Authors: Japanese Reaping the Whirlwind: Personal Accounts of the German,Italian Experiences of WW II
American-educated Dr Kawai, the chief editorial writer of the
Nippon Times
, also witnessed the Doolittle Raid and the bombing that followed:
There was a big change with the beginning of the air raids. There was real terror then. This, however, did not begin with the Doolittle raid which the people looked upon as a curiosity and they did not even bother to go to the shelters. At the same time there was considerable criticism of the army for letting the Doolittle raiders get through. The sirens did not even go off until the planes were over the city and the sky was full of anti-aircraft fire. I was out and saw the firing, but thought it was just practice, although it seemed strange to be practising with what appeared to be live shells. Then I saw the planes and realized it was a raid. Then finally the sirens were sounded. There was considerable criticism after that.
In March 1942, the Japanese had landed on the northeast coast of New Guinea at Salamaua and Lae. The next objective was Port Moresby on the southern shore, but to reach it they would have to cross the Owen Stanley Range, which rises to over 2,700m (9,000ft). In May 1942 Japanese newspaperman Seitchi Shiojiri joined them. He claimed to be the first war correspondent the Imperial Army had allowed to visit an operational area. Their advance, he noted, was slowed by the ‘stubborn resistance of the Australians’. They also found themselves perilously low on supplies.
When we were near the top of Mount Iaraba, the troops ahead were suddenly thrown into disorder and the pace of advance slowed down. The men scattered about in small groups, shouting at each other. Soon word came round that we had got splendid rations left by the Australians. When the soldiers came near what seemed to be the mountain top, they all left their path and started to run for their lives towards it. I found myself running too; the hungry man in me had got wind of something nice to eat. I was ashamed. I was fully aware how I was disgracing myself. But I kept on running. Nothing held me back. The soldiers I passed, one and all, had their mouths full of something delicious, their pockets bulging, their heads carrying all sorts of beautiful cans. The men coming up from below, dead tired from lack of sleep, suddenly came to themselves at the sight and rushed up the steep slope with amazing briskness. Soon I came out of the thick jungle into a small open place at the top. There stood a tall thatched Papuan hut, at the door of which I saw great confusion. Swarms of excited soldiers jostling and scrambling in and out. Evidently the hut had been used by the Australians as a storehouse. There were mountains of cans piled up – butter, cheese, milk, corned beef and everything. A number of cans of Arnold’s biscuits were scattered here and there on the bare ground. What a feast all those things were to us! It seemed as though we had suddenly landed in fairyland. We had run out of the meagre rice ration long before, and had trudged on day and night eating only tasteless army crackers with occasional wild potatoes and papayas. The majority of the unit coming from the farming villages of Kuchi prefecture had never seen or tasted anything like this in their lives. I saw some of the soldiers who had had their fill in the hut throwing away half-opened cans of corned beef with evident distrust. I helped myself to Arnold’s biscuits and butter, thinking that I had not tasted anything so fine for at least two years. Here in the Papuan mountains the standard of living was higher than in Japan! I thought that I saw something of the appalling power of Anglo-American civilization that Japan had so recklessly challenged.
The feast was abruptly ended by an enemy plane, which strafed the hut. For the next few days, they trudged on through jungle in the ‘half light of dusk’ even at midday. ‘The humidity was almost unbearable,’ said Shiojiri. It rained almost all day and all night until they were soaked to the skin and shivering with the cold. Then they reached Efogy ravine, where the Australians and the Japanese vanguard had engaged in hand-to-hand fighting.
There were about 200 bodies, Japanese and Australian, scattered in the ravine. Here and there, on both sides of the path of blood-red clay which ran through the cypress forest, I saw a great many Japanese and Australians lying dead. One of them had a twisted neck and broken legs, with his face covered all over with mud and blood. Another was in a crouching posture, his face resting at the foot of a tree. A third was lying on his back like a fallen tree, and a fourth was shot through his forehead in a prone shooting position, his gun left on the ground in front of him. Another again was hanging on a tree over the edge of a cliff; another lying with his upper body in a ditch; and another leaning against a tree with his body bent forward – men in all postures and conditions showing how desperately they fought and fell.
Shiojiri felt that if they had fought the enemy out in the open as they had in China, they would have stood no chance, as their forces would have been destroyed by Allied aircraft. As it was, they had numerical superiority over the Australian forces. They had more heavy weapons and, due to their low standard of living, were better able to withstand the privations of the jungle. These factors should have given them a decisive advantage.
But when we reached Mount Efogybia, we had lost nearly 80 per cent of our men killed or wounded in action, or disabled by illnesses. Besides we had almost run out of food and ammunition. Our supply line by way of Buna had practically been cut off by enemy submarines and aeroplanes. We were indeed in a hopeless position. The only thing that kept up morale was the thought of Port Moresby.
Then came news that the Americans had landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, denying the Japanese troops air support and further threatening their supply lines. They received orders from the area commander in Rabaul to abandon their attack on Port Moresby and withdraw to defensive positions in the mountains. That night Shiojiri saw the elderly commander, Major-General Noril, ‘sitting solemnly upright on his bed, his face emaciated, his grey hair reflecting the dim light of the candle’.
Lieutenant Colonel Tanaka, his staff officer, sat face to face with him, also on a mat. Two lonely shadows were cast on the dirty wet canvas.
‘I’m not going back, not a step! Are you going back, Tanaka? How can we abandon this position after all the blood the soldiers had shed and the hardship they have endured? I cannot give such an order.’
Noril grasped his samurai sword that lay beside him and, drawing a little closer to his staff officer, added in a biting tone: ‘I will not retreat an inch. I’d rather disguise myself as a native of these mountains and stay here.’
But then orders telling them to return to the coast at Buna arrived from Tokyo, ‘authorized by the Emperor himself – His Majesty’s order had to be obeyed’. Nevertheless, Shiojiri reported, the army was close to mutiny.
The order to retreat crushed the spirit of the troops which had been kept up through sheer pride. For a time the soldiers remained stupefied among the rocks on the mountainside. Then they began to move, and once in retreat they fled for dear life. None of them had ever thought that a Japanese soldier would turn his back on the enemy. But they were actually beating the retreat. There was no denying that. As soon as they realized the truth, they were seized with an instinctive desire to live. Neither history nor education had any meaning to them now. Discipline was completely forgotten. Each tried for his life to flee faster than his comrades, and the confusion was worse than it had been at the supply dump.
The Australians were soon in hot pursuit. At every jungle clearing the Japanese were attacked from the air. The supply situation grew more critical. And there was no living off the land. Fields far to each side of the track were already stripped bare. Men lay by the wayside dying of starvation, but their comrades could not risk their own lives to help them. They plunged on over towering waterfalls and through the sunless forest, soaked with rain and humidity.
And in that eternal twilight lay numberless bodies of men scattered here and there – men so recently killed in action had already begun to rot. A nasty smell, like that of burning old cloth, filled the air, giving us a stifling sensation of nausea. It was the smell of dead bodies – rotting human bodies lying in all possible postures, some on their faces, some on their backs, some on their sides, some in a squatting position. What struck me as being very strange was that they all had on their bellies something like a heap of sand, black, glittering and wriggling all the time. I approached one of the bodies and found that it was a heap of maggots bred in the belly, where the rotting process seems to set in before any other part of the body. They were little creatures about an inch long, with numerous slender legs like those of a centipede and closely lined across their backs which glittered like black lacquered armour. They crowded in a heap on the belly, which had fallen in, pushing, fighting, dropping to the ground and scrambling up again, eager to bite into the rotten bowels. All the bodies had their pants lying flat on the ground, their legs having melted away. In one case, both hair and skin had gone from the head, leaving the skull exposed as a white birch split open. In another case all the skin and flesh had melted away from the chest and the ribs were gleaming like chalk in the dusky jungle.
When I was about to turn a corner, where the jungle cast a deeper gloom on the path, I saw something white among the trees moving noiselessly towards me like a ghost. Could it be one of the dead? I stood transfixed.
‘Give me something to eat,’ said the ghost in my ear in a feeble, whispery voice. ‘Give me something to eat.’
I looked at him closely. Surely he was not a ghost; he was alive. His pale face, white as a sheet, was bordered sharply by black hair. His raw-boned, dark brown body was covered in part by a piece of white cloth. Probably he had been lying almost dead on the ground for some time and at the sound of approaching steps had risen to his feet by a superhuman effort and staggered out into the path.
‘Give me something to eat,’ he repeated over and over in his weak, husky voice, stretching out a thin hand which trembled like a piece of paper. I took a half-eaten rice-ball and a tiny taro out of my kit, put them in his outstretched hands and dashed away without ever turning my head …
At last, after about ten days, we managed to get back to Mount Iarada which stood at the northern end of the path across the Owen Stanley Range. Here the narrow path was congested with stretchers carrying the wounded soldiers back to the field hospital on the coast. There were so many of them that they had been delayed here since before the wholesale retreat began. Some of them were on makeshift stretchers, each made of two wooden poles with a blanket or tent-cloth tied to them with vines and carried by four men. They had slow and laborious progress, constantly held up by steep slopes. The soldiers on them, some lying on their faces, some on their backs, emitted groans of pain at every bump. In some cases, the blood from their wounds was dripping through the canvas onto the ground. Some looked all but dead, unable even to give out a groan …
As soon as we got out of the mountains into flat country we were exposed to more vigorous air attacks. We had a most terrible one by the Kumusi river, which flows along the bottom of Owen Stanley Range.
The river was 100m (330ft) wide but the bridge built over it by the Yokoyama Engineer Unit had been destroyed so often that they had given up rebuilding it. Instead, they slung a wire rope over the river and ferried supplies across with a basket and pulley.
Some of the American fliers performed the wonderful feat of cutting this thin rope in the air with machine-gun fire.
‘A circus in the air!’ said a young engineer platoon commander, who was a student of the Engineering department of the Tokyo Imperial University. He spoke in pure admiration of the daring and skilful performance of the enemy fliers, without a shade of hostility in his tone. There was no longer the least suspicion of hostile feeling or fighting spirit in any unit or soldier. The only thing that occupied our minds was to get back to the coast as soon as possible.
We were kept waiting for several days near the Kumusi, exposed night and day to air raids. Then, one dark night, we left the hut in the jungle and crept to the river. The engineers had made a big guide-light which illuminated the swift current. We waited in a long line and boarded a small folding boat which carried six of us at a time. When we got to the other bank, we pushed on through the darkness as fast as we could.
Soon after this, the Australians took the river crossing. The remaining Japanese tried to cross further downstream on rafts. Many, including Major-General Noril, drowned.
Shiojiri made it to the coast and back to Rabaul where he met other newspapermen who had just escaped the fighting on Guadalcanal.
We were not permitted to send a single line of news to Japan … On top of that, I was told that the truth about the campaign in New Guinea would never have a chance of being recorded in the war history of the Army.
The journalists asked to be sent back to Japan. The Imperial government refused. The army did not want them in Rabaul, so they were shipped to Manila where they could be ‘canned up’, arriving just in time to enjoy the Filipinos’ Christmas celebrations. The rest of Noril’s force was left to starve on the beaches around Buna. Then American Marines landed and the survivors were pushed back into the jungle, where they perished to a man.
While I was laid up in bed in a corner of Manila, trembling with malarial fever and morbid fear, and haunted by a vivid picture of Hell enacted on the coast of Buna, the whole city seemed to be intoxicated with the gay civilization left by the Americans, as if all were well under the sun.
Another survivor of the New Guinea campaign was Colonel Shigera Sugiyama. Interrogated after the war, he said:
I am convinced that the result of the many years of military training of the Japanese from childhood was revealed in this New Guinea campaign. The suffering and hardship endured by the very last man, I know, can never be equalled by the Japanese people again – not for many years anyway. The reason that enabled these men to attain this result was the fact that every man was determined to fight, even to die, for the Emperor. It was life to the men. No man ever forgot the Emperor, even at death, and whenever they suffered, each man remembered that he was fighting for the Emperor …
He also gave full credit to the Australians.