When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (4 page)

Their mission was to destroy the island's little airstrip and port facilities. They were prohibited, under any circumstances, from surrendering or committing suicide. ‘You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand', read Onoda's military order. ‘So long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him. You may have to live on coconuts. If that's the case, live on coconuts! Under no circumstances are you [to] give up your life voluntarily.'

Onoda was unsuccessful in destroying Lubang's landing facilities, enabling American and Philippine forces to capture the island in February 1945. Most of the Japanese soldiers were either taken prisoner or killed. But Onoda and three others fled to the hills, from where they vowed to continue the fight.

Lubang Island was small: sixteen miles long and just six miles wide. Yet it was covered in dense forest and the four Japanese soldiers found it easy to remain in hiding. They spent their time conducting guerrilla activities, killing at least thirty Filipinos in one attack and clashing with the police on several other occasions.

In October 1945, the men stumbled across a leaflet that read: ‘The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains.' Onoda did not believe it: he was convinced it was Allied propaganda.

A couple of months later, the men found a second leaflet that had been dropped from the air. It was a surrender order issued by General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Commander of the Fourteenth Army. Once again, Onoda and his men did not believe it to be genuine and vowed to continue Japanese resistance.

Four long years passed and still the little band were living in the forest. But by now, one of the four – Yuichi Akatsu – had had enough. He abandoned his comrades, surrendered to the Filipino army and returned to Japan. He informed the army that three of his comrades still believed the war to be ongoing.

Another two years passed before family photographs and letters were dropped into the forest on Lubang Island. Onoda found the parcels but was convinced it was all part of an elaborate trick. He and his two companions remained determined to continue fighting until the bitter end. They had little equipment and almost no provisions. They survived by eating coconuts and bananas and occasionally killing a cow.

Their living conditions were abominable. There was tropical heat, constant rain and infestations of rats. All the while they slept in makeshift huts made from branches.

Years rolled into decades and the men began to feel the effects of age. One of Onoda's comrades was killed by local Filipinos in 1954. Another lived for a further eighteen years before being shot in October 1972. He and Onoda had been engaged in a guerrilla raid on Lubang's food supplies when they got caught in a shoot-out.

Onoda was now alone, the last Japanese soldier still fighting the Second World War, a conflict that had ended twenty-seven years earlier. By now his struggle had become a lonely one, yet he refused to lay down his arms. He was still conducting guerrilla raids in the spring of 1974, when a travelling Japanese student, Noria Suzuki, managed to track him down and make contact with him.

Suzuki broke the news that the war had ended a long time previously. Onoda refused to believe it. He told Suzuki he would never surrender until he received specific orders to that effect from his superior officer.

Only now did the Japanese government get involved in trying to bring Onoda's war to an end. They managed to locate his previous commanding officer, Major Taniguchi, who was fortunately still alive. The major was flown to Lubang Island in order to tell Onoda in person to lay down his weapons.

He was finally successful on 9 March 1974. ‘Japan,' he said to Onoda, ‘had lost the war and all combat activity was to cease immediately.'

Onoda was officially relieved from military duties and told to hand over his rifle, ammunition and hand grenades. He was both stunned and horrified by what Major Taniguchi had told him. ‘We really lost the war!' were his first words. ‘How could they [the Japanese army] have been so sloppy?'

When he returned to Japan, he was feted as a national hero. But Onoda disliked the attention and found Japan a mere shadow of the noble imperial country he had served for so many years. He felt sure that if more soldiers had been prepared to fight to the bitter end, just like him, then Japan might have won the war.

 

8

The Kamikaze Pilot Who Survived

They were almost the same age – two young Japanese pilots who had joined the elite Tokkotai Special Attack Squadron. Now they had volunteered their services as kamikaze fighters prepared to sacrifice their lives for Japan.

It was spring 1945. Shigeyoshi Hamazono and Kiyoshi Ogawa were about to embark on their final mission, a devastating attack on American warships based in the waters around Okinawa.

Operation Kikusui was planned as a rolling wave of kamikaze attacks involving more than 1,500 planes. But the mission did not go entirely to plan, as Shigeyoshi Hamazono was soon to discover.

Hamazono had volunteered to serve in the Japanese military after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941. His mother was appalled: ‘She wrote me a letter with the only words she could manage: “Don't be defeated. Don't die.”' This injunction seemed a forlorn one, for Hamazono was selected to take part in Operation Kikusui.

Service in the Special Attack Squadrons was supposed to be entirely voluntary. The pilots in Hamazono's group had previously been given a recruitment form and told to mark it with a circle if they volunteered, or a cross if they declined.

‘Three men marked a cross,' recalled Hamazono, ‘and they were forced to go anyway. I felt hatred towards those officers who made them go like that.'

Hamazono himself was given little choice when nominated for Operation Kikusui. He was called by the commander and told that he'd been selected for the following day's attack.

‘As a military pilot, there was no way to say no … It was my duty. That night, all I thought about was my mission.'

He had already survived one abortive suicide mission: his plane had developed technical failure and he had been forced to return to base. Now he was despatched on what was supposed to be his final attack. He climbed into his Mitsubishi Zero fighter, knowing that he would never see his family again.

Before heading out towards the US fleet, he flew over his hometown and dropped a
hachimaki
headband with the words: ‘Hope you are well, goodbye'. It was a symbolic farewell.

His comrade-in-arms, Kiyoshi Ogawa, was rather more enthusiastic. He had been desperate to join the kamikaze squadron and was looking forward to the attack. He had no second thoughts as he climbed into his plane for his final mission.

Ogawa was one of the first to approach the American ships. As he did so, his plane came under sustained anti-aircraft fire. Undaunted, he kept flying directly towards his target, the American aircraft carrier
USS Bunker Hill
. When he was overhead, he pushed his plane into a steep dive, simultaneously dropping a 550lb bomb.

The warhead penetrated
Bunker Hill
's flight deck and exploded, setting fire to fuel. The flames spread to the refuelled planes on deck, which promptly exploded. Ogawa just had time to see the carnage he had caused before delivering his coup de grâce, crashing the plane into the ship's burning control tower.

There was utter devastation on board. The explosion killed many of
Bunker Hill
's pilots waiting inside the ‘ready room', burning the oxygen and asphyxiating the men.

Hamazono was also intent on hitting his target ship. But as he neared the American fleet, he noticed that a squadron of US fighters had been scrambled to meet him.

There followed a dangerous thirty-five-minute dogfight, with Hamazono dodging the American bullets while at the same time trying to identify his target far below. ‘At the end of the dogfight, I could see them coming at me again from a long way off. I was certain that I would be killed in a matter of seconds. But as they got closer, they banked and flew off. I still can't work out why they did that.'

Hamazono was by now flying an aircraft riddled with holes. He also had severe cuts and burns to both his face and hands. As darkness was approaching, he decided to limp back to the Japanese mainland rather than press on with his attack. ‘I was burned all over and only had five of my teeth left.' His mission was at an end.

Hamazono was not selected for another kamikaze raid. The war was almost over and he had lost all desire to die inside his plane.

For many years afterwards, he and the handful of other surviving kamikaze pilots had to live with the stigma of having survived a mission that ought to have claimed their lives.

‘They used to tell us that the last words of the pilots were: “Long Live the Emperor!”' says Hamazono. ‘But I am sure that was a lie. They cried out what I would have cried. They called for their mothers.'

 

9

Surviving Hiroshima and Nagasaki

He was travelling across Hiroshima on a public tram when he heard the droning sound of an aircraft engine in the skies above.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi thought nothing of it. After all, it was wartime and planes were forever passing above the city. He was unaware that the engines belonged to the US bomber
Enola Gay
, and that it was just seconds away from dropping a thirteen kiloton uranium atomic bomb on the city.

As the plane approached its target at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, Yamaguchi had just stepped off the tram. He glanced at the sky and noticed a bomber passing overheard. He also saw two small parachutes. And then, quite without warning, all hell broke loose.

‘[There was] a great flash in the sky and I was blown over.' The massive nuclear warhead had exploded less than three kilometres from the spot where he was standing.

The bomb was detonated at six hundred metres above Hiroshima. As Yamaguchi swung his gaze upwards, he saw a vast mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising high into the sky. Seconds later, he passed out. The blast caused his eardrums to rupture and the flash of light left him temporarily blinded.

The heat of the explosion was such that it left him with serious burns over the left side of his body. When he eventually regained consciousness, he crawled to a shelter and tried to make sense of what had happened. Fortunately, he stumbled across three colleagues, who had also survived. All were young engineers working for the shipbuilder Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. They had been unlucky enough to be sent to Hiroshima on the very day of the bombing.

They spent the night together in an air-raid shelter, nursing their burns and wounds. Then, on the following morning, they ventured out of their shelter and picked their way through the charred and molten ruins. As they went to the nearest functioning railway station they passed piles of burnt and dying bodies. Their aim was to catch one of the few working trains back to their hometown of Nagasaki, some 200 miles away.

Yamaguchi was in a poor state and went to have his wounds bandaged as soon as he reached Nagasaki. But by 9 August, after just two days of convalescence, he felt well enough to struggle into work.

His boss and his co-workers listened in horrified amazement as he described the unbelievable destruction that a single bomb had managed to cause. He told them how the explosion had melted metal and evaporated entire parts of the city. His boss, Sam, simply didn't believe him.

‘You're an engineer,' he barked. ‘Calculate it. How could one bomb destroy a whole city?'

At the exact moment he said these words – 11.02 a.m. – there was a blinding white flash that penetrated to the heart of the room. Yamaguchi's tender skin was once again pricked with heat and he crashed to the ground. ‘I thought that the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima,' he said later.

The US Air Force had dropped their second nuclear warhead – Fat Man – named after Winston Churchill. It was much larger than the Hiroshima device, a twenty-five kiloton plutonium bomb that exploded in the bowl of the valley where Nagasaki is situated.

The destruction was more confined but even more intense than at Hiroshima. Some 74,000 were killed and a similar number injured.

Yamaguchi, his wife and his baby son miraculously survived and spent much of the following week in an air-raid shelter near what was left of their home. Five days later, they heard the news that Emperor Hirohito had announced Japan's surrender.

Yamaguchi's survival of both nuclear explosions was little short of miraculous. Yet it was later discovered that he was one of 160 people known to have lived through both bombings.

In 1957, he was recognized as a
hibakusha
or ‘explosion affected person'. But it was not until 2009 that he was officially allowed to describe himself as an
eniijuu hibakusha
or double bomb survivor.

The effects of the double bombings left its scars, both mental and physical. Yamaguchi lost the hearing in his left ear as a result of the Hiroshima explosion. He also lost his hair temporarily. His daughter would later recall that he was swathed in bandages until she reached the age of twelve.

Yamaguchi became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons until he was well advanced in years, at which point he began to suffer from the long-term effects of the exposure to radiation. His wife developed liver and kidney cancer in 2008 and died soon after. Yamaguchi himself developed acute leukaemia and died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. His longevity was extraordinary, as he knew only too well. He viewed his long life as a ‘path planted by God'.

‘It was my destiny that I experienced this twice and I am still alive to convey what happened,' he said towards the end of his life.

 

PART IV

Ladies in Disguise

In final effect my outfit might deceive any eye; it revealed a thick-set and plump figure, finished by a somewhat small head and a boyish face.