No Surrender (8 page)

I do not exaggerate when I say that after getting to the bottom of this, I was completely unable to speak.

It is a fact that
yūgeki-sen
for “guerrilla warfare” was not a very common word at the time, but then there was no such thing as a “guerrilla boat.” To put this interpretation on the word was nothing more nor less than wishful thinking. These men did not want to wage guerrilla warfare. They wanted to get off Lubang. And the unfamiliar term
yūgeki-sen
offered them a straw to grab at.

Ruefully I remembered what Major Takahashi had said in the staff room: “The best outfit in the whole Japanese army.”

That evening I went back to the harbor with some troops to get my explosives. I left some dynamite near the pier, took some to the airfield, and brought the rest back to Mount Ambulong. While we were on the way, a formation of four Lockheed Lightnings flew over but left without doing anything.

The next evening the
Seifuku
Maru, now loaded with gasoline in place of the explosives, left for Manila. If Suehiro's Airfield Garrison and the maintenance crews who were already under orders to withdraw had left on that ship, the Japanese war casualties on Lubang would have been less numerous.

But the commanders and their men stayed put, on the theory that the
Seifuku
Maru would be back two more times. Kōichi Tachibana, a warrant officer who had fought at Truk and Guam, urged those who were authorized to leave to do so rapidly. “If my experience means anything,” he said, “the enemy attack will come sooner than you think. That ship may never come back again. Many of us aren't armed, and we had better beat it to Manila as fast as we can.”

But the officers would not listen to him. They kept saying that our side had only lost control of the air temporarily, and that as soon as that situation was remedied, the Japanese forces would counterattack. More wishful thinking! Lieutenant Suehiro held me up on the destruction of the pier until he could ship out all the gasoline, and the air maintenance crew argued against blowing up the airfield.

“If you blow it up now,” they said, “we won't be able to use it when we recover control of the air.”

My difficulty was that I did not have the authority to order them to go ahead. All I could do was direct them in carrying out the operation when their superiors agreed to it. When I tried to make preparations for later guerrilla warfare, the
commanders all snapped at me that their troops were much too busy to help.

At four o'clock in the morning, I finished transporting my explosives to the foot of the mountain. The sun had not yet risen on January 1, 1945. I had not slept since leaving Manila and had been running around the island ever since the boat landed; I was dead tired, so I lay down on the grass. Through the palm leaves I saw the sky growing lighter on this first day of the new year. A new year and a new job, I mused. And as I considered the stubbornness I was encountering, I heaved a deep sigh. I went to sleep there on the grass, my arms crossed on my chest.

I slept only about two hours, but when I awoke it was fully light. I jumped up and, facing east, bowed to the rising sun.

At about eight thirty in the morning on January 3, a lookout I had stationed at the top of the mountain came running toward me.

“Enemy fleet sighted!” he cried.

Clutching my binoculars, I hurried up the mountain. What the lookout had seen was an enemy fleet, all right. And what a fleet!

As carefully as I could, I counted the vessels. There were two battleships, four aircraft carriers, four cruisers and enough light cruisers and destroyers to make up a total of thirty-seven or thirty-eight warships. What astonished me most, however, was not this awesome armada, but the host of troop transports that followed it. There must have been nearly 150 of them. As if that were not enough, the sea was literally peppered with landing craft—more than I could possibly count.

The invasion of Luzon was about to begin.

I composed a cable giving the number of vessels of various
types that I had counted. Toward the end, I wrote, “Besides large vessels, there were innumerable landing craft and subchasers. They were bobbing so in the waves that I could not even make an estimate.” I concluded, “Fleet headed north.”

For some reason Lieutenant Hayakawa made a mistake and cabled “Fleet headed east,” but I saw the message and quickly sent off a correction. If the fleet had actually been on an eastward course, it would have been heading straight toward Manila, but in fact the northern course was without doubt taking it to Lingayen Gulf.

I was not sure that this cable had been received until thirty years later, when I saw Major Taniguchi at Wakayama Point. The Lubang Garrison had only a small short-range radio transmitter of the kind used between battalions. For my message to reach army headquarters, it would have to go through a communications squad to regimental headquarters and then division headquarters, and be decoded and reworded at each step.

Thirty minutes after the message was dispatched, the Airfield Garrison caught a signal from naval headquarters ordering all units in western Luzon to take up battle stations, but we did not know whether this order was based on our warning or not.

I felt a certain amount of satisfaction at having carried out my first official duty, but I was far from happy, because I feared that a section might break off from the enemy's Luzon landing force and attack Lubang. If this happened, the attack would begin with a thorough drubbing by enemy artillery, and the explosives that I had brought to the mountain on the last day of the year would go up in smoke.

At my urging, Lieutenant Hayakawa put his troops on the alert and had them move my explosives farther inland. Fortunately, the entire enemy fleet continued on toward Lingayen Gulf; not a single ship came toward Lubang. At the same
time, thanks to the arrival of this fleet, the
Seifuku
Maru never came back to our island.

If no boats were coming, there was no further need for the pier. Once again I asked to be allowed to demolish it, but Lieutenant Suehiro was still hesitant.

“Wait a little longer,” he said. “When the time comes, I'll take steps to blow it up.”

The man was trying to put the operation off just as long as he possibly could. The best I could get out of him was permission to let me use his troops to prepare for eventual demolition. I had them distribute the explosives still left on the pier in various strategic points and wired all the charges so that they could be detonated with a switch. In case the switch did not work, I strung out fuses.

A few days later two coded messages were received from division headquarters. The first said: “The Lubang Garrison is hereby placed directly under division command and will henceforth receive its orders directly from the division commander. Reports from the Lubang Garrison have an important bearing on the division's battle strategy. Henceforth you are to report directly and in detail to division communications headquarters.”

Upon receipt of this message, the garrison requested additional code tables and a supply of batteries, but the only answer received was, “Two diesel boats commanded by two transport officers are missing. The garrison is to search the island and report whether they have landed there.”

I had been told at division headquarters that unless I received word to the contrary before January 10, on that day I would become a full-fledged second lieutenant. No word came, and I assumed that my commission had become official, but during the next thirty years I never once wore a full officer's uniform.

On February 1, the enemy began landing operations at Nasugbu in west central Luzon. Nasugbu was on the shore opposite Lubang, and I reacted to this development by urging the garrison troops to move their food and ammunition farther up into the mountains.

I calculated that this operation would take about a week. As it turned out this was unrealistic, because only about half of the fifty men were available for work. Some were suffering from fatigue, some had fever; even the healthier ones could carry no more than about thirty-five pounds at a time.

To make matters worse, Lieutenant Hayakawa had had an attack of kidney trouble and needed to stop frequently to rest and take a drink of coconut milk. With their commander in this shape, the men were all the more truculent. It did not seem to me that they had any will to go on fighting.

The other outfits were no help. They began grumbling that if the enemy attacked, the garrison troops were supposed to stand in the front line and protect them as best they could. If the garrison was going to hide in the mountains, they said, they might as well commit suicide on the spot.

No matter how I tried, I could convince no one of the necessity for guerrilla warfare. They all talked big about committing suicide and giving up their lives for the emperor. Deep down they were hoping and praying that Lubang would not be attacked. I was sure of this, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had so little real authority that they did not even take me seriously.

My nickname among them was “Noda Shōyu,” the name of a famous brand of soy sauce. The
Noda
came from my name and
Shōyu
was suggested by
shōi
, the word for second lieutenant. The meaning was that I was not the main course—only a bit of seasoning. Needless to say, this was because I could not actually
issue orders to them in the same way as the commanders of their outfits.

How many times I wished that I were even a first lieutenant! Then maybe some of the work would get done. As it was, I had to listen to these men babbling at the mouth about dying for the cause, and listen silently with the knowledge that I was not permitted that out. I could not even hint to anyone that I had orders not to die. It was frustrating in the extreme.

I myself put off blowing up the airfield, because the project had ceased to have much meaning. I could crisscross the runway with ditches and potholes, but I had learned that the enemy now had steel plates with which they could make a new runway in no time. They used heavy beams under the plates, and as long as the terrain was roughly flat, holes in the ground were no hindrance. The most I could hope to gain from tearing up the field was a delay of a day or so, and it seemed to me that the explosives could be put to more effective use elsewhere.

As I was wondering what to do about the airfield, I remembered the famous fourteenth-century samurai Kusunoki Masashige, who during a difficult battle had a lot of straw men made and fitted out with helmets so as to waste precious enemy arrows. I decided to take a leaf out of Masashige's book. With Lieutenant Suehiro's assistance, I gathered up pieces of airplanes that had been destroyed and laid them out to look like new airplanes, taking care to camouflage them with grass.

As I think back on it, the scheme sounds rather childishly simple, but it worked. After that, when enemy planes came, they invariably strafed my decoys on the airfield. At that time, they were coming over every other day, and we utilized the other days to put together fake airplanes. I considered it good guerrilla tactics to make attacking planes waste as much ammunition as possible.

Around this time the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Coastal
Advance Squads arrived at the harbor in Tilik. These were army suicide squads that had small wooden boats, powered by automobile engines and loaded with explosives. The idea was that when an enemy ship appeared offshore, the squads would blow it up by ramming their boats into it. The two squads that came to Lubang were sent on the theory that the enemy would soon send a landing fleet to Manila, which they would be able to attack from the flank.