So Sad to Fall in Battle Read online

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE LEAVING FOR THE FRONT

  CHAPTER TWO 22KM2 OF WILDERNESS

  CHAPTER THREE THE STRATEGY

  CHAPTER FOUR RESOLVE

  CHAPTER FIVE FAMILY

  CHAPTER SIX THE AMERICAN INVASION

  CHAPTER SEVEN THE ISLAND WHERE YOU WALK ON THE DEAD

  CHAPTER EIGHT THE SOLDIERS’ LETTERS

  CHAPTER NINE THE BATTLE

  CHAPTER TEN THE END

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  List of Interviewees

  Bibliography

  Onsen Hama

  Kita no Hana

  North Shore

  Hyôryûboku Beach

  “Fukkaku Jinchi” (honeycomb defensive position)

  Command Bunker (“Kuribayashi’s Cave”)

  Memorial for the war dead

  Tenzan

  Table Iwa (Table Rock)

  Ginmeisui

  Kita (No.3) Airfield (under construction)

  Ôsaka-yama (Mount Ôsaka)

  Higashi-yama (Mount Higashi)

  East shore

  Second line of main defensive positions

  Motoyama plateau

  Naval gun battery

  Motoyama gun battery

  Nidan Iwa

  Tamana-yama (Mount Tamana)

  Byôbû-yama (Mount Byôbû)

  Motoyama (No.2) Airfield

  First line of main defensive positions

  Funamidai

  Chidori (No.1) Airfield

  Chidorigahara

  Mount Suribachi

  Suribachi Independent Base

  West Shore

  Chidori Hama

  Western unloading/disembarkation point

  South shore

  Southern jetty

  Southern unloading/disembarkation point

  Directional map of Central and South Pacific

  Tokyo

  Okinawa

  Taiwan

  Nansei Shotô

  Iwo Jima

  Ogasawara Islands (Ogasawara Shotô)

  Minami Tori Shima

  Mariana Islands

  Saipan

  Truk

  The Philippines

  Topographic profile of Iwo Jima from the Sea

  Mount Suribachi

  Nidan Iwa

  Sea level

  PROLOGUE

  HE HAD BEEN VERY TALKATIVE UP TO THAT POINT, BUT WHEN WE got to the subject of the telegram, he went quiet for a moment. Then, snapping to attention, he began to intone in a voice so firm that it belied his eighty-five years: “The battle is entering its final chapter. Since the enemy’s landing, the gallant fighting of the men under my command has been such that even the gods would weep.”

  The peaceful sun was pouring into the living room of the cramped house where the old couple—he was eighty-five, she seventy-five— lived in Nangoku in Kôchi Prefecture. On the comfortable, old-fashioned sofa sat an unopened box containing a robot dog that their grandchild had sent them from Tokyo as a substitute pet. “How can I possibly be expected to make head or tail of the instruction manual at my age?” the old man grumbled just a minute ago. Now, his voice quite transformed, he continued:

  In particular, I humbly rejoice in the fact that they have continued to fight bravely though utterly empty-handed and ill-equipped against a land, sea, and air attack of a material superiority that surpasses the imagination.

  One after another they are falling to the ceaseless and ferocious attacks of the enemy. For this reason, the situation has arisen whereby I must disappoint your expectations and yield this important place to the hands of the enemy. With humility and sincerity, I offer my repeated apologies.

  Our ammunition is gone and our water dried up. Now is the time for us all to make the final counterattack and fight gallantly …

  His voice was growing a little hoarse, and the unexpected recitation came to an abrupt end.

  The expression on his face now back to normal, he looked at me and smiled as if slightly embarrassed. Then, his expression serious once more, he said: “For me that message is like a sutra. It was the last message his lordship left us. It still just comes out word perfect like that. I can’t forget a single word of it.”

  The man Sadaoka Nobuyoshi was referring to as “his lordship” was none other than Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, commander in chief of Iwo Jima, the scene of some of the most savage fighting of the Pacific War. With a force of a little over twenty thousand men, Kuribayashi waged a campaign of unprecedented bloodshed and endurance.

  Meticulous and rational in the way he fought, Kuribayashi inflicted enormous damage on the Americans after they landed before eventually switching to guerrilla tactics. Ultimately, Iwo Jima, which was thought likely to fall in five days, ended up holding out for thirty-six.

  What Sadaoka Nobuyoshi had recited were the opening lines of the farewell telegram Lieutenant General Kuribayashi dispatched to the Imperial General Headquarters on March 16, 1945, when defeat and death were staring him in the face.

  Within the American military, the marines had a reputation as a wild bunch of toughs, but even for them Iwo Jima was a gruesome and terrifying battle variously described as the worst battle in history and a hell within hell. Confronted with his own imminent death, the commander in chief had composed his final dispatch in an attempt to let the world know how bravely his men had fought and died on that isolated island 1,250 kilometers south of Tokyo, so far away from home.

  The battle of Iwo Jima was hopeless from the start.

  A cursory look at the discrepancy in fighting power between the two sides makes clear that the Japanese did not stand a one-in-ten-thousand chance of winning. The Japanese force on the island had neither airplanes nor warships to support them.

  The same was true for land-based fighting power. Against a Japanese force of around twenty thousand men, some sixty thousand American troops came ashore, and backing up those sixty thousand were a further one hundred thousand support troops. The defeat and destruction of the Japanese forces was self-evident; their only real aim was to hold out for as long as they could in an effort to delay the American invasion of the Japanese homeland.

  Against such a background, Kuribayashi wanted to take the last chance he had to tell the world how his men—most of them conscripts in their thirties or older, many of whom had left wives and children at home to come to the front—had fought so brave and yet so tragic a fight that “even the gods would weep”—a Japanese expression meaning that neither the souls of the dead nor the gods of heaven or of earth would be able to remain unmoved.

  Sadaoka was not one of those men.

  “I wanted to die together with his lordship.” Who knows how desperately he wanted that fate as a young man of twenty-six? But it was not to be.

  Sadaoka was not a soldier but a civilian working for the military. In other words, he worked for the army, but fighting was not one of his duties.

  In 1941, three and a half years before the fall of Iwo Jima, Kuriba-yashi was chief of staff of the South China Expeditionary Force (23rd Army) in Canton (present-day Guangzhou in China), while Sadaoka was working in the “tailoring section” responsible for mending the clothing of the officers.

  One day, another civilian employee who worked in administration under Kuribayashi came over. “The chief of staff wants me to ask if any of you can make him a white shirt,” he said. The tailoring section dealt with army uniforms, and most of what they did was mending. There was nobody able to tailor a dress shirt.

  But Sadaoka dismantled a shirt he had brought with him from Japan and examined how it was put together. “I can do it,” he voluntee
red. Now he was able to go in and out of Kuribayashi’s private rooms, and Kuribayashi spoke to him kindly.

  The difference in their relative stations was as wide as the gulf between heaven and earth. Kuribayashi was an officer in his early fifties, while Sadaoka was in his twenties and a mere tailor. But Kuribayashi was genuinely fond of the young man. Sadaoka came from the Shikoku countryside. He had earned good grades at school, but his family was not in an economic position to send him on to college, so he had applied for the South China Expeditionary Force because he wanted to “get over to the continent and see the world.”

  IT WAS FEBRUARY 2004 when I visited Sadaoka in his home near Harimaya-bashi Bridge in the center of Kôchi—almost fifty-nine years after the defeat at Iwo Jima.

  After my interest in Kuribayashi had first been sparked, I found that the more research I did, the more I was drawn to the man. When a member of the Kuribayashi family told me that a onetime civilian employee of the military who had had a special bond with Kuribayashi was still alive and well, I lost no time in getting in touch.

  “If you are an admirer of his lordship, then you are family as far as I’m concerned.”

  As Sadaoka welcomed me with these words, he brought out a photograph. It was from 1943, he said, and had been taken in the barracks of the South China Expeditionary Force in Canton.

  The picture was of the garden of the barracks. Kuribayashi in his uniform and his boots was sitting on a chair with a white seat cover, his sword in his hand. Beside him was a military dog, a German shepherd, and behind him stood five men, one of whom was the young Sadaoka.

  “When they decided to have the picture taken, his lordship said, ‘This is too good an opportunity to miss. Let’s call Sadaoka,’ and he sent a messenger to fetch me. I was in my quarters inside the base, but to get from the garden where the photograph was taken to my quarters and back took a good fifteen minutes, even if you ran at full tilt. His lordship was good enough to wait for me all that time.”

  Under normal circumstances it was quite unthinkable that an army officer should wait fifteen entire minutes for a mere tailor. But I imagine that Kuribayashi wanted to give Sadaoka, a country boy, the chance to have his photo taken, which was still something rare and exotic at the time. In the picture, Sadaoka is standing very upright and stiff directly behind Kuribayashi with a rather tense expression on his face.

  The army was an institution where social class distinctions were carried to an extreme, and for Kuribayashi to be so open and friendly with his “inferiors” made him a most unusual officer. When soldiers were hospitalized, he would personally drive over to visit them in the military hospital, bearing gifts of fruit. He also delivered soothing ice to soldiers who suffered from malaria.

  Sadaoka, who frequently accompanied Kuribayashi, said to him one day half in jest, “When they get a visit from you in person, the patients probably feel so embarrassed that they can’t sleep peacefully.”

  Kuribayashi only smiled at the time, but starting with their next visit, he parked the car outside the hospital gates and would send Sadaoka in to visit the sick men on his behalf while he waited outside.

  Sadaoka loved this man, Kuribayashi, more than his true father, and when Kuribayashi was promoted to lieutenant general and transferred to the Second Imperial Guards Home Division in Tokyo in June 1943, Sadaoka put in a request for a transfer and remained with him.

  But a year later, when it was decided that Kuribayashi was to be sent to Iwo Jima as commander in chief, he forbade Sadaoka to go with him.

  Sadaoka was in torment. In August, two months after Kuribayashi had departed for Iwo Jima, he boarded a ship bound for Chichi Jima, around 270 kilometers north of Iwo Jima, “in pursuit of his lordship.” Iwo Jima is located almost at the southernmost tip of the Ogasawara Islands, but politically it is part of Metropolitan Tokyo. It was Chichi Jima, however, that was the political and economic center of the Ogasawara Islands, and transport ships plied between there and the mainland.

  Determined to be reunited with Kuribayashi, Sadaoka spent a whole night walking from Tokyo to Yokohama. After he had waited a week at the port, he came across a boat going to Chichi Jima.

  “I am a civilian employee of Lieutenant General Kuribayashi. I want you to take me to his lordship,” he announced as he forced his way on board.

  “Papers and written permissions? I had nothing like that with me. Frankly, I’ve got no idea why they let me on board. Maybe it was just that the war was turning against us and I was able to take advantage of the general confusion to sneak on.”

  Once Sadaoka got to Chichi Jima and finally managed to get through to talk to Kuribayashi on the radio telephone, he was subjected to a stinging rebuke. “What the hell do you think you’re doing there?” bellowed Kuribayashi. “I categorically forbid you to come out to this island.”

  “It was the only time his lordship had ever shouted at me—the only time.”

  Sadaoka’s eyes swam with tears as he told me that he never heard Kuribayashi’s voice again.

  He stayed in Chichi Jima until December of that year. Kuribayashi talked about Sadaoka in the letters he wrote to his wife, Yoshii, back in Tokyo. On December 11, 1944, he wrote:

  I heard that Sadaoka will be returning to the mainland on the next ship. He took the trouble to come all this way but was unable to see me. To top it off, he got sick and had to go into hospital, and that’s what finally persuaded him to go home. When he gets back to Tokyo he’s sure to drop in on the house. When he does, don’t just keep him out in the entrance hall, but please go out of your way to be nice to him. I heard that he’s eventually planning to go back to his hometown in the country.

  Kuribayashi had driven Sadaoka off because he did not want him to die in vain for his sake, and he was obviously concerned about this young man who had followed him so far to the south. Kuribayashi again mentioned Sadaoka in another letter written only eleven days later, on December 22, 1944: “I think that after taking the trouble to come out here and then having to go back to Japan without seeing me, he’ll probably end up returning to his hometown. That’s what war is like for all of us, after all.”

  The expression “taking the trouble to come” appears for a second time. Clearly, Kuribayashi understood how Sadaoka, who had traveled so far in order to see him, felt toward him. His comment, “That’s what war is like for all of us,” is not so much stoic, soldierly resignation, but has a poignant ring as if he is admonishing himself.

  After Sadaoka wrote to announce that he had reached Tokyo safely, Kuribayashi sent him a letter from Iwo Jima.

  In reply to your esteemed letter:

  Your card from Tokyo reached me. It is a pity that we could not meet here, but I am delighted that you returned safely. You mention that you were good enough to visit my house in Tokyo and I am deeply grateful for your kindness.

  I am in the best of health and have continued to work hard as usual, so there is no need for concern in that regard. Farewell.

  The letter is kind and warm—quite unlike the occasion when Kuribayashi shouted at him. In fact, the letter is so politely worded that you would never guess it was addressed to only a young civilian employee. It is written with neat brushstrokes on a postcard printed with the words “Army Post.” Yellowed now with the passage of almost sixty years, the postcard is carefully stored away in a safe in Sadaoka’s house.

  This message was sent at the end of December 1944, when the air attacks and the naval barrage against Iwo Jima were growing ever more intense. The Americans landed less than two months later, on February 19, 1945, and Kuribayashi is thought to have died in battle at dawn on March 26.

  Sadaoka was finally able to get to Iwo Jima in 1978, thirty-three years after Kuribayashi’s death. Iwo Jima was occupied by the United States for twenty-three years after the war, and Japanese citizens could not visit the island until after it was returned to Japan in 1968.

  Sadaoka went to the island with a group on a memorial pilgrimage, and when the guide pointed
out the command bunker where Kuriba-yashi is believed to have been based, he could not stop himself from rushing toward it.

  “It’s me, your lordship. It’s me, Sadaoka,” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Here I am at last.”

  A FEW DAYS AFTER I got back to Tokyo from Kôchi, I was in the library looking through newspaper articles from 1945 about the defeat at Iwo Jima, when I almost gasped aloud with surprise.

  It was the Asahi Shimbun newspaper of March 22, 1945. On the front page was a large headline that read: “Iwo Jima Falls to the Enemy: Heroic Commander in Chief Stands at the Head of His Forces: All-Out Attack.” The article included Kuribayashi’s farewell telegram in its entirety, but it was different from what Sadaoka had recited from memory that day.

  The battle is entering its final chapter. At midnight on the seventeenth, I will stand at the head of my men, and, praying for the certain victory and the security of the Imperial fatherland, all of us will resolutely carry out a heroic all-out attack.

  I pulled out my notebook and checked my transcription of the telegram as Sadaoka had recited it to me. It began: “The battle is entering its final chapter. Since the enemy’s landing, the gallant fighting of the men under my command has been such that even the gods would weep.”