The Samurai Inheritance

XXI

Tomoyuki Hamasuna felt a surge of emotion as he checked the fit of the senninbari thousand-stitch belt his wife had given him on the eve of his departure for Manchuria. Each stitch on the white cloth had been lovingly sewn by a family member or the wives of Hamasuna’s workmates in Nagasaki. The belt had seen him through the Manchukuo campaign, the invasion of Malaya and three months on Guadalcanal before he’d been posted to Bougainville. Sitting in the cramped, heavily camouflaged bunker, he was aware that he stank. His body and his tattered uniform were permeated with the stench of stale sweat, old urine, caked excrement and fear. Yes, fear. None of them had dared go out even for a shit since the Australians had started sending their dirty cannibals to roam the lines each night. The blacks moved like ghosts in the darkness and the first a man would know of them was a knife in the throat before his head was added to their collection.

Hamasuna had been condemned to this stinking hellhole since the ‘senior naval presence’ banished him back to the infantry for failing to secure the Yamamoto crash site. He’d wanted to explain about the missing briefcase and the bare footprint he’d found in a patch of sand nearby, but the admiral’s raw, almost demonic savagery had left him speechless with terror. He’d done what he could to impress the man with his diligence during the crash investigation, leading endless patrols to keep the natives from the site. One patrol had captured an Australian Coastwatcher, who died under Hamasuna’s knife screaming that he knew nothing of a plane crash or missing wreckage. He’d had the body secretly buried along with the spy’s still living Bougainvillean bodyguard.

But Hamasuna’s efforts had come to nothing. On the morning the admiral left he’d stood shaking as his own commanding officer questioned his integrity, his competence and his loyalty in an interview that was as frightening for its remoteness as it was for the implied threat of summary justice. In the end, he felt fortunate to be transferred to the infantry and placed in charge of a company digging in on the Buin road against the imminent American invasion.

Three years on they occupied the same stinking, airless bunker in the same stinking patch of jungle, only his ‘company’, which had started out with a hundred and fifty men, now numbered fewer than forty. The Americans had kept them waiting another six months before surprising General Hyakutake, Bougainville’s commander, with a landing at Empress Augusta Bay. Within hours the invaders had wiped out the bay’s few hundred defenders and established a bridgehead.

By the end of November, despite desperate counter attacks by Seventeenth Army, the invaders had built an airfield capable of sending bombers to hit the main supply base at Rabaul. Unless the Americans could be thrown off the island, the Japanese garrison of Bougainville would eventually be starved out. For four months Hyakutake had contented himself with pinprick attacks, but in late March Hamasuna and his men had been roused from their bunker to take part in a full-scale counter-offensive.

What followed was three weeks of terror, hunger, exhaustion and death as he and his comrades launched attack after attack against the American-defended hills protecting the bridgehead. They spent endless nights throwing themselves at the entrapping coils of barbed wire through an invisible wall of lead from the heavily dug-in positions. As the first waves were cut down, the survivors clawed their way over the bodies of the dead and wounded to grenade the dugouts and work themselves into the enemy trenches. Once through the wire it was bayonet to bayonet, knife to knife and man to man, screaming and hacking at the enemy until he was a bloody caricature of a human being. Then on to the next trench and the next, until only a visceral determination to survive — to live through this unbelievable horror and eventually return to his loved ones — gave a man the strength to lift his arm and strike the fatal blow. Daylight brought the inevitable bombs and artillery fire that shook the earth and turned the tree canopy into a blinding, eviscerating blizzard of shrapnel and splinters from torn branches. Soon it would be followed by the thunk-thunk-thunk of mortars that heralded a new barrage and the inevitable counterattack. Then it was your turn to cower in the trenches and fire your machine gun until the barrel became red hot, and the bodies were piled three deep across your front. In twenty-one days they took the same hill four times only to be driven off again. Not once had they come close to breaking the main American line. Eventually, even Hyakutake realized it could not be done and ordered a withdrawal. He’d started out with twenty thousand men. By the time he pulled out five thousand were dead, with three thousand wounded and no medical supplies to care for their injuries.

Hamasuna and his depleted company had stumbled, exhausted, back through the jungle to their bunker complex overlooking the road, and waited for the inevitable counter-stroke. But the Americans, it seemed, were content to hold what they had. Instead of attacking they decided to allow the Japanese garrison to starve, which they duly did. For months Hamasuna had been kept alive by cups of watery rice eked out with stringy, bitter strips of vegetation and unwholesome squirming grubs the medical officer claimed were nourishing. Beriberi, dengue fever, malaria, typhus and a curious enervating, wasting disease that came in many forms that the men simply called jungle fever caused more casualties than the enemy in the miserable hunger months that followed. But all that changed when the barbarians came.

The barbarians wore slouch hats and were aggressive even to each other. Since they had replaced the Americans five months earlier they had given Hamasuna and his men no rest. The barbarians patrolled by day and sent their cannibals by night. Half-starved and exhausted, each day that passed left the Japanese defenders weaker and less able to counter the constant probes and patrols by the Australians and their native allies. When General Hyakutake’s health began to fail he’d been replaced as commander of Seventeenth Army by General Matasane. With the enemy advancing steadily down the Buin road, Matasane decided he had only one course of action.

Which was why Lieutenant Tomoyuki Hamasuna was preparing for his last day on earth.

He’d been hoarding the paper and ink for this day and now he picked up the brush. His tired features creased in a frown of concentration that made the mix of dried sweat and dirt that coated his face fall away in tiny flakes.

The first was easy. A simple farewell to his wife and his family that had been written several times already in this war, but he had a feeling this would be the last. Once he finished it, he carefully folded the paper and wrote the family address on the front. The second letter required more thought.

‘Not long now, sir … Oh, I apologize,’ Murayama turned away as he saw what his lieutenant was doing.

Hamasuna ignored him and began writing, tentatively at first, but soon in bolder more confident strokes. ‘I Lieutenant Tomoyuki Hamasuna, 1st battalion, 45th Infantry regiment, 6th division, 17th Japanese Army wish to confess to a crime. On 18 April 1943, I was first to discover the crash site of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plane, south-west of Aku. I wish to state that I failed to report that the admiral was in possession of a briefcase, which I failed to secure, and subsequently lost to a native inhabitant. The contents of the briefcase contained the following information …’

When he’d completed the letter he felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from him. He folded up the sheets, addressed it to General Kanda Matasane and placed it, along with the other, in the water-proof map case he had taken from a dead American. One last check of the thousand-stitch belt, a pull at his legging cloths, hands automatically testing the draw of his katana ceremonial sword and the flap of his holster. The other men in the bunker had finished their preparations and were waiting for him by the entrance. He met their eyes one by one and was gratified by the determination he saw despite their weakened state. ‘Banzai,’ he whispered and they chorused the word in reply. With a last glance at his watch he nodded and one by one they slipped out into the night.

The soldiers formed up with the other survivors of the company and moved off northwards. Around them, the jungle was alive with the sound of movement. Matasane had ordered an all-out attack on the Australian positions. The First and Second battalions were tasked with taking an enemy strongpoint five miles ahead that prisoners had identified as Slater’s Knoll. Even for the hardened jungle fighters of the Sixth Division it took more than three hours to reach the assembly point as they stumbled through swamps and over gullies, fording waist-high rivers. An hour into the march a spine-chilling rush through the air above heralded the beginning of the artillery barrage that would hopefully destroy the enemy wire. The flash of bursting shells followed almost instantly, lighting up the night sky and creating terrifying shapes on the jungle floor. A moment later they heard the crump of the 75mm shells landing far ahead. Hamasuna’s men grinned nervously at each other in the bursts of pale light, taking comfort from the show of Imperial power, but they knew the barrage would also warn the enemy an attack was on the way. The only question being the timing of it. He thought of the soldiers waiting for him on the knoll ahead. He had seen Australian prisoners being marched back for interrogation, big men with brutal, angry faces, fearful of their fate and resentful of their captivity. They would be exhausted and frightened, but at least they wouldn’t be hungry. The thought of food made his stomach grumble. Westerners ate like dogs from tins of greasy canned meat, but after months of privation even that was incentive enough.

Word to halt came back from the unit ahead and an orderly appeared, whispering for the officers to go forward. Hamasuna found the other company commanders at the bottom of a steep gully huddled around Captain Minoru, the battalion’s most senior surviving officer. Soldiers shielded the men with coats and with a pen torch Minoru identified their position on a crude map. ‘We attack up this slope,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, indicating a feature about two hundred metres ahead. ‘A banzai charge of all companies. The signal will be a blue flare. Make sure your men are ready in ten minutes. Banzai!’

‘Banzai.’