Tears in the Darkness (14 page)

Almost from their beginnings, the samurai have stirred the popular imagination of the Japanese. Medieval poets and writers celebrated them in stories called “War Tales,” heroic chronicles of fact and fancy that turned on the lives of the greatest fighters and most famous battles. Like the American cowboy, the samurai came to stand as an exemplar of the national character: indomitable even in defeat, virtuous even in his most vicious moments, most of all faithful—faithful to family, ancestors, feudal lord. And it was this legendary allegiance, this sense of supreme loyalty and a willingness to sacrifice everything to prove that loyalty, that made the image of the samurai the perfect paragon for a country at war.

The truth, of course, was a lot less appealing. The samurai of old were rough, practical men, more like mercenaries than gallants. Nothing mattered more to an ancient warrior than his military reputation, his personal record of victories and defeats. That record determined a man's rank and rewards, and he would do almost anything to enhance it and gain advantage—betray a friend, deceive a comrade, switch sides in the middle of a battle, murder a loyal retainer to prove his allegiance to a new employer. And there was no opprobrium attached to any of this. The samurai thought of himself as a professional, and the mores of the day and customs of his profession gave him the license to act as he pleased.
²⁵

By the end of the seventeenth century, Japan's civil wars were over and the last of the fighting samurai were gone. Their descendants, some two million men who held the hereditary title “samurai” and received a samurai's stipend as well, no longer practiced the profession of arms. Samurai families still trained their sons in the martial arts, a part of their passage and heritage, but the samurai had become “domesticated.” Half of them worked as civil servants doing paperwork, inspecting damaged buildings, directing public works. Some became politicians, others scholars and writers. And it was from the pens of the now sedentary sons of warrior families that the great myth came.
²⁶

In essays and broadsides, samurai intellectuals revised the history of their mercenary caste and gave it a set of ideals it never had. Loyalty was everything, the samurai writers said, and for the soldier, the warrior, there was only one true measure of loyalty: his willingness to self-sacrifice. The most famous of the books preaching this new morality, one whose words would echo across the battlefields of World War II, was the
Hagakure
, a miscellany of advice, anecdote, and instruction, each item intoning the same powerful theme:

 

Bushido or the way of the [warrior], means death. Whenever you confront a choice between two options, simply choose the one that takes you more directly to death. It is not complicated; just advance to meet it with confidence . . . Every morning, with a calm mind, form a picture in your head of the last moment of your life . . . Every morning, be sure to take time to think of yourself as dead.
²⁷

 

The point was simple: purity of purpose through peace of mind. To daily embrace death was to be free of fear and hesitation, natural impediments to the ideal of self-sacrifice, which, in turn, was the ultimate expression of loyalty.

The political reformers of the nineteenth century borrowed this ideal, the spirit of Bushido or the “way of the warrior,” applied it to Japanese society at large, and made it the way of the good citizen, a zeitgeist of allegiance, obedience, and sacrifice. By the turn of the century the sentiment of duty and loyalty was as strong in the Japanese people as the sentiment of freedom and self-reliance was in Americans.
²⁸

 

Who that is born in this land can be wanting in the spirit of grateful service to it? . . . Fulfil [
sic
] your essential duty of loyalty, and bear in mind that duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.
²⁹

 

NEARLY NINETY THOUSAND JAPANESE DIED
for Dai Nippon in 1904 when Imperial Japan went to war with Imperial Russia. It was flesh-and-blood hurling itself against hot lead as wave after wave of loyal
hohei
charged up the muddy wastes of Port Arthur apparently oblivious to everything in their path. Against advanced Russian armaments, the Japanese carried single-shot bolt-action rifles, museum pieces that had little effect at long range. No matter, the
hohei
made themselves
nikudan
, “human bullets” or “flesh bullets,” and walked point-blank into the Russian guns.

Most Western observers concluded that the Japanese were a people who celebrated self-sacrifice, or in the idiom of the day, they held life cheap. The cognoscenti, of course, knew otherwise.

“There never has been a race of men who really enjoyed sacrificing their lives for their country, or for anything else,” Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of the
Times
of London wrote.
³⁰

And the Japanese soldier was no different.
Atara wakai inochi o otosu
, “to lose one's young precious life,” was as great a tragedy in Matsuyama as it was in the streets of Manchester, but the
hohei
had a feeling for his land and people that was rare among the soldiers of the West. To be Japanese was to be
futatsu to nai
, “second to none,” an idea instilled in every child. And this feeling of being thoroughbred, along with the sentiment of loyalty and duty, produced a patriotism so powerful it became a weapon.
³¹

Generals in every army take their lessons from history, and the Japanese generals who came to power during World War II preached the “fighting spirit,” the
seishin
, of Port Arthur. The realists in the army, a
handful of moderns unaffected by the slavish jingoism of their brother officers, understood that the West was rapidly developing new weapons that made old tactics—and old attitudes and sentiments—obsolete, if not appallingly prodigal. But the output of Japan's industries was limited and its natural resources few. The West would always have more assets, more tanks and aircraft, more trucks and guns. In comparison, Japan appeared poor, poor in everything except people.
³²

Millions of young Nipponjin of military age were available for service. Conscripts were called
issen gorin
, loosely translated as “penny men,” the cost of the postcard calling them into uniform. And to an army poor in the pocket, penny men were the perfect weapon. All the army had to do was fill a young soldier with
seishin
and send him forward to skewer the enemy with his bayonet. “Plunge into the field of death willingly,” an army pamphlet, echoing the
Hagakure
, advised young soldiers marching off to war. “Silently give your all.”
³³

 

THE TACTICAL PROBLEM
was simple enough.

Bataan was a peninsula and there were only two ways to attack such geography: storm it from the sea or mass at its neck, pushing the defenders from one trench line to the next until they came to the last trench, the last stand.

The backbone of mountains down the center of the peninsula left two approaches. Along the east coast was a relatively wide corridor of land, on the west coast a sliver of shoreline dwarfed by steep cliffs. Homma decided to divide his force in two and launch simultaneous attacks. The main push would come on the east coast by Manila Bay, where the mountains gave way to foothills, then tropical lowlands about a mile wide. On a large-scale map (at that point the only kind of maps the Japanese had), the east coast appeared flat and inviting. “The Plains,” the Japanese labeled this terrain, and they planned to send two regiments down this expanse, chasing the enemy ahead of them. The “plains,” however, were an illusion. The strip of land along the coast soon gave way to an undulating chaparral, jungle midland, then steep foothills. The hills were thick with plants, vines, trees, and tangled undergrowth.

Japanese intelligence had also been wrong about the enemy's strength. Some 68,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans were ready to defend the peninsula (roughly 47,500 of these men were classified as combat troops; almost all frontline troops were Filipinos). Homma had
reinforced the Summer Brigade to 13,000 men, but the Americans had twice that number in front of them on the eastern plain, well dug in and waiting. Counting American and Filipino reserves, the Japanese were outnumbered three to one.

 

[
Japanese 65th Brigade, After Action Report, January 9, 1942
] The front line units, which had been waiting tensely for the zero hour, commenced the approach march at 1500 hrs . . . The roar of the artillery of both sides shook the northern portion of the BATAAN Peninsula. The enemy shells fell particularly furiously in the vicinity of [our staging area]. One shell made a direct hit on Artillery HQ, and in an instant the greater part of the Staff was wiped out.
³⁴

 

American artillery fire was withering. The men of Colonel Takeo Imai's 141st Infantry told their commander that the shells sounded “as if oil drums” were flying though the air, “letting out loud screams” overhead. Those shells, they said, made their blood freeze.

American cannoneers seemed to have every inch of open space—roads, trails, and fields—plotted on their maps. Even the watering holes, the streams and rivers where the Japanese filled their canteens, were in the Americans' crosshairs. “Especially astonishing” to General Nara and his staff was the enemy's inexhaustible supply of ammunition, enough ordnance to fire “countless shells day and night without ceasing.”
³⁵

Nara went to the front to take a look, but “a vast jungle prevented a clear view of the battle area” and “the Brigade Commander . . . could see nothing but the furious enemy barrage in the direction of the coastal road,” the road down which his Summer Brigade was advancing.
³⁶

To try to outflank the American line, Nara sent a battalion from the 141st Infantry west into the knotty chaparral and foothills of Mount Natib, but the men quickly became lost. In this group was a thirty-year-old sergeant named Nakamura, a machine gunner. Like many Japanese soldiers with a high school or college education, the sergeant kept a diary, pages composed under fire.

 

[
Nakamura, Diary, January 10, 1942
] Our trail becomes stiffer and stiffer as we advance into the mountains. An officer reconnoitering unit was sent out for the third time before night [to try to find the rest of the brigade]. Platoon commander died in action. I recalled my brotherly association
with him since the organization of our unit. It is terrible to have to lose a man [on the first day]. I am downhearted . . . Everyone became silent after the death of our leader.
³⁷

 

The next night the two sides faced off in full-scale battle, the Summer Brigade hurling itself against units of the Philippine Army and the highly trained Philippine Scouts. The clash took place an hour before midnight in a sugarcane field south of the Calaguiman River and under a bright moon. The Japanese charged—their favorite tactic—and the Scouts and Philippine Army troops waiting in their fighting holes created a horizontal rain of rifle and point-blank cannon fire.

The first wave of
nikudan
were cut down, then came another wave of human bullets, then another.

In the morning, the cane field looked like an abattoir. Two hundred, three hundred
nikudan
lay dead in front of the Filipino positions. Japanese field officers reported that “the enemy positions were impregnable.”
³⁸

Just before dawn, Sergeant Nakamura and his machine gun squad ran into the American line.

 

[
Nakamura, Diary
] Received artillery shelling and rifle shot rained about. It took the guts out of me.
³⁹

 

Ammunition was short, food stocks dwindled, and “the demand for water was enormous.” The Imperial Army had very few trucks, and the trucks were easy targets. Nara's men switched to packhorses to traverse the heavy jungle and hills, but the animals could not negotiate the snarled traces or precipitous trails. The terrain was “so thick,” Colonel Imai often felt he was “walking against walls.” He kept running into “banyan trees, mahogany trees, mango trees, and the like, mixed with bamboo and thorns” and “vines of rattan and ivy.” At night “the screams of weird birds shrieking in the dark or cries of the lizard” followed the boys from Fukuyama as they moved into position to continue the attack.
⁴⁰

 

[
Nakamura, Diary, January 12–13
] Two men from 4th Squad and one man from 3rd Squad were wounded. PFC Kobata was killed by artillery . . . Our food supply is now low—there are very few dry crackers left. I am [existing on] water only. No supplies can be brought from the rear because of the difficult route. We are getting weaker.
⁴¹