Chapter 1065: A Hellish Place

Forget it. Suicide is death, and being killed by the enemy is also death. Since it was already destined that I could not leave this island alive, how I died really wasn’t that important anymore. He sighed, once again missing his family in his distant homeland.

The gunfire on the battlefield reminded Takemoto Tarō that he was still in a dangerous place. He raised his weapon, finally squeezed the trigger, and fired the last round in his chamber. Because at this moment, he had no time to hesitate. Not far away, American soldiers were already charging into this trench. He had personally seen a Japanese soldier get ripped to shreds by bullets and fall, covered in blood.

“Click.” He pulled the trigger a second time. Since there were no more bullets in the chamber, there was only a faint sound. He pulled the trigger a third time, and the only response was still that soft click from the rifle. He was out of ammunition, but he kept pulling the trigger, pulling the trigger. The bloody battlefield made his muscles tense, and his entire being began to unravel. He didn’t know what he was doing; he was just unconsciously repeating the motion.

He instinctively wanted to live, to survive in this bloody and desperate environment, but everything before him offered no hope of survival. “Aargh!” He let out a hysterical, desperate cry, as if to vent the inexplicable regret in his heart: he shouldn’t die here, he shouldn’t die so wretchedly in this place.

An American soldier spotted the screaming Takemoto Tarō and aimed his M1 Garand at the crazed Japanese soldier. He didn’t understand why the man was howling like a wild animal, nor why these Japanese, even in such a hopeless situation, still wouldn’t just surrender.

The second American soldier to leap into the trench was not as “polite” as the first. He raised his M1 rifle, aimed it directly at Takemoto Tarō, and pulled the trigger. The bullets flew at their target, tearing through Tarō’s clothes and plunging into his body. One shot went through his chest, and two others hit his stomach.

And so this Japanese soldier fell onto his back, twitched twice, and closed his eyes. He had not, like the other Japanese soldiers, chosen to be “shattered like jade” on his position, but had died at his post, holding his weapon. You couldn’t say whether this soldier was brave or cowardly; the only difference between him and the others was simply the way he died.

The two American soldiers stepped over Takemoto Tarō’s body, one after the other, and continued to feel their way forward. They hadn’t gone more than a few steps when they saw a scene that was like hell on earth: Japanese soldiers piled one on top of the other, blown to smithereens by the grenades they had been holding. It was a disgusting sight, like a pork butcher’s shop.

The gunfire had gradually died down. The Japanese resistance was growing weaker. The Americans began to search for surviving Japanese prisoners of war, but unfortunately, most of their efforts ended in failure. Over 18,000 Japanese soldiers had been left to defend this island, but all the U.S. troops could find now were corpses, and more corpses. These Japanese had not only committed suicide, but had also carried out a large-scale slaughter of their own wounded and any comrades who were unwilling to kill themselves. They shot each other; sometimes they even finished each other off with knives and bayonets.

The American soldiers simply could not imagine the state of mind a person would have to be in to choose such a desperate course of action. What was even more incomprehensible to them was why those who would rather blow themselves up with grenades wouldn’t just raise their hands and surrender. But when they were cleaning up what the Japanese army had left behind, they learned just what kind of desperate end this group of Japanese soldiers had experienced.

On the beach were placed hundreds of soldiers’ skulls and bullet-pierced, damaged helmets. At first, the American soldiers had even thought it was a cemetery or some kind of special Japanese memorial ritual. It was only later, when they interrogated the few prisoners of war, that they learned this was actually a special “farmland” for producing food.

The Japanese army had placed the skulls and damaged helmets upside down on the beach. When the tide came in, countless small crabs, fish, and shrimp would drill into these “habitats” full of holes to hide. When the tide went out, most of them couldn’t leave in time and would be trapped. They were then eaten by the Japanese soldiers, who had been starving for days.

But this seafood contained a large amount of bacteria, and the Japanese army didn’t have the means to cook it thoroughly. Eating it came with enormous risks—but, of course, not eating it was just as great a risk. It was a difficult choice: either eat this and die of dysentery the next day, or don’t eat it and starve to death the next day. Several hundred Japanese soldiers chose to die on a full stomach. Several thousand others starved into mummies, dying after the second or third day.

Don’t ever imagine that American soldiers were some kind of mighty, civilized army. In fact, their performance on the battlefield was no different from that of any other country’s army: they opened fire on anything that looked unsafe, they abused prisoners with bayonets… The Marine armored units would even cut off the heads of Japanese soldiers, hang them on their tank turrets to dry into shrunken skulls, and use them to intimidate the Japanese troops who refused to surrender.

War made everyone forget their basic humanity. Slaughter and cruelty became the only laws here. Perhaps, apart from a few beautiful moments that were recorded, all life here tended more towards the demonic than the human. And it is precisely because they are so precious that those moments that retained the light of humanity are so cherished, so moving.

“Sir, all Japanese forces on the island have been annihilated. The shooting stopped an hour ago. We’ve checked the tunnels the Japanese dug; they’re either full of bodies or empty.” An officer reported the island’s situation to the Marine division commander: “We found the Japanese command post. It’s a mess. The radios were intentionally destroyed, codebooks burned… Their commander committed suicide inside.”

“Let’s go. Let’s see these lunatics,” the American commander said, his hands behind his back, walking through the trench, which was slick with so much blood it had turned to mud. Even after having his men clean it up once, the place was still so horrific that everyone had to fight back the urge to vomit.

Compared to the distant Eastern Front, the fighting here was more brutal, more primitive. Everything reeked of ancient savagery, of a coldness and cruelty from the bottom of the human heart. The war in the Pacific was infused with an indescribable sorrow, making all who had lived through it unwilling to ever speak of it again.

Walking through the open entrance into this simple command post, looking at the island map on the wall covered in Japanese markings, and the messy temporary files on the table, the American officer finally, after scanning his surroundings, let his gaze rest on the three bodies lying on the floor.

“Have someone bury them,” the American commander said, then turned and walked out of the room. “Damn, this is a disgusting place.”

Smoke was still drifting from a nearby crater. In that crater, the bodies of Japanese officers lay scattered. Some of them had still been alive when the Americans charged, raising their weapons to fight back. Unfortunately, they were not, after all, battle-hardened, qualified soldiers, and they were quickly finished off by the U.S. Marines.

Not far away, U.S. combat engineers were working desperately to repair the island’s airfield. They had to get it back to operational status as quickly as possible, so that large numbers of American bombers could take off from here and directly bomb the Japanese soldiers defending the islands of Southeast Asia.

And just as the U.S. military was capturing this small island, annihilating the Ishida Division, Guderian’s armored forces had also almost completely occupied the entire Kursk region. 200,000 Soviet infantrymen, in the face of the powerful German offensive, could only raise their hands in surrender and lay down their weapons.

The German armored forces had advanced triumphantly, fighting their way to the core of the Soviet defenses at Kursk before stopping. And behind these rapidly advancing German troops, who were driving their new-model tanks under the cover of countless planes and heavy artillery, more than 200,000 Soviet soldiers had been left behind, struggling in an encirclement.

These troops were not just random farmers and factory workers. They were fundamentally different from the rabble Stalin had assembled, because these soldiers had all experienced war. They were qualified soldiers. The loss of so many veterans and officers had exacerbated the Soviet army’s manpower shortage, making a bad situation even worse.

But if these soldiers weren’t left behind, where would the Soviet army find the forces to hold back the German army and allow other, more elite, units to head north? Zhukov, at this very moment, sat in a swaying car, looking out the window. On both sides of the road, troops were shouldering their weapons, their faces grim and dejected as they marched north. An indescribable pain filled his heart.

Not long ago, he had led these troops in a rapid southward advance from the region south of Moscow, firing the opening shots of the Soviet counter-attack at Kursk. This army had lived up to expectations, quickly repulsing the German forces and recapturing a large swath of German-occupied territory south of Kursk, including Voronezh.

They had once been the hope of the entire Soviet Union. They had once been the hope for retaking Stalingrad. Unfortunately, now all of that had turned to dust. Half of these troops, who had been called “hope,” were at this very moment struggling in a German encirclement, while the other half were abandoning their comrades and fleeing north in disarray.

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