Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [41]
Just as the army possessed many reluctant soldiers, the air force had its share of pilots who flinched from combat. Iwashita acknowledged that every squadron was familiar with the odd man whose aircraft suffered chronic technical problems, or who found reasons to turn back before completing sorties. One such pilot on Iwo Jima was summarily transferred to an anti-aircraft battery, where he was killed by American strafing. Awareness swiftly dawned of the shortcomings of their own weapons and technology. Iwashita said: “When I became a pilot, I didn’t think anything could be better than the Zero. I was confident that I was flying the best fighter in the world. In combat, however, I came to understand that it was not as simple as that. American pilots were very good, and had a lot of kit we didn’t, like radio intercommunication.” On one sortie over Iwo Jima, thirty-one Zeroes took off and only seventeen came back. Four such battles reduced Iwashita’s Zero wing from thirty-eight pilots to ten. Soon afterwards, with no planes left for them to fly, the survivors returned to Japan in a transport aircraft.
The life of a Japanese soldier was wretched enough before he entered combat. Many officers were shameless in allocating food to themselves even when their men were starving. A British historian has observed that the Imperial Army’s frequent resort to rape reflected the fact that the status of women in Japan was low, while those of subject peoples possessed no status at all: “Right was what a soldier80 was ordered to do; to disobey was to do wrong. There was no moral absolute to set this against…For the ordinary soldier, rape was one of the few pleasures in a comfortless and deprived life in which he could expect to reap very few of the spoils of war.”
Hayashi Inoue’s closest friend was a fellow company commander in the 55th Regiment named Kazue Nakamura. When Nakamura was killed in northern Burma, his second-in-command withdrew without having retrieved the body, a grievous offence against the military code. Instead of facing court-martial, however, the delinquent was simply assigned missions on which he could expect to die. Inoue afterwards laughed at the memory: “It took ages for that man to get killed. Again and again, he was sent out—and came back. He got his deserts in the end, though.” Inoue was a colonial administrator’s son, drafted into the army in 1938 and commissioned in 1941. He accepted obedience without question: “If we were told to defend this position81 or that one, we did it. To fall back without orders was a crime. It was as simple as that. We were trained to fight to the end, and nobody ever discussed doing anything else. Looking back later, we could see that the military code was unreasonable. But at that time, we regarded dying for our country as our duty. If men had been allowed to surrender honourably, everybody would have been doing it.”
If obedience was fundamental to the samurai spirit, the conduct of the Japanese high command was confused by the power and influence wielded by some younger staff officers of violently aggressive enthusiasms, empowered by political links to the top of the military hierarchy. These promoted the doctrine of “gekokujo”—initiative from below. The most notorious exponent was Col. Masanobu Tsuji, a fanatic repeatedly wounded in action and repeatedly transferred by generals