Nineteen years after leaving his home country (3)

　
(3) Miserable "escaping march from death" --- Comrades broken down from exhaustion and starvation

The battles for capturing Port Moresby became harder one after another. Fights became severer day by day and eight hundred persons of the first rescue corps were all died as warriors at the landing point. The second corps were sent to the bottom of the sea along with ships. Reports of defeats thus came to our ears one after another. The next year 1943 began and on the New Year's Day, we were given from the headquarters one each of can and cigarette for five persons. It was a wretched New Year's Day having a touch of colors of tragedy that could not be put into words.

The New Year's Day ended in safe, and in a night of mid-January at around nine o'clock, we found that camps of our troops were calm like mirror-still pond. Only singing of insects was heard lonely in the unearthly lacquered dark. Suspecting unusual stillness, our corps tried to make contact at once with our troops in all directions and with the headquarters but both of the troop and the headquarters have went up in smoke already at that time, not leaving even a cat. We learned that the troops have retreated in the previous night.

We twenty-odd survivors soon arranged for departure and started to open a way in the middle of the enemy by relying a compass only.

When we started, there was a conflict of two opinions about the course to escape. Five comrades parted from us to enter in the jungle in the opposite direction. That was the end for them. The commander was completely incompetent in such a situation and we took the lead to the direction we believed. In that way, the party of ten and more persons passed through the enemy's position quietly. It was quite a labor that we went ahead step by step in the jungle with silent footsteps.

Taking a course for northeast in the dark, sneaking under several telephone lines of the enemy, we continued desperate escape. Hearing occasional sound of guns, we slept by binding own bodies on trees with vines. Without any food, we drank water and ate grasses. The battle was also against fatigue and death from hunger.

In the evening of that day, we found footprints of the main force, advanced by following them, and just reached the main force ten days after the start. While it was unknown if the number of victims were some hundreds or not, what we saw were many comrades and officers, with guns on their shoulder or military swords on their chest, laid their thin bodies down on roots of trees or on grasses and died of hunger. If a man once lost power to walk and sat down to sleep as a result of lost battles against fatigue and starvation, he would never wake up again.

I was also attacked several times by the fatigue and drowsiness and became aware of them when I fell down to the ground. Clinging to roots of trees and grasses, I followed comrades and had a narrow escape from death. The main forces of up to tens of thousand were thus just to be annihilated leaving three-odd hundred people at that time. I do not know what had become of the comrades since then.

Remembering that ten thousands of comrades met miserable ends at the Kumusi River basin devoting all their energy to hard battles for sincere patriotism, for peace, and for their home country, I was impressed very much of our return to our homeland in safe.

Without interval of taking a rest, we returned to Rabaul and in August 1943, went aboard troopships again to move from Saipan to Manila and from Manila to Singapore, and reached the battle line of Burma in January 1944.

After having engaged in road works near the border of India, backregions of Arakan Yoma, we kept guard in January 1945 at the lower reaches of Irrawaddy. In April of the same year, we withdrew to Rangoon city as the rebel army of Burma became active. Having made arrangement to pursue the main body of the Northern Burma Army, we moved from Rangoon city to Pegu, advanced north for two days, and came across the main forces of the enemy which were protected by corps of ninety tanks and air forces. After a four hours' fierce battle, we fell into a completely surrounded situation. The enemy headed by tanks rushed in the village. Comrades of our side were killed one after another, and our company commander who dared to escape with forty to fifty subordinates became completely invisible under convergent fires before he run fifty meters in only three minutes or so. We, around eight persons of survivors except the wounded fought for our life in the stifling smoke of powder until seven in the evening, defending our camp desperately. At night, we escaped through the interval of tanks of the enemy with wounded comrades on shoulders. We again had a narrow escape from death and went down for Moulmein.

(To be continued)