Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [40]
The NCO commanding Iwao Ajiro’s recruit detail disliked bruising his hand by beating offenders himself, and thus ordered them to beat each other. At first they did so without enthusiasm, causing the sergeant to shout in fury: “You are soldiers76 of the Imperial Japanese Army! When you hit a man, do it as if you mean it!” Once, after Ajiro missed a meal because he was running round the parade ground to atone for some crime, he crept into the cookhouse to claw a few mouthfuls of rice by hand from the pan—and was caught by his NCO. “You’re a pig!” the man roared. “Get down on your knees and behave like one!” Ajiro was obliged to crawl across the messroom floor, snorting and snuffling. On another occasion, clearing his rifle in darkness in the midst of a Manchurian winter wilderness, he dropped a bullet. When he reported to the guardroom, his sergeant screamed: “You have lost valuable army property! You will stay out there until you find that bullet!” If such behaviour reflected a psyche common to most armies, the Japanese carried it to extremes unknown elsewhere.
During Japan’s war in China, the practices of conducting bayonet training on live prisoners, and of beheading them, became institutionalised. Such experiences were designed to harden men’s hearts, and they achieved their purpose. A South African prisoner of the Japanese on Java wrote: “I saw innumerable ways of killing people77, but, most significantly, never by just shooting them. I say ‘significantly’ because this for me was the most striking evidence of the remote and archaic nature of the forces which had invaded the Japanese spirit, blocking out completely the light of the twentieth-century day.”
Naval discipline was little less brutal. On the seaplane carrier Akitsushima, Leading Seaman Kisao Ebisawa was a senior rating charged with administering punishment at the weekly disciplinary muster. He beat the backsides of green seamen with a heavy stave employed throughout the service for this purpose, “to sharpen them up.” Five strokes were customary. “After dealing with a score or two78 of men,” said Ebisawa ruefully, “one’s wrist got pretty stiff.” When a destroyer’s cutter79 rescuing survivors from a sunken battleship threatened to be swamped by struggling figures seeking to clamber aboard, those in the boat simply drew their swords and hacked off the hands of would-be intruders, Japanese like themselves.
Twenty-three-year-old Lt. Kunio Iwashita hailed from the mountain area of Nagano, where his father rather implausibly kept a French restaurant. To become naval officers, he and his brother had to overcome official doubts about whether scions of such a trade were socially eligible. The Iwashitas defeated prejudice by passing out at the top of their courses, including flight school. Kunio’s adored sibling died in 1942 at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, shot down after bombing the American carrier Hornet. His own entry into combat was delayed by a long stint as an instructor, which probably contributed much to his survival. Iwashita had flown over four hundred hours before he was posted to Iwo Jima, where he experienced a savage initiation. The first nine Zeroes of his unit, 301 Squadron, flew the 750 miles from their mainland base at the beginning of July 1944. By the time Iwashita arrived next day, three pilots including the squadron commander had already been shot down.
Next day, though suffering acute stomach pains which were