Tears in the Darkness (16 page)

Samat was the key, a strategic high point. Cannon emplaced there could shell the areas east and south. The heights looked down on the lowland coast, the East-West Road, and the narrow pass and hills between Samat and Natib, an important piece of ground that made Samat worth fighting for.

On their maps, the Japanese named the area
Yoshi
, for the bulrushes and banks of reeds along its many streams and rivers. And into
Yoshi
they sent three units, among them the 142nd Infantry with Hideo Sekihara.

Twice his unit attacked the new enemy defense line, and twice the Filipinos and Americans repulsed them and counterattacked. By January 29, Sekihara's Seventh Company, normally more than a hundred
hohei
, had just twelve men left uninjured, twelve men.
⁵¹

Their captain was dead and the
guns
had been named company commander. Late that afternoon Sekihara got his orders: they were to hold their ground, the north bank of the Tiawir River, no matter what. And to a
hohei
such orders had only one meaning.

Hideo Sekihara gathered the walking wounded, about twenty men, and led them to a quiet spot near the river. Then he handed each man a grenade.

“If the time comes when you know we have lost the battle, you can blow yourself up,” he said. “First pull the safety pin, then [arm it and] hold the grenade to your stomach, like so. See? Okay, then lie down on the grenade.”

He spoke softly of these matters. He was sure he would never see these men again, and he tried to keep his feelings from overwhelming him. Earlier he had gone among the dead and scrounged the last of the food, mostly crackers and condiments, and now he offered these grim spoils to his men. They should share a last meal, he said, and talk of home.

There under the stars they told stories of their parents, their children, their favorite foods, dishes that made them think of home, of Japan. Most of all they longed for rice,
gohan
, a meal that always made a displaced
Nipponjin wistful. They talked of
takuan
too, pickled radish, and
umeboshi
, pickled plums. They talked until their mouths began to water and their eyes filled with tears.

“This, comrades, is the graveyard of our youth,” the
guns
said. “And this gathering is our farewell.”

 

ON THE WEST COAST
of Bataan, a separate Japanese force, some 5,000 men, had also been trying to push south. Here there was no beach, so the infantry had to take to the hills above the water. The hills were heavily forested, a hard and tangled hinterland with deep ravines, sudden drops, and breakneck gorges.

A single serpentine road, the West Road, had been cut into the face of the hills. The road began at Morong, and on January 14 that's where the main Japanese push south started.

Most of the fighting took place along the ridges, hogbacks, saddles, spurs, and ledges that looked down on the West Road, the only route to bring up supplies, weapons, and equipment. If the Japanese could fight their way down the West Road and through the heights above it to Bagac, roughly halfway down the peninsula, then pivot east and push across the East-West Road, they could turn the American flank and attack the enemy from the front and side simultaneously.

By January 17, the west coast force, the Kimura Detachment (named for the general who commanded it), had taken Morong and was starting to move south. Four days later at midmorning, part of the 3rd Battalion, 20th Infantry managed to slip undetected through the American line and set up a roadblock behind the enemy's front on the West Road. The Japanese officer in charge of the position, Lieutenant Minobu Kawaguchi, was just starting to reconnoiter his front when he heard the sound of vehicles approaching and quickly ordered his men to slip back into the woods and wait.
⁵²

Coming around the bend now were two armored vehicles, half-tracks mounted with machine guns. The lieutenant let the half-tracks pass, too much firepower, but somewhat behind them was a plain black sedan with two men inside, two American soldiers, a driver and, in the front seat next to him, a much older man.

The driver had his window down, and when the car came abreast of Minobu Kawaguchi and his men, they fired, point-blank. The driver
slumped forward, the sedan ran off the road into a culvert, and the older man stumbled out of the passenger side and tried to take cover behind a fallen tree.

Earlier in the day headquarters had sent word it wanted prisoners, so the lieutenant tried to coax the older soldier out of hiding.

“Anata-wa Nippon-gun ni houi sareteiru,”
“You are surrounded by the Japanese Army,” he shouted in Japanese. Then, in English, he yelled, “Hold up hands. Come out!”

The American gave no answer at first, then he unholstered a pistol and fired a few rounds in Minobu Kawaguchi's direction.

The lieutenant was impressed. The older man's position was hopeless—surely he could see that—and yet he was fighting back.

Kawaguchi tried again. “Hold up hands. Come out!”

But the old one answered with another volley of pistol fire. Headquarters, it seemed, would have to find another prisoner. The lieutenant raised his rifle, took aim at the man's chest, and pulled the trigger.

Later that day when the rest of the battalion arrived, the lieutenant and a communications officer went through the American's pockets. His papers identified him as Colonel John Hoskins, commander of American artillery on the west coast.

Hoe-skins, Hoe-skins . . . Lieutenant Kawaguchi made an effort to memorize the name. After the war, he thought, he might try to find the man's family and tell them how bravely he'd fought, how well he had died.

Then he ordered his men to dig a grave, and there beneath a luan tree by the side of the West Road, the
hohei
of the 20th Infantry buried John Hoskins, Colonel, United States Army.

 

GENERAL KIMURA
, commander of the west coast attack force, now decided to try an end run, an envelopment. On the black night of January 22 he sent the 2nd Battalion, 20th Infantry, some nine hundred
hohei
led by Lieutenant Colonel Nariyoshi Tsunehiro (by all accounts an extremely able officer who had won the admiration of his men), in eight landing barges from Morong south with orders to land on a beach behind the enemy's lines.

Tsunehiro's instructions were to sail down the coast twelve miles and come ashore at Caibobo Point, a good landing spot, then proceed inland a few miles to the West Road and cut the enemy's line of communication and supply to Mariveles, its main base at the tip of the peninsula.

Envelopment was an ancient stratagem, but unlike the ancient
bushi
and samurai, who relied on speed, surprise, and daring to encircle an enemy, modern infantry had to be careful outflanking a foe, for deep in enemy territory the enveloper could easily be trapped and become the enveloped.

Colonel Tsunehiro had been given fewer than five days to prepare the assault, and he embarked ill equipped and underprepared for such an assignment: His maps were large-scale and useless for reading terrain; his reconnaissance reports told him little about the enemy he'd be facing; Japanese artillery was too distant to support him; and his timetable was based on the assumption that the rest of the division would be able to push south in time to link up with him, so he and his men carried only enough ammunition, provisions, and water for a few days' fight.
⁵³

 

PROM THE SEA
, Bataan's west shoreline was one set of cliffs and high bluffs after another: Ewan Point, Napo Point, Mabalan Point, Caragman Point, Cabayoc Point. With a good map and an experienced guide, the colonel might have been able pick out Caibobo Point from the others. At night with nothing but his instincts to guide him, he simply could not say where he was, and the navy coxswains driving the eight barges knew nothing of the swift tides of the South China Sea that were now carrying them way off course.

Soon one of the boats developed engine trouble, and as another took it in tow, an American patrol craft appeared on the scene and immediately attacked. It sank two of the troop barges, then broke off the fight and steamed away, apparently unaware of the rest of the flotilla.

Scattered by the attack, the flotilla split into two squadrons. One group of boats drifted south and came ashore in the darkness at Longoskawayan Point, not far from the tip of the peninsula, while the other group, barges carrying the majority of the landing force, some six hundred
hohei
with Colonel Tsunehiro, found itself drifting about halfway down the peninsula.

Dawn would soon break and the colonel did not want to attempt a landing in daylight, so he told his coxswain to head toward a small bay beneath a wide promontory, Quinauan Point.

 

FROM HIS SPOT
in one of the lead boats, Private First Class Kiyoshi Kinoshita of the Sixth Company stared at the shoreline. Through the dark
he could make out the contours of a ragged coast against a backdrop of black mountains.
⁵⁴

He was expecting a hard fight; they all were. Before the battalion embarked, the captain who commanded the Sixth Company called his men together.

“Most of the regiment is attacking the center, while we, the Second Battalion, will go on boats and attack from the side,” he told them. “You will be landing in the middle of the enemy.”

They had been in the boats for hours now, steaming along the coast, drifting, circling. Kiyoshi Kinoshita and his comrades were anxious to land—at sea a
hohei
feels helpless, a bull's-eye in an open boat, dead weight in the water.

At last the barges turned toward shore, fifty yards, thirty, ten, the hull scraping the bottom.

“Move quickly!” someone yelled, and the men in the bow vaulted the gunwales and landed in the surf along the rocky shore.

Facing them was an almost vertical cliff some sixty-five feet high, and in the darkness they quickly began their ascent. Grabbing tree roots, vines, fissures in rocks, and handfuls of earth, the raiders pushed and pulled one another up the face of the cliff, six hundred men struggling under the weight on their backs.

On top they quickly assembled into three companies, and Colonel Tsunehiro sent out patrols. One ran into some Americans on coast watch, and this skirmish, as well as the reports from the other patrols, must have convinced the colonel that a large enemy force was near, for he ordered his men to start digging.

Kiyoshi Kinoshita and his comrades began to hack out trenches and foxholes and firing positions among the tall trees, tangled vines, and underbrush on the shelf of land atop the cliff. With their entrenching tools and bayonets they chopped away at the stubborn roots in the jungle floor, and they clawed at the dark, moist jungle dirt until their hands ached and their fingers were numb.

 

THE JUNGLE
canopy was high—in some places more than a hundred feet—and thick: towering almacigas and molaves with massive trunks and aboveground roots like giant dorsal fins, roots so big a man could shelter himself in the folds between them. In the middle story were balete trees with their bizarre tentacles or prop roots, and stands of benguet
pine and green bamboo, bamboo so hard that bullets actually bounced off it. At ground level the understory was thick with thorny vines and creepers and chokers and stranglers, and everywhere—every square yard—there were winding lianas, wooden tendrils as thick as bridge cables, twisting and turning this way and that in tangles that hung from the trees and crowded the jungle floor.

Monkeys in the top story screamed protests at the interlopers below, and bent-toed geckos chirped at dawn like jungle roosters. The lizards and tree snakes, shy animals, stayed out of sight, but at night the rats came out, and so did the cockroaches and the itch mites and the red and black spiders. In the morning a man might wake in a swarm of mosquitoes and chase them off only to be assaulted by a cluster of flies.