Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [292]
Scattered enemy forces continued doggedly to reject surrender, and Allied soldiers were obliged to risk their lives to deal with them. On the night of 9 June, for instance, four Royal Navy motor launches took part in a characteristic little adventure up a river in southern Burma. Information was received from local people that Japanese were hiding nearby. Accompanied by a police inspector, Lt. Simon Mitchell led his boats up the Pebin until they reached a village named Payabyo. Police inquiries revealed that the Japanese had gone, but the British found a man whose sampan they had used for their escape. He took them to the place where he had deposited the fugitives. The British used loudhailers to summon the Japanese to give themselves up. Rewarded only by silence, the launches804 formed a line ahead and cruised upstream, pouring 15,000 rounds of automatic fire into the area behind the riverbank. Mitchell and his police companion then landed to make a cautious reconnaissance. To their surprise, and no doubt initial alarm, a Japanese officer and forty men emerged—and surrendered. A year earlier, such docility would have been unthinkable.
“From May onwards, prisoners805 in a terrible state came in daily,” recorded a British gunner unit in Burma, “many of them armed with nothing more dangerous than bamboo spears, and trembling with a mixture of malaria and humiliation.” Almost every Japanese soldier, sailor or airman who lived through the war, especially those posted to designated suicide units, afterwards felt obliged to offer elaborate excuses for his own survival. Most such explanations must be deemed fanciful. The truth, surely, was that a substantial number of young men found that the attraction of preserving their own lives overcame the pressures imposed upon them by the demented culture of bushido.
But if some proved ready to quit, others did not. To the end, most Japanese who lost their ships at sea deliberately evaded Allied rescuers. On the deck of HMS Saumarez, destroyer captain Martin Power was directing rescue operations after sinking a Japanese convoy off the Nicobars, when he suddenly heard a “clang” against the ship. Peering over the side, he saw a bald, heavily built Japanese clinging to a scrambling net with one hand, while hammering the nose of a shell against the hull with the other. Power drew his pistol, leaned over and whacked the man’s head. “I could not think of anything else to do806—I spoke no Japanese. Blood streaming down his face, he looked up at me, the pistol six inches from his eyes, the shell in his hand…I do not know how long I hung in this ridiculous position, eyeball to eyeball with a fanatical enemy, but it seemed too long at the time. At last he dropped the shell into the sea, brought up his feet, pushed off from the ship’s side like an Olympic swimmer, turned on his face and swam away.”
The main business of the Allies, following the conquest of Okinawa, was the maintenance of the blockade of Japan and the air bombardment by LeMay’s B-29s, now joined by carrier aircraft of Third Fleet, together with preparations for Mountbatten’s Operation Zipper, an amphibious landing by British and Indian forces on the coast of Malaya, to be staged in defiance of American disdain; finally, of course, there was Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, Japan’s southern island. This was scheduled for November. Despite rumours that Nimitz or even Marshall himself might direct the operation, MacArthur