One Man's Justice (7 page)

Takuya watched as they put on their service caps, picked up their swords and left the room. By now a weather report that rain had started to fall in southern Kyushu had arrived. No sightings of any enemy aircraft were reported. Takuya's subordinates worked away collating the mountain of damage reports received from the city.

Around two o'clock the door opened and the two sergeant-majors walked in, one after the other. Takuya searched their faces for a hint of emotion. They were both pale but there was a strangely radiant look in their eyes. Their brows glistened with sweat as though they had come from vigorous exercise, and a tangible heat emanated from their bodies.

They stepped toward Takuya's desk and in an animated voice one reported, ‘Duties completed, sir.'

‘How was it? Did all go well?' asked Takuya.

‘Yes, sir. We each executed one prisoner,' replied one of them, exhilaration lingering in his eyes.

‘Well done,' said Takuya, nodding his approval. The two soldiers returned to their desks and wiped their brows with handkerchiefs.

Takuya heard that four regular officers and three noncommissioned officers had taken part in the executions that day, including Lieutenant Howa Kotaro of the accounts department, the only man who had volunteered. A graduate of Tokyo University, Howa was a mild-mannered man known for writing beautiful tanka poetry. That morning
he had hurried down through the smouldering ruins of the Koojiya-machi area of Fukuoka to the house where his mother lived. It had burnt to the ground, so he waited for his mother to return from wherever she might have sheltered during the air raid. Casting his eyes over the sheets of roofing iron scattered across the ruins at the end of the little alleyway, he saw a black object resembling a scorched piece of timber. When he looked more closely and saw the gold-capped teeth showing from the gaping, burnt hole that had once been a mouth, he realised that this was the charred corpse of his mother. He wrapped her body in a piece of singed straw matting and asked a neighbour to look after it until he could come back to give her a proper funeral. Howa returned to headquarters and began working silently on his mother's coffin. Those attached to the tactical operations centre were in charge of organising the executions, but when Howa heard that the American airmen were to be killed, the request he made to the staff officer in charge of the operations room to be allowed to take part was so compelling that his name was added to the list. A member of the kendo club during his university days, Howa was the only man among the executioners to decapitate two of the prisoners.

While these executions temporarily relieved the frustration Takuya felt, each time he stepped outside the operations room and caught the horrific sight of a city razed to the ground, irrepressible anger and pain welled up inside him. According to reports issued by the municipal office, the death toll was over one thousand, with over fifty thousand families losing their homes and untold thousands
of people injured in the firestorm. Everywhere there were dazed people sifting through the ashes of the scorched ruins. Here and there groups of men, women and children sat listlessly on the side of the road. Viewing such scenes, and contemplating the fact that these people were destitute because of the B-29 raids, he thought it an injustice that the remaining prisoners were still safe inside the headquarters building.

The day after the incendiary attack on Fukuoka city the key members of the headquarters staff moved to caves near Yamae village in the Tsukushi area, leaving behind only those who worked in anti-aircraft intelligence. After the attack on Fukuoka, the US Army Air Force started saturation bombing raids on other main cities and towns in Kyushu. First, on the twenty-ninth of June, a force of ten B-29s bombed Nobeoka in Miyazaki prefecture, and then Kanoya in Kagoshima prefecture. Beginning in July, attacks were made on cities and towns including Kurume, Yatsushiro, Nagasaki, Kumamoto, Oita, Omuta and Miyazaki.

Among those left to work on anti-aircraft intelligence, tension mounted as preparations were accelerated to meet the expected American landings on Kyushu. Defensive earthworks were being constructed everywhere, artillery pieces were placed in caves facing the sea, and special kamikaze attack aircraft were hidden in underground shelters.

Plans were also being made to strengthen the mobile reserve, the Thirty-sixth Army, by redeploying three infantry divisions from the Chugoku and Kinki areas, and by moving the pride of the mainland defensive forces – two
elite armoured divisions and six reserve divisions – from the Kanto region to meet the enemy in Kyushu.

With such crucial forces being readied, Takuya began to sense that the last decisive moments of the war were close at hand. If the remaining armies played their part in the grand defensive strategy prepared by Imperial Headquarters, it would be possible for Japan to deal the American forces a body blow. There was no doubting Japan's advantage in terms of supply lines and the willingness of the ten million inhabitants of Kyushu to do their utmost to contribute to the success of the defensive effort. Though Takuya did not doubt that Japan would be victorious in the coming battles, he had a premonition that he himself would not live through the titanic struggle about to unfold. At least, he hoped, he would succumb knowing that he had inflicted the greatest damage possible on the enemy.

That summer was much hotter than average. The steel doors were usually pushed wide open, but because the tactical operations centre was encased in a thick layer of reinforced concrete it was oppressively hot inside the building, the lone fan sending a stream of hot air across the desks. Sweat dripping from their brows, Takuya and his colleagues went on processing incoming information and preparing the anti-aircraft defences for the next bombing raid.

Toward the end of July there was a dramatic increase in the number of enemy aircraft participating in each attack. On the twenty-eighth, a total of three thousand two hundred and ten planes attacked targets in the Kanto, Tokai and Kinki regions, while around six hundred and fifty carrier-borne planes made bombing and strafing sorties over
Kyushu, some of the latter aircraft even going so far as to attack targets in the Korea Strait and the southern region of the Korean peninsula. The following day a force of three hundred and sixty-one carrier-borne bombers and fighters attacked targets in central and southern Kyushu. The same areas were attacked by three hundred and seventy-nine aircraft on the thirtieth, one hundred and forty-eight on the first of August, and another two hundred and twenty on the fifth of August. The fact that these attacks were concentrated on military and coastal installations was judged to be an indication that the American invasion of Kyushu was imminent, and Western Command headquarters was on constant alert for news that the invasion fleet had been sighted.

Near-windless days with clear blue skies continued, and the morning temperatures on the sixth of August presaged another sweltering day. Forecasting another large-scale attack that day, the tactical operations centre issued orders for no relaxation of the full-alert conditions in all areas of Kyushu.

Just after eight in the morning Takuya looked up from his desk, his attention caught by something distant, yet quite audible. It was a strange, almost rending sound, as if a huge piece of paper had been violently ripped in two. Seconds later a palpable shock wave jolted the air. His subordinates all sat stock-still, looking bewildered. No enemy planes had been reported in Kyushu airspace, and the sound they had just heard was clearly different from anything they had yet experienced. Takuya thought it might have been a distant peal of thunder.

Later that day, as expected, a combined force of a hundred and eighty bombers and fighters from bases in Okinawa attacked targets in southern Kyushu. Takuya was busy processing incoming reports and issuing orders to anti-aircraft defence units in that region.

That afternoon a communique´ from Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo notified them of the truth about the ominous sound and shock wave they had felt that morning. The message stated that at 8.15 a.m. two B-29s had intruded into Japanese airspace on a flight path over the Bungo Channel before sweeping north-east toward Hiroshima, where one of them had dropped a special new bomb which had caused extensive damage. It went on to advise that on no account was the extreme state of alert to be relaxed.

Western Command staff tried in vain to contact Central Regional Command headquarters in Hiroshima by telephone, but before long they received an updated report from Imperial Command in Tokyo to the effect that Hiroshima had been completely devastated, and tens of thousands of people killed or wounded. Considering that the sound and shock wave from the explosion had carried a full two hundred kilometres from Hiroshima to Fukuoka, Takuya and his colleagues realised that this bomb must possess a fearsome destructive power, far exceeding that of normal bomb technology.

Over the next several hours, a range of reports came in about the new bomb. Evidently, after being dropped it had descended attached to a parachute and had exploded several hundred metres above the ground, unleashing a blinding
white flash of light, and punching a turbulent yellowish-white mushroom-shaped cloud up to ten or twenty thousand metres into the sky.

On the next day, the seventh, Imperial Command made a brief announcement on the radio regarding the bombing of Hiroshima. It stated that Hiroshima had been attacked by a small number of enemy B-29 aircraft and had suffered extensive damage, and that surveys were under way to establish the nature of the new weapon that had been used in this attack. Though reports from Imperial Command had mentioned nothing that specific, information had now been received to the effect that this new weapon was probably what was being called an ‘atomic bomb'. The term itself was new to Takuya and his staff, but from the incoming reports it was clear that the weapon's destructive power was something completely unprecedented.

That evening Colonel Tahara, the staff officer assigned to the tactical operations centre, returned from a visit to Air Force Operational Command. The aircraft he had travelled in had stopped off in Hiroshima en route back to Fukuoka. He described how the city had been reduced to ruins, with corpses lying everywhere.

An air of oblivion hung over the staff in the headquarters building, and no one uttered a word. Each struggled to understand how, in addition to devastating fire raids on towns and cities throughout the country, the American military could unleash a new weapon of such destructive power, expressly designed to kill and maim a city's civilian population. As fresh reports trickled in detailing the situation in Hiroshima, Takuya felt with increasing conviction
that the American military had ceased to recognise the Japanese as members of the human race. Evidently, all the buildings had been destroyed and a large portion of the city's population annihilated in an instant. How, thought Takuya, did the thinking behind this differ from the mass incineration of a nest of vermin?

Two days later, on the ninth of August, news of grave concern was received at headquarters. The Soviet Union not only had unilaterally renounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, but had also declared war on Japan. Red Army forces were already advancing across the border with Manchuria to engage the Kwantung Army. It was clear that the timing of the Soviet offensive was linked to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and now that the Russians had begun hostilities Japan was surrounded by enemies on all sides. Takuya sensed that the day he would be called upon to give his life for his country was near.

That morning at 7.40 a.m. a report came in from electronic detection posts that enemy aircraft had crossed the line between Aoshima in Miyazaki prefecture and Sukumo in Kochi prefecture on Shikoku island. Subsequently they were detected crossing the line between Hosojima in Miyazaki and Sukumo, so an alert was issued, followed by a full air-raid warning. But as spotters reported no sightings of intruders in that area of Kyushu, the order to sound the all clear was issued at 8.30 a.m. The high state of alert was maintained in the tactical operations centre, however, and when a report was received from spotters on Kunisaki peninsula that two Superfortresses had been seen
heading westwards, the order to sound the air-raid sirens was reissued at 10.53 a.m.

The fact that only two B-29s were sighted, as in the attack three days earlier, pointed strongly to the likelihood that one of these intruders was carrying a bomb like the one that had devastated Hiroshima, and the course of the aircraft suggested that their target was a city in the northern Kyushu area.

The two aircraft continued westwards until they reached the city of Kokura, where they circled for a short time before the dense cloud cover evidently forced them to switch to a contingency target to the south-west. In view of the aircraft's flight path, the tactical operations centre staff speculated that the target had been switched to Nagasaki, so radio and telex messages were sent to that city straight away, to warn them of the approaching bombers and advise that everyone should be ordered to evacuate immediately. To avoid panic among the populace, however, no mention was made of the possibility that the bombers were carrying the same type of weapon that had destroyed Hiroshima.

Virtually incapacitated with anxiety, Takuya and his colleagues sat mesmerised by the red lamps on the wall map indicating the movement of the two B-29s. The lamps showed the planes moving inexorably over the Ariake Sea and then down across the northern section of the Shimabara peninsula, approaching Nagasaki from the north-east and seeming almost to stop for a moment over the city before heading east and then disappearing in the direction of Okinawa.

Queasy with foreboding, Takuya sat at his desk and
waited for damage reports from Nagasaki. The only solace was the fact that they heard no sound and felt no shock wave like that experienced when the new bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Before long, however, his worst fears were realised. A report came in from Ohmura Air Force Base that a brilliant white light had been seen a split second before a thunderous explosion had rocked the ground where they stood, and a huge mushroom-shaped cloud had risen skywards above Nagasaki. There was no further communication until, after some time, reports began flooding in that the city had suffered extensive damage. Some information even suggested that the bomb had been dropped on a residential area in the northern part of Nagasaki. The bomb was obviously like the one that had destroyed Hiroshima. The thought that the tragedy visited upon Hiroshima had now been re-enacted in Nagasaki made it impossible for Takuya to remain sitting calmly at his desk.