level of the men they are replacing. The second-and rear-echelon soldiers are little more than half-trained criminals who have been conscripted and abused, and who have no wish to be in China. There have been incidents of soldiers murdering their own officers.”
That brought gasps, and even Toyoza Kaga was surprised.
“What can we do?” Hara asked sadly. “Japan will be defeated and the Americans will be on us in a rage for revenge.”
Akira smiled. “That is why we are here. We must organize and be ready to support the Americans when they invade. They must be made aware that not all Japanese support Tokyo. Not all are old fools or young radicals, like I was. We must be willing to pay for their understanding with our blood.”
“Excellent,” Hara said with an enthusiasm that surprised both Akira and Toyoza, “but how will we let them know we are here, and what should we do? It is rumored that Americans are active on Hawaii. Do we have a means of contacting them?”
Toyoza Kaga spoke for the first time. “I will work on that,” he said innocently and saw the look of comprehension on the others’ faces. When they laughed, he knew that Akira had chosen well, and he was proud of his son.
Lieutenant Goto fully agreed that punishment had to be given out for the deaths of Major Shimura and his guard. The second guard might yet die from his wounds, and his fate, whether he died or not, was part of the planned retribution.
What did surprise Goto was that Admiral Iwabachi had overruled Colonel Omori regarding its severity. Iwabachi wanted blood for the harming of his men and he wanted it in copious amounts, while Omori urged relative restraint. Deaths had to occur, but Omori wanted far fewer than Iwabachi did, and he wanted the native Hawaiian population insulated from the reprisal. It struck Goto as ironic that the admiral was endorsing acts not dissimilar to those that had seen him banished to Hilo.
The new commander of the Hilo garrison was Captain Isamu Kashii, and he held the post by virtue of being more senior in rank than the other captains. In his mid-thirties, Kashii was a firebrand and a fanatic, totally the opposite of the late, unlamented, and cowardly Major Shimura. Kashii wanted to kill Americans, and Goto wanted to help him.
A hundred men and women were chosen from the population. People of Japanese extraction were. excluded from the reprisal, but, regardless of his orders, Hawaiians were not. When Goto had commented that the Hawaiians were likely to be sympathetic to Japan, Kashii had told him it didn’t matter. They were all suspect in his eyes. Kashii could not even begin to comprehend the thought of the assassin being a lone warrior. He was vehement that the murderer had to have had help.
This was more like it, Goto had exulted. Shimura had been a pussy, afraid of his own shadow and more interested in entertaining himself with booze and drugs than in searching out the Americans. Let the blood flow.
As a result, the hundred doomed men and women had been chosen, some at random and some because they hadn’t shown enthusiasm for the Japanese cause, then interrogated with utmost brutality by Goto and some of Kashii’s men. Many couldn’t walk and had to be helped into the sunlight by those who could, while several were blind. Their eyes had been gouged out. The remainder of the Hilo population had been ordered to witness the punishment, and there was an audible moan by the assembled thousands as the tormented victims were led to the place of death.
Ten thick wooden stakes had been driven into the ground. They rose more than six feet tall and stood in front of a higher wall of sandbags. A Model 92 heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod stood about fifty yards away, while the two-man crew looked grimly at the empty stakes.
Moaning and numb with terror, the first ten were tied to the stakes. Captain Kashii signaled, and the machine gun commenced an insanely loud chattering that drowned out all other sounds. The victims jumped and writhed as the bullets tore into them, sending a spray of blood and flesh into the air. Then everything was still, and the bodies lay limp in their ropes. After a few seconds, some people in the crowd started screaming, but they were ignored. Soldiers untied the victims and dragged their bodies to the wall behind. A couple of them twitched and may still have been alive.
A second ten were brought forward, tied, and machine-gunned. The process was continued until only the last ten remained, and they too were tied to the now badly splintered stakes. The ground before them was so soaked with the blood of the preceding victims that red puddles had formed, and the crowd had ceased screaming or crying out. The mound of dead and dying behind the stakes had become a stack of bloody, raw meat as bullets that missed their targets had smacked into the bodies.
With the last ten in place, Kashii gave another signal, and ten soldiers with bayonets on their rifles took their places, one in front of each victim. Kashii bellowed an order, and the soldiers began their practice. First, they lunged their blades into the meat of their victims’ inner thighs, then the muscle of the upper arms. The last ten shrieked for mercy, but there was none. More thrusts slashed at their buttocks, the backs of their calves, the cheeks of their faces, their eyes, and, finally, slashing, disemboweling thrusts to the victims’ stomachs finished it.
Even so, it would take a while for some of them to die. The crowd was dismissed, but soldiers stood guard over the bloody place. Kashii ordered that no bodies be removed for at least twenty-four hours as an example.
The captain strode over to Goto and smiled. There was blood spattered on Kashii’s uniform. “Well, that ought to keep them in line. If it doesn’t, we’ll do it again and again until it does.”
The man loves to kill, Goto thought, and then laughed harshly to himself. And Omori thought I was a problem. At last, he congratulated himself, I am serving under a real leader.
“Some of the people in Hilo will move out, Captain.” Goto’s intelligence operatives told him that several hundred had already departed and more would follow. In a little while, Hilo could be a ghost town.
“Let them,” Kashii said. “There will be no food for them. They’ll come back.”
“Captain, any more clues as to the murderer or his helpers?”
“The killer was an American. One had been seen skulking around the day before, but it was unreported and apparently had happened earlier under the lax administration of my predecessor. But no, I did not get any information regarding specific assistance given to the assassin. Now I don’t need it. A message has been sent. I am confident it will not happen again.”
Goto agreed with Kashii. The Americans would be cowed by what had happened and would not attempt such a murder again. Unless, of course, someone struck at Kashii in revenge for this day. Goto saw how the captain’s actions might have launched a spiral of violence.
Good, he thought. Finally, he felt he was serving under a Japanese warrior.
CHAPTER 17
Lieutenant Brooks was appalled at the Japanese reaction to his killing of Major Shimura. Still, Jake felt compelled to read the young lieutenant the riot act, which he did with a vengeance.
It had taken Brooks several days to return from Hilo through Japanese patrols that were suddenly out in force. Prudently, he had taken a circuitous route back to the main American camp, and it was only then that he found out about what was being called the Massacre of the Innocents.
“I never thought the Japs would do anything like that,” Brooks had said with sincere contrition. He had never dreamed that he would cause anything so awful to occur, and the news had made him physically ill. He had killed an enemy soldier, which was what he had been trained to do.
“You never thought is right,” Jake had snapped. “Look, I’m sorry your brother was killed in the Philippines, damned sorry, but that doesn’t give you the right to go off and start your own private war. If I’d known you were going to shoot that Jap, I’d have stopped you from leaving camp. That Jap you killed was so stupid he was one of our best allies. Now they’ve replaced him with someone who can actually think, and that’s likely to cause still more people to die.”
“It won’t happen again, sir.”
