Tears in the Darkness (13 page)

Akira Nara knew better. The coming battle would be no mop-up. Nara had studied American infantry doctrine at Fort Benning, Georgia, and had taught tactics at the Imperial Army War College in Tokyo, the tactics of attacking fortified positions—positions exactly like those he was likely to encounter on Bataan.

For the Summer Brigade, he thought, the mission was “impossible,” but he agreed to attack. He would send his untrained, ill-equipped men into a lethal enfilade, knowing the consequences, because he was a Japanese general, and general-grade officers in the Imperial Army almost never argued their orders, even if they knew that following them might decimate or destroy their command.
⁹

On his way south to the battle line, Nara stopped at Homma's headquarters to pay a courtesy call on his chief. He kept his doubts and disquietude to himself and put on such a great show of enthusiasm for his brother officers that one of them, Lieutenant General Tsuchihashi, commander the departing 48th Division, wondered whether anyone on the staff had warned the newly arrived Nara what he'd be facing.

“As a gesture of friendship from one classmate at the Army College to another,” Tsuchihashi said, “I must tell you that you will be making a huge miscalculation if you think that those old soldiers [of yours] and the few supplies you have will be able to easily defeat” the Americans and Filipinos.

Never mind, Nara said, thanking him for his comments. Soon they would be celebrating their victory.
¹⁰

So the Summer Brigade started walking. And since they had few horses and fewer trucks, they walked under the weight of all their gear 137 miles from the white sands of Lingayen Gulf to the torrid flats and steaming marshes of Pampanga Province (the gateway to the Bataan peninsula), more than seven thousand men and their officers, the hardest walk any of them could remember.

Colonel Takeo Imai, commander of the 141st Infantry, led the walk. “It was the dry season in the Philippines with hot winds whirling under the roasting sun” on an “endless road of burning pavement with no trees.” It was so hot, Imai wrote later, the flowers and plants along the road looked like they were on fire, “reflecting” the rays of the “glaring sun.”
¹¹

They walked at night too, but “compared with the daytime march under the hot sun the march in the evening had a touch of charm.” Imai was bewitched by the “thousands of fireflies” that hung in the trees at the water's edge, some branches “so full of them, they looked like Christmas trees shining with small light balls.”

Mostly they walked fast, as fast as Imai could push them. “Hurry up,” he urged his men. “If you do not, the [enemy] will raise their white flags, leaving you no chance to distinguish yourselves in battle.” Headquarters, he reckoned, was doing the clerks, cops, and sentries of the 65th “a samurai favor” by sending them against the defeated rabble on Bataan. Imperial Army planners, Imai supposed, must think “we are the perfect match for these Americans and Filipinos.”
¹²

 

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE
the militarists and ultranationalists who controlled Japan had subjected the society to a program of agitprop that, by 1941, had left the Nipponjin among the most parochial people on earth, as hidebound as the “arrogant” white enemy they had been taught to hate. In newspapers, magazines, and movies, on the radio and the lecture circuit, and in every classroom in every school in every corner of the land, government pitchmen and pedants preached the glory of the East and the decline of the West. “Now, how about the Americans?” one such pamphlet began.

 

The men make money to live luxuriously and over-educate their wives and daughters who are allowed to talk too much. Their lack of real culture is betrayed by their love of jazz music . . . Sex relations have deteriorated with the development of motor cars . . . The number of divorce cases in America is the greatest in the world [and] consequently, the beautiful family system is destroyed . . . They have lost their moral courage by relying on their material and technical wealth . . . They are governed by [nothing but] frivolous ideas [and] hence the poverty of their thought . . . America is, as everyone knows, a Kingdom of Gangsters [and] a country of bribes.
¹³

 

And from this land of libertines came the most unfit and immoral soldiers imaginable. In the profession of arms, said a general named Kojiro Sato, “The Americans were the worst of all nationalities,” sybarites in uniform who did nothing but gamble and drink. On assignment in
America in the 1930s, another Japanese officer was stunned that the American Army did not train on Sundays, and Japanese newspapers reported that American draftees, leaving home for training, “were seen embracing their girlfriends in public in train stations and weeping.” No wonder, as the
Japan Times and Advertiser
wrote, that “many United States troops suffer from bomb-phobia.” They had no pluck, no grit, no
shin no y
ki
, true courage. Such soldiers would never stand and fight.
¹⁴

 

ON THE EVENING OF JANUARY
7, the lead elements of the 65th Brigade began to marshal in southern Pampanga Province, the gateway to Bataan. Nara's formal orders were simple: “Capture the Bataan Peninsula” swiftly. And to make sure the brigade commander understood the urgency of those orders, Homma sent an aide, Colonel Motoo Nakayama, to pay Nara a visit at his battle headquarters in Angeles.
¹⁵

In the seclusion of his command post, out of sight of his fellow officers, General Nara was no longer the eager hotspur bent on attack, and he pleaded with Nakayama for more time.

“But you can attack now!” Nakayama insisted. “The enemy is scattered.”

Attack where? Nara wanted to know.

Nara had no idea where the enemy was dug in. He had no battle charts, no intelligence or reconnaissance reports, only an old road map supplied by headquarters.

“We should take aerial photos and make surveys before we move forward,” Nara said.

“No!” Nakayama said. “You should attack immediately. It will be easy.”

All the general had to do was form up in columns and march his troops down the Old National Road or into the jungle until he made contact with the enemy.

Just “chase them,” Nakayama said, until they “collapse.”

Nara knew the man well; he'd taught him tactics at the War College and remembered him as a mediocre student at best.

“Is this the order of Homma?” the general asked.

Yes, the aide replied. That was the 14th Army commander's order. “Please carry out the pursuit. The enemy force is only twenty thousand strong or so. As soon as you get there, start fighting immediately.”
Osou!
Attack! “Dilly-dallying serves only to give the enemy time for preparation.”
¹⁶

 

SERGEANT HIDEO SEKIHARA
had come to believe that the war with America was a war “between the rich and the poor.” And what he had seen on the long hot walk from Lingayen Gulf to the Bataan peninsula had convinced him he was right—abandoned American tanks, half-tracks, and trucks, all repairable but tossed away like so much junk. At one spot along the road he discovered a “mountain of bullets” under a tarpaulin. He'd never seen such excess.

“We cannot win this battle by the amount of matériel we have,” he thought. “In order to win we have to have
Yamato-damashi
, Japanese spirit. Americans do not have our mental strength, the Yamato spirit. I am certain we will never lose. We never have, not in our history, but I must be ready to fight.”
¹⁷

Hideo Sekihara had been a star athlete in high school, a good student who wanted to be a teacher and coach. To please his father, however, he went into the family business making wooden barrels,
oke
. Then, on December 10, 1939, at the age of twenty, the
oke
maker was drafted into the Imperial Army.

Sixteen boys from Aoya had been called to service that month, and the morning they left for training camp, thousands of their fellow townsmen gathered at the train station to bid the boys a fond
wakare
. Shopkeepers closed their shops, farmers stepped away from their fields, children were marched out of their classrooms.

The ritual send-off, common throughout Japan, called for one of the young inductees to address the crowd, and his comrades pushed Hideo Sekihara forward.

He told the crowd that he and his fellow draftees were off to serve their country and their emperor, but they were not giving up the comforts of home just for the sake of his Imperial Majesty—May he live ten thousand years—they were out to prove themselves as well, he said, and they were grateful for the gift of this opportunity to do so.

The day was brisk and clear, and the wind off the water whipped the flags and pennants behind him. Then the mayor stepped forward to address the crowd. What a fine speech, the mayor said. Now it was time to salute all of Aoya's brave young men.

“Banzai!” he shouted.

“Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” the crowd answered back.
¹⁸

He was going to win a medal, Hideo Sekihara thought, the best medal the emperor could give.

 

BARRACKS LIFE WAS BLEAK
. The training company was housed in a shedlike building two stories high with an unfinished wooden façade protected only with a coat of creosote oil. In the damp winter the wood-stove in the center never produced enough heat, and in the stagnant summer the room turned foul and stale with sweat and “belly wind.”
¹⁹

In the barracks the first-year privates, the conscripts, were like wretched vassals at the bottom of a feudal hierarchy, obliged to obey everyone above them, both their betters (superior privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains) and those senior to them in the same rank (second- and third-year privates). And this authority, enforced by law (the maximum penalty for insubordination was death), stood behind the “lessons” of Imperial Army discipline—the slaps, punches, floggings, and bloody beatings that daily, hourly took place behind the barracks walls.
²⁰

Maurice de Saxe, marshal general of France, believed that “the severest discipline” produced “the greatest deeds,” and across the ages, East and West, men pressed into service often learned the lesson of discipline under duress. The Germans favored the whip, the French the fist. In the Imperial Japanese Army, this “encouragement” (
bentatsu
, it was called) turned the training camps of Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu into alembics, a closed world of violence where men were subjected to the most brutal system of army discipline in the world. Here the civilian in a man, all he had been or wanted to be, was beaten out of him. What was left were hollow men, automatons living in a space, as one recruit put it, where “all the breathable air seemed to be exhausted,” a “zone of emptiness.”
²¹

Most draftees hated the Imperial Army, and their discontent and bitterness filled the pages of their diaries and letters home. Army life was
ri ni kanawanai
, “unreasonable.” That was the word they used over and over again, for the injustice was so great, the injury so painful, and the insult so severe, life in camp was beyond all reason.

It was unreasonable, for instance, to be slapped at almost every turn, slapped for spilling a few grains of rice or wearing a tunic with a button
missing. “The ultimate purpose of [slapping],” a former army officer explained, “is to make them feel miserable, and thus to hammer it into them that absolute obedience is imperative in the army and that neither criticism nor protest is allowed . . . If the conscripts begin to give reasons for their deeds, they are hit for having tried to answer. If they keep silent, they are also hit. Either way there is no escape.”
²²

When extra “discipline” was required, a recruit would be told to brace himself for a fist in the face.

“Soko ni shikkari tate! Megane o tore!”
Stand firm there! Take your glasses off!

Men were beaten till their teeth fell out or their eyes swelled shut or they lost their hearing, “beaten like a dog!” one recruit wrote home, “beaten like a bag of flour!”
²³

When the first-year privates finally finished their pitiless apprenticeship, they were promoted to senior privates, stewards to a new cohort of conscripts. Now the bullied became bullies themselves. One group of primitives had created from itself another group of primitives, and all the groups from all the camps across all the home islands formed one great primal horde, 2,287,000 men who had been savaged to produce an army of savage intent.
²⁴

 

THE RIGHT-WING NATIONATISTS
, rabid reactionaries, and ideologues who controlled the Imperial Army were determined to model it, indeed model all of Japanese wartime society, on the values suggested by another national myth, the legend of the samurai.