The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [179]
The few doctors still serving his army had long exhausted supplies of useful drugs for treating the wounded, and even bandages were rare. Now those same doctors had begun to respond to the misery of their patients by administering one of the few drugs they had in their arsenal, cyanide. Some was used to silence the worst of the suffering, but more was given to those who asked for it, soldiers who might survive the caves, who would not accept that their fight was over. Some of the doctors had dealt with the overwhelming futility of what they saw by using the cyanide on themselves. Beyond the wounds there had been new suffering, outbreaks of every tropical ailment imaginable, diseases birthed by the deepening pools of blood and filth. In the larger caves, where hundreds of men might be packed side by side, those few doctors who kept their spirit were aided by nurses who suffered from the same disease and who endured the filth and starvation diets alongside the soldiers and medical men. But there had been a singular tragedy as well, a note brought to Ushijima that even he could not dismiss.
From one of the high schools on the island had come more than one hundred fifty young Okinawan girls who had volunteered to serve the Japanese as nurses, though their medical skills were nonexistent. With the number of sick and wounded increasing dramatically, with stacks of corpses and every kind of misery infecting everyone in the caves, the girls endured the same suffering as the dying men and overburdened doctors. The Himeyuri girls were relegated to the worst tasks imaginable, and what had once been carefully guarded innocence had been ripped away by the filth and horrifying duties they were forced to perform, the most basic tasks for the sick and broken men who could do nothing for themselves. When the Americans approached the cave where the Himeyuri girls were hiding, most of the soldiers who occupied the miserable place were already dead, or too sick to respond to the American calls to vacate their hiding place. The loyalty from the girls meant silence, and silence from a large cave brought the usual response from the anxious and exhausted Americans, who had already endured booby traps and all forms of deadly trickery. With few inside willing to surrender, the cave was bombarded by phosphorus grenades and blasted by flamethrowers. Nearly all of the girls were annihilated. In time the Okinawans who became aware of the astounding tragedy were calling the blasted hole in the ground the Cave of the Virgins.
Ushijima set the teacup aside, thought, girls die. Boys die. Babies and the elderly. The Okinawans can mourn their own, their farmers and their fishermen, their virgins and their grandmothers. I did not bring this upon them, and I will not accept that any of this is my fault. That is another antiquated notion, that the general will be blamed for the deaths around him. My army is dying, is nearly dead now. Even for that I will accept no blame.
He felt suddenly defiant, thought of the High Command. They accept none of the responsibility and yet it is their orders that put me here. They make the decisions. So they must bear the burden. Instead, they wash their hands of failure and ask the emperor for forgiveness. And he will oblige them. That is what he does, after all. He will accept this defeat as his own, and as long as we have served him with loyalty, we shall carry none of the guilt. For that we should be grateful.
It wasn’t working, nothing in those words soothing to him at all. That speech had been driven into him for too many years, but his faith in