiny, embodied in the person of Emperor Hirohito, was to unify the world through kōdō, the Imperial Way.

  9

  “Help is on the way”

  HOMMA MASAHARU was behind schedule. The fifty-four-year-old lieutenant general perplexed the Japanese High Command. Of aristocratic lineage, he towered over his countrymen at five foot ten, looked distinctly Eurasian, and had a penchant for poetry, drama, and star-crossed romances.

  Homma was indisputably brilliant, but he was also a notoriously poor judge of character. Having graduated from the Army Staff College with honors, he was fluent in English, and in 1918 was assigned to the headquarters of General Herbert Plumer, commander of the Second Army of the British Expeditionary Force in France. He returned to England in 1920, where he was attached to the Aldershot Regiment. In the meantime he married Tamura Toshiko, whose mother had been a geisha in Akasaka and whose father was General Tamura. When Homma learned that his wife had become a prostitute in his absence, he attempted suicide, and then, instead of divorcing her, he tried unsuccessfully to woo her back. In 1922 Homma was designated the Japanese Resident Officer in India, attached to the British East Indian Army. He was back in Japan by December 1925 as a major with the Imperial Army Headquarters staff. Then he fell in love and married Takata Fujika, a geisha who was fifteen years his junior. In 1927 Homma was chosen as personal aide-de-camp to Prince Chichibu, a younger brother of Hirohito. Three years later he was a full colonel, the military attaché to the Japanese Embassy in London, and by 1933 an appointee to the Japanese
commission at the Geneva Disarmament Conference, which sought to counterbalance French and German interests.

  By 1935 Homma was a major general in charge of the 32nd Brigade in Wakayama, and two years later he took over the Army Propaganda Department, a branch of the General Staff. He glorified the war against China, which he felt was necessary if Asia was to free itself of European domination, but he remained ardently pro-British, which was tantamount to being pro-American. Many Japanese considered Homma a pacifist, more suited to civilian than army life. He was opposed to Tōjō, the pro-German candidate for minister of war who had been chief of secret police in Manchuria. Once Tōjō became head of the army as well as prime minister, Homma’s views were immediately suspect, as were those of nearly all of the more liberal-minded Japanese officers. After Nanking fell, Homma declared: “Unless peace is achieved immediately it will be disastrous.” Homma had been led to believe he would be made Deputy Chief of the General Staff once the position became vacant. Instead, he was removed from any policy-making positions. In July 1938 Homma was transferred to China, where he served as commander of the 27th Division and then the Tientsin Defense Army, responsible for quelling domestic unrest. Given Japan’s deteriorating relations with Britain, Homma closed the Japanese concession in Tientsin, and in December 1940 he was sent to Formosa to take charge of the Formosa Army. He remained there until November 1941, when he was appointed commander of the 14th Army, whose unit code name was Watari, meaning “to cross.”

  “A paper genius,” Homma was a superb strategist brazen enough to question the objectives of his superiors. But until Bataan he lacked real combat experience. Homma grew increasingly aloof from his troops while investing more authority in his staff officers, daring to take them at their word. It was Homma’s Achilles’ heel.