August 11—The Conspiracy Begins
While statesmen in Tokyo waited impatiently for the Allied answer, a small group of Army officers on Ichigaya Hill, the nerve center of the Army, were plotting a revolution. For more than two weeks, ever since the Potsdam declaration had been issued, these men had been preparing for the day when they might have to act against the Government. Loose plans were formulated. Tactics were analyzed. Slowly, the officers evolved a design for action.
The inflammatory Army proclamation of August 10 had been only one of their many maneuvers. Now, on August 11, fifteen officers met in an air-raid shelter under the War Ministry Building to discuss implementing their strategy.
Colonel Masahiko Takeshita presided. As a brother-in-law of General Anami, he was in a singularly favorable position. He had learned the decisions of the Big Six and knew approximately how much time was left to alter the course of events.
The emotional, intense colonel found willing accomplices in men serving in staff positions at the Ministry. Some were sober, intelligent professional officers such as Colonel Masao Inaba and Colonel Masataka Ida; others were volatile, impressionable young men like Majors Jiro Shiizaki and Kenji Hatanaka. The pale, soft-featured Hatanaka, a “pet” of General Anami, was a man who could not imagine Japan in defeat. He was growing increasingly reckless as the men at Ichigaya went over the situation carefully.
While cigarette smoke filled the air, the conspirators sketched out a rough strategy. Their ultimate aim was to reject the peace terms. To attain that goal, they would have to seize the palace and dispose of the appeasers, Suzuki, Togo and Kido. As an afterthought, they added Baron Hiranuma to the list of victims.
They realized they needed support from four generals. Anami was the key man. Takeshita was sure of his brother-in-law: “I can guarantee that the general will join with us.”
General Umezu would naturally follow along if Anami agreed. Like dominoes, General Seiichi Tanaka, commander of the Eastern District Army, and General Takeshi Mori, of the Imperial Guards at the palace, would fall into line when they realized the revolt had the blessing of the highest officers in Tokyo.
Takeshita brought up the question of timing. Aware that the Allied answer was expected within hours, the rebels agreed that they must move no later than midnight on the thirteenth.
Major Kenji Hatanaka was detailed to contact General Mori and his regimental commanders to ascertain their feelings. If, despite their hopes, Mori proved recalcitrant, the men under the general were to be weaned away from their loyalty to him.
The approach to Anami would be a joint effort. Led by Takeshita, the group would confront him within twenty-four hours and solicit a quick answer.
As the last cigarette was stubbed out, optimism ran high in the conference room. Hatanaka was visibly excited. The others, though more restrained, spoke enthusiastically of the coming adventure. They separated outside the room and disappeared into the maze of corridors.
Once again in a time of crisis, the young officers of the Japanese Army had decided to take matters into their own hands. When they did so, blood always flowed in the streets and peaceful men died brutally.
The last great orgy of killing had taken place little more than nine years before, on February 26, 1936. It had been brought about by increased unrest in the Army over the direction of Japan’s future and was triggered by an order posting the Tokyo-based First Guards Division to Manchuria. The officers of the unit felt that opposing factions within the Army had taken this means to eliminate the division from any influence on events in Japan itself. A coup d’état was immediately decided upon.
Over fifteen hundred men went out into the streets of the capital that night to hunt down statesmen and generals known to be in opposition to Army plans. Finance Minister Takahashi was shot to death. General Jotaro Watanabe’s throat was cut as he lay in bed. Count Makino was assaulted, but survived. Baron Suzuki was shot in his bedroom and only saved by his wife’s presence of mind. As an army officer bent over his crumpled body to slash his throat, she rushed forward and said, “Please let me do it if it must be done.” The unnerved officer left without delivering the coup de grâce. Viscount Makoto Saito was also assaulted in his bedroom, but his wife’s efforts could not save him. He was found cradled in her arms on the floor, with a total of forty-seven bullets in his dead body.
Several of the victims of the coup had dined that evening at the American Embassy as guests of Ambassador Joseph Grew. Suzuki had been among them, as had Saito. The occasion had been pleasant and relaxed. It had included the showing of a Hollywood movie, Naughty Marietta, and a generous amount of wine and whiskey.
Another of Grew’s guests, the then Premier of Japan, Keisuke Okada, was also marked for death by the Army rebels. Like the others, he had been driven home through the beginnings of a snowfall late that night and had gone to bed. Because he had drunk too much, Okada slept like a drugged man. When the soldiers came for him in the predawn, he was still drowsy and unable to comprehend the danger. The officers had surrounded the house, broken in, and were flooding into the various rooms.
Okada’s brother-in-law, Matsuo, and two bodyguards managed to get the Premier up from his bed and lead him toward an emergency exit at the back of the house. Seeing men milling about in the rear yard, one of the bodyguards pushed Okada and Matsuo into the bathroom, where they cowered behind a screen. In the corridor outside, several guns were fired simultaneously and one of the guards died instantly. The other guard grappled with the advancing soldiers but fell to the floor mortally wounded by sword cuts.
As Okada and Matsuo waited for their own deaths, the bathroom door opened. A soldier stepped in and gazed quickly around. Then the trapped men heard the door close and footsteps retreat down the corridor.
Matsuo wasted no more time. Warning Okada to be quiet, he calmly walked out of the refuge to his own doom.
As Okada paced the floor, he heard the weak voice of the surviving bodyguard lying in the hall outside: “Please stay where you are.” The man repeated it twice more, then died.
Matsuo had left Okada for only one reason. He bore a superficial resemblance to his brother-in-law, and he hoped that the soldiers would mistake him for the Prime Minister and deal with him alone. He would gamble on trading his life for Okada’s freedom. Within minutes the soldiers caught Matsuo as he scampered through the rooms of the house. An officer ordered his men to fire, but at first they did not. When he repeated the instructions, twenty bullets ripped into Matsuo’s body.
The rebels carried his lifeless form into a bedroom and compared his face with a picture hanging on the wall. One officer said, “Yes, that’s Okada, all right.” Within a few minutes, the band of insurrectionists departed, leaving behind three dead men and one live Prime Minister, who now scurried into a maid’s room and squatted down in a closet. For the next forty-eight hours, while the Army rebellion rocked Tokyo, Okada hid in the darkness. He escaped from his refuge by mingling with mourners following Matsuo’s corpse as it was taken from the residence. With them, he calmly walked past rebel soldiers still patrolling the streets. He survived to attend his own funeral, which was staged in the belief that Matsuo’s body was truly that of the Prime Minister.
Though the rebellion of February 1936 ultimately failed to bring down the Government, it was symptomatic of increasing Army interference in national affairs. Year by year the military assumed more control of policy-making apparatus. Month by month the civilian government danced to the Army’s tune. Ahead lay the road to Pearl Harbor.
But even in the face of certain defeat in the summer of 1945, Army confidence remained high. Defeat was not real to the men still alive and healthy at the War Ministry in Tokyo. Takeshita, Hatanaka, Shiizaki, the names were different but the breed was the same as in the thirties. In both decades Army schemes were hatched in the name of the Emperor. In each case the victims were chosen from the same class: statesmen who blocked the Army plans. By 1945 nothing had changed the Army mentality despite the fact that it had led Japan to destruction. The night of the assassin was about to be repeated.
In the midst of the confused drift to violence, a man named Makoto Tsukamoto appeared at the War Ministry in Tokyo. He was a colonel in the Kempei Tai, the Japanese secret police, and had recently been transferred from Formosa. He had spent years before that as an undercover agent in China where he had witnessed the depredations carried out on both sides of the fighting lines during the Sino-Japanese conflict. Though he had lived on the edge of death, he was an intellectual, a sophisticated soldier who abhorred the brutality many of his fellow officers practiced. In the frenzy of total war, he maintained his own code of conduct and upheld his reputation as an honorable man.
On the twenty-seventh of July, Tsukamoto had received orders in Formosa to leave for Tokyo at once. He was mystified. There was no apparent reason for his transfer.
He left that same day by way of Shanghai. Because of faulty airplane maintenance and the increased bombings, his arrival in Tokyo was delayed until the sixth of August. Tsukamoto was stunned at the wreckage in the capital. When he had last been there in January, before General Lemay had sent the fire bombs down from five thousand feet, Tokyo had hardly been touched by the B-29’s. Now a wasteland lay before him. He hurried from the plane to the headquarters of the secret police and his new assignment.
At headquarters his arrival was a total surprise. No one had ordered his return, no one expected him, no assignment awaited him. Both Tsukamoto and his commanding officer were baffled, and neither could discover any clue to the origin of the mysterious summons to Tokyo.
Later the Kempei colonel went to the office of General Okido, commandant of the secret police, and reported the strange circumstances. Okido too was confused by the peculiar situation, but offered him a temporary assignment. He had been talking with General Anami, who was concerned about the unrest in the officer corps. Okido explained: “I have been instructed by the general to look into the talk of a coup. He wants me to watch over these people and report on their plans.” Tsukamoto accepted the job of surveillance and decided to go to the War Ministry where he had many friends among the staff.
On August 11, Colonel Tsukamoto drove up the winding road to the massive cement building at the top of Ichigaya. As he entered the office area, Colonel Masataka Ida saw him and rushed up. “Tsukamoto, where have you been? We’ve been waiting for you.”
The pieces fell quickly into place. It was Colonel Ida who had sent for him. The two had been friends for years, and since 1944 Tsukamoto had felt he owed the officer his life. At that time, when he was assigned to the jungles of Burma, a special order from Ida had brought him out before the Allies overran the Japanese defenses. Now his old friend needed him. As a participant in the officers’ conspiracy at Ichigaya, he wanted Tsukamoto to help in the coup. Because of his prominence in the secret police, the colonel would be an invaluable ally when trouble began.
Tsukamoto asked the obvious question: “What is this talk of a coup?”
Ida explained the situation at the Ministry in detail. The men were unhappy with the talk of surrender and might do something about it. “Suzuki is a Badoglio (traitor). He and others have surrounded the Emperor and have talked him into surrendering. We intend to take him away from them. Will you join us?”
Unaware of the intimate details of the cabinet negotiations with America, Tsukamoto cautiously answered: “I’ll cooperate on two conditions. First, if the Emperor’s decision goes against us, then it’s all over. Second, the entire Army must rebel, not just a group here and there.”
Ida was incredulous. “You mean you won’t come with us in any case?” He had thought that Tsukamoto would wholeheartedly endorse the plan.
Tsukamoto laughed. “I’ll talk to you later.” He walked away from his good friend, who was both annoyed and puzzled at the tenor of the conversation.
Having thus quickly uncovered the focal point of the pending coup, the Kempei colonel went directly to Okido’s headquarters and reported. Tsukamoto was ordered to keep closer watch on the situation at the War Ministry and to pay special attention to Colonel Ida’s movements in the days ahead.
On August 11, in Fukuoka, one hundred miles north of the burning remains of Nagasaki, some Japanese army officers sat in their headquarters and discussed murder. Just recently, news of the atomic bombings had inflamed opinion against the Americans. In Fukuoka, it occasioned a day of violence. There, the Japanese had under their control a group of captured American B-29 crewmen who had been shot down on raids mounted from the Marianas during the past three months. The jailers had already executed eight fliers in formal rites carried out on the twentieth of June. Now they were preparing to kill again.
At 8:30 A.M., a truck pulled up to the rear of Western Army District Headquarters. Thirty-two men got into the back and sat down. Eight of them were Americans. The rest were Japanese soldiers. The truck went out through the rear gate and down the road to a place called Aburayama, several miles south of Fukuoka City. In a field surrounded by dense undergrowth, the prisoners were led down from the back of the vehicle and arranged in a loose line. They were stripped to shorts or pants and forced to watch as Japanese soldiers began to dig several large holes in the ground. The Americans said nothing to each other.
Shortly after 10:00 A.M., a first lieutenant from a Japanese unit training for guerrilla warfare stepped forward and brandished a gleaming silver sword. As one of the Americans was prodded forward and forced to a kneeling position, the Japanese officer wet his finger and ran it across the sharp edge of his weapon. Then he looked down at the bowed head of the prisoner and gauged the distance. Suddenly his sword flashed in the sun and crashed against the bared neck. It cut nearly all the way through to the Adam’s apple.
The line of captives silently watched their comrade die. Some turned away. Others saw the body roll sideways onto the grass.
A second flier was pushed forward to be killed. A third, a fourth was decapitated. The fifth one was butchered by an executioner who required two strokes to sever the head.
The Japanese officers introduced a new torture on the sixth prisoner. He was brought in front of a group of spectators and held with his arms behind his back. A Japanese ran toward the American and smashed him in the stomach with the side of his hand. The flier slumped forward but was pulled upright again to receive another karate blow. Three, four times, the powerful chops to the body were repeated. When the victim did not die, his head was cut off.
The seventh prisoner suffered the same cruelty from men practicing the art of killing with their bare hands. When he too survived the vicious karate, one of the officers, angered by his own failure, rushed up and kicked him in the testicles. The prisoner fell to the ground, his face contorted by nausea and pain. He pleaded, “Wait, wait,” but his tormentors had no pity. He was pulled into a kneeling position while the captors debated another manner of execution. They settled on kesajiri. Another sword glinted in the sun over the bowed form and cut down through his left shoulder and into the lungs. The American died in a froth of blood.
The last prisoner had seen seven men hacked to death before his eyes. His last moments were a blurred image of blood, steel slashing through skin and bone, cries of pain from his friends and shouts of glee from his enemies. Now he knew it was his turn. He was pushed into the center of the maddened group of soldiers, who made him sit down on the ground. His hands were tied behind him. Ten feet away, another officer from a guerrilla unit raised a bow and placed an arrow on it. The American watched as the Japanese pulled it back, sighted on him, and let go. The arrow came at his head and missed. Three times the officer shot at the American, and the third arrow hit him just over the left eye. Blood spurted out and down his face.
Tired of the sport, his captors prodded him into the familiar kneeling position and chopped his head from his body. On the field of Aburayama, eight torsos stained the meadow grass.
In China on August 11, control of the prisoner rescue operation was handed over from General Olmstead in Chungking to Colonel Richard Heppner in Kunming. Heppner would handle the next phase. As director of all undercover activities in China for the OSS, the colonel controlled networks of spies and saboteurs working throughout the mainland. From these he could draw personnel to mount the ambitious scheme.
As he labored over the details of the mission, a telegram came in from the advance base at Hsian, far to the north, at the edge of the vast Gobi Desert. Major Gus Krause, commanding officer of that vital espionage center, was advising Heppner that he was ready for any change in the war situation:
WE HAVE AVAILABLE HERE FULLY TRAINED AND EQUIPPED OBOE SUGAR SUGAR [OSS] PERSONNEL … TO DROP OR PLACE IN STRATEGIC AREAS. PLEASE ADVISE YOUR DISPOSITION REGARDING THIS PERSONNEL.
A later telegram from Krause expanded on the readiness of the Hsian garrison:
KELLIS AND TEAM ARE TO BE DROPPED ONE ZERO ZERO MILES SOUTHEAST OF PEIPING. BY THE ABOVE MEANS WE SHALL HAVE OBOE SUGAR SUGAR PERSONNEL SO LOCATED AS TO MOVE INTO EITHER PEIPING OR TIENTSIN UPON YOUR DIRECTION.
Gus Krause, aware of the imminence of capitulation by the Japanese, was moving to take advantage of the few hours or days left. In Kunming, Colonel Heppner began to organize his own forces for the mercy missions into enemy territory.
In Tokyo during that afternoon, Admiral Soemu Toyoda sent out an order to all fleet commanders:
FURTHER POSITIVE OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES, GREAT BRITAIN, THE SOVIET UNION AND CHINA WILL BE SUSPENDED PENDING FURTHER ORDERS.
That message was picked up by American intelligence and flashed to Washington. Undersecretary of War Robert Lovett called Secretary Stimson right away to inform him of the Japanese action. Stimson, suffering from a recurrent illness, left later that day for a rest in the mountains. For him the issue was resolved. For the leaders in Tokyo, the issue was in serious doubt.