Ships from Hell E-Book

Raymond Lamont-Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 298

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2002

Beschreibung

This is a new and frightening insight into Japanese atrocities in the Second World War. The horrific conditions aboard hellships at sea are revealed including the torture, disease and massacre which characterised them.

Leseprobe

SHIPS FROM HELL

‘The first men died, I think, of broken hearts; died knowing that cruelty has no frontier, and that though God wept for a fallen sparrow, the Japanese had in them so little of the milk of human kindness that they could leave a thousand men in the vastness of the China Sea to die in certain and terrible agony.’

Alfred G. Allbury, survivor of the torpedoed hellship

Rakuyo Maru.

SHIPS FROM HELL

Japanese War Crimes on the High Seas

Raymond Lamont-Brown

First published in 2002 by Sutton Publishing

Reprinted in 2002

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Raymond Lamont-Brown, 2002, 2013

The right of Raymond Lamont-Brown to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9483 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Chronology

Acknowledgements

Preface

Prologue: Samurai of the Sea

Introduction

1   Early Shipments of the Damned

2   Workers for the Divine Emperor

3   Kwai PoWs Survive Hell at Sea

4   A Quartet of Naval Massacres

5   Sensuikan Targets: the Killer Submarines

6   Death by Surface Raider

7   The Last Hellship Transports, 1944–5

8   Japanese Navy Involvement in Biological Warfare

9   The Japanese Navy and the Comfort Women

10    Kendari: Tokkeitai Killing Fields

Epilogue: Betrayal of the Damned

Appendix: Known Japanese Hellships, 1942–5

Memorials to the War Dead: Japanese Naval Atrocities on Land and Sea

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Hana wa sakuragi; hito wa bushi.

[The cherry is the first amongst blossoms;

the warrior is first amongst men.]

Service personnel motto, 1941

Since the end of the war I have read that inhuman deeds have been committed by the Army and Navy of Japan. That was certainly not the intention of the authorities, namely the Sanbo Hombu (General Staff), the Rikugunsho (Ministry of War), the Kaigunsho (Navy Ministry), and myself. We did not even suspect that such things were occurring; the Tenno-Heika (His Majesty the Emperor) in particular, should, considering his humane observances, inspire the contrary sentiments. Such deeds are not tolerated in Japan. The character of the Japanese people is such that neither in ten-chi (heaven nor earth) should such things be tolerated. It would be very bad if men elsewhere in the world should believe that these inhuman deeds arise from the Japanese character.

Declaration by former Minister of War and Prime Minister, General Hideki Tojo, during interrogation at Sugamo Prison, March 1946.

Over a period of several months the tribunal has listened to witnesses who have described in detail cruelties committed on all war fronts and on such a large scale and indeed with such a fixed pattern that only one conclusion is possible. Those cruelties were authorised in secret either by or with the approval of Japanese Government, by individual members thereof and by commanders of the armed forces.

Statement from the judgment of the International Military Tribunal, November 1946.

The evil inspiration behind Japan’s war atrocities, General Hideki Tojo, was executed for war crimes at 1.30am on 23 December 1948.

On 28 May 1959 Emperor Hirohito gave a personal order to the Shinto priests who administer the Yasukuni-jinja – Japan’s main war memorial – to inscribe the names of all Japan’s war criminals on the scrolls of the 2,500,000 immortal military dead commemorated at the shrine. In benediction he uttered words deemed blasphemous to the memories of the murdered PoWs: ‘I have a special appreciation for the families of our war criminals. I know what they have done for Japan. They were among our greatest leaders.’

In 1998 the Japanese film Pride – The Fatal Moment was issued for public release, praising General Hideki Tojo as a heroic samurai in the Japanese tradition and a war hero.

Chronology

1941

7 Dec.

Chujo Chuichi Nagumo’s carrier-based planes attack Pearl Harbor.

8 Dec.

Ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy sink or capture British and American warships at Hong Kong and Shanghai.

9 Dec.

Surrender of Siam (Thailand).

Japanese occupy Makin Island, Gilbert Islands.

10 Dec.

Japanese capture Guam.

Japanese land-based planes of the 22nd Air Flotilla sink British battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse.

23 Dec.

Japanese capture Wake Island.

1942

19 Jan.

British Borneo surrenders.

23 Jan.

Japanese occupy Rabaul, New Britain, and Kavieng, New Ireland.

First slave-labour gangs of US personnel arrive in China aboard the hellship Nitta Maru.

4 Feb.

First major massacre of civilians by naval staff at Amboina.

15 Feb.

Capitulation of Singapore, which becomes transportation port for PoWs.

17 Feb.–1 Mar.

Battle of the Java Sea.

28 Feb.–1 Mar.

Battle of the Sunda Strait.

8 Mar.

Surrender of Netherlands East Indies.

Japanese occupy Lae and Salamaua, New Guinea.

Japanese capture Rangoon, Burma.

8 Mar.

Plans to use PoWs to build railway from Bangkok to Rangoon launched.

23 Mar.

Japanese occupy Andoman and Nicobar Islands.

28 Mar.

Japanese occupy the whole of Sumatra.

Mar.–Apl

Japanese occupy Admiralty Islands and other key islands in Bismarck Sea, and Halmahera.

Apl

Transportation of Netherlands East Indies PoWs.

30 Apl

Japanese occupy Tulagi.

7 May

US Navy carrier planes attack Close Support Force of Port Moresby invasion fleet, and sink the light carrier Shoho (ex-Tsurugizaki). Battle of the Coral Sea.

8 May

Carrier battle in the Coral Sea. Heavy carrier USS Lexington sunk.

15 May

Toyohashi Maru, the first hellship to be sunk, by HMS Trusty.

4 Jun.

Chujo Chuichi Nagumo’s carrier force attacked; Akagi, Kaga and Soryu sunk.

5 Jun.

Japanese occupy Altu Island.

7 Jun.

Japanese submarine I-168 sinks the crippled USS Yorktown.

1 Jul.

First hellship to be sunk by US ‘friendly fire’: Montevideo Maru sunk by USS Sturgeon (SS187).

29 Jul.

Japanese capture Kokoda.

9 Aug.

US Marines eliminate Japanese at Tulagi.

4 Oct.

Hellship Lisbon Maru sunk after torpedoed by USS Grouper (SS214).

15–27 Oct.

Carrier battle of Santa Cruz Islands.

By the end of 1942 some fifty-four hellships had transported around 50,000 PoWs for slave labour.

1943

3 Jan.

Imperial Japanese Army eliminated at Buna, Gona.

Feb.

Beginning of Japanese evacuation from sites like Guadalcanal.

3–4 Mar.

Battle of the Bismarck Sea.

18 Mar.

Massacre of civilians aboard the destroyer Akikase.

18 Apl

USAAF P-38 intercepts and kills Shosho Isoroku Yamamoto near Buin.

Jul.–Aug.

Japanese evacuate Solomon Islands.

Oct.

Imperial Japanese Navy personnel begin slaughter of civilians at Kavieng.

Massacre of Pan-American Airways employees at Wake Island.

Sept.–Nov.

Severe Japanese losses at Villa Lavella and Rabaul.

24 Nov.

Japanese lose Tarawa.

By the end of 1943 around forty hellships have transported a further 24,000 PoWs.

1944

Imperial Japanese Navy involved in transporting biological warfare materials and personnel to the Pacific.

Feb.

Heavy Japanese losses in Marshall Islands.

Japanese abandon Truk as main naval base.

Mar.

Transhipment by sea of PoWs from Bangkok–Rangoon railway site.

Apl

Japanese lose New Guinea.

Last Japanese mass atrocity carried out on Allied merchant seamen following the sinking of MV Behar.

19–20 Jun.

Battle of the Marianas.

7 Oct.

Massacre of PoWs by naval personnel, Wake Island.

24 Oct.

Battle of Sibuyan Sea; loss of Japanese battleship Musashi.

25 Oct.

Battle of Surigao Strait.

Battle off Sanar and Cape Engaro.

1945

19 Jan.

Moji, the PoW port of entry into Japan, suffers major Allied attacks.

17 Apl

Battleship Yamato lost.

5 May

Results of ‘civilian atrocity’ Operation FUGO discovered in USA.

17 May

Last sea battle. Heavy carrier Haguro sunk by Royal Navy destroyers off Penang, Malaya.

2 Sept.

Formal surrender of Japanese accepted by General Douglas MacArthur aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

1946

1 Jan.

Establishment of the International Military (War Crimes) Tribunal for the Far East.

Thames Maru first hellship to be mentioned in war crimes trial (in the Gozawa Trial, Singapore). War Crimes Tribunals uncover evidence that some 127,000 PoWs were transhipped during the war period in various hellships; deaths estimated at some 21,000, making a death-rate of around 16 per cent.

Acknowledgements

Text

Every effort has been made to trace literary heirs and successors for every quotation used in this book. The passage of time, the death of copyright holders and the moving of address by literary custodians all contribute to the difficulty of tracing copyright ownership, especially those that have reverted from publishers to authors. Nevertheless each quotation is individually acknowledged, where possible, in text and notes.

Special thanks are given to the following for helping to trace rights of ownership and specific quotations and sources: Kelvin Smith; Peter Elphick; Syd Sanders, Victoria, Australia; Lance and Mary Gibson, Victoria, Australia; Jim Barnes, Aspley, Australia; Don Wall, New South Wales, Australia; Dr John L. Weste, University of Durham; T.R.J. Coles, Southwest Wales Far East PoW Club; Carol Cooper, Children and Families of the Far East PoWs Association; Catherine Trippett, Permissions Manager, Random House Group Ltd; Florence Pinard, Subsidiary Rights Manager, Robert Hale; and Myrto Tzanatou, Rights Assistant, Little Brown. Extracts have been taken, with permission, from the following publications: Eric S. Cooper, Tomorrow You Die, E.S. Cooper & Sons, 1995; James D. McEwan, The Remorseless Road, Airlife Publishing, 1997; A.G. Allbury, Bamboo and Bushido, Robert Hale, 1955; and John and Clay Blair, Return from the River Kwai, Futura Publications, 1980. And thanks also go to the estate of the late Lord Russell of Liverpool and Messrs Cassell for permission to use extracts from The Knights of the Bushido, 1958.

Documentation

Assistance in tracing relevant documents for research for this book is gratefully acknowledged to the following: Dr A.P. van Vliet, Director, Instituut voor Maritieme Historie, The Hague; Dr R.C.C. Pottkamp, Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, Amsterdam; Dr Peter Liddle, Director, The Second World War Experience Centre, Leeds; Dr Rick D.H. van Velden, Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague, M. Kakinoma, Japan Information and Cultural Centre, Embassy of Japan, London; Captain Keeichi Kuno, Japanese Defence Attaché, Embassy of Japan, London; Stephen Walton, Archivist, Dept of Documents, Imperial War Museum, London; and Kiri Ross-Jones, MSS Dept, National Maritime Museum, London.

Photographs

Each photograph is individually acknowledged where it occurs for source and ownership. Particular thanks are due to Terence Kelly for supplying a rare photograph of Hellship survivors, and to William Hodge for the trial site and defendant illustrations, Singapore.

Preface

On 5 March 1942 my late father was arrested in his room at the Palace Hotel, Shanghai, on the orders of Shosho Koneshita, head of the Shanghai Kempeitai. The Kempeitai, by the by, were the dreaded Japanese military police. At the time my father was working as a civil engineer in the employ of the British firm Babcock & Wilcox Ltd, who had electric power contracts with General Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Government in what was then dubbed the ‘intelligence capital of the Far East’. At 4am – the Kempeitai liked to make their arrests at 03.00hrs Tokyo time – he was taken to the already notorious Bridge House Prison. This was the Kempeitai HQ fronting on to Soochow Creek, a part of the Shanghai waterfront known as the Bund of the Whangpoo River. There he was placed in one of the seventeen barred and bolted steel ‘cages’, some 9ft 4in by 20ft, with around forty other detainees, to await interrogation.

Shosho Koneshita, who had established his reign of terror as soon as the Imperial Japanese Army’s occupation of Shanghai had been secured by 2 December 1937, was arresting foreign nationals on trumped-up charges of espionage and anti-Japanese propaganda. Under a programme of dehumanising beatings and torture, confessions were extracted when the victims had been pushed to the fringe of insanity. The horrors of interrogation went on for hours, the sound of screaming victims forming a horrific background for those waiting their turn.

At that time the Shanghai office of Britain’s Consul-General, Sir Herbert Phillips, had been closed, but the Swiss tried to monitor what happened to the Allied civilians who suddenly disappeared into Bridge House Prison. After brutal interrogation to no avail my father was released as a part of the August 1942 repatriation programme for 225 British and Allied civilians, brokered between the Japanese and the British Government with the help of the Swiss Consul-General M. Emile Fontanel. But father’s trials were not finished.

He was taken, with other prisoners, to the Shanghai docks on a stretcher, as he was unable to walk unaided following his beatings by Kempeitai ‘liaison officer’ Tai-i Hirano. Once at the docks the prisoners were embarked aboard the 17,256-ton liner Kamakura Maru (ex-Chichibu Maru). The ship soon became overcrowded with foreign nationals for repatriation; the tortured victims, sick deportees and assorted ‘enemies of the Emperor’ were given no medical care. Within months of the repatriation trips the cruise liner was to enter a new role as a PoW ‘hellship’, and soon Kamakura Maru was to be joined by another soon-to-be-notorious hellship, the 16,975-ton liner Tatsuta Maru.

While my father was being abused by the Kempeitai, the British Ambassador to Japan Sir Robert Leslie Craigie and his staff had been interned from the outbreak of the war at the embassy compound in Tokyo.

Their release was negotiated on 30 July 1942 by the Swiss Minister M. Camille Gorgé. All the while the Kempeitai made it as difficult as possible for the staff, hounding them at every opportunity, totally against international diplomatic law. Craigie and his staff were eventually taken to Yokohama and locked below decks in the Tatsuta Maru. The midsummer sun had made the ship into an oven. Overcrowded with repatriated foreigners, Tatsuta Maru left Yokohama for Ito on the Sagami Nada, thence to Shanghai, to rendezvous with Kamakura Maru.

One after the other the two liners set off for Lourenço Marques (modern Maputo), the neutral Portuguese port in Mozambique on the Indian Ocean. Here an exchange of evacuees was to be effected, with calls at Singapore and Saigon. After ten days at Lourenço Marques, the Far Eastern evacuees boarded the Khedevial Line’s SS El Nil and the P&O Line vessel SS Narconda; my father was a passenger on the latter. On 9 October 1942 the vessels docked at Liverpool to a civic welcome.

Just as the British Embassy staff had been hassled and impeded on their way to the Tatsuta Maru by the Kempeitai, on 9 December 1941 life for the US Ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew and his staff also became unpleasant – until the Swiss Minister M. Gorgé effected their repatriation in June 1942 aboard another Japanese Trans-Pacific liner, the 16,975-ton Asama Maru. Before sailing from Yokohama to Hong Kong the Americans were locked up in the sweltering ship for hours. For a while both the Kempeitai and the Tokkeitai (the Imperial Japanese Navy equivalent of the Kempeitai) illegally treated the US diplomats as PoWs.

At Hong Kong the ship took on more evacuees and sailed by way of Saigon and Singapore to join the Italian vessel Conte Verde, which had been stuck in Shanghai since the beginning of the war, and a rendezvous at Lourenço Marques. Thereafter the Americans were embarked on the US-chartered Swedish vessel Gripsholm, bound for New York. Asama Maru returned to Singapore and Yokohama to take up a role as a hellship.

During his repatriation my father first encountered the vessels that would later be transformed into the hellships in which thousands of Allied PoWs would be subjected to Imperial Japanese Forces atrocities. Through my father’s diaries of his captivity I too gained my first knowledge of Japanese naval war crimes in the Second World War. These nautical atrocities are much less well-known than those perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army, but they deserve an equal airing. My further research into this branch of Japanese war crimes introduced me to the naval equivalent of the Kempeitai, the shadowy but equally bestial and zenophobic Tokkeitai. Just as Kempeitai officers had disappeared, reinvented themselves and merged with the Japanese populace after the Second World War so the Tokkeitai personnel were equally difficult to trace. But this book contains a part of their story, as revealed in the war crimes tribunals.

My father’s story, and other eye-witness accounts of atrocities, were dismissed as uso wo (lies) by such men as Chief of Intelligence and Propaganda Taro Terasuki. Today, many Japanese still deny that any war crimes ever took place, and there is a renewed attempt in the Japanese media to portray the Japanese as the ‘liberators’ of the Far East.

Just three years after a film called Jiman (‘Pride – The Fatal Moment’) offered a sympathetic portrayal of Hideki Tojo, hanged for war crimes in 1948, a movie from the Toho Studios was launched in Japan in March 2001 called Merdeka (‘Independence’). It glorifies the troops of the Japanese Imperial Army as liberators of fellow Asians, in particular freeing the people of Indonesia from Dutch colonial rule. The irony is, of course, that the same soldiers murdered both Dutch and Indonesians in well-attested incidents during the war.

This propaganda line is in keeping with the revived trend among historians of such groups as the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, and politicians like those of the ruling Liberal Democrat party, to rewrite history for schoolchildren, glossing over Japanese army and navy war crimes. This rewriting has been endorsed by the Japanese Mombusho, the Ministry of Education. The revised version has been met with dismay in countries that suffered under Japanese occupation, and both the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea and the Chinese Ambassador to Japan went public to express their ‘deep concerns’.

This book is dedicated to the author’s late father and his fellow sufferers of the Bridge House Prison, and to all those PoWs, civilian and service, who were murdered by Imperial Japanese Forces in the Second World War. While factions in Japan are intent on rewriting and falsifying history, this book aspires to right the balance.

PROLOGUE

Samurai of the Sea

‘You are all Samurai no Umi [Samurai of the Sea], rid the waves of the Emperor’s enemies. Execute the trespassers of the Emperor’s oceans at dawn, let their blood honour the Nation of the Rising Sun.’

Katei-kyoshi no aisatsu (Tutor salutation to graduating naval officers).

PUBLIC REVELATIONS

During December 1941 and March 1942 offices were established in Tokyo within the Heimu Kyoku (Military Administration Bureau) of the Rikugunsho (Ministry of War) to oversee the handling of furyo (PoWs) and log their numbers. Although the Dai Nippon Teikoku Rikugun (Imperial Japanese Army) was to handle such prisoners from captured territories from North China to what the Japanese called Nan ’yo (Southern Region), the Dai Nippon Teikoku Kaigun (Imperial Japanese Navy) was to administer those in the Celebes, part of Borneo, the Moluccas, Timor, the Lesser Sundas, New Guinea, Rabaul, the Bismarck Archipelago, Guam and Wake. The navy was also to oversee the transport of prisoners by sea between captured territories and work-camps.

Within their remit, personnel of the Imperial Japanese Navy contributed to some of the worst atrocities of any war, past or present, and from the very first days of the Allied surrender members of the Imperial Japanese Navy, of all ranks, were slaughtering, abusing, torturing and humiliating prisoners of war.

Within the hundred-plus volumes of the Senshi Sosho (Japan’s official military history) there is no mention of their infamy. A huge raft of incriminating evidence was ‘deliberately’ destroyed on direct orders (by telegram) from the Rikugunsho as early as 1944, when the Allies retook the Philippines. Many senior Japanese naval officers committed suicide when they heard they were to be arrested, but first they burned their records.1 Yet from the files of the Kyokuto Kokusai Gunji Saiban (International Military (War Crimes) Tribunal of the Far East), which held its hearings at Tokyo from 4 May 1946 to 16 April 1948, a horrified world began to learn of the atrocities at sea. For example, one early summation revealed this concerning the Imperial Japanese Navy’s conserving of space on their PoW ships:

Wooden stages or temporary decks were built in empty coal bunkers and holds, with a vertical space of only three feet between. The space allotted to prisoners on these decks was an area six feet per fifteen prisoners. They were compelled to sit crosslegged during the entire voyage. Space was conserved also by the elimination of proper sanitary facilities. Those provided consisted of buckets or boxes which were lowered into the hold or bunker with ropes, and were removed in the same manner for emptying over the side. Drippings from these containers added to the general insanitary conditions. Many prisoners were suffering from dysentery . . . their excreta fell freely through the cracks in the wooden stages upon their comrades below.2

The PoWs’ food was also served pre-prepared on shore and cold in order to conserve space that would have been needed for a separate galley. Water rations were restricted for the same reason.

TRAINING FOR INFAMY

As international correspondents filled notebook after notebook with such material a broader picture of the cruelties enacted by the Imperial Japanese Navy began to emerge. The source of the training and inculcated philosophy which had produced the officers who conducted such barbarities, and condoned them in subordinates, lay far to the south-west on the Japanese main island of Honshu. It was the Kaigun heigakko (Naval College) at Etajima.

By ferry, the island of Etajima (‘Water ricefield island’) is some 25 minutes’ sea journey from Kure, the former great Japanese naval port from which the Second World War Imperial Fleets set out to conquer the Pacific. Situated in Hiroshima Bay, Etajima remains famous as the ‘Cradle of the Imperial Japanese Navy’. For the Japanese, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 has something of the significance of the French Revolution for the French. The Emperor Meiji (r. 1867–1912) took over the rule of the country after centuries of military dictatorship by the Shogun (generalissimos). As Japan entered a period of westernisation in all aspects of government, establishments such as the Kaigun heigakko were one consequence.

Japanese Ship Designations and Names

Maru: All Japanese merchant ships are given the suffix Maru, the written ideographic character meaning ‘round’. It is generally supposed that this custom dates back to medieval times when the daimyo named their vessels after their castles – wherein the central part is the Honmaru.

Ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were designated Ken, while foreign ships were called Go.

Naming of vessels:

Carriers:

After animals, birds and flying objects.

Battleships:

After provinces of ancient Japan. Purists might like to note that there were four exceptions, all battle-cruisers, Haruna, Hiei, Kirishima, and Kongo, which were named after mountains.

Heavy cruisers:

After mountains.

Light cruisers:

After rivers.

Destroyers:

Poetic names of climatic conditions, such as Shigure (‘Drizzling Autumn Rain’). Again for the purists, after 1944 the shortage of war materials obliged the Japanese to build smaller destroyers, which had the names of flowers, fruit and trees.

Submarines:

There were three classes of submarine denoted phonetically I, RO and HA (corresponding to A, B and C).

The appearance of foreign war vessels off the coast of Japan in the nineteenth century underlined their realisation that only a powerful navy could ensure national defence. This was a fact made more evident when an American squadron under Commodore Matthew Perry forced open the isolationist gates of Japan in 1854 – gates that had been shut to foreigners since the seventeenth century. Indeed, there are those who argue that Perry’s success was to lead to the logical and inevitable Japanese retaliation at Pearl Harbor as a delayed rejoinder to the unwanted intrusions by the West.

Etajima kenji no uta

(Anti-western Song of Kaigun heigakko – the ‘Etajima Strong Ones’)

On the ocean surge and break big waves

Where stands Akitsushimaa our beautiful country

Adorned with evergreen pines.

Her history is thousands of years old,

Her Imperial Policy is great and noble.

There stands the beautiful Fuji-Sanb

High up on the Tokaidoc.

Our hearts throb more and more with the hot blood

Of the sons of the Sacred Land.

We shall never stop sacrificing ourselves

To defend the glorious foundations of our country.

At the foot of Furutakad the water is clear

And the wind-kissed pines make sweet music.

At daybreak Nomishimae looms hazy amid purple shadow.

Here hoisting the flag of daring and bravery

We spend four years.

We launch out cutters on the sea

Our strong arms bend even the oars

When we land armed with bayonets

We look grim and severe and all silent.

Now let us be wonderfully high spirited,

And let us cultivate an indomitable spirit.

Behold! in the West, blooming proudly, there lie

Hidden blights under its civilisation.

Look! the Pacific Ocean is stormy

And dark clouds hover over East Asia.

Who will shoulder the duty of defending our country?

Oh! strong ones of Etajima!

You are just like dragons who hide in a lake

Who, if a chance comes when storm clouds gather

Dash up into the sky.

To fight till we fall

Is the sincere cry of our hearts!

a.   Akitsushima: Ancient name for Japan, derived from its resemblance to the body of a dragonfly.

b.   Fuji-San: Sacred Mount Fuji.

c.   Tokaido: The road along the eastern coast of the main island of Honshu, from Tokyo to Kyoto.

d.   Furutaka: Mountain on Etajima used for training purposes.

e.   Nomishima: Island off Etajima.

A naval school was first opened at Nagasaki in 1855 and soon afterwards a shipyard (Mitsubishi Dock) was established there. A little later, a training centre for seamen opened in Edo (the old name for Tokyo) and the gift from the Netherlands of the training ship Kanko Maru led to more gifts of vessels from other countries. The importance of sea defence, and Japan’s impotence to respond, was underlined in 1863 when a British squadron bombarded Kagoshima (after the murder of a British citizen). When Meiji took over the reins of government the Imperial Japanese Navy consisted of nine vessels, all under 1,000 tons, and the dockyards were only capable of building wooden ships.

In 1887 Japan launched its first ironclad and a fleet of ships was ordered from abroad; they came mostly from Britain and sailed under the guidance of British naval advisers. By 1889 the naval stations at Kure and Sasebo had been established.

On 4 January 1882 an Imperial Rescript was promulgated for the Japanese Imperial Navy and its personnel (Keigun-guntia, ‘Soldiers of the Sea’), exhorting them to carry out five major instructions: to be loyal to the divinely succeeded Emperor; to be courteous to each other – those who had no respect for their superiors were dubbed uragirimono (traitor); to engender courage; to be faithful and conscientious; and to be simple and frugal in habits. This Rescript became the Japanese sailor’s Bible and led to a devotion marked by the fanaticism of their fighting in the Second World War.

During 1892 the Japanese Government began a new naval programme, issued under Imperial Rescript, and to which Emperor Meiji contributed personally from his own funds; government officials too contributed 10 per cent of their salaries to the building up of the navy. The Japanese Navy was first tested in a theatre of war against China between 1 August 1894 and 17 April 1895; this war startled the West, with Japan quickly and utterly defeating a superior force. After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, wherein Japan challenged and neutralised Imperial Russia for the control of Korea and Manchuria, Japan became one of the Great Sea Powers. The Imperial Japanese Navy increased in strength and efficiency and rendered significant service to the Allies during the First World War by taking over Tsintao and the German South Sea Islands, and convoying troopships from Australia and New Zealand to France. All the lower deck ratings of the Imperial Navy were composed of conscripted men and volunteers.

In its first form the Officer Cadet College was founded at Tsukiji, Tokyo, in 1869. As the Meiji Revolution modelled all the new state governmental institutions on western originals, the Japanese Navy was inaugurated on occidental principles. A British Navy Mission of thirty-four officers and other ranks, under the command of Captain A. Lucius Douglas RN, arrived in Japan in 1873 to supervise the development of the college.

The college was moved to Etajima in August 1888 and renamed ‘The Imperial Naval Academy’. It was located on a site overlooking an almost landlocked bay called Etajima. Today the oldest building remaining is the Suikokan, erected in 1888. Once the Imperial Navy Officers’ Club, this building is now used for formal receptions and college functions. The Akarenga (Main Building) was built in 1893 and was constructed of red bricks imported from Britain.

The Imperial Japanese Navy, 7 December 1941

Vessel manifest: 235 ships. Largest naval force in the Far East.

10 battleships, 18 heavy cruisers, 20 light cruisers, 6 heavy carriers, 4 light carriers, 111 fleet destroyers, 1 escort carrier, 65 submarines

Combined Fleet Commanders: 6 Fleets, 2 Air Fleets

1.   Battle Fleet. Chujo Isoroku Yamamoto. Hiroshima Base. Yamamoto was born in 1884, and shot down at Buin, 18 April 1943.

2.   Scouting Fleet. Chujo Nobutake Kondo. Hainan Island Base. Kondo became a businessman after 1945.

3.   Blockade and Transport Fleet. Chujo Ito Takahashi. Formosa Base. Takahashi was arrested as a war crimes suspect, 2 December 1945.

4.   Mandates Fleet. Chujo Shigeyoshi Inouye. Truk Base, Caroline Isles. Inouye survived the war.

5.   Northern Fleet. Chujo Boshino Hozogaya. Maizuru and Ominato Base. Hozogaya was relieved of his command after 1943.

6.   Submarine Fleet. Chujo Teruhisa Komatsu. Kwajalein Atoll Base, Marshall Islands. A cousin of the Empress, he was in government after 1945.

1st Air Fleet. (Carriers) Chujo Chuichi Nagumo. Kure Base. Nagumo committed suicide, 7 July 1945.

11th Air Fleet. Chujo Nishio Tsukahara. Formosa and Indo-China Base.

Naval Districts: 4 – Kure; Maizuru; Sasebo; Yokosuka.

Naval Guard Districts: 6 – Chinkai (Korea); Hainan (S. China); Ominato; Osaka; Ryojun (Port Arthur, Manchuria); Takao (Formosa).

During the 1930s, when Japan was guided by politico-military rulers bent on imperial conquest, the Naval College was greatly expanded and offered a four-year training course for some 250 entrants a year. Until the 1930s all practical training and technical naval subjects were taught on the Chihaya, an old dispatch boat of pre-Russo-Japanese War vintage, or on the light cruiser Oi. An important part of the college training before the Second World War was the teaching of Bushido, ‘The Way of the Samurai (warriors)’: this was a code of selfless honour upon which every samurai was expected to base his actions; loyalty, veracity, sincerity and readiness to die for honour were the main virtues required.

An examination of the code of Bushido has always perplexed westerners, as it appears to be entirely at odds with Japanese actions during the war. Like Imperial Japanese Army recruits, the Imperial Japanese Navy trainees were taught that death before surrender was the ultimate achievement, as death in the Emperor’s service guaranteed that the soul would go to dwell with the pantheon of the Kami (Japanese gods). Thus an enemy who surrendered rendered himself ‘inhuman’, and the atrocious bestiality and cruelty meted out to Allied PoWs in the war was the consequence of this Bushido training philosophy. To add to the mystery, the code of Bushido was virtually gone from the Japanese class system by around 1877, although its ethics were still incorporated into the Army and Navy training programmes. Most of the senior officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1941 were not of the samurai class, but had learned their cruelty to PoWs in the China campaigns from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s.3

The ‘religious spirit’ of the Naval College at Etajima was fundamentally focused in 1928 on a small Shinto shrine called the happoen, which means, literally translated, ‘the eight-points-of-the-compass-garden’. The strong focus of ‘ancestor worship’ engendered by Japan’s national Shinto religion, and underlined in Bushido, led to close links between the Naval College and the Japanese imperial family. Before the Second World War all shiki (ceremonies, such as the Emperor’s birthday parade) commenced at college assemblies in the daikodo (main assembly building) with ritual bowing to the portraits of the Emperor and Empress.

Each year the passing out ceremony was attended by Gensui (Admiral of the Fleet) HIH Prince Hiroyasu Fushimi, Chief of the General Staff, and on rare occasions by Emperor Hirohito himself. Fushimi, by the by, was the Emperor’s cousin and had served as a Shosa (Lieutenant-Commander) in the Russo-Japanese War; as the most senior of all naval officers he knew about Imperial Japanese Navy war crimes, condoned them, and promoted the use of suicide weapons (such as Kamikaze) when the war went against Japan. He died, unpunished, in 1947. During the period 1888 to 1939 eighteen imperial princes underwent training as cadets at Etajima; indeed, when HRH Edward, Prince of Wales, visited Etajima in May 1922 he was hosted by cadet HIH Prince Takamatsu, the Emperor’s youngest brother.

Discussing the pre-1939 cadets at the college, Cecil Bullock, who taught there, described them as ‘magnificent persons’ physically, but ‘rather dull’ intellectually, a state he put down to ‘an overloaded curriculum’ and ‘too much physical exercise’ cutting down concentration. 4 Discipline was also brutally severe.

The Imperial Japanese Navy conducted a disciplinary system known as tekken seisai (the iron fist), in which cadets were physically mistreated for mistakes, or sometimes for no reason at all. This was euphemistically called ai-no-muchi (the whip of love), the Japanese equivalent of the occidental phrase ‘cruel to be kind’. Tekken seisai was later to be vigorously meted out to PoWs by Imperial Japanese Navy personnel.

The insistence on blind obedience to their superiors made the cadets susceptible to the bad influence of dominant leaders. One example of this blind loyalty leading to violence was the murder on 15 May 1932 of Sori-daijin (Prime Minister) Tsuyoshi Inukai by Chu-i (sub-lieutenants) led by Shosa Hitoshi Fuji. Devotion to the Hakko ichiu principle (‘the whole world under one roof’, with Japan as leader under the Emperor) led to the officers’ assassination of Inukai, who was deemed to have gone soft on this policy. All through the 1930s young officers of Etajima continually criticised men such as Kaigun-daijin (Navy Minister) Mineo Osumi for their ‘non-imperial policies’.

Another aspect of the training which was to have some relevance in the war crimes trials was the Naval College’s classes in international law, a subject instituted at the turn of the nineteenth century. Consequently