The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [27]
Although the Japanese succeeded in landing the main body of the Nankai Shitai, two battalions of the 144th Infantry, two artillery companies, crack naval landing troops, and a huge support force, they were not yet finished sending troops to New Guinea. A day after Horii’s men arrived at Basabua, another regiment left Rabaul bound for the Buna coast. Like the Nankai Shitai, the 15th Independent Engineers and the Tsukamoto Battalion that preceded it, the Yazawa Detachment, under the command of Colonel Kiyomi Yazawa, was a veteran fighting force.
Again, the Japanese navy’s luck held. The convoy that carried the Yazawa Detachment reached Basabua under cloud cover on August 21, bringing Japan’s troop count to a total of eight thousand army troops, three thousand naval construction troops, and 450 troops from the Sasebo 5th Special Naval Landing Force.
These were not the “minor forces” Allied intelligence had predicted. Still, Willoughby persisted in his stubborn appraisal of Japanese plans. When Allied air reconnaissance discovered that the Japanese were lengthening a landing strip at Buna, Willoughby seized on the report as evidence that he had been right all along—the Japanese would penetrate inland only as far as they needed to build airfields.
In dismissing the threat of a land-based assault on Port Moresby, Willoughby, MacArthur and his advisors, and the Australians were forgetting the lesson of Malaya. There, British forces had relied on a vast jungle to the north to defend Singapore from a Japanese incursion. The Japanese overcame that jungle through sheer force of will, once again proving themselves capable of enormous daring, and forced the surrender of eighty thousand British troops.
The “ghost” in the modern Japanese army that allowed military strategists to forgo caution and field officers to push their troops beyond what was considered humanly possible was the samurai spirit. Around the ninth century, as feudalism evolved in Japan, samurai, or “those who serve,” were a small, elite warrior class within the feudal system. The samurai emphasized the twin virtues of loyalty and self-sacrifice and evolved an ethic known as bushido, the “way of the warrior.” In the first half of the twentieth century, the Japanese military resurrected bushido, and distorted it as a way to transform Japan’s entire male population into willing warriors. In fact, at the time, the whole of Japanese society was being systematically indoctrinated and militarized. Slogans were omnipresent: “Ichoku isshin” (One hundred million [people], one mind) “Hoshigarimasen katsu made wa” (Abolish desire until victory). Dissent was aggressively suppressed. Unwavering dedication to the emperor, to Japan, to a culture that considered itself morally superior to the degenerate West became the norm. In fact, by World War II, the average Japanese citizen had been instilled with a master race mentality that was every bit as dangerous as the German conception of the Aryan race.
Many Japanese soldiers who came ashore at Basabua in July and August carried with them a copy of the famous Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors. The Imperial Rescript, which was promulgated by Emperor Meiji in 1882, articulated a series of virtues similar to the traditional samurai code of bushido. Bravery and loyalty were seen as the ultimate manifestations of a soldier’s commitment. He was encouraged to relinquish all personal initiative. Consequently, Japanese soldiers carried out orders unquestioningly. To become an officer, a cadet had to pass through the military academy at Ichigaya, where absolute obedience was inculcated during every waking hour, originality and individuality were stifled, and death was glorified as a transcendent act that brought honor to oneself and one’s family. A good soldier was said to die with the “Emperor’s name on [his] lips.” And death, even a grisly one, was preferable to surrender. Surrender was the consummate disgrace, a humiliation that would forever