Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [180]
Most men on Iwo Jima felt a dull, bitter loathing for the enemy who inflicted such horrors upon them. Lt. Robert Schless expressed uncommonly sensitive emotions when he wrote to his wife, Shirley: “I was never once sore518 at the Japs. The more I learned of them, the more I could understand their motives. They were scrupulously clean, despite living underground. They carried photos of their families with them, and those families had a nobility which would be difficult to match. Many of their personal objects—their fans and swords and other things—are of great beauty. If Japan is at present going through a Victorian period of bad taste nevertheless there is taste among all her people. I believe the symbol of the rising sun has for them a great beauty of a pristine, virginal nature.”
More commonplace was the attitude of the group of Marines whom eighteen-year-old Corporal Jerry Copeland encountered poised over an oil drum in which they were boiling Japanese skulls, which earned them $125 apiece. Copeland, who described himself as a San Francisco juvenile delinquent until he joined the Marines, had loved training on Parris Island, South Carolina, and was among the few who now found the experience of combat rewarding: “The first guy I ever killed519, I got so much joy, so much satisfaction out of it…Flame-thrower’s great to get guys out a cave, but boy, the guy who’s got to approach the cave has a problem. You don’t move too well with a flame-thrower.”
In the first days of March, just as MacArthur’s men were completing the capture of Manila, the Marines on Iwo Jima started direct attacks on the positions of Harunori Ohkoshi’s naval group. Incoming fire was devastating. Ohkoshi and his companions found that in daylight they dared not raise their eyes to the weapon-slits of their bunkers. They were forced to fire their heavy machine gun blind, pulling a lanyard from beneath. After two days of American assaults, the navy men were ordered to withdraw into the dense network of tunnels and bunkers at the summit of the position. On 8 March, they were told that they were to sortie for a mass night attack, to regain the lost summit of Mount Suribachi.
It was plain from the outset that this was suicidal, and initiated by officers disobeying the stringent orders of General Kuribayashi. Their objective was more than two miles distant. Every Japanese movement provided the Americans with the opportunity for a massacre. Yet some of the navy’s officers, knowing they must face death anyway, chose to indulge themselves by doing so on their own terms. They sprang from tunnel entrances at the head of their men, into the path of overwhelming fire. Darkness offered the Japanese no protection, for flames and American flares lit the battlefield. By the time Ohkoshi and his group emerged, the ground was piled with bodies. “The attack was a shambles,” said the young sailor. “The whole thing never had a chance.” Not every Japanese sought martyrdom eagerly: “We had to push a lot of men out of the tunnels, because they knew what was waiting for them on top.” Around eight hundred navy personnel perished, for negligible American losses.
One senior soldier, Lt. Col. Baron Takeichi Nishi, tried in vain to dissuade the naval officers. Nishi was a legendary figure who had won an equestrian gold medal at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games. Ohkoshi had glimpsed him a couple of times before the battle, riding by on a horse as he and his comrades dug trenches. Now, Nishi commented contemptuously on the navy men’s futile action: “Anyone who wants to die can do it any time. It’s only fifty metres to the American positions.” Uncertainty shrouded Nishi’s end. Some said that he shot himself, others that he was led into an attack by his orderly, having been blinded by blast. He left behind a fine collection of photographs