‘I have decided to destroy myself on April 18, 1943, at nine o’clock somewhere in New Guinea’
—Nishio Shiro, 33, a doctor and medical captain, to his wife, Mineko
At the designated time—4.00 p.m. on 19 January—Major-General Oda opened his sealed envelope. The last commander of the 144th Regiment read his new orders. To his shame and disgust, he was to retreat, and evacuate the men. He felt keenly this stab of betrayal by the Imperial Army, chiefly Yamagata, whom he accused of abandoning the troops.
Oda was an honourable man—within the strict remit of the Japanese martial tradition. He subscribed to the warrior code of ‘never surrender’. His memory is revered in Japan—at least among the few who revere war heroes. ‘The strength of the Imperial Army,’ Oda famously said, ‘is based on the soldiers’ trust of commanders. If I betray that trust, I would not be able to put my head up before the families of spirits of the war dead.’1
On the Papuan beaches Oda lived, and died, according to this personal rescript. On 19 January he found himself walking through the wreckage of his army. He’d pressed Rabaul for reinforcements; none had come. The ignominy of retreat left him only one alternative.
On the 20th—‘X-Day’—he dutifully ordered the general evacuation from Giruwa westwards to Bakunbari, at the mouth of Kumusi River. The withdrawal commenced at 8.00 p.m. and continued through the night. Sixty rounds of machine-gun fire signalled the start.2
‘At 2000 hours, all units assembled,’ one witness recalled. ‘Since afternoon, rain had been falling and this continued into the night. This heavy rain deadened the sound of our footsteps and any other noise that we made; furthermore it concealed our attempts to get away.’3
The sick and wounded assembled on the beach near Giruwa in the bleak hope of being evacuated. When a few landing barges arrived, the mud and sand seemed to come alive with prostrate forms, scrambling for a place. The stretcher cases or those too weak to walk were abandoned where they lay, and were expected to commit suicide.
‘The confusion on the faces of the more serious cases, when told they had to stay behind, indicated their strong desire to live,’4 reported one Japanese witness. It was a fleeting hope. Most shot themselves—or were shot in their stretchers by obliging troops. The severely wounded were given a grenade each—it was easier to pull a pin than lift a revolver.
A few pathetic cases summoned the strength to fight. ‘I cannot even get up and walk,’ wrote one very sick soldier. ‘I picked up my pistol. Loaded it, and determined to fight the enemy even if I had to do it sitting in that hospital.’5
Ohara Kizuchi, a wounded prisoner who’d bitterly watched the officers abandon the sick and wounded, ‘cried freely’ when describing the sight to his Australian interrogators.6
Oda had fulfilled his hated orders, and waited as the last units departed Giruwa into the jungle. Nothing could be done for the stretcher cases, and he visited the men in the Giruwa field hospital for the last time.
‘That’s the end of that. I’m going to smoke one cigarette,’ he told Private Fukuoka Shigeji. He handed Fukuoka all his property, including food and cigarettes, and told him to follow the retreat.
As he smoked, Oda’s executive officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Tomita Yoshinobu, asked him what he would do. The major-general answered, ‘Of course, I will stay with those wounded men here.’
Tomita replied, ‘Then, I will stay with you here, too, sir.’7
After the last of the walking wounded were gone, Oda embraced Tomita, laid a cloth on the beach, bowed in the direction of Japan, put a pistol to his head and shot himself. Tomita repeated this performance.
Fukuoka* heard the pistol shots, returned and saw his commander’s body ‘lying on a cloak spread out on the ground’.8 Oda had committed suicide because ‘things had shown him he must die’, concluded Yoshihara Tsutomu, chief of staff of the 18th Army. ‘This sublime conception of duty was the ideal representative of an officer and warrior.’9
Oda had always accused Yamagata of betrayal, of abandoning the wounded and refusing to kill himself—the only honourable course for a defeated Japanese officer.
‘Under Japanese military custom, Yamagata should have stayed with the men until the end,’10 said Nishimura Kokichi, the 144th Regiment soldier who returned to New Guinea many times after the war to retrieve the bones of missing soldiers. Yamagata’s reputation plunged among the troops, but his actions did not inhibit promotion: after he escaped Papua, he became commander of the 26th Division and died at Leyte Island in the Philippines in February 1945.
In Japanese eyes, Oda’s death was exemplary. As the Allies closed in, dozens of officers expired in similar circumstances on the Papuan beaches. Soldiers, too, played out this ritual self-sacrifice that would claim many thousands of Japanese lives in coming months. Many quietly died, like Oda, by their own hand; others gave their lives more usefully—as Kamikaze pilots or human torpedoes, in the later Pacific battles.
Corporal Tanaka died in a suicide squad. His last written words to his unit, the Kusunose Tai, were not encouraging: ‘It is now merely a case of waiting for death. Most of the officers have been killed…The garrison of about 600 has been reduced to 200…Sgt Yoshikawa had a stomach ache and went to the toilet 50 times and is very weary. We have not eaten for over a week and have no energy. As soldiers we are ready to die gallantly. Take care of yourself and do your best. Excuse my hasty writing. Corp Tanaka.’11 And off he went.
Younger Japanese were prone to melodramatic exits. The ecstatic quality of the act of self-immolation is captured in one young soldier’s diary, in December 1942:
At the time I left my fatherland I pledged that I would never again during this life see the mountains and rivers of my country. But it was 22 November when I resolved to become the soil of Basabua. When I prayed for the eternal life of the Emperor, to my fatherland deities and Buddha, and when I prayed thanks to my parents, wife, brother and sister I felt a high-spirited courage inside of me. It is my great pleasure to die at Basabua. Parents! Wife! Brother and Sister! I have fought with all my strength…but now my fighting strength is weakened and I am about to expose my dead body on the seashore of Basabua. My comrades have already died, though my heart is filled with joy because I can become the guardian spirit of my country. I will fight and crush the enemy. I will protect the seashore of Basabua forever.12
Few committed hara-kiri—perhaps there wasn’t time, or they lacked the requisite ceremonial daggers. A bayonet, it seemed, wouldn’t do. Or men clung together around grenades and pulled the pins; others shot or obliterated themselves in native huts. Occasionally they tried to blow up their Allied captors, who had to ‘root out’ the enemy from every trench and bunker.13 Instead of accepting Allied medical help, a Japanese prisoner nursing a shattered arm pulled the pin of a grenade and tried to kill his Australian doctors as well as himself. Such acts partly explain why so few prisoners were taken. The Australians killed them, often after they had surrendered or been captured, as Major-General Cullen and others confirm.
An Australian patrol gave a trapped Japanese officer until the count of ten to surrender. Ignoring the demand, he bowed three times to the sun, stood to attention and raised a small Japanese flag with his sword. At the sound of ‘nine’ he shouted ‘Out’, and was riddled with bullets. Similarly, Sergeant Lew Scott of the 55/53rd Battalion witnessed a high-ranking Japanese officer die: ‘He lifted his head, tried to smile, slowly attempted a salute and…picked up his pistol…He placed it ever so carefully to his temple, paused to nod in my direction, and pressed the trigger.’
Many seemed over-eager to kill themselves, and had to be restrained until the right time. The Buna army commander Yamamoto received reports that ten men had survived an Allied attack, and had fought on under Major Kenmotsu, who said he would defend his position to the death. Yamamoto replied via a runner: ‘Kenmotsu’s death is not permitted yet. He must return to here. This is an order.’14
And there were officers abandoned by their men, such as Lieutenant-Colonel Hozumi, commander of the Mountain Artillery Battalion, who collapsed with acute diarrhoea and couldn’t go on. When his subordinates refused to help him, he shot himself.15 Many officers died in similar circumstances.
What became of the Nankai Shitai? The frail, sick old soldier who stood silently in a corner of Asakura Station, Shikoku, in December 1943, watching the caskets of the war dead come home, was Colonel Kusunose Masao, who had led the 144th Regiment against the Australians on the Kokoda Track. Kusunose had fallen seriously ill in Papua and famously issued orders from a stretcher as his troops carried him over the Owen Stanleys. He was later repatriated—and tended to linger near the station watching the ashes of comrades come home.
In December 1945, Allied Occupation Forces summoned Kusunose to testify before the war crimes hearings. Kusunose refused. He walked into a forest on the side of Mount Fuji and, in the freezing winter, starved himself to death—an act of empathy, it seems, with the fate of so many of his troops. In a suicide note he wrote that, as an imperial military officer, he would not accept ‘victors’ justice’.16
Kusunose was deeply mourned. One Japanese soldier, who worked for him for five years, said he never heard him yelling at anyone. ‘Colonel Kusunose is a warm-hearted commander.’ This became a widely accepted belief among the 144th Regiment in Asakura.17 ‘He never let his men die in vain…He was the best commander I have ever known,’18 said Nishimura.
Very few of the Nankai Shitai came home—estimates suggest only 5 per cent of the original 13,000 survived. Only 140 of the 3500 men in Kochi’s 144th Regiment returned to Japan after the war.19
Warrant Officer Shimada Yuki survived—his last act, he remembers, was to help Private Ôno Nobuyuki, who was badly wounded in the leg during the evacuation of Giruwa. Shimada stayed behind and kept encouraging Ôno during the long march through the jungle to the Kumusi delta. They made it on 28 January and joined a boat to Rabaul. Shimada now lives in Kochi City.
The naked Imanishi survived the raft journey down the Kumusi, scavenged a uniform from a corpse, and fought on at Buna and Giruwa. He refused several offers to evacuate. ‘We do not have orders to retreat!’20 he told friends preparing to escape by barge. He finally withdrew when ordered—he said he felt ‘released’21—reached the Kumusi and returned to Japan. He became the mayor of Motoyama, a Kochi village where several 144th veterans lived, including Wada and Oda’s staffer, Fukuoka.
Some prisoners pleaded for their captors to kill them.* When Lieutenant Inagaki Riichi, 27, a naval paymaster, decided to give himself up at Giruwa, he walked into the Australian lines shouting, ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’ One prisoner ‘wept with frustration and humiliation’ because his Australian guards would not shoot him, according to an account in Johnston’s Fighting the Enemy. When he bared his chest, an Australian soldier said, ‘You stupid bastard, you don’t know when you’re well off!’
The case of Naka Masao symbolised the self-inflicted destruction of the Japanese army. Naka, a second lieutenant in the 41st Infantry Regiment, was captured near Giruwa on 27 January. Aged 24 and five feet high, he weighed 115 pounds in captivity. His war record tolls out the names of imperial conquest: he’d fought in China, at Nanking and Shanghai; in Malaya, at the fall of Singapore; in Rabaul and New Guinea. His unit had relieved the Kusunose Butai at Ioribaiwa, only to face the mountain retreat.
A member of the Imperial Army’s elite, a product of years of martial training, Naka was found lying in the jungle with severe malaria, barely conscious and unable to walk. He had lost his platoon. He lacked the strength to kill himself. Three times during interrogation he formally asked the Australians to kill him, or permit him to kill himself. He repeatedly requested a revolver. He rated New Guinea the worst campaign of his experience.22
Some chose life. The deeply rooted human desire to live sometimes conquered—at the critical moment—the Japanese soldier’s compulsion to destroy himself.
There were groups of Japanese who surrendered. One unit, led by an English-speaking officer, marched out of their bunkers in an appalling state. The Americans and Australians were amazed that such men, having fought so bitterly, and for so long, were suddenly willing to give themselves up.
‘He never wanted to kill himself, and knew of no one who honestly did,’ remarked Allied interrogators of one POW. ‘He hated war and wanted to live,’23 they said of another, who had clung to a shipwreck after failing to drown himself with his fellow troops. Apparently he objected to having a loin cloth rammed down his throat.
One soldier simply threw away his rifle and lay down in the long grass. He had a grenade with him when captured, but decided that suicide would be ‘foolish’.24
Certainly some Japanese troops who were taken prisoner were surprised by their treatment in Allied hands. They presumed they would be tortured or killed; instead they were fed and generally treated in accordance with international law. ‘Had he known previous to capture that he would not be killed but accorded good treatment he would have…surrendered at the first opportunity,’ said one Allied intelligence officer.25 There is no reason not to believe this—atrocities against Japanese prisoners were rare—and usually the result of violent spasms of revenge by furious troops. Once in prison, the Japanese tended not to be harmed, for which many were grateful. Few, of course, reached that state of grace.
A poem by an anonymous prisoner beautifully expresses this realisation:
As I cursed the irony of my fate
I received the compassion of a people of an alien land,
And more deeply than in my homeland
It touched my heart.
On a white cot in the hospital
Those who came to comfort me
Were men of a strange country
Who made me weep…
Having become a prisoner of war
For the first time I know
The human kindliness of the Australian soldier.26
Similarly, probationary officer Watanabe Fukuichi, of the Yazawa Regiment, wrote in captivity on 29 November:
To all in the Australian Red Cross Hospital; I am deeply grateful for the devotion with which you have nursed me…when you took an X-ray of me I broke down and cried in front of the soldiers. Your doing all this…for an enemy soldier made me think of Florence Nightingale.27
Families in Japan knew little of the soldiers’ fate. Troops in combat zones generally were not allowed to write home. Instead they committed draft letters to their diaries. Two convey precisely the nihilistic psychology of the last days of the Imperial Army:
A soldier wrote to his wife, on 10 January 1943:
I do not know when I will be going to the next world…and I would like to write a few lines before I die. You have a fine soul…By chance you married unworthy me and you devoted yourself faithfully to me. I will always be grateful. However, your devotion will have been in vain, as I will soon die for our country. There is no greater glory than this for any man. However, when I think of your sorrow and hardship, how can I die? Be virtuous and bestow the devotion you offered me on your mother and Kunisuke. Your future will be a hard one. My blood and spirit will be carried on by Kunisuke. One of your duties is to look after him and to teach him.28
His Australian interrogators described Nishio Shiro, 33, a doctor and medical captain in the 51st Independent Engineer’s Regiment, as highly intelligent and, though patriotic and loyal, ‘not the usual jingoistic type of Japanese officer’. He maintained constantly that his sole interest was the practice of medicine and that he hated war.
‘Beloved Mineko,’ Nishio wrote:
As I write my last letter it comes to my mind that we have been married but a short time and so the greatest misfortune has come to you and it is with poignant regret that I shall not again see the face of Toshiko. I have decided to destroy myself on April 18, 1943, at nine o’clock somewhere in New Guinea. Death is the custom for soldiers and therefore I feel you should be prepared for it—take good care of Toshiko…29
Death, for some, was not as light as a feather.
*Fukuoka Shigeji witnessed the deaths of the first and last commanders of the South Sea Detachment—he was with Horii Tomitaro when he died at sea. Fukuoka survived the war, and lived just down the road from Imanishi in Motoyama-Town.
*Many Japanese troops committed suicide because they were led to believe they would suffer a barbarous death at Allied hands. In one survey, of POWs, 85 per cent said they had expected torture or execution by their captors. One prisoner quoted the story—for which there is no evidence—of ten Japanese POWs buried in sand up to their necks and then killed by a tank running over them. Japanese prisoners at Finschhafen, and as far north as Alaska, had heard this story (ATIS Research Reports).