No Surrender (10 page)

On the following night I resolved to carry out a raid on the troops blocking our retreat.

Lieutenant Ōsaki had been killed yesterday, Lieutenant Tanaka today, both by mortar shells. Together with Lieutenant Suehiro, we had lost three officers, and another, Lieutenant Tategami, was missing, having gone off in pursuit of enemy scouts (he was later found dead). With no commanding officers, the troops lost all sense of organization. They were firing willy-nilly, as the spirit moved them. Unless something was done soon, they would all be destroyed.

A mountain range, about eighteen hundred feet high at its peak and covered with dense forest, ran down the island from northwest to southeast. My idea was to retreat along the ridge, offering resistance when necessary. I thought that if we could reach a certain point I had in mind, some of us could then double back along the skirt of the mountains to our former base, where provisions had been hidden, and then dive back into the forest.

To carry out this plan, it was essential to wipe out the enemy troops to the rear. I waited until the night of March 2, because Captain Tsukii had promised to rendezvous with me by that time at the latest. His squad had almost no weapons; I did not want to retreat ahead of them, leaving them defenseless.

Holding up under sporadic mortar fire, we waited and waited, but no Captain Tsukii. I finally decided we could wait no longer. Taking fifteen men with me, I set out to attack the enemy troops who were blocking us. The path along the
ridge was fairly straight, and if we were to run into the enemy, the men in the vanguard would certainly be wounded or killed. Still, I figured that if we resigned ourselves to sacrificing three or four men, the rest of us could get through to the enemy camp. I was confident that in hand-to-hand combat we would beat them.

The airfield had been captured intact by the enemy. The pier had not been blown up. I had, in short, allowed the enemy to land without accomplishing either of the specific objectives I had been assigned by division headquarters. I had disgraced myself as a secret warfare agent. Deep down I felt that we would not be in the predicament we were in if I had been more forceful and aggressive as a leader. The only way I could see now to discharge my duty to those who had died so tragically was to carry out this desperate night attack on the enemy. I would lead the way into the enemy camp and slaughter as many Americans as I could.

When we reached a certain point, I took a deep breath and looked around behind me. The men's helmets dully reflected the moonlight. I breathed again and drew my sword, discarding the scabbard by the wayside. From now on I would not think of anything. I grasped the sword tightly and started forward. I had nothing to rely on but my own strength.

When I threw away my scabbard, I was disobeying the orders I had received from General Yokoyama. I was also ignoring all I had been taught at Futamata about the duties of a secret warfare agent. I was reverting instead to the suicide tactics I had been taught at officers' training school. I was young; I had lost my head!

If the enemy had been waiting for us at that moment, I would probably have been killed. As luck would have it, however, they had found out about our night attack and withdrawn far to the rear. I was both crestfallen and relieved. We moved quickly back the way we had come.

On the way we found the body of Private First Class Muranaka. With the dagger my mother had given me, I cut off his little finger, which I wrapped in paper and placed in the inner pocket of my jacket. I also recovered my scabbard. As I picked it up, I remembered the division commander's face as he ordered me to stay alive. I was ashamed of myself.

On the morning of the third, Captain Tsukii and his men finally arrived at our base. I decided to check our path of retreat once more, and I took Corporal Shōichi Shimada with me. As we started to leave, Lieutenant Ueno told me he had also sent out a scout and asked me to bring him back if I saw him.

Then, just as we were setting out from the base, a messenger came from the sick tent asking for explosives. I went to the tent to see what the situation was. A young man with a very pale face looked up at me from his cot and mumbled, “We can't move. Please let us kill ourselves here.”

The rest of the twenty men in the tent, all gravely wounded, stared pitifully at me.

I suppressed my emotions and said, “All right, I'll do it. I'll attach a fuse to set off the dynamite, but just in case it doesn't, I'll leave a cannister, which you can throw into the dynamite to ignite it.”

I looked at each and every face, twenty-two in all. They were all resigned to death, ready to make the sacrifice they had been brought up to make. With difficulty, I continued.

“Also, in the event that your matches don't light, I'm leaving a piece of long-burning incense to light the fuse with. One way or another, you should be able to achieve your wish. There is one thing, however, that I must ask you in return. It is hard for me to give you an assignment when you have already made up your minds to die, but I ask you one more time—just one more time—to serve your country. Do not blow yourselves up until you can see the enemy from this tent. There is food
here. You can hold on until the enemy has been sighted.”

One man answered, “It's all the same to us whether the enemy comes or not.”

“I know that, but it's not the same to us. If the enemy invades this base, we can't return to it. We want some way of knowing whether the enemy has come or not. Do you understand?”

They said they understood and would do as I requested. Then they all thanked me for making it possible for them to destroy themselves.

I prepared the explosives and the cannister and left the tent.

The feeble voices followed me, “Take care of yourself, Commander!”

I found Corporal Shimada and pushed off.

Later I came back to the place and found no trace of either the tent or the twenty-two corpses. Nothing was left but a gaping hole in the ground. I stood there and stared at it. I did not think to bow my head or say a prayer. I just stood and stared at that awful hole. Even the tears refused to come.

After Shimada and I had walked for a while, we ran into the scout that Lieutenant Ueno had mentioned. He was a boy of only seventeen or eighteen. I asked him whether he had sighted enemy troops; he said no.

“Go back to the base,” I told him. “Guide the men there to the point where we are now. In the meantime, we'll check the road ahead and take up a guard position there. When you've brought the troops here and secured the place, come ahead for us. Whatever happens, see that you establish contact with us.”

After seeing him off, Shimada and I moved on, but we found no sign of the enemy. After a time, we decided to stop and wait for the young scout. If we went any farther, it would be impossible to return to the others before dark.

We waited one hour, two hours, but the boy did not show
up. The sun began to set, and I was worried. In the dark we had nothing to fear from the enemy, but it would be next to impossible to establish contact with our own men.

Shimada looked closely at my face and asked, “What shall we do, Lieutenant?”

I did not know the answer. If we started back now, it would be dark before we arrived. On the other hand, we had brought nothing at all to eat, and we were out of water.

Finally I said, “Before it gets too dark, let's go down into the valley and find some water.” We clambered down about 150 yards into a ravine and found a brook, but as we were making our way back up, the sun set, and we found ourselves in total darkness.

“Where are you, Lieutenant?” asked Shimada.

“I'm still here,” I replied.

It was so dark that we had to keep reassuring each other that we were still together, but we pressed on in an effort to find the ridge again.

That was a mistake. After a while, we realized that we were going in circles. We decided to sit down and wait until morning.

At dawn we started out again, and before long we spotted the place where we had been the evening before. From among the trees, I looked out at the road and got the shock of my life. Not one hundred feet away was an American scouting party!

Shimada had a rifle, but I had only a pistol and my sword. We were hopelessly outmatched. We threw hand grenades simultaneously and the instant they went off scrambled down into the valley. After crawling around down there for about thirty minutes, we cautiously worked our way back up to a point just below the spot where our young scout had been instructed to lead our men. Feeling fairly sure that it would be safe this time, we started up the cliff above us, and almost immediately found ourselves in a shower of mortar shells. They
arced up into the sky one after another, landing in the valley below us. We hugged the cliff, not daring to move.

The young scout had followed my orders and brought the troops to the appointed place, where they had set up their machine guns and spent the night. In the morning, the enemy scouting party we had seen appeared, and our troops opened fire on them with machine guns, killing one American. The other enemy soldiers withdrew, but almost immediately there was a barrage of mortar fire.

I did not know all this until later, of course. The shells Shimada and I saw falling in the valley were misses from the barrage aimed at the men on the hill. Misses or not, they were falling all over the valley, and there was nothing we could do but stay where we were.

Finally the firing ceased, and quiet returned, but we were afraid to go up the hill immediately. The silence itself had an eerie quality. The sky above was a transparent blue. There was not a cloud to be seen.

Something else I did not find out until later was that while we were on the cliff, Captain Tsukii had ordered the men to disperse. He sent some toward Vigo and some in the direction of Tilik. When we reached the top of the crest, there was nobody there. I decided to go back to our former barracks, where supplies had been cached. It seemed likely to me that any Japanese troops would eventually go there for food.

On the way I saw American chewing gum wrappers by the side of the road. In one place a wad of chewing gum was sticking to the leaf of a weed. Here we were holding on for dear life, and these characters were chewing gum while they fought! I was more sad than angry. The chewing gum tinfoil told me just how miserably we had been beaten.

Any semblance of organized warfare on Lubang ended that day. Afterward there were only occasional mopping-up operations by the enemy.

Lieutenant Hayakawa was attacked in the upper reaches of the Vigo River while he was taking a break after eating. He and ten of his men were killed.

Captain Tsukii and the Fifteenth Coastal Attack Squad attempted to storm the enemy barracks at Tilik, but failed. They were later attacked on the Vigo River and again on the south coast. In the meantime, Captain Tsukii fell ill and died.

I heard that Lieutenant Ueno and the Sixteenth Coastal Attack Squad also launched an unsuccessful raid in the Tilik area and later hid in the hills south of the port, but I had no further word from them. So far as I could tell I was the only Japanese officer left on the island.

The only men I was able to communicate with were ten members of the garrison unit, four members of the air intelligence squad, four members of the air maintenance crew and two members of the navy squad—twenty in all. The only army noncoms left were Corporal Shimada and Corporal Yoshio Fujita.

One day Corporal Fujita picked up a model 99 infantry rifle in the woods. I had earlier found a model 38, and I traded it to Fujita for the model 99, because I had about three hundred cartridges for a 99. I carried this model 99 for the remainder of my thirty years on Lubang.

I hoped eventually to lead the troops in an attack on the airfield, and I ordered them to stretch out the rice supply as long as possible. It was March, and I calculated that if each man ate four bowls a day, we could hold out until August. But the soldiers were more worried about their own bellies than about anything else, and some of them took to filching rice from the storage bins. At mealtimes they griped over the tiniest difference between their helping and the next person's; sometimes they would have come to blows if I had not stopped them. If the enemy had ever attacked us at mealtime, we would have been wiped out on the spot.

Just as I was wondering what to do to maintain order, Corporal Fujita said to me, “I don't think it is safe for us all to be in one place. We might be surrounded at any time. Would you permit some of us to split off and go somewhere else?”