Read Online One Man's Justice by Akira Yoshimura - Free Book Online

learnt about the eight prisoners in the course of that day. Colonel Tahara instructed them not to mention what had happened to anyone else, telling them that the official stance was to be that these prisoners had been sent to Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo.
    While Takuya felt no particular emotion about their death, it struck him that executing them by means of experimental surgery was rather unusual. Still, regardless of the method used, he did not falter in his belief that it was only natural that they should die for their sins. In fact, more than anything, he felt increasingly indignant that the remaining prisoners were still alive and depleting precious food stocks in the headquarters compound.
    That evening, in the headquarters judicial department, the remaining sixteen prisoners were arraigned before a formal military tribunal, and based on a re-examination of the transcripts of their interrogations it was confirmed that every one of the airmen had taken part in the bombing of urban targets. All were found guilty of the murder ofnon-combatants and, based on the tenets of international law, all were sentenced to death.
    The following day, another seventeen airmen who had been captured after parachuting from B-29s shot down over Kyushu were delivered to the rear entrance of the headquarters building in a kempeitai lorry, then put into holding-cells together with the previous batch of prisoners. The cells were too small to handle the influx of prisoners, however, and with four men in each it was almost impossible for all of them to lie down. So the judicial department moved immediately to convert the litigants’ waiting-room in their part of the building into an extra holding-cell for some of the newcomers.
    Over the next few days, Takuya found himself virtually confined to the tactical operations centre. On the eighth of June, reconnaissance photographs taken by a plane flying over US Army Air Force facilities on Okinawa were delivered to headquarters. They showed clearly that the airfields in north and central Okinawa, along with those on Ie Island, were fully operational, and confirmed the existence of at least five hundred and twenty-three fighters and bombers. Takuya and his comrades all sensed that an intensification of the attacks on Kyushu was imminent, and that the stage was set for a decisive battle for the homeland.
    On the evening of the eighteenth of June, the mood at Western headquarters grew sombre. On the radio they had heard the farewell message from Lieutenant-General Ushijima Mitsuru, commander of the Thirty-second Army in Okinawa, to Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo, informinghis superiors that he was about to give his life for the Emperor’s cause. ‘While our forces have fought with supreme heroism over the last two months, the enemy’s overwhelming numerical superiority on land, sea and air means that this struggle has entered its closing stages. I most humbly report that the final preparations are in hand to lead those surviving soldiers to a glorious death.’
    The final battle for Okinawa was a struggle of apocalyptic proportions. According to reports from pilots of reconnaissance planes, the pummelling of the southern tip of the island by concentrated bombardment from warships, ground-based artillery and the air was such that it looked as though there had been a huge volcanic eruption, with streams of tracer bullets, raging fires and plumes of grey and black smoke all adding a macabre effect to the hellish scene. Since the battle for Saipan and the struggles for the islands across the northern Pacific, non-combatants had been deeply embroiled in the conflict and had even lost their lives, together with the soldiers of each defending garrison. No doubt this tragedy had been repeated in Okinawa, with scores of old men, women and children losing their lives in the bombardment or choosing to die by their own hand.
    That night, the news came that a force of fifty B-29s based in Saipan