Japanese Soldiers Were Ready for Any Enemy—Until American Marines Came Ashore D

In the summer of 1945, an American translator sat down in a captured Japanese command post on the island of Okinawa. He opened a diary taken from the body of a dead lieutenant. He read three sentences. Then he stopped reading and lit a cigarette with hands that would not stop shaking. The sentences were these.

The Marines are not soldiers. They are something the gods sent to punish us. And I have watched them for 3 years now. And I still do not know how to kill them. 81 years later, that diary still exists. It is one of hundreds like it pulled from the pockets of Japanese officers on a dozen islands from Guadal Canal to Ewima.

And when you read them together in order uh from the first battle to the last, they tell a story that most Americans have never heard. They tell the story of why the Empire of Japan feared the United States Marines more than any other force on Earth. And they tell it in the words of the men who fought them.

Oh, the story begins with a letter. The letter arrived in a small wooden box wrapped in white cloth. the way the bones of the dead were sent home from the front. Inside was a lock of hair, a fingernail clipping, and a single folded page written in the careful hand of a man who knew he would not return.

Colonel Kona Ichiki had mailed his own funeral to his family in Tokyo before boarding the transport ship. He was 49 years old. He had spent 30 of those years in the Imperial Japanese Army and he had never once been defeated. He did not expect that to change on a jungle island most Japanese officers could not find on a map.

The island was called Guadal Canal in August of 1942. It was a name that meant nothing. By the end of that year, it would mean something else entirely. It would mean the first place the son of the Japanese Empire began to set. Ichiki did not know this. He could not have known this. What he knew was what his superiors told him.

And what his superiors told him was simple. The Americans on Guadal Canal were weak. They were few. They had landed by accident and would flee at the first serious pressure. His detachment of 900 veteran infantry hardened in the brutal campaigns of Manuria and China would sweep them into the sea within a single night.

Intelligence estimated 2,000 Americans on the island. The real number was 11,000. The Americans were not army. They were United States Marines. And the Marines were not going anywhere. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hiakutake, commanding the 17th Army from Rabal, studied the maps with the confidence of a man who had never lost.

He was 54 years old. A career officer whose entire understanding of war had been shaped by victories against Chinese armies that broke. Filipino defenders who surrendered, British forces that retreated. He believed, as most of the Imperial general staff believed, that Americans were a nation of shopkeepers and factory workers.

Democracies produced soft men. Soft men could not fight. When enough of them died, the rest would collapse. He ordered Ichiki forward. Ichiki obeyed with the enthusiasm of a man who wanted his name written into history. His men landed at Tyvu Point on the night of August 18th, 1942. They moved through the darkness like ghosts, silent and disciplined, veterans of a 100 forced marches.

They carried light packs. They carried heavy rifles. They carried the certainty that has always come before catastrophe. They did not carry enough ammunition to fight a real battle. They did not need to. They were not coming to fight a battle. They were coming to execute an eviction.

Somewhere in the jungle ahead, in a shallow trench of black volcanic sand, along a sluggish river, R the Marines called the Tenaru, a young private from Ohio, was cleaning his rifle for the third time that hour. He did not know a Japanese colonel was walking toward him with 900 men. He did not know that in 72 hours that colonel would be dead.

He did not know that he was about to teach the Empire of Japan its first lesson in a language it did not yet understand. The First Marine Division had come ashore on August 7th. They were not what Japanese intelligence had described. They were not soft. They were not few and they were not going to run.

Their commanding officer was Major General Alexander Vandergrift, a slowspeaking Virginia of 55 years, quiet in the way of men who have nothing left to prove. He had been in the Marine Corps for 33 years. He had watched the core rebuild itself between the wars, watched it study the failures of Gallipoli, watched it invent the modern science of amphibious assault from the ground up.

His men had trained for this. They had trained until the training broke them and then they had trained through the breaking until what remained was something the Japanese Empire did not have a word for. They dug in along the Tenaru River and waited. Ichiki’s scouts made contact on the night of August 20th. The Marines were ready.

The Japanese doctrine o of night attack was among the most refined in the world. It had shattered Russian lines in 1905. It had uh broken ch Chinese formations in the 1930s. It rested on a single principle that darkness belonged to the soldier who trained hardest for it. And no soldier trained harder than the soldier of the emperor.

Ichiki formed his men in column. He drew his sword. He gave the order to charge. 900 men rose from the jungle and ran screaming across the sandbar at the mouth of the Tenaru River. They ran into a wall. Marine machine gunners opened fire at point blank range. 37 mm cannon loaded with canister shot swept the sandbar like a sythe swung through wheat.

Pre-registered artillery came down within seconds. called in by radio. In a system of communication, the Japanese had not yet learned to match. The screaming did not stop. It changed. It became something else. It became the sound of men who had not expected to die tonight discovering that they were going to die tonight.

The charge lasted 20 minutes. At dawn, Marines walked out onto the sandbar to count the dead. 800 Japanese bodies lay tangled in the sand and the shallow water. Some were still moving. The Marines had lost 35 men. Colonel Konowo Ichiki stood at the edge of the jungle and watched the American Marines move among his soldiers. He did not run.

He did not hide. He burned the regimental colors, the sacred flag entrusted to him by the emperor himself. And then in a manner that historians still argue about 80 years later, he ended his own life. He had mailed his funeral home a week earlier. He had been more correct than he knew.

Somewhere in the ranks of the Japanese soldiers who had not been at Tenaru, but would soon face what Tenaru had produced. There was a corporal named Hideo Takahashi. His name appears in intelligence documents. His words appear high in captured diaries translated by American analysts and archived after the war.

Whether the man himself was one soldier or a composite of many, the words he left behind are real, and they carried something no Japanese soldier had ever written before. Oh, he wrote that the Americans who landed were different. He wrote that they did not retreat when surrounded. He wrote that they did not surrender when their position became hopeless.

And then he wrote the sentence that would echo through every Japanese diary recovered from every island in the Pacific for the next 3 years. They fight at night as if darkness gives them strength rather than fear. Th this was not supposed to be possible. The Marines were violating every assumption the Imperial Japanese Army had built into its understanding of the enemy.

Americans were supposed to sleep at night. Americans were supposed to panic in the jungle. Americans were supposed to rely on machines and break when the machines were taken away. Oh, the Marines had brought their machines, but they had also brought something else. Something the Japanese officer corps had not been trained to recognize.

They had brought a doctrine that no other American force possessed. The Marines had studied the Japanese soldier the way a surgeon studies an anatomy chart. They had read every intelligence report. They had learned every trick. They had internalized a single ruthless conclusion.

The Japanese soldier would not surrender. Therefore, the Japanese soldier had to be killed. All of him. Huh? Every time. 2 weeks after Tanaru, a Japanese lieutenant named Chigeru Fuku led a reinforced company toward Henderson Field, the small airirstrip that had become the beating heart of American power on Guadal Canal.

His men were veterans of China. They had defeated Chinese divisions three times their size. They advanced in textbook formation, confident that the Americans softened by two weeks of artillery harassment and jungle disease would break under a proper night assault. The Marines were waiting, but this time they did not simply defend.

When the Japanese assault stalled against the outer perimeter, the Marines did something no Japanese officer had ever seen an enemy do at night. They counterattacked. Small squads moved through the darkness with submachine guns and grenades, flanking the stalled Japanese columns, cutting communications, killing officers first and sergeants second. Fuku’s company disintegrated.

His diary was recovered from his body 3 days later, torn and stained with rain. in it. In the last entry he ever wrote, he had recorded something that would have been treason to say aloud. They attacked us in the night. We are the ones who attack at night. They moved through jungle we considered impassible.

They killed in silence and vanished. By dawn, 90 men remained from his 200. The Marines had suffered 12 casualties. Fukuome was not among his survivors. Somewhere far behind the lines in the humid staff rooms of Rabalo, General Hayakutake read the reports and did not understand what he was reading.

He requested more men. He requested more artillery. He believed that the failure at Tenaru had been Ichiki’s error. He believed that the failure at Henderson had been Fuku’s error. He did not yet believe what his soldiers on Guadal Canal were already beginning to write in their diaries. That the error was not tactical.

that the error was not personal, that the error was the entire foundation of what the empire believed about its enemy. Corporal Takahashi wrote his diary by the light of a shielded lantern in a bunker that leaked rainwater onto the pages. He was 28 years old. He had killed men in Manuria. He had watched entire Chinese battalions melt at the sound of a bugle.

He had believed because he had been told from boyhood that the Japanese soldier was the finest fighting man on earth. He wrote that he no longer knew if this was true. He wrote that the Marines fought as if death did not frighten them. He wrote that this was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Japanese warrior.

He wrote that he was afraid. And then he closed the diary and put out the lantern because in the jungle beyond his bunker, the sound of American artillery was walking closer through the trees. And somewhere out in the darkness, quiet and patient and utterly awake, the Marines were coming again.

They would come every night. They would come every day. They would come for three more years across 10,000 miles of ocean. From Guadal Canal to Terawa to Pelu to a black volcanic island called Ewokima, where a general who had lived in America would write in his final letter that these men were the finest soldiers he had ever seen.

But that was still to come. For now, in August of 1942, on an island most of the world had never heard of, the Empire of Japan was learning its first lesson. It did not yet understand that it was being taught. It did not yet understand that the teacher would not stop until the lesson was complete. And in a bunker in the jungle, a corporal named Takahashi was writing the first honest sentence any Japanese soldier had written about the Marines.

They do not die like other men. He would spend the next 3 years discovering exactly how right he was. 15 months after Guadal Canal on a coral atal in the central Pacific that measured less than half a square mile, a Japanese admiral stood on a bunker roof and told his officers that the island beneath their feet could not be taken. His name was KG Shibazaki.

He was 49 years old. He commanded 4,500 men on an island called Bedio in the Tarawa atal and he had spent a year fortifying every meter of it. Coconut log seaw walls, steel reinforced concrete pill boxes, naval guns stripped from cruisers and buried in the sand. Every approach registered for artillery.

every beach zeroed for machine guns. He told his officers in a sentence that would be quoted in every history book written about the Pacific War that a million men could not take terow in a 100red years. The second marine division took it in 76 hours. They came in on the morning of November 20th, 1943.

The tide was wrong. The Len uh crowned grounded on the reef 600 yards from shore. Marines climbed out into chestde water and walked toward the beach through a killing zone that the Japanese had been preparing for 18 months. The first wave was cut to pieces in the water. The second wave died on the sand.

The third wave stepped over the bodies of the second wave and kept walking. Admiral Admiral Sheibbazaki did not live to see the end of what he had begun. On the second day, a 5-in shell from an American destroyer struck the concrete blockhouse where he was moving between command posts. He died with most of his staff buried in the rubble of his own fortifications.

His men fought on without him because there was nothing else to do. Of 4,500 defenders, 17 survived to be taken prisoner. Every other man died on that island. The Marines suffered 3,000 casualties of their own in 76 hours. A private named Tadashi Ogawa, one of the 17, was pulled unconscious from a bunker with burns on both hands and a fractured skull.

When the American interrogators asked him what he had seen, he told them the truth. He said the first wave was massacred in the water. He said more came. He said the second wave died on the beach. He said more came. He said the third wave reached us with flamethrowers and they did not stop until we were dead. Or they were.

He said it as if he still could not believe it because a Japanese soldier trained from the age of 14 in the code of Bushido could accept an enemy who fought bravely. He could accept an enemy who fought well. What he could not accept was an enemy who walked into machine gun fire, watched his brothers die, and kept walking. That was not war.

That was something new. Something the language of the samurai did not have a word for. The Marines had a word for it. They called it Tuesday. 10 months later on a jagged coral island called Py Leu, a colonel named Kunio Nakagawa spent his last summer preparing a defense that would have made his ancestors weep with pride.

He was 46 years old, a graduate of the Imperial Military Academy, a soldier who had studied every American landing since Guadal Canal. He had learned, he had adapted, he had built inside the ridges of Pelleu 500 interconnected caves, hidden gun positions, and killing tunnels. designed to bleed the Marines for every meter of coral they took.

He told Tokyo the battle would last one week. It lasted 73 days. The First Marine Division came ashore on September 15th, 1944. By the end of the first day, they controlled half the airfield. By the end of the first week, they had lost so many men that veterans of Guadal Canal were unable to recognize their own companies.

By the end of the campaign, the First Marines had suffered 6,500 casualties. It was at the time the highest casualty rate in the history of the United States Marine Corps. The Marines did not stop. Colonel Nakagawa retreated deeper into the ridges. He watched his defenders die by the hundreds, then by the thousands.

He watched Marine demolition teams crawl to his cave, mouths under fire, and seal his men inside with satchel charges and burning gasoline. He watched an entire regiment of the finest defensive infantry Japan possessed die in a labyrinth of rock without slowing the American advance by a single day beyond his estimate multiplied by 10.

On November 24th, Colonel Nakagawa burned his regimental colors. Then he committed ritual suicide in a cave that his men had prepared for him with clean water and a folded uniform. His last radio message to Tokyo was brief. It reported that the defense of Pleu had ended. It thanked his men. It asked the emperor’s forgiveness for the loss of the island.

By the time the message was received, he was already dead. Between Tarawa and Pleu on a mountainous island called Saipon, a lieutenant general named Yoshitsugu Saito watched his command collapse with a slowness that was almost dignified. He was 53 years old, in poor health, half starved on the reduced rations that had become the standard diet of every Japanese garrison the American submarines had cut off from resupply.

His army had been shattered across three weeks of American offensive. His men were surrounded. His artillery was destroyed. His options had narrowed to one. On the night of July 6th, 1944, Seido wrote his final order. He commanded every man still able to walk together at the northern end of the island.

wounded men from the field hospitals, cooks, clerks, sailors who had lost their ships, airmen who had lost their planes, anyone who could hold a bayonet, a bamboo spear, a kitchen knife tied to a stick. 4,000 men assembled in the darkness. At dawn on July 7th, they charged. It was the largest banzai attack of the Second World War.

They came out of the pre-m morning gray in a wave that stretched from the ocean to the ridges screaming, weeping, some of them singing. Mo most of them running toward men they had been told were cowards. The men waiting for them were not Marines. They were soldiers of the United States Army’s 27th Infantry Division and they were about to have the worst day of their lives.

But the Marines were on their flanks. And when the 27th line broke, it was Marine artillery and marine reserves that closed the gap and finished what the army had begun. By nightfall, more than 4,000 Japanese lay dead in a valley that would be remembered for a century. General Sat was not among them. He had eaten a last mill of canned crab and sake.

Then he had faced the direction of the emperor’s palace and driven a dagger into his own stomach while an aid fired a pistol into his temple to complete the ritual. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had commanded the carriers at Pearl Harbor 31 months earlier, had killed himself in a cave the day before. The men who had planned the war were now killing themselves to escape the war they had made.

And in Tokyo, in a room where Imperial Army intelligence officers translated captured American documents and Japanese diaries recovered from the front, a report was being written that would be distributed in secret to every garrison commander in the Pacific. The report described the Marines in language the Imperial Army had never used about an enemy.

It called them shock troops. It called them a force displaying fanatical devotion to objectives. It said their casualties, no matter how severe, did not degrade unit effectiveness until the unit was completely destroyed. And then it said the sentence that no Japanese soldier was ever supposed to read.

The Marines cannot be stopped. They can only be delayed. That report was captured by American intelligence. on the island of Tinian in July of 1944. It was translated, it was archived, and it stands today as the moment the Imperial Japanese Army officially told its own soldiers in writing that the war was already lost.

Every man who read that report and every man who fought after it was written understood the truth. Their newspapers still refused to print. They were no longer fighting to win. They were fighting to die well and to make the Americans bleed for the privilege of killing them. Somewhere in a bunker on an island that had not yet been invaded, uh, a young private first class named Tadashi Yamamoto was cleaning his rifle and reading a letter from his mother.

He did not know that in 7 months on a black volcanic beach beneath a mountain called Suribachi, he would meet the men his generals could not stop. He did not know that his diary would be found in the ruins of his bunker. He did not know that his last written words would be read 80 years later. by strangers who would understand exactly what he meant.

But the Marines were already loading their ships. And the mathematics of slaughter had one more equation left to solve. In the winter of 1944, on an island of black sand and yellow sulfur 800 miles from Tokyo, a 53-year-old lieutenant general walked the ridge lines alone and did the arithmetic in arithmetic in his head.

His name was Tadamichi Kuribayashi. He had been a cavalry officer once, a young man who rode horses across the plains of Manuria. He had traveled to America in 1928. He had served as a deputy military atache in Washington. He had studied for a time at Harvard. He had crossed the United States by automobile from coast to coast. And he had seen the factories.

He had seen the highways. He had seen the endless rolling fields of a country that could feed the world twice over and still have grain left to burn. He had come home and told his superiors what he had seen. They had not wanted to hear it. Now on the island of Ewogima, he was the man they had chosen to defend what could not be defended against the enemy he had warned them about with the resources they had refused to give him.

He accepted the assignment without protest. He wrote to his wife that he would not be coming home. He wrote to his young daughter that she should remember him as a man who had done his duty. Then he began to dig. For 8 months, 21,000 Japanese soldiers carved a fortress into the volcanic rock of Ewima.

18 kilometers of tunnels, 1,500 cave positions, gun imp placements cited to cover ev every meter of every beach. Kuribi Bayashi banned the banzai charge. He told his officers that a soldier who died screaming had killed no Americans and a soldier who died silent waiting could kill 10.

He told them to kill 10 each before they died. He told them in the last order he issued before the invasion that not a single one of them would leave the island alive. They believed him. The Marines came on February 19th, 1945. 70,000 men in the largest amphibious assault the Pacific War had ever seen. They landed on beaches of soft black ash that swallowed their boots to the ankle.

And for the first 20 minutes, there was almost no fire from the Japanese positions. Kuribi Bayashi had ordered his men to wait. Then the beaches filled with Marines, tanks bogged down in the ash, landing craft stacked up behind the reef, men and machines and ammunition piled onto a strip of sand 2 mi long and 300 yards deep.

Kuribayashi gave the order. The mountain opened fire. every gun on Mount Surabbachi, every mortar in the northern ridges, every hidden artillery piece that had been laid in months earlier and camouflaged with handwoven mats. All of it at once on a beach with nowhere to hide. The black sand turned red before noon.

Private firstass Tadashi Yamamoto watched from a firing slit in a concrete bunker on the slopes above the beach. He was 24 years old. He had been in the Imperial Army for 3 years. He had been told from the moment he first put on the uniform that Americans were soft, that Americans would break, that Americans could not endure what a Japanese soldier could endure.

He watched six Marines assault the bunker to his right. The first fell in the sand, then the second, then the third. A grenade came out from behind a rock and burst among the survivors and one of the Marines. Yamamoto could see him clearly, could see his face, threw himself onto the blast to shield the men behind him.

The men behind him kept moving. They reached the bunker. They killed everyone inside. It took them from the moment the assault began to the moment the last Japanese defender stopped screaming less than 4 minutes. Yamamoto wrote in his diary that night by the light of a shielded lantern the sentence that would be found on his body 5 weeks later.

The Marines are not human. He meant it as an insult when he wrote it. By the time he was killed, he meant it as something else entirely. For 36 days, the Marines walked north through Kuri Bayashi’s fortress. They fought for every ridge. They died for every cave. They flushed defenders from the tunnels with gasoline and phosphorus and satchel charges packed with 50 pounds of TNT.

When a bunker would not fall, they buried it. When a cave would not surrender, they sealed it. When a Japanese officer refused to die, they gave him the opportunity as many times as it took. 6,800 Americans were killed on Eoima. Nearly 20,000 more were wounded. It was the only battle in the Pacific War where American casualties exceeded Japanese casualties in absolute numbers.

21,000 Japanese defenders had held the island. 216 were taken prisoner. Every other man died. Baron Taichi Nishi, an equestrian who had won a gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932, who had ridden his horse Uranus into the affection of the American public, who had befriended Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pikford in Hollywood after his Olympic triumph, and who had kept those friendships alive through letters even as the two nations drifted toward war.

Baron Nishi died on Ewima commanding a battalion of tanks that were dug into the ridges as fixed artillery. His body was never identified. General Kuri Bayashi sent his last radio message to Tokyo on March 21st, 5 days before the end. It was addressed to the Imperial General Staff. It apologized for his failure to hold the island.

It asked forgiveness for the men he had lost. It ended with three death poems he had written himself in the classical form about a soldier who dies far from home and is not permitted the honor of being buried in his native soil. Then he took off his general’s insignia so that the enemy would not know they had killed a commanding officer.

and he walked out into the ridges with the last of his men. His body was never found uh somewhere in a cave or beneath a collapsed tunnel or in the anonymous mass of the dead who were bulldozed into unmarked graves. In the days after the battle, the general who had warned Japan about America is still there. He has been there for 81 years.

The war ended 5 months later. It ended in a way Kuribayashi had feared and predicted with two cities erased in white light and a nation that had promised to fight to the last child instead bowing uh to the terms of unconditional surrender. The Marines came ashore in Japan expecting resistance. They found a country of exhausted people who were grateful the killing had stopped.

They found families who fed them. They found children who followed them through the streets. They found in the ruins of Tokyo and Osaka and Nagoya a truth that the diaries of dead Japanese soldiers had already recorded on a dozen islands. The propaganda had been a lie. The Americans were not demons. The Marines had not been savages.

They had been young men, most of them under 25, who had been trained to kill and who had killed exactly as they had been trained. And when the killing was finished, they had put their weapons down and gone home. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the battle, Marines returned to Ewima. They were old men now.

Their hair was white, their hands shook. They walked with canes across the black sand where their brothers had died. The Japanese came too. Among them was Taro Kuri Bayashi, the son of the general who had disappeared into the ridges. He had been 11 years old when his father sailed away.

He had grown up without a father in a country that had been rebuilt by the sons of the men his father had died fighting. He shook hands with the Marines who had killed his father’s soldiers. They shook hands with the son of the general who had killed their brothers. They did not speak of forgiveness because forgiveness was not the right word. They spoke instead of respect.

The Marines had not won because they were braver than the Japanese. The Japanese soldier had matched them in courage on every island from Guadal Canal to Okinawa. The Marines had not won because they were better men or because their cause was more noble in some cosmic ledger that history keeps and human beings uh cannot read.

They had won because they came from a nation that could give them everything they needed to win. And they had been trained by a core that would not let them stop until the winning was done. They had won because a Virginia named Vandergrift had understood what an island war would require.

And a Texan named Nimmitz had understood how to feed it. And a president in a wheelchairs had understood that the factories of Detroit and Pittsburgh and Cleveland would decide the war more surely than any battle. And they had won because nearly 20,000 of them had died to prove that the men their enemies had called soft were something else entirely.

Corporal Hideo Takahashi lived to be an old man. He was interviewed in 1975 in a small house outside Yokohama by an American historian who spoke Japanese. He was asked what he had learned in the war. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said that his generation had been taught that the spirit could conquer the machine.

He said the Marines had taught him something different. He said the spirit combined with the machine would always conquer the spirit alone. He said his country had been given only half of what was needed. He said the Marines had been given all of it. And then he said the sentence that Private Yamamoto had written in a bunker on Ewima 40 years before and had died believing they do not die like other men.

He said it this time without fear. He said it the way a man says the name of an old opponent he has finally learned to understand. The Marines said they would take the objective. They took it. They said they would pay the price. They paid it. They never stopped. And on on 10,000 mi of ocean on a dozen islands whose names most Americans have now forgotten, they wrote a lesson in the black volcanic sand that the Empire of Japan would remember until the last soldier who fought them was in his grave.

They were what the Empire had claimed to be. The empire was what it had claimed they were. And that was the difference that ended a war.