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By Root 1176 0

Hara sought to sustain the custom of taking home to Japan some portion of every dead fellow soldier: “After daybreak, removed arm471 from the dead body of a comrade and followed the main body…was attacked by a company of guerrillas and suffered one casualty. Killed one enemy with the sword.” In addition to the usual tropical afflictions, men discovered that scrub typhus was carried by a small local red mite. Its symptom was a high fever, which inflicted heart damage from which some victims never recovered. “Practically every day472 two or three men fall out and [are] instantly shot by the officers,” said Private First Class Bunsan Okamoto, a twenty-four-year-old apprentice salesman serving with the 30th Recce Regiment. He was fortunate enough to be captured by the Americans and kept alive for intelligence purposes. A U.S. officer met an attractive young Filipino woman who said she had been in flight for weeks with three Japanese soldiers. “The last few days,” she reported, “they were in tears most of the time.” Americans found a pencilled note among supplies abandoned by the enemy, signed by a despairing Japanese: “To the brave American soldier who finds this—tell my family I died bravely.”

All over the Philippine archipelago in the early spring of 1945, Japanese garrisons waited with varying degrees of enthusiasm for Americans to come. On Lubang, for instance, an island some eighteen miles by six within sight of Luzon, 150 of Yamashita’s men shifted supplies into the hills, in readiness to maintain a guerrilla campaign. “They all talked big473 about committing suicide and giving up their lives for the emperor,” said their commander, Lt. Hiroo Onoda. “Deep down they were hoping and praying that Lubang would not be attacked.” A small American force landed on 28 February, inflicting a slight wound on Onoda’s hand as he and his men retreated. Thereafter, hunger and sickness progressively worsened their circumstances. One day, high in the hills, a pale young soldier came to Onoda from the sick tent, asking for explosives. He said: “We can’t move. Please let us kill ourselves.” Onoda thought for a moment, then agreed: “All right, I’ll do it. I’ll set a fuse to the charges.” He looked into twenty-two faces, “all resigned to death474,” and did his business. When he returned after the explosion, there was only a gaping crater where the sick tent had been.

In those months, more Japanese in the Philippines died from hunger and disease than the U.S. Army killed. In some degree, this must be attributed to a psychological collapse, overlaid upon physical weakness. Onoda, whose life on Lubang became that of a hunted wild animal, prowled the mountains struggling for survival, rather than making much attempt to injure the enemy. One day he glimpsed American gum wrappers beside a road, and found a wad stuck to a weed. He felt a surge of bitterness and frustration: “Here we were, holding on for dear life, and these characters were chewing gum while they fought! I felt more sad than angry. The chewing gum tinfoil told me just how miserably we had been beaten.”

A military surgeon in the Philippines, Tadashi Moriya, ate bats:

We tore off the wings475, roasted them until they were done brown, flayed and munched their heads holding them by their legs. The brain was delicious. The tiny eyes cracked lightly in the mouth. The teeth were small but sharp, so we crunched and swallowed them down. We ate everything, bones and intestines, except the legs. The abdomen felt rough to the tongue, as they seemed to eat small insects like mosquitoes…Hunger is indeed the best sauce, for I ate fifteen bats a day.

An officer reported that he saw a group of soldiers cooking meat. When he approached, they tried to conceal the contents of the mess tins, but he had a peep at them. A good deal of fat swam on the surface of the stew they were cooking, and he saw at once that it couldn’t be karabaw [animal] meat. Then I had the news that an officer of another unit was eaten by his orderly as soon as he breathed his last. I believe the officer was so devoted to