Tears in the Darkness (23 page)

He was on a pinto stallion named Patches, an ornery creature. At the end of the first day the boy was spent and looking for a place to stop and put up the string.

“Where you headed?” said a rancher's wife, serving him some fried chicken and potatoes.

“We wintered a bunch of sheep up in the Big Hole, ma'am, and now we're bringing them back to the Yellowstone.”

“Wintered in the Big Hole?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“That's really something!” she said. “Let me see that coat of yours. Looks like you have some buttons missing.”

He could have stopped anywhere, any ranch along the way for a bed of dry hay and a hot breakfast at sunup. That was the custom of the country. And he knew he could count on it, the kindness of strangers, count on it even in the hardest of times.

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE LAST WEEK OF MARCH
1942, and after more than a month's lull in the fighting, the revitalized 14th Army was ready to begin the second battle for Bataan.

Homma had 39,000 men now, well rested and well supplied. Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the first battle, his field officers had taken a month to teach their troops new tactics and fire discipline. No more blind charges across open ground, they told their men, no more attacks without bombing and shelling the enemy first.
¹

Nearly 150 big guns were positioned in front of the American line. Japanese bombers and fighters were armed with more than sixty tons of high explosives. And in jungle clearings, cane fields, and rice paddies just north of the American line, thousands of
hohei
were massed, bayonets fixed, waiting for orders to attack.

Among these nervous foot soldiers was Takesada Shigeta, a twenty-one-year-old private from the town of Yori in Yamaguchi Prefecture, a replacement to the 122nd Infantry, one of the regiments in the revitalized Summer Brigade.

 

HIS FATHER
, one of the original “human bullets”
(nikudans)
in the war with Russia, thought Takesada Shigeta, the youngest of his five children, unfit for the army. The boy was stubborn and something of a
kojin shugisha
, an “individualist,” and his father worried he wouldn't keep his promise, the promise all young conscripts made at their send-off ceremonies—to forget home and leave their lives on the battlefield.
²

Father and son had never been close, so when Takesada reported to
Ogori station for the train ride to his port of embarkation, he was surprised to find his father waiting for him.

His father handed him a ten-yen note, a customary good luck gift to a soldier going away. The father tried to make small talk with his son, but Takesada, distracted by the moment and disaffected by this man who had always doubted him, just stood there and nodded.

At length the train arrived and Takesada Shigeta picked up his rifle, shouldered his pack, and turned to go.

Just a minute, his father said. He had something to say: “Go fight, and remember the promise you made at the shrine before you left for training—don't come back anything but dead.”

 

Friday, March 27, 1942, south bank of the Abo-Abo River, Bataan
Takesada Shigeta had never heard an officer speak so respectfully to a group of
hohei
.

“
Anata-gata wa
. . .,” the general began, which was almost like saying “My dear fellows” or “My good men.”

What courtesy! Takesada thought.

The general, Akira Nara, commander of the 65th Brigade, was standing on a small wooden platform that had been set on a rise above the river. In a clearing in front of him, hundreds of replacements stood in formation shoulder to shoulder listening.

“Thank you for your efforts and for coming here to fight,” the general said. On April 3, a national holiday at home, they would begin their attack. While their families and friends were celebrating the anniversary of the death of the Emperor Jimmu, founder of the Imperial line, they would be crossing the Tiawir River, their departure point. Already, he said, the army's big guns were pounding the American lines. Listen! Could they hear the explosions? That's where they were going to attack. The fighting would be difficult, but they had been well trained, and the emperor would be with them. In fact, the general said, to bring them luck His Majesty had sent some presents, a royal gift of sake, and cigarettes for each man.

Standing in the middle of the formation, Takesada Shigeta tried to listen hard to what the general was saying, but he felt nervous, distracted. For days the old hands in the 122nd, the handful of men who had survived the first battle for Bataan, had been regaling the replacements with
horror stories of the murderous fight and malevolent jungle that had consumed so many of their comrades.

“Fight hard,” the general was saying, concluding his remarks. “We're depending on you.”

When they had finished their sake and smoked their cigarettes, the replacements returned to their bivouacs, where their officers gathered them for one final ritual.

“This is the last chance you will have to prepare yourself for death,” Takesada's captain said.

Then each man was issued a small paper bag. On the outside he was to inscribe his name and address, inside he was to put a lock of hair and some fingernail clippings, “remains” (in lieu of ashes) that would be interred in a stone reliquary at home, perhaps behind his parents' house or in some well-kept cemetery where his family would gather to chant prayers and whisper his name.

 

HE WENT INTO ACTION
almost immediately. The big attack was scheduled for April 3, but parts of the 122nd Infantry and other elements of the 65th Brigade had been ordered to probe the enemy's outposts and look for weak spots in advance of the big push, and on March 28 Takesada Shigeta tightened his helmet strap and checked his weapon.

The men moved out slowly, deliberately, for the going was difficult. They climbed up hills and shimmied down escarpments; they forded rivers and picked their way through the tangles of thorns that tripped their feet and tore their uniforms. On open ground under a burning sun, their helmets became
nabe
, “frying pans,” and Takesada Shigeta started to feel faint.

His company was positioned well back in the line of march, and as he and his comrades reached the heavily defended approaches to Mount Samat, they came upon what was left of the units that had preceded them, a grim parade of dead and wounded
hohei
lying by the side of the trail. Here was a man without a foot, there a boy with an arm shot away. Takesada Shigeta wanted to avert his eyes but could not stop himself from staring. These were landsmen, Yamaguchi boys!

Then his company too came under fire, and by the time the 122nd reached Mount Samat, half his platoon had been killed or wounded.

“The moment has come,” he told himself. Time to give up all
thoughts of home, thoughts of Japan and Yori and his family. “There is no way for me to come back,” he thought.

Still, like most young men, he loved life. And like most soldiers he could not stop himself from calculating his chances. All around him men were dying, and yet, curiously, he had remained untouched. And now he began to think, perhaps his moment had not come after all. Perhaps his
shukumei
, his “destiny,” was to survive.

The thought came and went and came again, gnawing at his resolve, his determination to do his duty. The uncertainty was so irritating, he decided to test his fate, and one afternoon under fire he rolled on his back and stuck his arms in the air to see if he'd get hit. The enemy obliged with a volley of bullets. (He was sure he could feel the rush of air as the rounds whizzed past his arms and around his fingers.) Then he thought, “I should try this again to make sure.” This time he raised his legs. Another volley, another escape. Now he was certain.

“I will never be shot,” he thought. He was going to go home whole after all, instead of
hone to chitte
, a “bunch of bones in a box.”

 

ON THE SAME DAY
east on the same field, Second Lieutenant Hirohisa Murata, who had wanted nothing so much as to be a soldier, gathered a squad of sixteen
hohei
for a night patrol against the American outposts.
³

He was young, this lieutenant, just twenty years old, but not without experience. His unit, the 61st Infantry, had been fighting in China when orders arrived transferring it to Bataan. The men of the 61st hated the wet and cold of China and imagined an easier time in the tropics, then they discovered they had only exchanged one tough piece of ground for another, frozen slop for sweltering jungle. The work was the same and it worried them.

The Chinese had run them ragged, sniping at their flanks, skirmishing in their rear, lurking in ambush around the next bend. Now, despite the assurances of their commanders that this new enemy would be easier, the men of the 61st expected another difficult campaign.

Their line officers were anxious as well. In other armies subalterns “directed” their men, reckoning risk and gain as they steered them toward the objective. In the Imperial Army, where “the object of all maneuver” was “to close quickly with the enemy” and apply the point of a bayonet, young lieutenants and captains led from the front. They were
the bellwethers, vanguards of one whose job was to set an example of gallantry and daring so conspicuous that their men could not help but follow. In the West, leading from the front was considered above and beyond the call of duty. In the Imperial Army, however, such intrepidity was expected.
⁴

In his first action in China, Hirohisa Murata was uncertain of himself, and he was sure his men could see it. He was nineteen, soft eyes, cherubic cheeks. He imagined his men asking, How is this “little boy” of an officer going to lead a platoon of His Majesty's
hohei?

“I will take my helmet off and advance in front of everyone” in just a cloth cap, he thought. “It will make me look very brave.”

His losses that day were heavy and so heartbreaking he worried he might not be able to summon the courage for the next day's fight. All around him the wounded were groaning, begging for help, or calling for their mothers and wives. From time to time one of the dying, sensing his end, would beg for
jisatsu
, and Hirohisa Murata would hand him his pistol or, out of pity, pull the trigger himself.

Now the lieutenant had been ordered to take a scout platoon south toward the Tiawir River and foothills of Mount Samat to probe the enemy's line of defenses along the East-West Road. To the Japanese, “probe” meant attack. Twenty-five
hohei
poking at a great beast hiding in the dark, trying to get it to snap back and reveal itself.

They set out after 8:00 p.m., Hirohisa Murata plus a communications officer named Kunoda and a platoon of scouts. The night was liquid black. All he had to guide him was a compass.

“We will use the inchworm tactic,” he told his men.

The two officers advanced first. (“It is as if we are being sucked into the deep darkness,” Murata thought.) As they made their way into no-man's-land, Kunoda pinned pieces of paper to the trees, then at a certain point he would double back, following the markers and bring the rest of the platoon forward to where Murata was waiting. And so they went, Murata and Kunoda, then the rest of the platoon; first the head, then the tail. Slow. Quiet. One length at a time.

The jungle was thick, the night black, and at first the two officers found themselves leading their men in circles. After a while Murata got his bearings, sent Kunoda back for the platoon, then sat on a tree stump in the dark, sword in his right hand, pistol in his left, to wait.

A few moments later, from somewhere in the black, somewhere
close, Hirohisa Murata heard voices, voices speaking English. They sounded urgent, these voices, excited. Then he heard gunfire, followed by the sound of exploding grenades. He was blind in the dark, but he could smell smoke from the explosions and hear the voices again, more urgent than before.

Maybe Kunoda and the men had run into the enemy on their way to him, or perhaps another patrol, also probing the American lines, had stumbled into a strong point.

Never mind. He had his orders, his standing orders, and the orders were to attack.

He turned toward the sound of the voices, raised his sword and, as he imagined it, “dove into the darkness.”

 

March 28, 1942, American main line of resistance, near the East-West Road
Every night the Air Corps ground crews could hear the enemy pushing against the outposts in their sector, probing the main line of defense.
⁵

“Stay alert!” the officers yelled, but the men were spent and surly, and they snarled at such orders and cursed those who issued them.

“Officers,” Ben Steele thought. “Worthless as tits on a boar.”

Every day Japanese planes and artillery pounded them, then pounded them again. The bombing and shelling uprooted trees and left men with blood running from their ears and noses.

Ben Steele hunkered down like everyone else. He'd never heard such noise, seen such fury. And there seemed no way to stop it. When American artillery tried to answer, Japanese dive-bombers arrived to knock out the American guns. Then the enemy shelling would resume. Clearly they were coming, the Japanese. They would come out of the jungle by the thousands, and they would come soon.

More than 60,000 troops manned the American main line of resistance, which stretched fourteen miles across the middle of the peninsula just behind the East-West Road. Dividing the line roughly in half was the Pantingan River. The Americans guessed that the Japanese main thrust would come down the east side of the peninsula where more than 32,000 Filipinos and Americans were dug in defending that half of the line. Behind them were some 5,200 additional troops ready to counterattack and fill any gaps or breaches.