‘Gyokusai’
—‘A glorious sacrifice for the Emperor’
‘…the only way the Army Commander and his immediate subordinates could make it all up to the fighting troops and officers is by committing Hara-Kiri. The stupid fools’
—Lieutenant Kuroko Toshiro, on the desertion and cowardice of senior Japanese officers
In their bunkers on the Papuan shores many of the unquestioning foot soldiers of the Imperial Army began privately to protest their predicament. They did not contemplate open mutiny or mass desertion. But a substantial number criticised, and dared to disobey, their officers.1 A sense of defiance, of self-worth, seemed to challenge their military indoctrination, ironically on the eve of the obliteration of that self-awakening.
If the Japanese soldier never lost faith in his Emperor, neither was he an ‘ignorant automaton’ incapable of individual thought. ‘He is capable of criticising what he believes to be erroneous decisions…misconduct or dereliction of duty by his superior officers, sometimes in the bitterest terms,’ noted Allied intelligence.’2
Was the signalman Nada being grateful or sarcastic when he wrote, in early January, 1943: ‘Because we succeeded in contacting Rabaul, His Excellency gave us one cigarette each.’3
Troops began to wonder why they had shed so much blood for a place of no consequence, at the extremity of the Empire. Rinzo Kanemoto wrote plaintively:
When you look around…there is no agriculture. No towns…What possible plus can our occupation of such a place offer to our national strength? Yet even given that, here we are, two large groups of white and yellow fighting over the Giruwa area, flinging the fires of war at each other…What on earth is all this for? That soldiers…had to die so horribly to secure such a completely worthless piece of land! What is the bloody sense of that?4
Their greatest complaint at Sanananda and Giruwa was the lack of food, and the perception that officers were being fed while the troops starved. Throughout December and January, hunger, and the greed and cowardice of officers, were recurring themes in Japanese soldiers’ diaries.
In January 1943, the rice ration disappeared. Until the end of December, each man had received 300 grams of rice per day; that fell to 30 to 60 grams from 1 to 7 January; and then no rice from 8 to 12 January, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Tanaka.5 They ate shellfish, coconuts and horsemeat. When they exhausted these, roots and bark, and human flesh—which acquired the nickname ‘white pork’.
Morale swiftly collapsed when the food ran out. Arguments flared with officers, who seemed always to be fed. Military order dissolved into ‘a snarling scramble for the means of existence’.6 These were not isolated instances: Borneo, New Britain, Saipan and the Philippines experienced a similar pattern of collapse. The starving men reacted furiously to their sense of abandonment by officers, whose cowardice and greed shed a new light on the sacred myth of Japanese duty and self-discipline. To the abandoned soldier, starving in his bunker, duty seemed a one-way street.
‘The indifference and bungling of high commanders,’ wrote Lieutenant Kuroko Toshiro, revolted by the failure of the campaign and the desertion of senior officers, ‘should be a court-martial offence. Their crimes are worse than desertion, cowardice or running away under fire, but they get off scot-free. If you ask me, the only way the Army Commander and his immediate subordinates could make it all up to the fighting troops and officers is by committing Hara-Kiri. The stupid fools.’7
Wada Kiyoshi, an excruciatingly honest private of the 144th Signal Unit, scribbled through his suffering: ‘All officers…eat relatively well. The majority are starving…the higher officials are not starving. This is indeed a deplorable state of affairs for the Imperial Army.’8
In this sense, the officers can be said to have deserted the men at Sanananda.*
The most senior commanders were scorned: Tsukamoto was ‘a bawling old buffoon’, a crapulent drunk. Lieutenant Watanabe Fukuichi was so disgusted by Yazawa that he told his Allied interrogators, ‘[Yazawa] had the habit of ordering his troops to advance and hiding himself in a hole like a rat during the action.’9 The men called him ‘2nd Class Private Yazawa’.**
For their part, the Japanese commanders severely punished any attempt to retreat. Troops who withdrew without permission were ‘sneaking cowards’ and should be severely dealt with, instructed Colonel Yokoyama, who shortly evacuated himself without orders.
Even the sick and wounded were ordered to stay at the front. ‘Short term casualties were simply carried behind forward positions, to enable them to quickly rejoin their units,’ wrote Steve Bullard.10 Those who withdrew without permission—even the seriously wounded—were severely punished.11 Illness itself was a disgrace, unworthy of the Japanese soldier. The sick were made to feel ashamed of themselves. ‘Malaria or diarrheal patients deserting the front line were to be treated as cowards,’ instructed the commander of a transport unit.12
Desertion, hitherto unthinkable, became a lively option. A disincentive was summary execution under the catch-all Military Criminal Code: ‘Notwithstanding the reason or motive the crime will be punished with execution by sword.’13 Officers whose men deserted were themselves disgraced and severely punished, though usually not executed—they were expected to kill themselves instead.14
The Japanese did not desert because they feared fighting. They did so to escape excessive cruelty, or severe hunger. A significant number at Sanananda and Giruwa, unable to take any more, simply staggered towards the Allied lines. Most didn’t make it.
Yoshimoto Yoshihiro, eighteen, a first class private in the Yokoyama Advance Force, collapsed with malaria after the retreat across the Owen Stanleys. An officer beat and kicked him where he lay, for ‘malingering’.15 Yoshimoto later said this made him so depressed he got up and walked off. After three days, he surrendered to an Australian camp, and pleaded to be taken prisoner. His Allied dossier states: ‘PoW did not want to return to Japan at the end of the war. His presence would shame his folks and the Military Police might even kill him…PoW said he would like to…become a citizen of Australia; this was his only wish.’
Another eager deserter was Fusei Iawataro, a labourer, who gave himself up on 3 January. Fusei was ‘of extremely short stature…uneducated but [with] an insatiable curiosity; very talkative and intelligent’. Aged 40, he weighed 93 pounds when captured, and suffered from pleurisy and shell shock. He said that he deserted because he was so disgusted with his treatment at Buna. When he regained his health he grew ‘unusually cheerful and co-operative’.16
Some resisted the order to fight to the death. One soldier considered this unreasonable; his platoon commander, he said, was the first to disregard it and run. Japan could not win her battles, explained another prisoner, unless ‘the men abandoned their suicidal tendencies and the leaders abandoned their heartless attitude towards subordinates’.17 The irony of an enemy soldier explaining the collapse of the Imperial Japanese Army to Allied interrogators would surely have been lost on his superiors.
Far from the swamps of Sanananda, MacArthur’s PR machine fired off a series of victory communiqués. MacArthur’s bid for immortality demanded no less. On 8 January, four days before the thrust to the beach, MacArthur returned to Brisbane, having satisfied himself that the job was done. His order of the day issued Distinguished Service Crosses to, among others, Blamey, Vasey, Eichelberger, Sutherland, Willoughby, Eather and Wootten. He thanked ‘Almighty God’ for His guidance ‘which has brought us this success in our great crusade’.18
At the same time he issued one of his most fatuous communiqués, declaring, ‘One of the primary objects of the campaign was the annihilation of the Japanese Papuan Army…This can now be regarded as accomplished.’19
By now, Doug’s communiqués enjoyed the status of a black joke. The Australian officers were wearily familiar with his exaggerated and mendacious interpretation of events. MacArthur’s self-serving nonsense—his dismissal of the battle for Sanananda, in the first week of January, as a ‘mopping up’ operation—was grotesque.*
The battle for Sanananda–Giruwa lasted ten weeks—until the last week of January—and resulted in 2186 Allied soldiers killed or wounded, and 1600 Japanese dead (the number wounded is unknown).20 Both Blamey and Herring saw Sanananda as the most vital Japanese stronghold, with a deep defence extending well inland. Eichelberger described the fight as ‘a completely savage and expensive battle…siege warfare [of] the bitterest and most punishing kind’.21 The fatality rate—in percentage terms—approached the heaviest of the American Civil War. Neither side, as a general rule, took prisoners—with the exception, on the Allied side, of a few Japanese stragglers, who lacked the strength or weapons to kill themselves. The battle had to be fought until there was ‘not one Japanese left who was capable of lifting a rifle’.22 The premature announcement of victory, on 8 January, infuriated Eichelberger. It cheapened the duty of thousands of Australian and American troops who were about to give their lives or limbs in battle.
On 12 January the last battle for Papua convulsed the Sanananda beachhead. Wootten planned to ram a passage along the central Sanananda Track; his 18th Brigade would attack on both flanks, and an American regiment, from the west, at Tarakena.
Wootten’s men, reinforced with 1000 fresh troops flown in from Australia, marched off at a minute past eight behind three Australian light tanks, which rumbled out of the low mist in single file and headed straight for the Japanese bunkers at Killerton junction. The road was a ‘narrow defile through the swamps, the ground flanking its raised surface so soft that no tank could travel on it’.23 It seemed no tank could U-turn once it entered the battlefield.
The tank crews were commanded, in order of their departure, by the Australians Lieutenant D.A. Heap, Corporal Charles Boughton and Sergeant Ken MacGregor. All were assured the Japanese did not possess anti-tank weapons. They were misinformed. Anti-tank guns fired on all three. Heap’s tank was forced into the jungle; Boughton’s was ripped apart, though a lance corporal managed an astonishing U-turn, and got the tank back to safety. A fireball engulfed MacGregor’s. Japanese suicide squads leapt on the tanks as they rumbled forward, and tried to drop grenades and Molotov cocktails down the turrets.24
The infantry, trotting along behind, fared little better. One battalion25 scarcely made any ground for the loss of 99 men. Six officers including two company commanders (Lieutenant George Jackson and Lieutenant Paul Lloyd) were killed in the attempt to destroy the enemy at Killerton junction, whose bunkers resembled squat humpies laden with vegetation, in which the tiny firing slit was virtually indiscernible.
The apparent failure of the tank charge provoked sharp disagreement at Vasey’s HQ. Berryman (Eichelberger’s chief of staff) resurrected the worn idea of blockading the Japanese and starving them into submission. Eichelberger conditionally agreed. The meeting ended with Eichelberger favouring another frontal charge, at which Vasey stormed out, ‘stating that he would not be party to further murder’.26 Another stalemate ensued.
The Japanese resolved the disagreement. On 12 January Colonel Tsukamoto—still slurping sake, no doubt—ordered the evacuation of the Killerton–Sanananda Road junction. He did so without official authority from Rabaul. His supply lines were wrecked; and his few remaining bunkers unsupportable. His men were shaken by the Australian attack and utterly exhausted—it seemed the Australian charge had been more effective than Vasey realised.
Worse, Tsukamoto had been abandoned by the entire Takenaka Company, who defied the gruff old man’s orders to stay and fight. Impossibly outnumbered, and staring down the barrels of Allied tanks, he pre-empted the evacuation order. ‘Had he not done that, his men would have been wiped out,’ said Shimada. ‘If Tsukamoto hadn’t give order [sic], his men had no doubt that they would execute a final charge into the enemy and die.’27
In this highly unusual case, Tsukamoto withdrew his men to the coast without authority. He saved their lives—but was later scorned by some in Japan for not laying them down.
That day, the remarkable Major-General Oda Kensaku landed at Giruwa, having travelled along the coast from the Kumusi. A powerful spirit with a high-minded sense of duty, Oda was determined to save the coastal garrison and give not an inch to the Allies.28 He marshalled the surviving soldiers of the Nankai Shitai, whose shocking state deeply disturbed him. Reinforcements here, he realised, were mere cannon fodder, sacrificed as part of a delaying strategy to buy time for the illusory reconquest of Guadalcanal. If Oda tilted at windmills, he did so in the spirit of a true samurai.
In fact, the imperial edifice was crumbling around him. On 17 January Colonel Yokoyama—commander of the first landing party at Gona on 21 July—retreated with 50 troops, also without permission. Oda was furious, and ordered Yokoyama to return to the front. Yokoyama ignored the order, and boarded the boat intended for the evacuation of another commander, Yamagata, to the latter’s fury.* When Oda realised that Yamagata, the most senior commander on the coast, had also evacuated Giruwa without permission, he declared, ‘I have been betrayed by Yamagata!’29
Apparently isolated, consumed by a growing sense of abandonment, Oda wired Rabaul pleading for reinforcements. Most of his men were ‘without food and too weak for hand-to-hand fighting…Starvation is taking many lives…We are doomed.’30
‘Our duty,’ he declared from his battered bunker, ‘will have been accomplished if we fight and lay down our lives here on the field.’ But that would mean losing ‘our eastern foothold in New Guinea…the sacrifices of our fellow soldiers during the past six months will have been in vain’.31 For their sake, Oda demanded that reinforcements be landed at once.
Rabaul refused. On the 12th, Adachi gave permission for Yamagata to prepare for a general evacuation—scheduled for 25 January—to the mouths of the Kumusi and Mambare rivers, some fifty miles west of Sanananda, where motor launches would be ready. Adachi personally conceived the plan. To get there, thousands of Japanese troops would have to slip through Australian-held territory, at Gona.
The Allies first heard of the evacuation order from a sick Japanese soldier captured on the 14th. Vasey acted immediately. He sent Wootten’s brigade crashing up the Sanananda Road to the Killerton Junction. It was indeed deserted. ‘The bugger’s gone,’ Vasey told Eichelberger.
The Allied commanders seized the opportunity. Wootten struck out along the Killerton Track to the west, the American regiments charged up the coast from the east, and along the Sanananda Road in the centre. Incredibly, the survivors of the 39th Battalion were still busy mopping up in the rear and protecting the supply lines.
‘Today, all is optimism,’ Eichelberger told MacArthur. ‘Vasey, from pessimism, has changed 100 per cent.’32 Normally a hugely cheerful man, Vasey’s dark moods were the consequence of months of immense pressure. And he had malaria.
The approach to Cape Killerton was an abomination. The track simply disappeared into shoulder-deep mangrove swamps. At dawn on the 16th the men waded in; one Australian officer recalled: ‘Sometimes the water was over our heads, most times up to our armpits. Our rate of progress was about 100 yards an hour.’33 They camped in the branches of mangroves, ‘perched in the trees like wet fowls’.34 All the stores, weapons and ammunition were handed over their heads, in a human chain.
On firmer ground, they found a little track running along the shore to Killerton village. Here the Australians shot a group of sunbathing Japanese soldiers, who had not expected an attack from this direction.
Ahead, forward Australian patrols35 claim to have encountered a remarkable example of Japanese pride in their national standard. Though purely anecdotal, it has a ring of truth, given the ample evidence of Japanese protectiveness towards regimental and national colours. Sprawling across the beach was a large, dead tree; suddenly a Japanese soldier jumped out and hung a Rising Sun flag on a limb, then ducked back behind the tree with a ‘defiant yell’.36 The Australians riddled the flag, and when it fluttered onto the sand another Japanese soldier jumped out, grabbed the flag, and hung it back on the limb. He was shot. Then another soldier leapt out, and raised the flag—he too was shot. ‘The grim game of up-flag, down-flag went on for several minutes’, until a pile of corpses remained, and no flag.37
Resistance at Killerton collapsed. On the 16th Wootten unleashed the broad, westward sweep of the Sanananda area; his three battalions fanned out through swamp and jungle; to the east and south Colonels Doe and George Elms reduced the remaining inland bunkers, and advanced up the road towards the beach. The last Japanese beads in the necklace fell away, and only coastal resistance remained.
The last days of Sanananda entered the realm of the diabolical. A spectacular tropical storm deluged the coast on the night of the 16th. It was fittingly biblical. The black clouds amassed and lowered over the jungle, ‘so close that a man reaching out and trying to touch them would not be regarded as in the throes of a malarial nightmare’.38 Telephone wires were deemed useless.39
The rain fell steadily in heavy, monsoonal sheets all night. Twelve inches of rain fell. Water filled the bunkers and trenches. The swamps spilled their banks, rose about the mangrove roots and lapped at the boards on which Allied troops sat. Bloated, waterborne corpses were commonplace. They nudged amidst the mangroves with a ghastly gregariousness. Near the beaches the swamp and tide—whipped up by the wind—merged into a stew of abandoned supplies, palm leaves and human detritus.
During the night two companies of the Australian 2/12th Battalion clung to a narrowing spit of sand between the rising tide and the encroaching swamp—just to the east of Sanananda village. ‘The sentries stood waist deep in water looking out into the black void ahead; huddled in their capes but with rifles always ready.’40 At one point they mistook dozens of bobbing coconuts for Japanese heads; at other times, the coconuts came to life, as Japanese soldiers swam from their bunkers just a few hundred yards away.
With daylight, the storm ceased as if ‘cut off by a switch’: ‘What a scene the early sun revealed,’ observed Lieutenant-Colonel Allchin. ‘The jungle dripped like a leaking faucet. The sea had cohabited long enough with the swamp, leaving in its wake a trail of dirty foam, wind-wrecked palms, and coconuts strewn along the beach. Bodies of dead sprawling in the reeking undergrowth, rolled with the receding tide…The battle of the elements over, the battle of the humans…resumed.’41
That day one of Wootten’s battalions,42 under Major William Parry-Okeden, reached the threshold of an undefended section of Sanananda village. They approached via a particularly deep stretch of swamp, which Wootten accurately thought the Japanese would consider an adequate natural barrier; as he expected, it was left undefended.
The Australians waded in, waited for most of the night in the swamp, then attacked at dawn on the 17th. The remnant of the enemy, utterly surprised, offered little resistance, and Sanananda fell that morning—not with a bang but a whimper.
Two Australian battalions43 encircled a last knoll of Japanese resistance, just inland from Sanananda village. The monsoonal rain and rising swamp water made this push perhaps the most loathsome experience of the campaign. Between 50 and 60 Australians were killed or wounded each day, from 17 to 21 January. On the last day, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Arnold, commander of the 2/12th Battalion, ‘rang down the curtain’ over this ‘scene of mud, filth and death’.44 A prisoner divulged that only the sick and wounded were left—the rest had fled westwards. Arnold’s men waded in, through waist-deep swamp, to the island of the dead: 100 Japanese troops fell, ‘while swollen and discoloured corpses’ of those previously killed ‘bumped against them in the swamp water or protruded from the obscene mud’.45
The sight sickened Arnold, who wrote with a mixture of morbid fascination and disgust: ‘the whole area, swamps and rivers included, are covered with enemy dead and the stench from which is overpowering. It is definitely the filthiest area I have ever set eyes upon. In a great many cases the Japanese bodies are fly-blown and others have been reduced almost to skeletons.’46
The Australians reunited with Colonel Doe’s American regiment advancing up the Sanananda Road. On 22 January, Doe fought the last battle of the campaign, in which dozens of Japanese troops were slaughtered in the swamp as they tried to escape west, leaving only ‘several skeletons walking around’ the battlefield.
Of the Japanese survivors, 1200 sick and wounded were evacuated by sea between 13 and 20 January, and about a thousand escaped overland to the west of Gona. More than a thousand fled east—away from their supposed evacuation point—into the tropical ghetto of Giruwa, nominally the main Japanese hospital. It was, on the contrary, the closest thing to hell on earth.
The cornered Imperial Army awaited evacuation on the beach. With Sanananda ‘collapsing about his ears’,47 Major-General Yamagata brought forward his evacuation orders from 25 to 20 January, and handed over new orders, in sealed envelopes, to the two remaining commanders: Yazawa, in charge of the coast east of Giruwa; and Oda, commanding west of the village. They were instructed not to open their envelopes until 4.00 p.m. on 19 January.
Yamagata then escaped by barge, at 9.30 that night, with his staff. They reached the Kumusi mouth under heavy bombardment. There are several accounts of his notorious flight. In one version, the sick and wounded crawled to the beach and tried to board his boat. Yamagata’s men allegedly threw them in the sea, or abandoned them on the beach, thus securing their commander’s safety.
A prisoner who witnessed the general’s flight corroborated this: ‘When Major-General Yamagata fled…an attempt was made to evacuate some stretcher cases, but the Major-General ordered this to be stopped and [he] pushed off leaving the wounded on the beach.’48
The Australians entered the smouldering village of Sanananda on 22 January. They found signs of organised cannibalism. Human flesh, it seemed, had become part of the Japanese soldier’s regular diet. At Giruwa, too, anthropophagy appeared to be routine, confirming Tanaka Yuki’s view that cannibalism was sanctioned by the inaction of Japanese commanders. ‘We saw little billy tins of human flesh at Sanananda,’49 reported Lieutenant-Colonel Stan Sly of the 55/53rd Battalion. Asked why he thought the meat was human, Sly replied: ‘Ohh well! We were certain there was no other fresh meat around…it was just straight out human flesh. I couldn’t say that the rest of the body was there.’50
The explosive feelings of the Australians can be imagined. When the 18th Brigade found the mutilated corpses of men from their own unit—with the flesh stripped off and wrapped in leaves in tin dixies—they resolved to wipe out every Japanese soldier. The discovery reconfirmed the no-prisoner policy. One officer wrote later, ‘This incident sealed the fate of any Japanese we came across. General Vasey was determined that no Japanese should escape from the Sanananda area, and a plan was put into operation that would seal them in and then eliminate them.’51
Japanese diaries tell the extraordinary chapter of the final days. In one case, seven troops divided a can of sardines among them; all the horses were consumed; and the rice exhausted. For four days—8 to 12 January—they ate nothing. The commanders of the last survivors at Sanananda told Rabaul on 12 January that the men were too weak to fight and many were dying of starvation: ‘We will be doomed in a few days,’ wrote Oda. ‘For…two months, the men [have been] standing in the flooded and filthy trenches.’52
The most famous account of the end of the Nankai Shitai was that of starving signalman, Wada Kiyoshi, whose diary was found floating on a raft and handed over to the Allied forces. ‘So it was not surprising that they thought I was dead,’ Wada later wrote.53
This is the diary of a young soldier on the edge of life—Wada had malaria, dysentery and could barely move—yet somehow he remained sentient, and preserved a basic sense of humanity. His mind conjured soaring appeals to the divine, and reverted as quickly to thoughts of his most basic animal needs (he wrote, for example, ‘Caught six crabs and ate them raw’). He guiltily admits to nibbling on friends’ rations, although the impression that emerges is of a loyal, selfless, highly articulate young man, deeply concerned about his fellow troops. He was remarkably human:
‘Do not lose hope,’ Wada tells himself on 21 December. ‘Do not forget to be grateful. The foundation for all is based upon military spirit. Loyalty is judged by this.’
22 Dec: I am getting a little better. This must be due to the grateful aid of the gods…Horita has died. I respectfully pray for his peace and happiness…I took out the picture of mother and father and thought about home, and I prayed that they may be well.
24 Dec: Seems that there will be no rice today. Supper—coconut, octopus. No rice. Ate snakes.
27 Dec: The enemy shelling from last night was very severe. Since Hagino [Wada’s dying friend] is all alone, I cannot very well leave him behind. When shells fall all around us he grits his teeth and bears it…It is not right to leave wounded comrades behind.
28 Dec: Even though I know we are members of the Imperial Army, there are times when things look very black. I must do my best to the last with the noble spirit of dying for the Emperor…I could not treat Hagino sufficiently this morning…Everyone has taken cover in the jungle, but since there is no one to carry and take care of Hagino, I cannot leave him behind.
29 Dec: What a discouraging and miserable state of affairs…the hospital is in a horrible plight. What is going to happen to us? I pray to the morning sun that our battle situation be reversed. The [hospital] patrol unit has fled and there are only four of us; the platoon leader, Nakano, Hagino and myself. There isn’t a single person who will come to help…I pray only for divine aid.
1 Jan: I greeted the New Year. I spent the last days of 1942 in the jungle amidst bursting shells. I greeted the New Year in the same way. Received 1 Go of rice…New Year’s Day ended with me still being alive, although with an empty stomach. Prayed for mother’s and father’s health.
3 Jan: Since eating yesterday’s rice I haven’t had a single grain to eat. On top of that I had malaria fever last night. I get dizzy when I stand. I must not weaken. I must get well somehow.
4 Jan: Terrific shelling again last night…I can’t nurse Hagino and Kinoshita sufficiently…forgive me for my body is exhausted.
6 Jan: I dream that I am home every night. When I wake up and realise that I am in the jungle it is exceedingly disagreeable.
7 Jan: We live on borrowed time, but it is a wonder that I can go on living without eating. Our planes do not come over. There are no good stories to tell…I know I should go to Hagino but I can’t. Please forgive me. Wet through from the rain. The three of us made a bed and slept under a coconut tree. No strength left. To do an hour’s work requires a whole day.
8 Jan: Died, Hagino Mitsuo. It is regrettable. I did what I could. Please forgive me.
10 Jan: Enemy shelling and bombing everyday. It is about time that we received divine aid. Starvation is a terrible thing. It seems all the grass and roots have already been eaten in the Giruwa area.
11 Jan: Enemy shelling becomes increasingly intense. While I think quietly I feel discouraged and wretched…But I am a member of the Imperial Army! I will live proudly to the last. If I am to believe General Oda’s instructions, the situation should gradually be turning in our favour by now.
12 Jan: It is difficult to control evil thoughts when alone, especially when the rice bag is left by my side when I am so starved. I ate into Kinoshita’s and Okasaki’s rice rations. Ate the rice raw…I am a weak character! I am troubled. I am troubled…Wish I had a thousand yen and could buy a lot of rice.
16 Jan: For the first time in a long while I slept…on dry ground in the jungle…I spent a restful night. Fierce rifle fire was heard from the front lines. Stray bullets whizz overhead.
[Wada is sent to the rear to prepare for evacuation.]
17 Jan: We think tonight will be the last night for Giruwa and we talk about swimming together to Lae. We talked about such things. Fortunately the day dawned.
18 Jan: We looked forward to getting on the boat tonight but because the wounded were put on first, we could not get on. It is regrettable. Reinforcements haven’t come. There are no provisions. Things are happening just as the enemy says…I don’t think Wakaichi will leave us behind.54
*Some troops’ behaviour became homicidal. One POW despised his superiors because they treated him and his comrades like dogs. During a retreat they buried alive a wounded sergeant major with a reputation for extreme cruelty. Later in the war there were many examples of Japanese troops killing their officers.
**Watanabe was asked to comment on the style and form of an Allied propaganda leaflet; he said the language was too advanced, technical and ‘high class’ for the average soldier. Asked to write one himself, he declined, not because he thought the act disloyal, but because he felt ill-equipped to cope with a matter of such grave importance.
*Eisenhower later told a group of American New Guinea veterans that he’d never heard of Sanananda, because MacArthur always described it as ‘mopping up’.
*In 1959 Yokoyama was asked to explain his decision to retreat without orders: ‘On 17 January,’ he said, ‘the artillery attack became more severe…we tried to attack, but there were only about ten of us who were mobile…I had a high fever of forty degrees…In front of my men I had to crawl into the sea and stay in the water for about thirty minutes with diarrhoea. On the evening of 17 January…the artillery attacks became more incessant. Thunder and lightning brought drenching rain. Our fox holes were filled with water and there was no boundary between the sea and the ground.’ (See The Human Face of War—Unauthorised Retreat from Buna? Australia–Japan Research project, AWM.)