Tears in the Darkness (19 page)

They returned him to the room where Saito-san, his fellow fugitive, was waiting.

“We are going to be punished,” Kinoshita told him. “We are going to be put to death. You must get yourself ready.”

For his part, he was prepared. “I have no private wish, nothing that I want, nothing at all,” he told himself. “I am not afraid. I am ready to accept death.”

The next day the two men were ordered into an automobile and off they went. The road cut through an area of undergrowth, then, ahead, Kiyoshi Kinoshita saw a break in the terrain, a flat, open place.

He thought, “This is the time I will be put to death.”

The car, however, kept going. A while later they arrived at a hospital, and the two men were given uniforms. After they changed, they were driven up the road to Santa Cruz, and the car stopped in front of a big church.

“Oh,” Kiyoshi Kinoshita thought, “here, here is where we will be shot. What a splendid thing it is to be shot like this at a church. My mind is pure, my heart is full.”

The two men were given a meal, then they waited.

Two days later they were waiting still.

“Maybe we will not be shot,” Kiyoshi Kinoshita began to think.

After that he was transferred from one hospital to another. His wound had healed and he was beginning to get some feeling back in his left arm.

At each place, he and a handful of other men who had been captured and repatriated during the campaign—amputees and cripples, most of them—were kept in separate quarters, apart from all other troops. The army apparently did not want these
horyo
, these men of shame, to befoul the ranks or stand as survivors, exceptions to the ethic of self-sacrifice.

When he was well, the army assigned Kiyoshi Kinoshita to a small garrison unit, then one day he was told they were sending him to Davao to work in a shipyard, his civilian job before he joined the army. So he went south and took up the welder's torch.

Here, as elsewhere, everyone knew he had been a
horyo
, but none of his superiors, or the men on the job, mistreated him, though from time to time someone might ease up next to him and, with the customary courtesy and respect, ask, “Why didn't you kill yourself?”

 

 

 

 

 

T
HAT DAY
, as usual, Ben Steele, fifteen now, was working, mowing hay.

He'd cut only a quarter of the field, but already the meadow was filling with the scent of his work. At the far end he turned the team for another pass, back in the direction of the house, and as soon as he did he was surprised to see the Old Man coming up the road and cutting across the meadow. At breakfast his mother had told him his father had gone to town early on business and wasn't expected back till supper.

Bud pulled on the reins, stopped the team in the sun. It was hot in the meadow. The rimrocks often blocked the breeze.

“Unhook 'em and turn 'em loose,” the Old Man said, as he approached. “We're leaving.”

“What do you mean, leaving?” the boy said, looking down from his seat.

“We're just leaving the ranch, that's all!”

“But why? Why are we leaving?”

“We've lost the ranch . . . The bank . . . You know.”

He didn't know. He didn't know anything.

“We have to move,” the Old Man went on. “We have to get off the place.”

“Get off when?”

“Now, like I just told you.”

“What about the stock?” the boy said. “What about Buck?”

He still loved that horse, his old lineback buckskin. (Had him since he was seven, used to jump up and straddle his neck to get on. Got so he
could ride that horse anywhere without a bridle, just touch his neck and he'd turn.)

The Old Man said that Buck and the rest of stock would be going to Uncle James's place a few miles down the creek. If they ever got out this way again, the boy could see him.

Then the Old Man turned on his heel and headed down the meadow to the dirt road leading back to the house.

Bud got down from the machine. The sun was hot. Birds were beginning to swoop down and feed among the clumps of cut hay and stubble.

Leaving Hawk Creek—he couldn't imagine it. There was a gnawing in his stomach, like a hunger pang, but more empty, and he was tired like he'd never been tired before.

From Gert later he got the story: the Old Man was mortgaged up to his gray Stetson, but he owned two hundred head of cattle free and clear, and the bankers, knowing he knew his business, urged him to stay on and try to turn a profit. Bess wanted to stay too. She loved the yellow clover by the roadside, the magpies making their nests in the trees, but the Old Man, he did not want to hear it. He owed on the land, owed on the machinery, owed on his taxes.

“We're leaving,” he said.

 

PROM THE MUDROOM
of the house they'd rented in Worden the boy could hear his mother light into his father.

“That's a job you should be doin',” his mother said. “Not that kid. Sending him out there, you'll get him killed this time of year.”

“Aw,” the Old Man came back, “that kid can do it as easy as I can.”

Outside, beyond the mudroom door, the temperature was well below zero, and the thirty miles of broken ground between Worden and the Bull Mountains, where the boy would soon be headed, were frozen with ice and snow.

For a year now the family had been living in a thin-walled bungalow in a small town along the Yellowstone River, his father doing a little of this and a little of that and selling off what was left of the stock from Hawk Creek. The Old Man had made a deal to sell a nearby rancher a couple of workhorses, and he was sending the boy north on a borrowed saddle bronc to fetch them.

“You get with Fred Treible up there and he'll help you to tie those horses' heads together,” his father told him. “Then you fasten onto them with a lariat and bring 'em into the valley.”

He made it north okay, but early the next morning when he went to collect the animals he would be trailing, he discovered they were wild, fourteen hundred pounds each of unruly horseflesh.

A hired hand on the place helped him get halters on them, and around 7:00 a.m. Bud bundled up best he could against the cold and set out for the Yellowstone. He headed south first, across the hills toward the Dry Fork of Hawk Creek, then, keeping Steamboat Butte to his right, he planned to angle east toward Hubbard Creek, hoping to pick up the Bundy Road—if he could find it and it was passable—and use that old track to lead him to the river.

The horses fought him every step. He thought, “How the hell am I gonna break 'em and lead 'em at the same time?”

He yanked and tugged the beasts across the frozen prairie. After three hours, he'd gone barely a mile.

By noon he was hungry and half frozen but dared not stop. It was late afternoon by the time he reached the Bundy Road. At that point he was still some fifteen miles from the river, still wrestling with the knotheads on the other end of the rope.

Now darkness was falling and he was shaking with cold. He hoped he could keep to the road and not end up riding in circles till he fell frozen from his horse.

At last, in the blue light and a swirl of snow, he rode into Worden. It was well after midnight when he walked into the house so stiff with cold he had to stand for a while in front of the stove before he could bend to pull off his boots.

His mother tried to fuss over him. The Old Man stood nearby and said nothing, but the boy knew what he'd done. Knew the Old Man knew it, too.

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE FIRST BATTLE
for Bataan was going badly, and on February 8, 1942, at his new field headquarters, a large two-story house in the town of San Fernando some thirty miles north of the Bataan battle line, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the 14th Army and the man in charge of all Japanese troops in the Philippines, turned again to his officers for advice.
¹

Beleaguered in the field and beset by political enemies at home, Homma was in trouble.

Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong had been captured in the first three weeks of the war, and by early February, Imperial soldiers were marching hard on Singapore and coming ashore in the Dutch East Indies. Japan was taking the territory it wanted, taking it with just ten divisions, 200,000 troops, a relatively small number of men. The Imperial Army appeared invincible, and that chimera created a fervor back home and fear overseas. Quick strikes followed by fleet advances, swift victories, and stunning propaganda. The strategy seemed to be working—working everywhere except the Philippines. There a ragtag army of natives and the soft Western sots who sponsored them had dug in for a fight in a jungle wasteland, and suddenly there was a hitch in Japan's plan for early victory in the Pacific.

Homma had been given fifty days to take the islands. His deadline, January 26, had passed without a good result, and he knew that his countrymen, accustomed to waking to news of victories with their morning miso and steamed rice, would be disappointed. “It seems that the general public feels that since we captured Manila easily, the rest of the area is virtually won as well,” he wrote in his diary. “This is immensely
annoying to me. They should understand the difficulty we are experiencing here. Our opponent is the United States, an entirely different enemy from China. Of course there is no way for an easy resolution.”
²

More troubling, the general had learned through channels that the Throne—likely at the urging of its “advisers,” which is to say his rivals on the Imperial General Staff—had refused to issue a general commendation to the men of the 14th Army, an accolade that by custom should have been theirs, and his, for taking an enemy capital. “I have no response when asked whether the Bataan battle will be over soon,” he continued. “I only have fear.”
³

Most troubling of all, Japan's central strongman, General Hideki Tojo—war minister, prime minister, and one of Homma's old antagonists—was angry. Japan's other field commanders had brushed aside the British and bowled over the Dutch, but Tojo felt that against America, Japan appeared to be “blundering.”

In truth, Homma's failure to secure the Philippines in fifty days had done nothing to delay Tokyo's timetable in the southwest Pacific. Indeed, the Imperial Army was ahead of schedule, but daily stories in the American press about the “valiant defenders of Bataan” had left Tojo “irritated.” Frank Hewlett, for example, a United Press reporter, kept pounding out the same story line: “American and Filipino troops, after six weeks of battling here in the wilds of Bataan . . . have exploded the myth that the Japanese are ‘supermen.' ”
⁴

 

THE MEETING
at Homma's headquarters in San Fernando began in the middle of the afternoon. As was his custom, the general said little. As was their habit, his officers, divided into camps, were sharp-tongued and full of choler.

One side clamored to continue the attack. They argued that Nara and Kimura had repeatedly pushed the American line back. The 14th Army had the advantage, the initiative. If they would just concentrate their forces along Bataan's flat east coast, they could break through the enemy line and push the adversaries into the sea.

The other side wanted to break off the attack. To continue, they said, would be
jisatsu
, “suicide.” Yes, Nara and Kimura had indeed made gains, but between them they had suffered so many casualties, an attacking force of nearly 20,000 men now could scarcely muster three battalions,
fewer than 3,000 men, a handful against the enemy's horde. Take the peninsula under siege, they advised. MacArthur's men were already on half rations, and with Japan in control of the sea and sky, the situation was bound to get worse. The Filipinos and Americans had no hope of help. All the Japanese had to do was sit back and starve them into submission.

Homma sat in silence. To Major Moriya Wada, a young staff officer, the general looked troubled, “blue.” The general's face, Wada thought, seemed filled with
anrui
, “hidden grief, tears in the darkness.”

Since landing at Lingayen Gulf, the 14th Army had suffered 3,320 killed, 5,350 wounded, and 15,500 sick—men disabled by malaria, dengue fever, beriberi, dysentery, and other diseases. Homma had lost roughly half his army, more than 24,000 casualties. The 2nd Battalion of 20th Infantry, the unit that had landed at Quinauan Point, had, as the general later put it, “vanished without a trace,” and its sister battalions, sent to its rescue, were decimated. An entire regiment wiped out.
⁵

After hours of argument the general finally spoke. He was calling off the offensive, he said. With such losses the army was near collapse. If the enemy counterattacked, he told his staff, “we will have no choice but to hold up our hands and surrender.”
⁶

He ordered his officers to prepare a message for Tokyo, a plea for re-supply and reinforcements. For a Japanese commander, no request could be more bitter, for it reeked of resignation and defeat.

 

Under the present conditions, even if we continued our offensive, the chances of success are slim, and at the very least, huge losses will be incurred. In the worst case scenario, this will produce disastrous effects for the entire strategy of the Philippines . . . As the army sees the shedding of more blood and tears, we recommend the maintenance and reorganization of our present position. After increased troop strength arrives, we will think of an appropriate strategy for the changed conditions.
⁷

 

And then, turning back to the long lists of casualties, the general's tears were hidden no more.