The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [154]
Above him the Shuri Castle had finally been blasted to rubble, the inevitable result of days of constant shelling from the heavy guns of the Americans. The rains had returned the day before, and the shattering devastation to the hills around him had caused ruptures in the carefully constructed supports of the caves. There had been no major failures, not yet anyway, the timbers still preventing any kind of general collapse, but Ushijima could see the result now, the floor coated with a gentle flow of rainwater, a muddy creek that sifted through the dirt above and beside him. He stood silently for a long moment, still thought of the Germans, had never really known any high-ranking German commanders, his counterparts, but there had to be this, he thought. After so much destruction, even the earth punishes us. Surely, in Berlin, in Munich or Frankfurt, there were generals who stood in their luxurious headquarters and mourned the great loss, helpless to hold back the tide. Did they cast blame on their subordinates, or did they stand tall and accept that Hitler had simply miscalculated? He thought of the book, sitting high even now on a shelf in his room. He had used Sun Tzu’s The Art of War at the military academy, had kept it with his possessions all throughout his travels. There was annoying irony to Ushijima that Japan would employ so much cultural propaganda about the Chinese, using that as their pretext for the invasion of Manchuria. And yet, he thought, for twenty-five hundred years, there has been no one with a clearer understanding of the art and science of war than a man who was … Chinese. Sun Tzu’s most poignant lesson was painfully obvious now, even more so than it had been in his classrooms. Know your enemy. Whether the enemy fights with sticks and arrows, or whether he brings tanks and vast fleets of warships, the lesson must be obeyed. In that we have failed, and that failure will cost us our army, our emperor, perhaps our nation. Men like Cho do not read the lessons. Cho believed the Americans would be defeated by the sight of their own blood. Perhaps Hitler believed that as well. The Americans must certainly teach the wisdom of Sun Tzu to their generals. Perhaps they are better students than we are.
The return of the rains was a blessing that Ushijima knew he had to take seriously. All along the entire defensive line, the American drives had so weakened what remained of his army that the fighting could be brought to a close within a week. The most significant breakthrough for the Americans had come to the east, the Japanese right flank, a tenacious effort by the American infantry divisions. That was a surprise, no one in the Japanese hierarchy believing that infantry could mount as stubborn an offense as the Marines. Our strongest defensive efforts against the entire front were fruitful, he thought, for a while at least. Their casualty counts have to be astoundingly high, and surely there is hand-wringing, an agony of conscience among the American generals that so many men have died where we invited them to come. I feared the Marines, but I did not expect the American infantry to be as formidable. Sun Tzu speaks again. I did not know them. That is no one’s failure but my own.
He moved slowly forward, shuffled his feet through the shallow sheet of water, mud on his boots, the wetness soaking through. He glanced into the map room, men working as they had always worked, doing their duty, no one reflecting his own gloom. But they know, he thought. There can be no cheerfulness now. He realized how bleak the offices seemed to be, thought, of course, it is the flowers. They are gone.
The seeping rainwater had quickly brought deterioration to the sanitary facilities in the caves, one more reason