Tears in the Darkness (18 page)

If self-sacrifice was the apotheosis of loyalty, then surrender was its apostasy. “Retreat and surrender are not permissible in our Army,” General Sadao Araki told an American professor teaching in Japan before the war. “To become captive of the enemy by surrendering after doing their best is regarded by foreign soldiers as acceptable conduct. But according to our traditional Bushido, retreat and surrender constitute the greatest disgrace and are actions unbecoming to a Japanese soldier.”
⁵⁸

Araki and his fellow ideologues were determined to create an army of human bullets and, like the Meiji politicians and strongmen before them, they too regularly hijacked history to do it. They took Bushido, that loose canon of moral instructions purporting to be the samurai code of behavior and belief, and created a code for the modern soldier, the
Senjinkun
, a pamphlet that served as a manual of battlefield morals. “Fight faithfully to the last,” it reminded the soldier. “Even if it means dying on the battlefield, never give in to the enemy . . . Do what is expected of you, remembering that what you do will reflect on the honor of your home.”
⁵⁹

Thus a man who surrendered, or was captured, betrayed not only his country but all those who had ever shared his name, living and dead. And the shame of that was more than most Japanese were willing to carry.
⁶⁰

 

“
GO TO THE SIXTH COMPANY
and tell them they have to hold,” Colonel Tsunehiro told Kiyoshi Kinoshita. “Tell the Sixth they have to fight until help comes.”
⁶¹

He kept low, crept slowly. Any movement, a rustling of leaves, a swaying of vines, would set off a storm of fire. So he inched along,
zen-dosuru
,
“like a worm,” first to the right and down the line, then forward toward the command post of the Sixth Company. Already the day was stifling. No breeze beneath the canopy to carry away the decay and rot.

From time to time the enemy fired bursts in his general direction. From time to time his comrades returned the fire. He stayed below it all, on the jungle floor, hugging the ground—“seeking cover,” infantrymen called it—as if the reddish brown soil, the sweet earth, could enfold a man and keep him safe.

The command post was just ahead, but a tree felled by enemy artillery blocked his path, so he lifted himself up just a little to peek over the top, then, by degrees, he started to slide across the log and down the other side. And just then he felt a dull, heavy thud on his back, below his left shoulder, then an intense pressure, as if someone had poked him hard from behind and knocked him to the ground.
Itai
! He'd been hit.

The bullet mauled him. In an instant a sweet-smelling serum began to well up in the wound and spill down his back. The pain took his breath away, made his heart pound, soaked his body in sweat.

His left arm hung limp and heavy at his side. He fished a large white handkerchief from his pocket and tried to stuff it into the wound to stem the flow—

The message! He had to get to the Sixth Company and deliver the message.

The gunfire was more intense now as the enemy advanced. He started to crawl forward, dragging himself with just his right arm.

At the edge of the command post he encountered the company staff sergeant and made his report.

“The battalion commander says you should stand still until the help comes, until the relief comes,” he said. “And—” He didn't get to finish because the sergeant was shot dead in front of him.

He crawled on, finally reached the captain, delivered his message, then turned around and began the long trip back along the line to the colonel's command post in the center.

He could sense he was seriously hurt. “This is a real miserable situation,” he thought, but if he could make it back, crawl to the colonel's position, the doctor there could treat him. A bandage, some medicine, a drink of water, and a little rest, and he would be fine.

He dragged himself a few feet at a time. When he reached the command post, the doctor examined his shoulder.

“There is no way to treat such a big and serious wound,” the doctor said. “The only thing you can do is wash it with seawater.”

 

ON FEBRUARY
2, the eleventh day of the battle for Quinauan Point, the enemy brought in tanks. The Americans attacked twice that day, their tank cannon firing point-blank while their artillery and mortar rounds rained down on the
hohei
foxholes.

The battlefield was a wasteland—the denuded jungle, the brown dust and black smoke, the rotting corpses—and with the rumble of explosions, the unrelenting heat and thirst and cries of the wounded, Quinauan Point became
kono-yo no jigoku
, “a kind of hell.”

Kiyoshi Kinoshita made his way to the edge of the point, stumbled down the ravine to the beach, and washed his wound with seawater, a remedy that brought him nothing but more pain. He was relieved of all duty now, save to survive.

One day passed, two. He grew weaker, more helpless. The blood vessels and nerves in his shoulder had been shattered, and the damaged muscles in his rotator cuff had left his shoulder, arm, and hand dead weight. His wound, still spilling fluid and blood, was suppurating, and he could smell the rot on his back. The foul emanation drew flies, swarms of them, a black blanket on the wound.

Dizzy and faint, he set himself down at the base of a large tree atop the point where many other seriously wounded men had gathered. The tree was near a steep ravine that led from edge of the cliff down to the beach. In the ravine was a natural spring where, during breaks in the battle, the men still able to fight went to fill their canteens. As they passed by his tree, Kiyoshi Kinoshita would beg them for water and ask for news of his comrades in the Sixth Company, still trying to hold the line.

The battalion's arc was slowly contracting, and the defenders were being squeezed into a pocket. From time to time Kiyoshi Kinoshita could hear the colonel yelling encouragement to the men in the foxholes.

Gambare! Gambare!
he would shout. Keep going, men! Hold on! Hold on!

Every time he yelled, the enemy answered with more fire.

Now the dead lay where they fell, grotesques, tongues hanging, eyes bulging. The gas and sewage from the black and bloated bodies left the air rank and the men gagging.

Kiyoshi Kinoshita lost track of time. The sun rose, the sun set. It was light, it was dark. He started to think he was dying.

Gambare!

The colony of wounded around the palm tree had grown to more than a dozen now. Gut shot, many of them, others holding a mangled arm or leg. Now and then a man unwilling to face the shame of capture or so miserable in his suffering he no longer thought his life precious enough to preserve, would place the muzzle of his rifle under his chin and reach down and pull the trigger.

Kiyoshi Kinoshita thought, “This is the end now.”

He passed out, came to, passed out again. When he awoke it seemed to him that the volume of fire had decreased. No one came by for water now, and he was so desperate for a drink he drank his own urine.

He thought he heard someone say that the colonel was dead. At all events he did not hear his beloved commander yelling anymore. He did not hear anything at all.

 

VARIOUS AMERICAN
and Filipino units had attacked repeatedly during those last days. Their tanks blasted the Japanese out of their holes or kept rolling and crushed them where they stood. The evening of February 4 the Philippine Scouts leading the attack reported that they had forced the Japanese into a pocket roughly a hundred yards across and fifty yards deep. The Scouts could see the edge of the cliff and, beyond, the water. Alongside the Scouts were American airmen-turned-infantry, led by pilot William E. Dyess. “At fifty yards [from the edge] we could see [the Japanese] plainly,” Dyess wrote later. Then, “suddenly, above the noise of the gunfire, we could hear shrieks and high-pitched yelling.” Some of the Japanese were “tearing off their uniforms and leaping off the cliffs.”
⁶²

Several score Japanese held out in the ravines and beach caves for another three days. They refused all offers of surrender, so on February 8 the Americans collapsed the caves with dynamite and called in gunboats to shell the last of the holdouts. A handful of Japanese, unconscious but still alive, were taken prisoner. Some six hundred
hohei
were killed at Quinauan Point and two hundred more at another landing. In effect, the 2nd Battalion, 20th Infantry was wiped out, the first Japanese unit in World War II to suffer a total defeat. Later in the fighting in the Pacific this kind of mass sacrifice became so regular the Japanese gave it a special name,
gyokusai
, “honorable death,” and
gyokusai suru
, “to die but never surrender,”
became a rallying cry. But in those first days of the war, when such a large loss still shocked the Imperial General Staff, the Nipponjin used another word to describe the bloodletting at Quinauan Point.
Zenmetsu
, they called it. Colonel Tsunehiro and his men had been “annihilated.”

 

GAMBARE
!

Kiyoshi Kinoshita felt someone patting him on the cheek. Was he dead, dreaming?

He opened his eyes and saw . . . a
hakujin
! A white man!

He was in bed in a place of beds, beds in rows in the open and out among the trees. In a few of the beds he saw Japanese. In most he saw Filipinos. All around were
hakujin
, tending to things.

He thought, “This is an American soldiers' place. How did I happen to come here? How did I get to a place like this?”

His uniform was gone; he was in gray bedclothes.

“What am I wearing?” he wondered.

The
hakujin
who had patted him on the cheek was leaning over him now. Around the man's neck was a doctor's instrument.

All at once Kiyoshi Kinoshita realized, “I have become a
horyo
!” a prisoner of war.

The shame hit him hard, like another bullet in the back. His comrades were dead—he was sure of it—but Kiyoshi Kinoshita, orderly and messenger for the Sixth Company, was lying in an enemy bed.

He wanted to die, but he was weak, too weak to kill himself.

“This is miserable,” he thought. “Why do I have to be a prisoner?”

He had betrayed his comrades, he had betrayed his colonel. They had died and he had lived, and the stink of that failure, that disgrace, would always be on him.
Haji
, they called it, a shame that ran deep.

His duty had been to die for his country (“Duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather”), die with the
hohei
on Quinauan Point, but he had failed, and that failure turned his survival into an act of treachery.

Horyo!
Prisoner of war. His mother, father, brothers, friends, neighbors—all Ayabe would know, or so he imagined. His shame would become his family's scandal. (“There goes the mother of Kiyoshi, the
horyo
!”) The family would have to disown him. In a society where everyone was somehow connected, he would suddenly be estranged. How could he live? He was a
horyo
, and to everyone a
horyo
was dead.
⁶³

“I must get out of here,” Kiyoshi Kinoshita told himself. “I must somehow change this situation of being a prisoner.”

Each day he grew stronger. His left arm was still useless, but after a while he could make his way around unassisted, and he began to feel better.

The Americans were feeding him and caring for him, and for that he was grateful, but when he closed his eyes he could still hear the cries of his comrades—“
O itai
”—and the enemy's kindness only deepened his shame, so one day several weeks after his capture he leaned over to the man in the next bed, a
hohei
named Saito who had lost his right hand, and whispered, “Would you like to escape?”

That night as their Filipino guards slumbered, the two soldiers slipped out of their beds and into the jungle. Two cripples hanging on to each other with their good arms, running as fast as they were able.

They ran for days. One day they came to a hill and, still clinging to each other for support, clawed their way to the top, then down the other side into a valley with a river. They were very thirsty and helped each other down the steep bank and into the water. Dipping their faces to drink, they noticed a school of small fish swimming among the rocks. They were hungry, but one-armed men make poor fishermen, so they dined on earthworms that night and washed them down with river water.

They wandered and wandered, how long and how far they did not know. They lived on leaves and grasses, forage, belly-fill. After many days of wandering, perhaps twenty, they noticed something strange—it was quiet. What happened to the sound of the big guns? they wondered.

A while later in a field they saw some figures in the distance. Soldiers. But whose? They looked again and recognized the uniforms.
Hohei
. From the look of them, a Scout unit. They were finally home, in their own lines, among their own comrades.

Then Kiyoshi Kinoshita remembered, “I was captured. I was a
horyo
.”

The
horyo
were ordered to report to the military police. How did they come to be prisoners? the police asked. What happened in the battle? Where did the Americans take them? The police wanted to know everything.

Kiyoshi Kinoshita told them about being a messenger, about how he was sent to the Sixth Company to tell them to hold on, about being shot and losing consciousness. The police made him tell this story several times, and with each telling their reaction grew more grim.

At first they said, “How can you have survived until now?” Later
they said, “Aren't you ashamed of yourself?” After his final recitation, an officer told Kiyoshi Kinoshita, “You are going to be put to death.”