No Surrender (13 page)

Still, as the person technically in charge, it was my responsibility to see that some restraints remained in force. I myself would have liked to eat all I wanted. I would have liked to sleep all I wanted to, too. But even aside from the shortage of food, if we ate all we wanted, we would get fat, making it harder than ever to do the work we had to do. And if we did not develop the habit of suppressing our baser instincts, we would gradually become demoralized to the point of admitting to ourselves that we were stragglers from a defeated army. We definitely did not want to be classed as stragglers. There was no possibility at that point of adopting aggressive guerrilla
tactics, but when we learned all we needed to about the terrain, we would go on the offensive and take control of the island.

In this connection, Kozuka was very important to me. I had not told him my special mission, but he seemed to sense something and was always cooperative. He never complained, nor did he once look resentful. He was quick to make decisions, and there was a positive air about him. Whenever I watched him in action, I remembered the saying about big things coming in small packages.

Akatsu finally deserted in September, 1949, four years after
the four of us had come together.

I had thought this would happen some day. Kozuka, too, just shrugged and said, “This kind of life was too much for him from the beginning.”

Akatsu had disappeared three times previously; each time Shimada had found him and brought him back. The first time he left, we later saw a little fire burning at night a long way off. It was deep in the mountains, and we knew it could be no one but Akatsu, so Shimada went and got him.

The second time was in the middle of the rainy season. Shimada showed me where he had lost sight of the man, and I figured out the direction in which he must have gone. Shimada, taking a pup tent with him, went off to search and six days later came back with Akatsu.

I was able to guess where he had gone because I knew where on the island he might find food in any given season. Shimada found Akatsu almost exactly at the point I had predicted.

There was a reason why it was always Shimada who went to look for Akatsu when he ran away, and this was that Akatsu always got lost when he and Shimada were out somewhere together.

The four of us had paired off, Kozuka with me and Akatsu with Shimada. The twosomes took turns doing various tasks. When something had to be done that could not be done by two men alone, we all joined forces. In hunting, for example, three men would go out, while the fourth stood guard at the encampment. Most of the time, however, we moved in pairs. When the four of us were together, I kept a close enough watch on Akatsu so that he never once fell by the wayside. Shimada, unfortunately, was not that careful.

I felt some responsibility for Akatsu's desertion. From watching his everyday actions and listening to what he said, I concluded that he would not last very long. When I worked on plans and strategy for our future movements, therefore, I discussed them only with Shimada and Kozuka and kept them secret from Akatsu. I did not even tell him where the ammunition was hidden. I remember once whispering in Kozuka's ear, “I'm taking Akatsu out an on errand with me. While we're gone, transfer the ammunition to a different place. I placed a marker on the trunk of a palm tree about thirty yards away, so you can see where to put it.”

If Akatsu deserted and surrendered, he would certainly be forced or persuaded to give the enemy information about the rest of us. This prospect seriously affected my attitude. We were after all at war with a fearsome enemy, and nothing could have been more infuriating to me than the idea that one of our group might betray the others. Suspecting that Akatsu might defect, I took the precautions that seemed necessary, but this may have had the effect of making him feel left out.

When Akatsu disappeared the fourth time, Shimada started to go look for him, but this time Kozuka and I argued that it was a waste of effort. We did this with the knowledge that Akatsu would eventually tell the enemy everything he knew about our group.

We expected that the enemy would launch an attack based
on the information Akatsu supplied, but we were confident now that if we made advance preparation, we would not be captured.

Beyond that, there was a possibility that Akatsu on his own might not survive long enough to be taken by the enemy. While he was with us, he was never sick once, largely because we were always thinking of his health and always protecting him. On the three previous occasions when he had gone away, he had come back in a depleted physical condition. I thought to myself that if we were in the dry season, he might have a chance, but now, in the rainy season, I doubted whether he would have the stamina to survive. I predicted that he would die somewhere in the mountains, wet, shivering and emaciated.

But then Akatsu must also have been aware of what he was up against. If that was the case, his departure must mean that he was really fed up. Unlike me, he had no assignment, no objective, and the struggle to keep alive here in the mountains may well have come to seem pointless to him.

Shimada went off in the rain to look for him anyway, but came back a week later alone and completely worn out. My feeling was one of relief. I did not believe in chasing after a defector to begin with, and by this time I had come to regard Akatsu's departure as good riddance.

Shimada asked anxiously, “Do you suppose he'll lead the enemy to us?”

“Probably,” replied Kozuka, in a tone indicating that he thought it only to be expected. I was convinced then that Kozuka had also expected Akatsu to desert sooner or later.

The place where Akatsu had disappeared was toward the western end of our circuit, deep in the forest near Snake Mountain Abutment. We were later astonished to find that he surrendered at Looc, toward the eastern end of the island—and not until six months afterward. I was amazed and a little chagrined that his luck had held out that long.

About ten months after Akatsu's departure, and only a few days after the end of the rainy season in 1950, we found a note saying, “When I surrendered, the Philippine troops greeted me as a friend.” The note was written in Akatsu's hand. Shortly afterward we spotted a light aircraft circling slowly in the sky above Vigo. Taking this to mean that the enemy was about to start looking for us, we moved over to the other side of the island.

The next day we heard a loudspeaker that seemed to be somewhat north of Wakayama Point. The voice said: “Yesterday we dropped leaflets from an airplane. You have three days, that is, seventy-two hours, in which to surrender. In the event that you do not surrender in that time, we will probably have no alternative but to send a task force after you.”

The voice spoke in Japanese, with no trace of a foreign accent, but the choice of words sounded American. Japanese do not speak of three days as “seventy-two hours,” and the whole announcement impressed us as being a translation from some foreign tongue. For them to ask us in strange-sounding Japanese to surrender was still more proof that the war had not ended.

I had come to this island on the direct orders of the division commander. If the war were really over, there ought to be another order from the division commander releasing me from my duties. I did not believe that the division commander would forget orders that he had issued to his men.

Supposing he had forgotten. The orders would still have been on record at division headquarters. Certainly somebody would have seen to it that the commander's outstanding orders were properly rescinded.

Three days later, we spotted the expected task force from a distance of about 150 yards.

Kozuka whispered, “That idiot Akatsu has really brought the Americans. Let's try to get a good look at them!”

The enemy troops were on a road that runs through a forest of palms east of the Agcawayan River and inland from Brol. They were not Americans but Filipino soldiers, and there were only about five or six of them, carrying a loudspeaker with them. In front was a man in a white hiking hat, walking somewhat nervously.

“That's Akatsu, isn't it?” whispered Kozuka. We squinted, but we could not see his face well enough to tell. After the task force moved on, we persuaded ourselves that it had indeed been Akatsu, now working for the enemy.

After this encounter, Kozuka said, “They couldn't take us prisoner with a force of fifty or even a hundred men. We know this island better than anybody else in the world!”

The main thing that bothered me was the fear that the enemy might try using gas. This would do us in immediately, because we had no gas masks. As an emergency measure, I told the others to keep a towel tied to their canteen straps and in the event of an attack to soak the towel in water and hold it over their faces. I also warned them to keep an eye on the direction of the wind, because the wind would blow the gas in. We did not abandon our makeshift gas masks for six months.

T
HREE
S
OLDIERS
AT
W
AR

After Akatsu surrendered, we were able to take a more positive course of action. We speeded up the trips around our circuit of campsites, which we began to regard as inspection tours of the area under our “occupation.” When we encountered the enemy, we fired without hesitation. After all, the enemy must have learned from Akatsu when and where they could expect to find us. We considered people dressed as islanders to be enemy troops in disguise or enemy spies. The proof that they were was that whenever we fired on one of them, a search party arrived shortly afterward.

The number of enemy troops increased every time they came, and it looked as though they were trying to surround us and then kill us. By and by, I began to wonder if they were not eventually going to launch an all-island campaign.

To search all the hills and valleys in the central area at one time, however, would require at least one or two battalions, and it seemed unlikely that they would send such a large force just to capture three men. My guess was that they would never send more than fifty or a hundred troops. We were confident that we could cut our way through a force no larger than that. We had the advantage of knowing central Lubang like the backs of our hands. In fact, the largest force we ever saw numbered no more than one hundred; usually there were only about fifty.

When we fled into the jungle, the large trees became our
protectors. Sometimes the enemy troops would continue firing for some time at the trees we were hiding behind, but this did them no good. As they grew more and more frustrated, they aimed less carefully and wasted still more ammunition. That was exactly what we wanted them to do. We were only three men, but we were making a force of fifty look silly. That is the kind of warfare I had been taught at Futamata.

I told Shimada and Kozuka about my orders from the division commander.

Kozuka immediately said, “Lieutenant, I'll stay with you to the end, even if it takes ten years.”

Shimada spoke even more enthusiastically. “The three of us ought to secure this whole island before our troops land again.”

The two of them usually addressed me as “Lieutenant” or “Commander,” but there was no real distinction of rank among us. I was an officer, Shimada a corporal, and Kozuka a private first class, but we talked as equals, each of us having an equal say in the laying of plans. We took turns hunting and cooking.

I hid my sword in the trunk of a dead tree not far from Kumano Point. This left me armed just like the other two, with a rifle and a bayonet. The three of us were comrades, fighting for the same goal, and we had a good deal in common. None of us drank, all of us had healthy teeth, and, in general, we were all healthy. Although Shimada was somewhat larger than the other two of us, we were all small enough to move about with the speed required for guerrilla tactics.

I do not mean that we had no quarrels. Far from it! There were times when we were frothing at the mouth and taking pokes at each other.

In our heads we carried a “food-distribution map” of Lubang. From the weather and from experience, we could tell which part of the island we should go to to find ripe bananas or
a relatively large number of cows. It often happened, however, that when we arrived at the spot indicated by our food map, there was not as much food as we had hoped, and a clash of opinions would ensue.

“Let's go farther inland.”

“No, let's rest here for a day.”