Tears in the Darkness (15 page)

 

By day the sun hung high and hot, baking the men in the open and turning the airless jungle into a suffocating shroud. A writer in the Imperial Army's Propaganda Corps, traveling with attacking units on Bataan, tried to capture the hardship in verse.

 

Our troops plod wearily

Through a furnace wind.

There is no food,

Our bellies must be filled

With water.

Drops of sweat roll out

From under our helmets.
⁴²

 

By sundown the
hohei
would be soaked in sweat, then, as the temperature dropped and day gave way to night, their wet uniforms would cling to their skin and make them shiver. And all at once, from somewhere in the dark, would come the order to attack.

Each night they went forward, then attacked again.

“Whaah!” they yelled, charging into the darkness. “Whaah!”

And each morning the fields and jungle floor of Bataan were covered in corpses.

They attacked on January 11 and they attacked on the 12th, but, as they were wont to say, “without a good result.”

“I am thoroughly disappointed,” General Homma wrote in his diary. “Takeuchi [a regimental commander who led a flanking column west into the hills] took the wrong road and [got lost] . . . missing out on a good opportunity. What an incompetent fellow.”
⁴³

But it was not incompetence that was killing the Summer Brigade; it was the exigencies of the moment. Without detailed maps, accurate intelligence, and reliable communication with brigade headquarters (their wires were continually cut by enemy shelling), the officers in the field leading the brigade's columns were left wandering in the dark.

Many led by instinct, which is to say the mindless reflex to storm ahead, and they positioned themselves at the most dangerous spot on the battlefield, the head of the column. Nara was losing so many lieutenants, captains, majors, and colonels that he had to order them to stop their bravado. “A person who cannot lead his men if not in a standing position
is not a hero but a fool,” he wrote in a battlefield directive. “There have been actual examples where three persons, the company commander and the platoon leaders [gathered at the head of the column], were killed at the same time.”
⁴⁴

As the casualties mounted, the men in the ranks started to lose their
seishin
, their fighting spirit. Leading an attack, an officer might stop and turn to urge his men forward only to find himself alone in front of the enemy. “If a charge is to be carried out,” Nara wrote in yet another directive, “it should be the creed of every officer and man in the force to charge en masse into the enemy's position, even if enemy shells are falling all around.”
⁴⁵

On January 16, Sergeant Nakamura's unit managed to rout the enemy from a position in the foothills, but enemy artillery had the spot zeroed in and the new occupants soon found themselves under a “continuous rain of artillery shells.”

 

[
Nakamura, Diary
] I thought my end was near, so I took out my mother's photo. Yesterday and today are festival days at home. I wonder what the people are doing. I am praying for the health and happiness of grandma and the others from a fox-hole at the front.
⁴⁶

 

At last the Japanese changed tactics. Instead of ordering one infantry charge after another, Nara's officers first sent out infiltrators to probe the enemy strength, intrepid men like Sergeant Hideo Sekihara.

 

KIRIKOMI-TAI
, they called themselves, men who slipped silently through the black and “cut deep” into the enemy's trenches. In a dangerous profession,
kirikomi
was the most dangerous of jobs, and Hideo Sekihara, the
oke
maker from Aoya, was well suited to such work.
⁴⁷

He was a
guns
now, a senior sergeant in charge of his own five-man squad. An hour or so before dusk, he and his men would gather at the edge of the battlefield, about five hundred yards in front of the enemy's position, and there, in the fading light, they would look through their binoculars and study the enemy trenches, noting the placement of machine guns and the other strong points on the line.

“Put every feature of the field in your mind so that you can walk it with your eyes closed,” the
guns
told them.

Then they waited.
Kirikomi
required “sheer darkness,” the blackest black. To muffle their steps they swaddled their boots in socks or rags. Halfway to the enemy's lines they would get down on their bellies and, as the
guns
had instructed them, crawl “like house lizards,” right side, left side . . . right side, left side. Within a hundred yards of their objective they turned into “inchworms,” undulating forward (again as they'd been taught), rising and falling, rising and falling slowly, silently until they reached the edge of the enemy trench line.

At this point, the
guns
always took the lead. He looked for a soft spot in the lines, a few yards left unmanned where he could slide into a trench unnoticed, then work his way left or right until he came upon an enemy on watch, almost always a hapless Filipino. If the man was facing away from him, Hideo Sekihara would reach out in the dark and tap him gently on the shoulder.

“Hi,” he'd say, or sometimes “okay,” or even “
magandang gabi
” (Tagalog for “good evening”), anything to get the man to turn toward him so he could drive his bayonet into the man's heart.

Sometimes he would stick the blade between the man's ribs and rip into a ventricle or slice through a major vein or artery, and sometimes he would stick the man in the diaphragm, or just below it, and thrust upward, as hard as he was able, into the body.

The first time he tapped a man on the shoulder, Hideo Sekihara started to tremble. He thought, “If I do not kill this man, I will be shot immediately.”
Kore wa shinu-ka ikiru no mondai desu
, This was a question of life or death. After that he did his job without thinking.

Before the
kirikomi-tai
returned to their own lines, they scoured the enemy trenches for weapons, ammunition, food, clothing—anything to supplement the pitiful provisions of the Imperial Army.

More often than not, Sekihara and his men got away clean, but now and then one of the men would trip an alarm and then, all at once, the enemy trench line would erupt with rifle and machine-gun fire, and the house lizards and inchworms would have to crawl for their lives.

The gunfire always frightened the
guns
. It sounded like the roar of “a river in a flood,” a rush of water at his back, chasing after him.

 

GENERAL NARA
was fuming (“indignant in a towering rage” was how one of his operations officers described him in an after-action report).
“All units were attacking repeatedly . . . with no hope of victory in sight and with steadily mounting casualties,” and Nara, who just a fortnight before had been so cocksure in front of his brother officers, was now worried about losing his brigade.
⁴⁸

His troops had begun the campaign without enough food or potable water, without enough ammunition and supporting arms. At the moment, they were reduced to eating dry biscuits and hardtack and foraging for roots and wild fruit. More than half the force was sick with tropical diseases, and almost every man on the front line had dysentery from drinking out of streams and rivers. By the third week in January, Japanese casualty lists were longer than the daily combat roll.

 

[
Nakamura, Diary, January 22
] Last night a trench mortar shell about three feet long dropped near us. I thought it was my end. At dawn one enemy truck came directly towards us. The second squad attacked [it]. The truck swayed toward our heavy machine gun. Our machine gun opened fire. A man who looked like a driver was killed. Minami and Aoki of the 3rd Squad died in action.
⁴⁹

 

It was attack and counterattack, the Summer Brigade taking ground and pushing the enemy back, the Filipinos and Americans trying to hold the ground or regain what they'd lost. At last, late on January 22, American commanders began a staged withdrawal to a reserve battle line that stretched across the middle of the peninsula. To cover their withdrawal, American artillery pounded the Summer Brigade.

“I was completely paralyzed when I was suddenly attacked by the enemy at dawn,” Sergeant Nakamura wrote in his diary. “Fortunately I spent the night in the fox-hole, safe.”

The next day, January 24, somewhere in the southern foothills of Mount Natib, the sergeant's good fortune left him, and his diary abruptly ended.
⁵⁰

 

AFTER A FORTNIGHT
of fierce combat around Mount Natib, the Summer Brigade needed to rest and refit, but Generals Homma and Nara were determined to pursue and destroy their enemy. Using maps captured after the fall of Manila, they ordered the regiments of the 65th Brigade to chase the withdrawing American-Filipino force south to
what they thought was a thin line of outposts, but either the captured maps were wrong or the Japanese misread them, for they rushed headlong into the enemy's strength, a well-fortified second line of defense that stretched across the middle of the peninsula along the East-West Road. The line ran past the base of Mount Samat, a 553-foot spur with a commanding view of the lowlands.