Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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into the cookhouse to claw a few mouthfuls of rice by hand from the pan—and was caught by his NCO. ‘You’re a pig!’ the man roared. ‘Get down on your knees and behave like one!’ Ajiro was obliged to crawl across the messroom floor, snorting and snuffling. On another occasion, clearing his rifle in darkness in the midst of a Manchurian winter wilderness, he dropped a bullet. When he reported to the guardroom, his sergeant screamed: ‘You have lost valuable army property! You will stay out there until you find that bullet!’ If such behaviour reflected a psyche common to most armies, the Japanese carried it to extremes unknown elsewhere.
During Japan’s war in China, the practices of conducting bayonet training on live prisoners, and of beheading them, became institutionalised. Such experiences were designed to harden men’s hearts, and they achieved their purpose. A South African prisoner of the Japanese on Java wrote: ‘I saw innumerable ways of killing people, but, most significantly, never by just shooting them. I say “significantly” because this for me was the most striking evidence of the remote and archaic nature of the forces which had invaded the Japanese spirit, blocking out completely the light of the twentieth-century day.’
Naval discipline was little less brutal. On the seaplane carrier Akitsushima, Leading Seaman Kisao Ebisawa was a senior rating charged with administering punishment at the weekly disciplinary muster. He beat the backsides of green seamen with a heavy stave employed throughout the service for this purpose, ‘to sharpen them up’. Five strokes were customary. ‘After dealing with a score or two of men,’ said Ebisawa ruefully, ‘one’s wrist got pretty stiff.’ When a destroyer’s cutter rescuing survivors from a sunken battleship threatened to be swamped by struggling figures seeking to clamber aboard, those in the boat simply drew their swords and hacked off the hands of would-be intruders, Japanese like themselves.
Twenty-three-year-old Lt Kunio Iwashita hailed from the mountain area of Nagano, where his father rather implausibly kept a French restaurant. To become naval officers, he and his brother had to overcome official doubts about whether scions of such a trade were socially eligible. The Iwashitas defeated prejudice by passing out top of their courses, including flight school. Kunio’s adored sibling died in 1942 at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, shot down after bombing the American carrier Hornet. His own entry into combat was delayed by a long stint as an instructor, which probably contributed much to his survival. Iwashita had flown over four hundred hours before he was posted to Iwo Jima, where he experienced a savage initiation. The first nine Zeroes of his unit, 301 Squadron, flew the 750 miles from their mainland base at the beginning of July 1944. By the time Iwashita arrived next day, three pilots including the squadron commander had already been shot down.
Next day, though suffering acute stomach pains which were afterwards diagnosed as appendicitis, he was scrambled with his squadron to meet a new American strike, from which bombs were already cascading down on the airstrip. Airborne, Iwashita found himself behind a flight of four Hellcats, and poured fire into the rear plane. Its wing broke off. The Japanese saw the American pilot, wearing a white scarf, meet his own glance for an instant before the Hellcat plunged towards Mount Suribachi. The other Americans swung in pursuit of the Zero. Iwashita’s plane was badly hit before he escaped. After killing his first enemy, his reactions were those of novice warriors of every nationality. He found himself speculating about the American’s girlfriend, mother, last thoughts.
Just as the army possessed many reluctant soldiers, the air force had its share of pilots who flinched from combat. Iwashita acknowledged that every squadron was familiar with the odd man whose aircraft suffered chronic technical problems, or who found reasons to turn back before completing sorties. One such pilot on Iwo Jima was summarily transferred to an anti-aircraft battery, with which he was killed by American strafing. Awareness swiftly dawned of the shortcomings of their own weapons and technology. Iwashita said: ‘When I became a pilot, I didn’t think anything could be better than the Zero. I was confident that I was flying the best fighter in the world. In combat, however, I came to understand that it was not as simple as that. American pilots were very good, and had a lot of kit we didn’t, like radio intercommunication.’ On one sortie over Iwo Jima, thirty-one Zeroes took off and only seventeen came back. Four such battles reduced Iwashita’s Zero wing from thirtyeight pilots to ten. Soon afterwards, with no planes left for them to fly, the survivors returned to Japan in a transport aircraft.
The life of a Japanese soldier was wretched enough before he entered combat. Many officers were shameless in allocating food to themselves even when their men were starving. A British historian has observed that the Imperial Army’s frequent resort to rape reflected the fact that the status of women in Japan was low, while those of subject peoples possessed no status at all: ‘Right was what a soldier was ordered to do; to disobey was to do wrong. There was no moral absolute to set this against…For the ordinary soldier, rape was one of the few pleasures in a comfortless and deprived life in which he could expect to reap very few of the spoils of war.’
Hayashi Inoue’s closest friend was a fellow company commander in the 55th Regiment named Kazue Nakamura. When Nakamura was killed in northern Burma, his second-in-command withdrew without having retrieved the body, a grievous offence against the military code. Instead of facing court martial, however, the delinquent was simply assigned missions on which he could expect to die. Inoue afterwards laughed at the memory: ‘It took ages for that man to get killed. Again and again, he was sent out—and came back. He got his deserts in the end, though.’ Inoue was a colonial administrator’s son, drafted into the army in 1938 and commissioned in 1941. He accepted obedience without question: ‘If we were told to defend this position or that one, we did it. To fall back without orders was a crime. It was as simple as that. We were trained to fight to the end, and nobody ever discussed doing anything else. Looking back later, we could see that the military code was unreasonable. But at that time, we regarded dying for our country as our duty. If men had been allowed to surrender honourably, everybody would have been doing it.’
If obedience was fundamental to the samurai spirit, the conduct of the Japanese high command was confused by the power and influence wielded by some younger staff officers of violently aggressive enthusiasms, empowered by political links to the top of the military hierarchy. These promoted the doctrine of ‘gekokujo’—initiative from below. The most notorious exponent was Col. Masanobu Tsuji, a fanatic repeatedly wounded in action and repeatedly transferred by generals exasperated by his insubordination. Tsuji once burned down a geisha house to highlight his disgust at the moral frailty of the officers inside it. His excesses were responsible for some of the worst Japanese blunders on Guadalcanal. He was directly responsible for brutalities to prisoners and civilians in every part of the Japanese empire in which he served. In northern Burma, he dined off the liver of a dead Allied pilot, castigating as cowards those who refused to share his meal: ‘The more we eat, the brighter will burn the fire of our hatred for the enemy.’
Gen. Sosaku Suzuki, who commanded the defence of Leyte, wrote bitterly: ‘It is the Ishiwara-Tsuji clique—the personification of gekokujo—that has brought the Japanese army to its present deplorable situation…I tell you, so long as they exert influence…it can only lead to ruin.’ Paradoxically, in a culture dominated by obedience, some militant junior army officers exercised political influence out of all proportion to their ranks. It was unacceptable for subordinates to display intelligent scepticism. They were constantly indulged, however, in excesses of aggression.
For every four tons of supplies the United States shipped to its ground forces in the Pacific, Japan was able to transport to its own men just two pounds. A Japanese infantryman carried barely half the load of his American counterpart, because he lacked all but the most basic equipment. It is extraordinary to contemplate what Japanese troops achieved with so little. It became normal for them to fight in a condition of semi-starvation. Their wounded were chronically vulnerable to gangrene, because they possessed no anti-tetanus drugs. Signals equipment was never adequate, making it hard for units to communicate. Whereas US and British armies were organised in balanced formations, composed of purpose-trained specialists—infantry, gunners, engineers and so on—in 1944-45 many Japanese positions were defended by improvised battlegroups made up of whatever men could be provided with rifles and grenades. Service units, cooks, clerks were alike thrust into the line. In the circumstances, no great tactical