Tears in the Darkness (7 page)

As a boy he had loved the bustle of the place, the noisy commerce of
the streets, the
chin-chin
of the trolley bells, the
gatakoto-gatakoto-gatakoto
of the locomotives on the tracks.

At a local college of commerce, Ryotaro Nishimura had prepared himself to enter the family lumber business. Then in 1932, around his twentieth birthday, the government sent him a draft notice. His mother thought him too weak for the army, but his father, who revered the Throne and believed Japan a nation with a divine destiny, was proud his oldest son had been called to serve the emperor.

Commissioned an officer, he was assigned to the reserves near his home, then in 1936 he was called to full-time duty, fought in China the following year, rotated home, and in the fall of 1941 was ordered to report to the 9th Infantry. By the second week in December he was on his way with his men aboard a ship in the South China Sea, part of a flotilla staging for an invasion of the Philippine Islands.

On the early morning of December 22, eighty-five transports carrying 36,000 troops from the 14th Army's invasion force dropped anchor in the waters of Lingayen Gulf off the main Philippine island of Luzon, preparing for a predawn attack. On the
Yae Maru,
Ryotaro Nishimura
went among his men checking their equipment and quizzing them on the order of battle.
²

He had worked hard to “get familiar” with his troops, to treat them with “affection” and “consideration,” sleeping in the same hold, eating the same food, by turns encouraging and calming them. He knew well that combat was close work (is there anything more intimate than dying in the arms of a comrade?), work driven by love, not hate or fear. He also knew that men never follow a bully (they'd been bullied enough in training), so he spared them the tub-thumping lectures on the evils of the West, loyalty to the emperor, their duty to give up their lives.

“Do not die for no purpose,” he urged them. “Think well before doing things. Don't hurry to die.”

On the morning of the invasion he woke his men at three o'clock and huddled with them at breakfast: miso soup and an egg over a thick porridge of barley and white rice. Japanese soup always reminded the men of home, but on this morning the troops complained the miso had a “strange” flavor, and Ryotaro Nishimura knew that the men had awakened with the metallic taste of fear in their mouths.

He tried to keep his mind on the moment (there was much to think about—the objective, the weather, the terrain), but as he ate his porridge and soup his thoughts began to drift.

“Even in a little war,” he thought, “we have only one life as a human being. And even in a little battle we are worried about that life, our one important precious life to be lost. Now we are in a big war with a big enemy, a war very different from the war we fought before in China. This enemy is a very difficult enemy to attack.” Naturally, the men were worried about their lives. “I am worried too, worried about my own life, my one precious life to be lost in battle.”

And then the call came to assemble on deck. The men silently shouldered their packs and queued up at the ladders to go topside. They were breathing heavily, sighing, and shifting about.

On deck, waiting for the landing boats to return from shore to pick up his battalion, Ryotaro Nishimura looked at his watch—the boats were late. This was not good. They had wanted to land in the dark to shroud their movements, but now he could see the first approach of dawn, the slow gray awakening of day he had watched so often at home above Mount Momoyama.

By the time the landing boats returned, the sun was well above the horizon. The tillermen reported that the swift currents and rough seas had carried the first battalion south of its assigned beach to a spot near Bauang, where troops of the Philippine Army's 12th Infantry Regiment were waiting with machine guns. Casualties had been heavy. Now Nishimura's battalion was being taken out of reserve and sent into the fight. The lieutenant would get his orders on the beach, he was told.

So they would be landing under fire after all. Ryotaro Nishimura looked at the lines of soldiers waiting on deck. The men would do fine, he thought. They had been trained to fight hard. Then he caught sight of his battalion commander weaving his way toward him through the lines of men. The colonel put his hand on the lieutenant's shoulder.

“I will pray for the safe landing of your company,” he said.

The wind was up and the sea was full of swells, some ten feet high. The landing boats were rising and falling and banging against the hull, and the men climbing down the side of the ship on nets and rope ladders felt awkward and clumsy, the weight of their packs and ammunition and heavy equipment throwing them off balance in the pitch and roll.

Now the boats were heading toward shore, the wind blowing them south toward the beach at Santiago. Ryotaro Nishimura noticed debris in the water ahead of them, round metal casings floating off the bow. Mines!

At almost the same moment, he could hear the
ping
and
snap
of bullets passing overhead, then came the
sh-h-h
and
whump
of mortars or perhaps small artillery shells landing around them.

As the boat approached the heavy surf it started to founder, and the company sergeant jumped over the side and ordered the men into the water.

They were bobbing about now in their life belts, beginning to separate, and the lieutenant threw the sergeant a rope from the boat. He was a good man, this sergeant, a very clever man, and he told the men in the water to grab the rope, and then he began to tow them to shore, through the roiling surf toward the beach and the sandy bluffs and earthen re-doubts where the enemy was waiting.

 

ONCE ASHORE
and driving toward their objectives, the invaders knew they would be outnumbered but they did not feel overmatched. They had air and naval power, and the enemy did not. More tanks, too. Most
of all, they were sure they had better troops. The Japanese estimated that 130,000 Filipinos and Americans would be dug in against them at various places on Luzon and the other islands, but they believed that an Imperial Army force less than half that size would be more than enough to carry the campaign.
³

 

[Pre-invasion Report] The Americans have the makings of excellent soldiers, but due to the torrid zone, there is a tendency to physical and mental laxness and subsequent lack of eagerness.
⁴

 

And they were right. According to a U.S. Army report, “the average enlistee” in 1941 “was a youth of less than average education, to whom the security of pay, low as it was, and the routines of Army life appealed more than the competitive struggles of civilian life.” They resented their officers, the army's remote upper class, and saw their sergeants as crude overseers promoted more for their mindless forbearance, their time in uniform, than their merit. They thought the training rote and stupid, drill for “nitwits”: marching in formation, scrubbing barracks floors, shining shoes, standing frequent inspections. Instead of
esprit de corps
—a “moral force,” Ardant du Picq said, that wins battles—the average soldier in the Army of the United States had
esprit étroit,
narrowing self-interest. “Don't stick your neck out,” he would tell his buddies, then reach for another beer.
⁵

In their pre-invasion reports, the Japanese thought even less of the Filipinos: “Their military ability is lower than the Americans'.”
⁶

In 1934 when the U.S. Congress voted to grant the Philippines full independence (effective in 1946) and created a Commonwealth government, the first president, Manuel Quezon, asked his American sponsors to help him plan for the islands' defense. Quezon wanted his old friend Douglas MacArthur, soon to retire as U.S. Army chief of staff, to be his military adviser, and Washington approved.

MacArthur's staff drafted plans for a “citizen army” of trained Filipino reserves ready to be mobilized in an emergency. By July 1941, the Philippine Army and the American garrison in the Philippines had been combined under one command, and MacArthur told Washington that 120,000 Filipino reservists had been trained and were ready to fight. “The Philippine Army . . . is progressing by leaps and bounds,” he wired the War Department.
⁷

In truth, the Commonwealth Army was more of a
levée en masse,
a force of reservists being quickly mobilized, than a standing army. The Filipinos were without adequate equipment or quarters. Their guinit helmets were fashioned from coconut husks and varnish; some had combat boots, but most wore rubber-soled canvas shoes that fell apart or rotted in the wet climate; in their initial training they used lengths of wood and stalks of bamboo instead of rifles and had only limited opportunities to handle or test-fire real weapons.

More than half of them were illiterate peasants drawn from the provinces. They came into the training camps speaking a hundred regional languages and dialects, and orders often had to be translated and retranslated three or four times before a man could understand them. During their first week of “training,” they learned how to operate flush toilets and were lectured on the value of washing their hands before they sat down to eat. In the mornings they were taught how to march, stand in formation, tender a crisp salute. In the afternoons they worked in the camp gardens raising vegetables, and tended herds of livestock and flocks of fowl so they would have something to eat.

Their officers were often wholly ignorant of the most basic military subjects—map reading, troop movements, tactics, even simple self-defense. An American adviser once asked a Filipino officer to order his men to dig foxholes, and the Filipino, out of earshot, turned to a subordinate and whispered, “What is a foxhole?”
⁸

Had they been well trained and well led, the Filipinos might have made superb soldiers. Generally a passive people, they followed the custom of
pakikisama,
Tagalog for “just go along with it” whatever the “it” was—the rule of government, the will of the family, the preferences of friends. And if going along put trouble in his path, well, then, the weary
magsasaka
(farmer) would just
bahala na,
“leave it to God, come what may.” But wrong him, insult him, slander his family, question his honor, and the average Filipino would likely turn his bolo from cutting sugarcane to harvesting someone's head.

A handful of Americans in the islands, veterans of the Spanish-American War, had experienced this fury. After the United States invaded the islands in 1898, Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Filipino revolt, and his peasant army fought pitched battles with the Americans, then became a guerrilla force that regularly harassed and ambushed the American troops who pursued them into the provinces. Impressed by
the Filipinos' capacity to fight, the American Army created within its ranks a unit called the Philippine Scouts, ten thousand highly trained Filipino troops considered by some in 1941 to be the best light infantry in the Pacific.

Unlike the veteran Scouts, however, the much larger Commonwealth Army, only five years old, had no experience and little support. When the Japanese set sail from Formosa, the native force preparing to meet them was ill led and underequipped. Morale was high—the Filipinos shared their American overseers' contempt for the Japanese and were proud of their birthright and eager to defend it against the invaders. But without the proper equipment and preparation for the hard fight ahead, they were just “multitudes of men,” as the ancient Roman, Vegetius, might have called them, waiting to be “dragged to slaughter.”
⁹

MacArthur knew of these deficits but never corrected them. Instead he concentrated on the politics of the moment, building morale and maligning his enemy. In May 1941 he told a reporter that the Japanese Imperial Army had suffered so many casualties in China, it was now a “third-class” force, a statement that said more about the general than the Japanese. Only a handful of American intelligence officers had the ability to analyze the strength and caliber of the Japanese troops, and these men had scant information in front of them. Japan was a police state in 1941, and everyone—natives, foreign residents, diplomats, and travelers—was under surveillance. So American operatives in Tokyo could only guess at the proficiency of the emperor's troops, and their best guess was sobering: the Japanese, they believed, were among the finest fighting men in the world, “aggressive, well-trained . . . superbly led,” and “dogged in combat.”
¹⁰

 

AN ARCHIPELAGO
of 7,100 islands lying on an axis some 1,150 miles long, the Philippines was too diffuse for a garrison to defend and too far away—almost 7,000 miles from American shores—for a battle fleet to reach them in time to thwart an invasion or relieve a garrison under siege. And for more than forty years, from December 1898 when America took possession of the Philippines, until December 1941 when the Japanese attacked, this conundrum, this classic problem of assembling “forces in space” and “forces in time,” as Carl von Clausewitz called it, kept military planners spinning.