A Captain of the Gate (3 page)

The platoon was delayed between the sand dunes for all of ten minutes before the demands of their timetable saw them leave the mortally wounded soldier behind in the care of two Navy corpsmen. McKinnon's men met up with their sister platoons at the rendezvous point a mile inland, at the site of what had been a small fishing village. First Platoon had been sniped on the way in, but without casualties. Their radio was working fine and they called in close air support from a pair of P-51 Mustangs which unloaded a volley of rocket and cannon fire on the small hill from which the fire was judged to have come. Third Platoon, by way of contrast, came up five minutes behind McKinnon and reported no incidents at all.

With the Company gathered together at its first staging point, McKinnon and the other platoon commanders wanted to press on, but had to wait for orders from Battalion HQ before they could move any further inland. The situation across the southern reaches of Honshu was still in violent flux. In contrast with the operation at Normandy, which involved twelve divisions, the invasion of the main Japanese
island required twenty-five divisions, two separate US armies, the Eighth and the First, and a Commonwealth Corps made up of forces from Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the command of Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead. The British Empire forces, in-line with a strong recommendation from Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had trained in the United States for six months before the operation and deployed using only US equipment and logistics. They came ashore with the US First Army at Kujukuri Beach on the Boso Peninsula. Even so, there were significant and occasionally calamitous breakdowns of communication between the armies.

Over one million Allied troops were ashore and engaged with the enemy by the time McKinnon's platoon disembarked from their armored landing craft. Opposing them were 800,000 Japanese soldiers, many brought home from the occupation of China in the previous six months. Allied planning had allowed for an opposing force of up to 600,000 men, up to half of whom were expected to be low-quality personnel from home defense units. The disparity in these numbers was one of the great intelligence failures of the Second World War and as a direct consequence the casualty figures for Operation Coronet skewed wildly towards the upper limit of the worst-case scenarios, in spite of all the lessons learned on Kyushu.

Complicating matters at a tactical level were hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who abandoned their noncombatant status. As before, they were not organized in any sense that a military mind would recognize. No poorly trained, poorly equipped regiments of home defense troops or civilian militia joined their uniformed colleagues on the frontline. Rather thousands of Allied soldiers died at the hands of women, children, the old and infirm who had been wired up with explosives and left behind as human bombs. After the Allies changed tactics on Kyushu and began engaging any civilian who did not immediately surrender, the enemy responded by having its civilian kamikaze do just that, before blowing themselves up as their surrender was taken.

Of course not every civilian was ‘booby-trapped' in that way, but the uncertainty created a tactical nightmare for the advancing Allies, who never knew whether the small child or aged refugee crying out for
assistance with their hands held high was swathed in a bomb belt, packed with ball bearings, rusty nails, scrap metal and even handfuls of gravel. Every single human being they encountered thus became a potentially lethal adversary. Add to that the efforts of the main force Japanese military, which included not only the Army units returned from China, but thousands upon thousands of ‘special units' trained and equipped for more ‘conventional' kamikaze operations, and the utter chaos and insensate savagery of those first days of combat become a little clearer. Ten thousand Allied Naval personnel alone died as Japanese pilots, their fragile, obsolete aircraft packed with high explosive, threw themselves on the invasion fleet. Over a dozen capital ships, including three aircraft carriers, succumbed to attacks by ‘suicide submarines'.

‘Thou camest on earth to make the earth my hell,' quoted Admiral Fraser, Commander of the British Pacific Fleet, as he witnessed near simultaneous detonations of underwater kamikaze beneath the keel of the
USS Iowa
at the very moment that Lieutenant Branch McKinnon back on shore ordered Sergeant Greaves to gather the men and prepare for a double-time march to the frontline where the Battalion was urgently needed to bulk up a collapsing flank.

The men of Second Platoon, still daubed in the remains of Private Forster, shouldered their packs and weapons without complaint, but with a grim and somber frame of mind as they prepared to push deeper into their own small corner of the earth, their hell.

This is an idea I had a few years ago, that I'm still working on, for an alternate history of the Cold War. There were a couple of what-ifs in the back of it. What if the A-Bomb didn't work, at first? What if the slaughter of invading Japan pushed America back into isolationism? What if, and this my favorite, the Domino Theory then came true? ASEAN becomes the Association of Socialist East Asian Nations, a third communist bloc. The fag end of the British Empire is wheezing along as the world's policeman. And then Ronald Reagan gets elected and everything changes. The idea was to write the history of the period via a biography of one of its players, an adventurer by the name of Branch McKinnon. If I ever go ahead and do it, a big if, it would look exactly like a work of non-fiction, with footnotes, appendices etc, but of course, it'd all be total bullshit.

— John Birmingham

¹
The policy was credited with saving thousands of American lives but it remains a sticking point in relations between the two countries, with some ultranationalist Japanese politicians still demanding fifty years later that the US apologize for its ‘war crimes'. Throughout the 1970s some American diplomats maintained that they could tell how difficult any given set of trade negotiations were likely to be by the fervor with which, in the weeks beforehand, the Japanese Foreign Ministry pressed the issue of ‘reparations' to make good civilian losses during Operation Downfall.

 

²
McKinnon had ample chance to find out whether he could forgive himself over the next two weeks, as three of the four new recruits were killed. Pvt. Andrew Forster, from Delaware, stepped on a mine less than a mile from the beach where the platoon disembarked from their landing craft. Pvt. Michael Hall, Sioux Falls, was cut down while approaching a Japanese pillbox on the outskirts of Tokyo. And Pvt. Greg Beck, Kansas City, was cut down by a pitchfork-wielding gardener in the grounds of the Imperial Palace.

 

³
The Fall of Giants
, unpublished manuscript, McKinnon, B. 1953. Original copy held by The McKinnon Foundation, Washington DC.

Books like this bear the name of only one author, which is a grave disservice to the many people who bring them into being. My US editor, Betsy Mitchell, and my Australian boss lady, Cate Paterson, are both owed a debt I can never hope to repay. So too my agent Russ Galen who first proposed this idea while I was in the US on a Fulbright scholarship in 1998. To them, and to all of the production staff at Random House and Pan MacMillan, I offer thanks.

A number of people from various libraries, universities, research foundations and public and private archives were also embarrassingly generous with their time on this project. I am grateful beyond words to the trustees of the McKinnon Foundation for the unfettered access and unstinting support they provided throughout the research and writing process. The US Library of Congress, the Department of Defense in Washington, the Office of Strategic Services (Archives and Records), the Imperial War Museum in London, the Australian Colonial Office and the Southeast Asian section of the International Criminal Court (War Crimes and Human Rights Division) were all enormously important and supportive of this project.

Finally I must acknowledge the love and counsel of my wife and children, who put up with six years of obsessive, irascible, distant and downright unacceptable behavior from me while I brought this book to print.

John Birmingham's proudest achievement as a writer was being published in the Long Bay Prison News. After that it was all downhill. Contributing editor for a bunch of porn mags like Playboy and Penthouse, sleeping on the couch at Rolling Stone while he waited for his dole cheques to clear. Raiding the beer at the cricket and footy while writing for Wisden and Inside Sport. No wonder he shifted to indie comedy in He Died With a Felafel in His Hand and genre writing with the Axis of Time series and his current trilogy, which kicked off in Without Warning and After America, and will continue with Angels of Vengeance.

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