Killing the Rising Sun Read online

  Americans kept their heads down at all times lest a Japanese sniper take aim. “Captain Haldane peeked over the top of this ridge. Bang. One shot was fired. He was shot right through the forehead. It killed him immediately,” one marine will recall about the death of a beloved officer.

  The island smells of decomposition as dead bodies turn black and bloat in the sun. Land crabs feed on the corpses at night. Blow-flies ingest so much flesh and blood that they become too heavy to fly. The stench of rotting food and diarrhea adds to the fetid odors. The heat is so great that artillery shells must be kept in the shade lest they explode. And merely killing Americans is not enough for the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. As they did so often early in the war, they mutilate the bodies of dead marines whenever they can, cutting off their penises and stuffing them into mouths yawned open by rigor mortis.

  Yet, cave by cave, the Americans slowly take control of the Umurbrogol Pocket. The tactics of conventional warfare are set aside; napalm and flamethrowers flush the Japanese from their hiding places. For those who refuse to come out, explosives are used to seal the cave entrances, forever burying the Japanese soldiers within. And while the island’s eleven thousand defenders almost all perish, the cost in American lives is equally extraordinary—the First Marine Division suffers 6,500 casualties in one month of fighting. Midway through the Battle of Peleliu, they no longer constitute a vital fighting force. Despite having captured the island’s most strategically important terrain, they are evacuated, replaced in combat by the Fifth Marines and elements of the US Army’s 81st Infantry Division.

  Finally, the Umurbrogol Pocket is declared secure. Peleliu has been captured. The battle that was supposed to last just four days has taken twelve weeks. In his underground command post, Colonel Nakagawa lies dead, his hand still clutching the short-bladed knife with which he committed ritual suicide. One day soon, his wife will learn that he has been posthumously promoted to lieutenant general for his genius and courage.4

  It has taken the marines an average of 1,500 rounds of ammunition to kill just one Japanese soldier. More than 13 million bullets were fired by the Americans, along with 150,000 mortar rounds. The mental and physical toll on the Americans has been tremendous. “I was wiped out after thirty days of constant fighting. Exhausted—mentally and physically. We all were,” Private R. V. Burgin will remember. “Everybody’s clothes were ragged, frayed, torn. Shoes were just about gone. Everybody stunk. Nobody was changing his socks.… There was a lot of diarrhea going on. We were a bunch of raggedy-ass Marines.”

  * * *

  For both American and Japanese military planners, Nakagawa’s tactics provide the blueprint for all future island invasions. In all, his defensive style of battle has cost the Americans more than fifteen thousand casualties.

  Back in Washington, war strategists begin to ask one vital question: If the Japanese will fight with such determination over a small, remote island of little tactical significance, how many Americans will die when the time comes to invade the Japanese homeland?

  5

  IMPERIAL PALACE

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  NOVEMBER 24, 1944

  NOON

  As Colonel Kunio Nakagawa commits ritual suicide in a dark Peleliu cave, the man to whom he prays for courage sits down for a lunch of dumpling soup and vegetables. In America, it is Thanksgiving, and President Franklin Roosevelt issues a special exhortation. He encourages citizens not just to give thanks but to read their own version of Scripture every day between now and Christmas to ensure “a renewed and strengthening contact with those eternal truths and majestic principles which have inspired such measure of true greatness as this nation has achieved.”

  In Japan, sipping his soup, Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito does not give thanks to a god—he is a god. This short, shy, nearsighted forty-three-year-old is considered to be a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, a Shinto religious deity.

  Hirohito’s daily life, however, is far from transcendent. In fact, it is quite common. Though he lives in an enormous castle with its own forest and moat, he does not smoke or drink and a litany of worries keep him up at all hours of the night. If the emperor really believes he is a god, he surely now knows that thousands of mortal men are looking to destroy him.

  The 124th emperor of Japan rises promptly at seven o’clock each morning, then starts his day with oatmeal and a slice of black bread. He parts his black hair on the left, has a passion for marine biology, and has fathered seven children with the distant cousin whom he married twenty years ago. Being absentminded, Hirohito often strolls through the Imperial Palace with his pants undone. He is unbothered by the many visible moles on his face or the fact that he often has trouble seeing, even though he constantly wears thick spectacles.

  At five feet five inches tall, Hirohito is the smallest of the world’s wartime leaders, though he surpasses the five-feet-six-inch Winston Churchill on those ceremonial occasions when he dons his thick-soled cavalry boots. He continues to live in splendor as the war forces the Japanese people to endure enormous deprivation. But there is little resentment among his subjects, who celebrate him as their “cosmic life force.” In turn, the citizens of Japan know themselves as the “shido minzoku”—the chosen people.

  The irony is that Hirohito ventures out of the castle so infrequently that he considers his life to be that of “a bird in a cage.” So great is his isolation that Hirohito has never actually addressed his subjects; instead, his proclamations are printed and then distributed throughout Japan.1 Few of his subjects know the sound of his voice. Many of them have no idea what their emperor even looks like.

  Still, the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army fight to the death in his name. Even though Hirohito publicly prefers to let his military leaders conduct the war, he plays a pivotal role. In 1937, when Japanese troops conquered the Chinese city of Nanking, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process, Hirohito pronounced himself “deeply satisfied.” And while he worried that the Pearl Harbor attack would pull Japan into a “reckless war” with the United States, he did nothing to stop his generals and admirals from proceeding.

  Now, as he eats lunch within his lavish Tokyo palace, Hirohito is paying particular attention to the battle for the Philippine island of Leyte, which he has ordered commanding Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita to hold at all costs. The emperor has allowed his prime minister, the former army intelligence officer Kuniaki Koiso, to publicly declare that Leyte will be Japan’s greatest military victory since the long-ago Battle of Yamazaki in 1582, which began a period of Japanese reunification.2

  The emperor’s public proclamations are bluster. He is aware that the Philippines may indeed fall, but he will do anything to prevent the Americans from conquering Japan. The United States would first have to take the key islands of Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and perhaps Formosa, so the Japanese have at least a year to prepare. For the past three months, a campaign has been under way to arm every citizen of Japan. Military training is now mandatory in all schools and places of employment. The nation’s air defense network is being upgraded to prevent attack by American bombers. And Hirohito himself is involved in the development of “sure victory weapons,” a form of unconventional warfare against which the Americans will be powerless.

  Hirohito has approved the launching of these weapons. If all goes well, these hydrogen balloons carrying incendiary bombs and antipersonnel weapons will waft skyward from Japan five miles up into the jet stream, which will then whisk them five thousand miles across the Pacific to America. There, the explosives will detonate in cities and towns, surprising an American public that thinks it is safe from attack. In this way, the people of United States will see for themselves that Japan will never be defeated.

  These firebombs will fall from the sky as if hurled down by the hand of a vengeful god. From his vast castle in the middle of Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito’s divine power will shock the barbaric Americans. Of this, the emperor is certain.3

 
; * * *

  The Second World War officially began on September 1, 1939, with Germany’s invasion of Poland. But that act of aggression took place two years after Japan sought to increase its sphere of influence by conquering the northeastern provinces of China, collectively known as Manchuria—a region the Japanese had renamed Manchukuo. The world’s great powers were at a loss as to how to stop them.

  Like Formosa, which Japan colonized in 1895, and Korea, colonized in 1910, Manchuria both enriched Dai Nippon and gave it enough power to compete with China and the Soviet Union as a leading power in Asia.

  But Japanese military leaders did not stop there. In fact, they could not. As an island nation, Japan is lacking in many natural resources; chief among these are oil and rubber, two items vital to military mobility. The bulk of Japan’s oil, steel, and iron throughout the 1930s was imported from the United States, while the plantations of British Malaya provided Japan’s rubber supply. These products continued to flow into Japan even after Japan invaded China in the summer of 1937.

  But by that time, the world’s powers had grown wary of Japan’s increasing belligerence. The United States, the Soviet Union, and even Germany began providing military aid to the Chinese, but it did not matter. Fighting in the name of hakkō ichiu, a belief that all of Asia must be united under one emperor, Japanese troops quickly overwhelmed China, their superior training and aggressive tactics devastating the forces of Chiang Kai-shek.

  The Japanese did not limit their killing to Chinese soldiers. “At 10:00 on 29 November 1937 we left to clean out the enemy in Chang Chou and at noon we entered the town,” Japanese army doctor Hosaka Akira wrote in his three-by-five-inch pocket journal. “An order was received to kill the residents and eighty of them, men and women of all ages, were shot to death. I hope this will be the last time I’ll ever witness such a scene. The people were all gathered in one place. They were all praying, crying, and begging for help. I just couldn’t bear watching such a pitiful spectacle. Soon the heavy machine guns opened fire and the sight of those people screaming and falling to the ground is one I could not face even if I had had the heart of a monster.”

  By December 1937, the Japanese had captured the capital city of Nanking. Prior to that, the battle for Shanghai during the autumn months of 1937 had cost the Japanese ninety-two thousand casualties; more than two hundred thousand Chinese also lost their lives. The Imperial Japanese Army immediately sought revenge for their Shanghai dead, inflicting horrifying atrocities on the civilian population.

  The Japanese began their killing spree with the execution of ninety thousand captured Chinese soldiers. In a pattern of behavior that displayed Japan’s contempt for the Geneva Conventions, which protect prisoners of war from torture, assault, or execution, these men were stabbed to death, hung by their tongues, attacked by dogs, set ablaze, machine-gunned, buried alive, and beheaded.4

  Next, civilians in the city were shot at random, sometimes being forced to dig their own graves beforehand. Japanese soldiers held horrifying killing contests in which they strived to see who could behead the most Chinese.

  Those barbarous acts were a mere prelude to what became of the women of Nanking, an estimated eighty thousand of whom were systematically raped. Japanese soldiers would recount for years to come how much they enjoyed these acts, often perpetrated against children and grandmothers. Teams of Japanese soldiers developed a routine for each assault: the group would hold a victim down while one man checked to ensure that the woman did not have a sexually transmitted disease. Then the soldiers would cast lots to see who would go first. Victims were often bayoneted after the last man finished; if a woman was pregnant at the time, the baby might be cut from her womb with a knife.

  If the soldiers who fought in the name of Emperor Hirohito came upon a family, it was common for them to force fathers to rape their daughters, brothers to rape their sisters, and even sons to rape their mothers. Those females who survived these horrors often went on to become “comfort women” for the Japanese soldiers who would occupy China until 1945. These sexual slaves had no choice but to endure many more years of rape.

  In all, the Japanese systematically defiled and murdered half of Nanking’s six hundred thousand citizens. Their behavior was hardly a secret. The people of Japan thrilled to news that the Chinese were being savagely tyrannized; in Tokyo, the Japan Advertiser ran a daily tally of the dead in a decapitation contest between two prominent Japanese soldiers.

  * * *

  Back in Washington, DC, President Roosevelt and Congress all but ignored the Japanese atrocities. When the New York Times printed a front-page story about the brutality in Nanking, the article was treated with skepticism—some Americans considered the “Rape of Nanking” too gruesome to be true. And the American leadership stayed silent.

  When the Japanese continued their military expansion with the invasion of French Indochina in 1940, President Roosevelt embargoed the sale of all oil to Japan. As an ally of America, Great Britain soon followed suit. On July 26, 1941, FDR went a step further and froze all Japanese assets in the United States.

  On the surface, FDR’s action was a simple attempt to stop Japanese aggression in Asia. Yet it sent shock waves through the Japanese military: without oil, their tanks and ships would be useless. Japan’s navy had a six-month reserve of fuel, but no more. Japan’s top generals began making plans to find new sources of oil. Japan began to see itself as a victim of American aggression. Unfortunately, rather than discouraging war in the Pacific, Roosevelt’s embargo made it more likely.

  As tensions rose between Japan and the United States, the Japanese military came up with a most audacious plan: it would invade every nation, island, and colony that could offer it natural resources. In a matter of days, Japanese forces would spill onto the beaches of the Philippines, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, Sarawak, and British and Dutch Borneo, and into the jungles of Burma. Prisoners taken along the way would be put to work as slave labor—building infrastructure, harvesting on plantations, and digging in the mines.

  The plan was horrifying but brilliant. While Japanese aggression was not unexpected, the scope of this outrageous design would catch the rest of the world flat-footed. Japanese generals hoped the element of surprise would guarantee total victory. The peace-loving prime minister at the time, Fumimaro Konoe, hoped for a diplomatic breakthrough with the United States, but by October 1941, it was quite clear this would not come to pass. Konoe then resigned, not having the stomach for a brutal world war.

  His replacement was Hideki Tojo, a short, arrogant army general. Nicknamed “Razor” for his brusque demeanor and attention to detail, fifty-six-year-old Tojo distinguished himself on the field of battle in the early days of the war in China. He is descended from Japan’s venerated samurai warrior class. Selected over others who thought him too militaristic, Tojo was handpicked by Emperor Hirohito to serve as the new prime minister, making him the second most powerful man in Japan. His pro-war stance made it very clear how he would wield that strength. “We have finally committed to war,” a high-level Japanese official will write in his journal shortly after Tojo’s selection. “And now we must do all we can to launch it powerfully.”

  For those who opposed his jingoistic attitude, Tojo had a simple argument: “Sometimes it is necessary to shut one’s eyes and take the plunge.”

  Tojo had to manage two key elements if the plunge was to succeed. The first was Hirohito himself. For months, the emperor wavered on whether or not to expand Japan’s war with China to include a continuation of its conquest of Asia and vital Pacific island nations within its sphere of influence. “Of course his majesty is a pacifist, and there is no doubt he wished to avoid war,” former prime minister Konoe will write on the day he resigns from office in October 1941, knowing that his attempts to prevent war will be in vain. “When I told him, that to initiate war is a mistake, he agreed.… Gradually, he began to lean toward war.”

  Through Tojo’s careful ministrations, Hiroh
ito became more hawkish. At first, the emperor was reluctant to give his final blessing to the attack plans. But on November 2, 1941, just two weeks after Tojo took office, his persuasion won the day: Hirohito agreed that it was time to complete the Japanese mission of conquest.

  Which left one last stumbling block to Japanese victory in what the nation will come to call the Greater East Asia War: the United States Navy.

  No other force was capable of stopping Japan’s mighty fleet as it sailed forth through the Pacific, sending aloft its planes and delivering waves of soldiers to foreign beaches. As long as the US Navy loomed as a threat, Tojo could never be completely assured of Japanese success.

  So in addition to overseeing the invasion plans that would place tiny Japan in a position of dominance no other Asian nation had ever known, Tojo also made Emperor Hirohito aware of plans to destroy America’s Pacific Fleet.

  All of it.

  For years, the Japanese military had known its primary adversary might eventually be the United States. Although himself opposed to embroiling Japan in a dangerous and costly war, commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had long been in favor of an aerial bombardment that would destroy the “dagger being pointed at our throats,” as he referred to the US fleet.

  The attack would happen on a Sunday morning, a time when most sailors would be sleeping in after a night on the town. Waves of carrier-launched Japanese dive-bombers would drop from the skies, unloading torpedoes and bombs that would sink destroyers and demolish airplanes, forever ending America’s naval presence in the Pacific.

  Yamamoto knew just where to find these ships. They were anchored bow to stern and side by side at a balmy tropical naval base in Hawaii—a place known as Pearl Harbor.5

  On November 8, 1941, Emperor Hirohito was provided with specific details about the surprise attack.