Colonel Tsuji of Malaya (part 4)

Meanwhile, the U.S. and Japanese fleets engaged in a major battle whose immediate outcome favored the latter, but which nevertheless cost many planes and prevented the Japanese navy from supporting the effort to retake Guadalcanal.

Col Tsuji headed back down the Maruyama Trail to report on the fate of the 2nd Div. On the way, he passed a terribly wounded battalion commander and some of his men, whom Tsuji fed with rice from his own hango. They opened their mouths like baby sparrows when the chopsticks came toward them

Took him 5 days to reach the coast, where he asked for rice to be sent to the front and dictated the following radiogram to Army Chief of Staff Marshal Sugiyama : "I must bear the whole responsibility for the failure of the 2nd Division which courageously fought for days and lost more than half their men in desperate attacks. They failed because I underestimated the enemy's fighting power and insisted on my own operations plans which was erroneous." Saying he deserved "a sentence of ten thousand deaths," he asked to be transferred to the 17th Army on Guadalcanal. Probably a ritual request. In any event, it was denied on Nov 3. When Kawaguchi left the island (Nov 4?), "feeling as if my intestines were cut," Toland says that "He nursed more hatred for his countryman Tsuji than for the enemy."

In a three-day naval battle, Nov 12-14?, the Japanese fleet lost heavily and was unable to bring a relief convoy to Guadalcanal. Of 12,000 troops and 10,000 tons of supplies, only 4,000 men and five tons got ashore when the surviving transports in desperation were driven onto the beach. They found an army so hungry that 100 men died of starvation every day. Nov 29, the navy tried a desperate expedient to supply them, lashing metal drums to a destroyer's gunwales and cutting them loose for a swimmer or motorboat to pick up a line and bring it ashore, where men would be waiting to haul in the string of drums. At great cost, the American fleet intercepted the destroyers, but nothing was landed. On Dec 1 a modest success managed to land 300 of 1,500 drums that were dropped. A third relief expedition was driven away. A trickle of supplies came in by submarine or by air-drop. No longer fit enough to attack, the Japanese army dug foxholes and defended them to the death, hoping that the Americans would be unwilling to take the casualties necessary to dig them out one by one. Much the same sort of suicide resistance was shaping up on New Guinea, 600 miles to the west.

And back to China

Tsuji was back in Tokyo with a proposal to send Lt Col Kumao Imoto to supervise a new offensive on Guadalcanal. Imoto "gamed" a relief expedition and concluded that hardly a transport would reach the island. On Christmas day, in an emergency meeting in the Imperial Palace, the army and navy hashed out who would take responsibility for recommending withdrawal. Marshal Sugiyama and Col Tsuji represented the army. Tsuji argued for withdrawal. The navy insisted on more gaming. Not until Dec 31 was the recommendation for withdrawal from Guadalcanal and Buna (on New Guinea) presented to the Emperor, who approved the retreat with bitter words about the speed with which Americans could build an airfield compared to the Japanese. After a two-hour debate, he concluded: "Well, now the Army and Navy should do their best as they have explained." So when Lt Col Imoto finally reached his new duty post on Jan 13, his task was to transmit the withdrawal order. The troops at the front began to steal away on Jan 23, passing through the second line of defense, which in turn leapfrogged the third. Incredibly, the 50,000 Americans now on the island did not pursue, convinced by a thin line of scouts that the Japanese army was still in place. The destroyers sent to evacuate were mistaken for another relief attempt, and more than 5,000 men were taken off during the night of Feb 1-2. A second destroyer force took almost as many off on Feb 4. A third took off nearly 3,000 including the commander. But almost twice as many--25,000 men--had died or were left to die on Guadalcanal. Kawaguchi blamed their deaths on Tsuji.

Despite his occasional visits to Japan, he evidently never saw his family. During the war, his wife had to go to work in a garment factory and send his eldest son to work in a bakery shop, while two younger children were put in an orphanage.

After the Guadalcanal disaster, Tsuji was rusticated to China, where he served at Headquarters, Japanese Expeditionary Forces, in Nanjing. In August 1943, he says at one point, he was an aide to the Emperor's younger brother, Prince Misaka, who was working there as a "staff officer major." As Tsuji later told the Chinese, the prince proposed that they hold a memorial service for CKS's mother on the 80th anniversary of her birth. Tsuji according spoke to Wang Ching-wei the head of the Japanese puppet government, who sent a representative, and they had a two-week fete at CKS birthplace in Hsi-kou-chen, Fengua prefecture, Nov 1943, and the prince took the photo album to the Emperor himself, who "long after cherished the pictures taken of this occasion." Hm. CKS was born at Chikow in Chekiang Province, west of Shanghai. However, the chronology is right: Seagrave says mom was 23 when CKS born 31 Oct 1887, so she was indeed born in 1863. Tsuji suggests also that he dealt with Tai Li's agents at this period. That event was held in collaboration with Tao Hsiao-chieh, Wang Chang-chun, and Dr Miao Pin ("N-K's man"). The last "a comrade of mine in the East Asia Federation."

Elsewhere he says he was stationed in Hankou. Whichever it was, he was "chased out" in June 1944 and sent to Burma.

Eating the liver of a captured pilot

Tsuji went to Burma, he says, "immediately after the failure of the Imphal campaign." He arrived Jul 15 at General Masaki Honda's 33rd Army, whose task it was to launch an offensive--Operation Dan, or Cutoff--up the Burma Road from Lungling to the Salween River, whose deep gorge the Japanese army had reached in May 1942 but had not been able to cross or hold. "Why should they send this troublesome fellow?" raged Colonel Shirazaki of Honda's Operations Staff. "It will be bad for me, bad for Yamamoto and even worse for Honda." Seie Yamamoto was Honda's chief of staff, a boisterous officer who enjoyed food, drink, and sex, and who expected his men to do likewise. "We shall have to tame him [Tsuji] before he tames us," he said to his staff. Honda was no more pleased than his junior officers, knowing that if Operation Dan failed, he would get the blame, while Tsuji would take the credit if it succeeded. He made it clear to Tsuji that he would be serving under Colonel Shirazaki.

They did not get off to a promising start. Not at all humbled by his experience at Guadalcanal, he boasted on one of his first evenings in the mess: "My body carries the bullets of five countries--Russian from Nomonhan, American from Guadalcanal, Chinese from Shanghai, British from Burma, and Austrian [sic] from the Philippines." He boasted that no enemy bullet could kill him, and that his lines of communication went back to General Tojo and perhaps even to the Deity. He immediately began agitating for army headquarters to be moved from the comfortable highland town of Maymyo, which had served the British as a retreat from Rangoon during the hot season. Headquarters instead should be at Lashio, at the end of the Burma railroad, with a forward detachment on the Burma-China border. It was a sensible move, and Honda agreed to it. About this time, Shirazaki fell sick and Tsuji naturally replaced him.

Honda's offensive was endangered by General Joseph Stilwell's Chinese troops, trained and equipped in India, which now attacked his left flank at Myitkyina, the same town at which Stilwell had lost control of the retreating Chinese army in May 1942. Once in control of it, the Americans would be able to push their supply road and oil pipeline virtually to the China border. On July 31, the garrison commander radioed that he could no longer hold the town. As Yamamoto later told the story, Tsuji drafted the reply: there could be no retreat. Honda signed the order, nevertheless, and when Myitkyina fell, the commander did the expected thing and committed suicide. Honda decorated him posthumously, and demoted the subordinate officer who had escaped Mitch with most of the garrison, thus signaling to the rest of the 33rd Army that their duty was to stand and die, wherever fate found them.

continued in part 5