Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ valued in the Japanese military hierarchy of the 1930s, and Mutaguchi was a true creature of that rash decade. Born in Saga prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, he was the son of the once prominent Fukuchi family, which had fallen on hard times. His father had died when Renya was young, leaving the boy and his brother to be brought up ‘almost like orphans’. He was eventually adopted by the Mutaguchi family and made their heir; this was a common practice, dating from the Samurai era, when families who did not have a male heir could adopt in order to preserve the family line and name. A few years after Mutaguchi’s death in the 1960s, his son Morikuni told a biographer that his father had gained his driving energy to succeed from the difficulties of his childhood. ‘Where his father had drifted, he was determined to forge ahead resolutely. Where his father had faltered before opposition, he would blast it aside.’ In later life Mutaguchi never spoke willingly of his father. It was as if he felt shame or anger towards him, or perhaps a mixture of both. More than anything, it seems, he was determined not to be weak. The military offered the strength and resoluteness that he craved.

      The Japan in which Mutaguchi grew up regarded the military as a higher caste, in whose ranks lay the great hope of national unity. Wars had been fought and won against the Chinese and Koreans, but also against Tsarist Russia, the first European power to be defeated by Asians in the modern age. The distinguished historian of Japan, John Dower, quotes a song from the 1880s that presages the intentions of this new power:

      There is a law of the nations it is true

      but when the moment comes remember the strong eat up the weak.

The lives of young Japanese males were circumscribed by two core imperial rescripts. The first was a code of ethics for all the military, which was the most important document in preparing for a militarised society. ‘Loyalty [is] their essential duty,’ it declared, ‘death is lighter than a feather.’ Soldiers were told that orders should always be regarded as coming from the emperor himself.^* Military training was brutal and designed to instil an attitude of mercilessness towards their opponents.

      Takahide Kuwaki was born in 1918, the son of a lieutenant general who had fought in China and served as a military attaché in Turkey and France. Kuwaki graduated as a doctor before being sent for military training where, to his shock, social class and educational qualifications made no difference to the way he was treated. ‘I was surprised by that! They slapped me if I said something wrong.’ Hiroshi Yamagami left home for an army college at the age of fourteen. At school he remembered feeling sorry for people who were not Japanese. The Chinese were referred to with contempt. ‘We called them “Chankoro”, which means Chinks,’ he said. His parents rowed incessantly and the military life offered him an escape. There was fun sometimes but what he remembers most is a great deal of suffering. The day began with a three- or four-hour run to build up physical stamina. The slightest infraction was severely punished. ‘The teacher beat you with his fist and the reason for the punishment would be something like not saluting properly, or if you were not standing properly to attention. Sometimes the whole group would be slapped because of what an individual had done. The punishment to the soldiers would be worse; we would instruct the NCOs to hit our soldiers. They would slap harder and more often. They would stick their stick into them or beat them with them. Or they would keep the man standing in the same posture for an hour. The Japanese army trained soldiers very strictly in order to make a strong army.’ Violence was a matter of policy, not occasional excess.

Renya Mutaguchi emerged into manhood in a society where parliamentary democracy was still relatively new, and constantly threatened.^* The Japanese military was captive to expansionist ideas, not simply as an expression of historical destiny but as an answer to the more pragmatic issue of limited national resources. Japan imported more than 80 per cent of its oil from the USA, a humiliating and strategically crippling dependency. If Japan were to meet its destiny as a great world power, an empire in more than name, it would have to expand beyond the portions of China and Korea that it controlled and into the resource-rich nations of South-East Asia. The Japanese military constructed the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as a cover for their new imperialist expansionism. It was a charter to loot the resources of these territories, with even more rapacity and brutality than the incumbent powers.

      Renya Mutaguchi joined the army as a teenage cadet in 1908. As a young officer he served with the international expeditionary force dispatched to Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, as military attaché in France, and on active command in China. It was a heady time for young officers like Mutaguchi, as military influence in Japanese society was growing rapidly. Cliques within the military formed secret societies, all pledging devotion to the emperor, all propagating expansionism, but divided, often murderously so, over the exact nature of the state they wished to create.

Tokyo was snowbound on the night of 25 February 1936 as the death squads fanned out across the city. One of their targets was the Lord Privy Seal, the elderly Viscount Makoto Saito, who had spent the evening at a private showing of Naughty Marietta, featuring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, in the home of the American ambassador. Within a few hours the old man was dead from an assassin’s bullet. The finance minister, Korekiyo Takahashi, who had resisted a huge rise in the military budget, was lying in his bed when the killers arrived. When an army captain told him he was to receive the Tenshu – the ‘punishment of heaven’ – he told him he was an idiot. Minister Takahashi was shot, then disembowelled and his arm hacked off.^*

      Although he is not mentioned in the contemporary accounts, Renya Mutaguchi came under suspicion as a member of the Imperial Way faction which launched the coup and he was sent away to China to command a regiment. There he made the fortuitous acquaintance of Major General Hideki Tojo, a coming force in the Japanese military, whose advocacy of expansion into China had helped set Japan on its collision course with the USA. The relationship would prove valuable in the years to come. By the time he reached his regiment in Peking, Mutaguchi had a finely developed sense of his destiny. On earth he contented himself with indulgence in women and alcohol – he was a prodigious drinker – and the admiration of sycophantic junior officers. But glory also existed for him as a posthumous ideal. He already inhabited his own glowing obituary.

Later, he would claim his place in history by asserting that he had precipitated the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 by ordering the firing of the first shots at the Chinese in the Marco Polo Bridge incident.^* Whatever the precise truth of Mutaguchi’s claim, he was certainly one of the central instigators of the pivotal act of Japanese aggression towards a gravely weakened Chinese state. Then came the war with the British and his triumph in Malaya. By the time he was appointed to command the 15th Army in March 1943, Renya Mutaguchi yearned for even greater glory and looked to the west, across the Burmese frontier into India, to realise his dream. He longed to exercise a ‘definitive influence’ on the outcome of a war that was daily slipping from Japan’s grasp.

      Throughout 1943 there had been steady American gains in the Pacific. There had also been an ominous growth in submarine attacks on Japanese shipping, all of it prompting the emperor to announce in October that the country’s situation was ‘very grave’. Imports of bauxite, the aluminium ore that was vital for building aircraft, were among the worst affected. The shortage of oil, too, had consequences beyond the restrictions it placed on war industry, for it dramatically reduced the flying time available to train pilots. The young men being rushed through training to replace dead pilots were a poor match for their allied opponents.

      Japan’s troops still defended stubbornly, fighting for every inch of ground, and her armies still controlled great swathes of China and the Pacific, as well as South-East Asia. But the problem for Tokyo was brutally simple: with American sea power in the ascendant, the island nation of Japan would soon be cut off from her empire, and the country lacked СКАЧАТЬ