Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (51 page)

In an effort to conserve what food supplies there were on the island the commanding officers warned the troops in September that they must not carry out wild acts of plunder on the villagers’ gardens. The natives ‘are are to be pacified’, the troops were told, ‘and we are planning thereby to increase our supplies especially fresh vegetables’.
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But the inhabitants of Loboda village near Milne Bay recalled that the Japanese constantly pilfered from their gardens, killed their pigs and even ate raw taro they were so hungry. Others would go from hamlet to hamlet begging for gifts of food in exchange for a compass or clothing.
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About a third of the 20th Division stationed at Finschhafen were allocated gardening tasks, while about one-sixth of the men went out foraging for food in the local area. Japanese troops became more preoccupied with finding their next meal than fighting to hold on to territory, and the Allies found that they fought hardest to maintain their occupancy of areas where they controlled native gardens. If the gardens were eaten out then they might fight to gain ground in areas where there was more food, and they were so hungry that they would sometimes raid native vegetable gardens behind the Allied lines.
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A significant number of ambushes and attacks were carried out with the express purpose of stealing Allied rations.
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For the natives, 1944–45 was a period of terror. Their buildings, cooking fires and gardens all attracted Allied bombing. On the ground the Japanese foraging parties were brutal and vindictive.
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But even when the Australians arrived, conditions did not improve greatly as their soldiers raped the women without fear of being disciplined. One senior Australian officer was said to have commented that ‘after all, “the Marys raped very easily”’.
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Allied interrogations of Japanese prisoners revealed an army slowly disintegrating from hunger.
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An Allied Intelligence Research Report concluded, ‘officers and men alike, in forward areas, are preoccupied almost to the exclusion of everything else with the shortage of food
… Bitterness and resentment, reaching at times a homicidal level, are generated by this life or death competition, especially towards officers who are, or appear to be abusing the privileges of their rank … Comparison of their own plight with the enemy’s comparative affluence, especially brought home by the capture of our parachute dropped supplies or one of our ration dumps, reminds the Japanese soldier again of the extent of his abandonment.’
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Superior Private Nakata Motoo told his interrogators that he had decided to surrender after his officers had ordered the men into the fields to collect potatoes during mortar and air attacks and then had taken the best food for themselves.
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By the summer of 1944 the Japanese were reduced to eating
sacsac
, a tasteless, brown starch made from sago palms. Water was passed through the fibre hollowed out of the palm trunks to produce a glutinous mass which was wrapped in leaves and cooked. The sticky mess was even sent up to feed the front-line troops. At first they mixed it with rice or wheat but eventually they ate plain
sacsac
, which did little to assuage hunger pangs or provide energy or nutrition. In the Sepak river area the men in combat were given dried grasses to eat.
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Well aware of how hungry the Japanese were, the Allies bombed supply bases, and even strafed the palm trees to deny them coconuts and
sacsac
.
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On 10 December 1944 the commander of the 18th Army on New Guinea, General Adachi Hatazo, issued an order that ‘while troops were permitted to eat the flesh of the Allied dead, they must not eat their own’.
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This admission of cannibalism among Japanese troops is supported by a number of Australian War Crimes Section reports as well as by US army documents which indicate that the Japanese on New Guinea ate each other, members of the local population, Asian prisoners of war who had been brought to the islands as forced labourers and Allied soldiers. The reports contain eyewitness accounts by soldiers who discovered the mutilated bodies of their comrades, as well as evidence that their flesh had been eaten. On 20 May 1945 an Australian soldier recovered the body of one of his battalion. He had been stripped, and both his arms were cut off at the shoulder. ‘The stomach had been cut out, and the heart, liver and other entrails had been removed, all fleshy parts of the body had been cut away … A Japanese
mess tin which appeared to contain human flesh was lying four to five yards away … between two dead Japanese soldiers.’
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Hatam Ali, an Indian soldier taken prisoner by the Japanese, was sent to New Guinea as part of a labour force to build an airfield in 1943. He later recounted that when the Japanese ran out of food in 1944 the guards would select one prisoner each day who ‘was taken out and killed and eaten … I personally saw this happen.’
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The prisoners had been transformed from a workforce into a food supply.

By failing to provision their troops the Japanese high command not only displayed a criminal contempt for the value of their soldiers’ lives, they handed the Allies an excruciatingly effective weapon to use against their soldiers. As the Pacific fleet under the command of Admiral Nimitz moved through the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana islands, capturing only those islands of strategic interest, the US navy left the remaining Japanese garrisons to ‘wither on the vine’.
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The islands became floating prison camps and the starving Japanese resorted to eating any living thing: ‘pigs, dogs, possum, mice, bats, kangaroos, snakes, lizards, frogs, leeches, earthworms, centipedes, all sorts of insects (butterflies, caterpillars), maggots (in some cases they even took maggots from the latrines), crocodiles, fish, lobsters, crabs, shells, birds’.
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They dug up any edible vegetable matter, collected wild grasses and ate water lilies and duck weed. Australian soldiers moving into areas that had once been held by the Japanese found that they had completely cleared these regions of food.

The Americans did supply food to those islands which were cut off from supplies but where there were no occupying Japanese. But the term ‘wither on the vine’ was a euphemism worthy of the National Socialists, who spoke of ‘resettlement’ rather than ‘mass murder’. The indigenous islanders ‘withered’ alongside the Japanese, like the Greeks who died as a result of the British blockade of occupied Europe, incidental victims of a wider military strategy. In the Caroline Islands, the Japanese on Kosrae turned into ‘stick men’, and they and many of the 179 labourers who had been brought in from Pohnpei died of malnutrition, unable to survive on potato leaves.
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The last Japanese supply ship reached Ocean Island in 1943. After that a few submarines dropped off bales of food. The islanders ate
ren
ruku
(pawpaw leaves) while the Japanese grew pumpkins in barrels of night soil. The islanders
began to die of starvation
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and a few were executed for stealing rice. Eventually the Japanese evacuated the survivors to Kusaie where they were set to work growing food for the Japanese while surviving on a diet of soup made from leaves.
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One islander commented, ‘It would be better to be a soldier than a civilian prisoner. Soldiers have weapons and have a chance. We had no chance, we were slaves. We were the same as pigs: we had no human rights.’
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Allied prisoners of war also withered on the vine. Kasayama Yoshikichi was a Korean guard for a prisoner of war camp on an island off the coast of New Guinea where they were supposed to be constructing an airfield. Here the guards, like the prisoners, slept in blankets without shelter. When it rained, guards and prisoners alike caught cold and came down with dysentery.
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‘Demands for food and medical supplies came from the prisoners, but we didn’t have any “main course” either. We had only rice and the leaves of the tapioca plant. We made some soup with those leaves, a little garlic, salt and a bit of butter. Our superiors were in the same shape. There was nothing to eat and nothing to give. Japanese army regulations specified that we were to feed the Japanese first, then the locals, and what was left was for the prisoners.’
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He described how the prisoners would first become emaciated, then their lips would dry out, their eyesight blur and then they would die. ‘At the end it wasn’t a matter of giving food to the prisoners or not giving it. There wasn’t any food even for the Japanese soldiers.’
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As the guards and prisoners attempted to escape by sailing to Java, they drank water contaminated by corpses and contracted beriberi. Their flesh swelled and their legs became heavy. The guards began to die alongside their prisoners. Only 800 of the original 2,000 prisoners made it back to Java.
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Desperate hunger prevailed throughout the Pacific and south-east Asia. In a letter to the newspaper
Asahi Shimbun
, the veteran Nishihara Takamaro, then in his seventies, recalled how on Luzon in the Philippines ‘a fellow soldier whose name I didn’t know came crawling over to me. Taking off his clothes, he bared his pointed rear end. It had become dark bluish-green. “Buddy, if I die, go ahead and eat this part,” he said, touching his scrawny rear end with his bony finger.
I said, “Idiot, how could I eat a war buddy?” But I couldn’t take my eyes off the flesh on his rear.’ Nishihara claimed that he was saved by the discovery of a dog, which he killed and ate along with some salt he found stored on a dead comrade’s body.
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In Ooka Shohei’s autobiographical novel
Fires on the Plain
he described how the remnants of Japanese regiments were left wandering the islands looking for something to eat. Ooka’s novel describes how the soldiers descended into cannibalism. His protagonist would occasionally meet another soldier. They would both let out ‘an inhuman cry’ and avoid each other: ‘I was not interested in them; I was on the lookout for immobile people – for fresh corpses that still retained human lineaments.’
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Although they may have descended to an unimaginable level of hunger and misery the majority of Japanese soldiers appear to have clung on to a remnant of their initial fighting spirit. The ethos of
bushido
taught that when a Japanese soldier went into battle he had two options: to fight and win, or to die fighting. Surrender was not considered an option, and the majority of Japanese soldiers eventually chose to commit suicide or to die of starvation rather than surrender.

BURMA

While the Japanese troops in the Pacific degenerated into starvation, in Burma the military command demonstrated their inability to learn lessons from previous mistakes. In April 1944 Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi Renya launched an attack on India. He had been charged with preventing the Americans from reopening the Burma road and the supply line to Nationalist China. However, he had a much grander vision, supported in Japan by War Minister Tojo Hideki. Mutaguchi was under the illusion that he was about to lead a triumphant march on India which would take the British out of the war and persuade the United States to negotiate with Japan.
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The idea was to capture Imphal, the key logistical town in Assam, and cut off the supply route by capturing Kohima. The Japanese could then move on to Dimapur, a key British supply base in the Brahmaputra river valley.

The route into Assam from Burma was along narrow tracks through thick, hot, steamy, muddy jungle. The only way to move supplies up the line was by pack animal. This was obviously a re-run of the Kokoda Trail: half of the supplies which left the supply base would have been consumed by service personnel before they reached the combat troops.
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Major-General Inada Masazumi, Vice-Chief of General Staff of the Southern Army, expressed his reservations about the feasibility of the plan and was consequently levered out of his position.
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The division commanders for the attack on Kohima were also dubious and thought that it would be impossible to maintain the supply routes. Lieutenant Sato Kotoku was said to have told his staff that they would most probably all starve to death. However, the campaign went ahead and the supply services mustered a herd of 15,000 cows to double as meat on the hoof and pack animals (despite the fact that cows are unsuited to carrying heavy loads). The usual orders were issued to the commanders that they must capture enemy stocks.
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This time the British had no intention of feeding their enemies, and as his regiment approached Kohima Captain Kameyama Shosaku was disappointed to discover ‘the enemy had destroyed all their food and supplies’ as they retreated.
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His regiment was forced to attack enemy positions at night in order to plunder their supplies of ‘rations, bullets and grenades’.
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When Senior Private Wada Manabu’s transport section moved on to the northern ridge at Kohima they found the ‘British had burned their food and supply depots so that not even a grain of rice or a round of ammunition was left for us. The best my comrades and I could do was to find three tins of corned beef in the enemy positions.’
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Not only were the Allies now better at evacuating their positions without leaving presents from Mr Churchill for the Japanese, their supply logistics had advanced considerably by 1944. The Japanese laid siege to British and Indian troops at Kohima, but throughout the seventeen-day siege air supply flew in 3,000 tons of stores, including food, drinking water and ammunition.
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In 1942 an Air Dispatch Depot had been set up at Chaklala in India where pilots were trained how to drop supplies packed into carefully designed containers attached to special parachutes.
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This enabled the British and Indian troops to keep fighting, albeit on half rations, while the Japanese, unable to supply themselves from Allied food dumps, starved. The British also
managed to blockade Japanese communication lines and by April the Japanese were so short of shells that they could only fire at the enemy for a few hours a day. Reduced to boiling ‘vegetable matter’ to stave off ‘our terrible hunger’, they watched the British through their telescopes as they took their afternoon tea break.
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