Author: Akira Fujiwara (Japan)
See above for the author's introduction
The previous article wrote that the author's experience in 1941 stationed in the river scenery and town,
Today's article is to send out the three small chapters related to Jizhong in the future. These three chapters reveal the various atrocities committed by the Japanese army in Hebei. Later, it is written to move to the east of Hebei, the northeast, and the experience of going south, etc., it is no longer written, if you are interested in searching, physical books are not easy to sell now, and there are still many network resources. Thank you all for your support.
Crusade with the people
From going to China to fighting the Eighth Route Army, I have not gained any knowledge about the existing state of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese peasants. From the very beginning, I have always accepted and believed in the militaristic things that I was taught at the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School, that is, to wage war against China is to "severely punish China that does not submit to the emperor's divine power." Therefore, he is also convinced of the preaching that the war of aggression against China "allowed the Chinese people to bathe in the benevolence and kindness of the emperor." However, when I arrived on the battlefield in China, I immediately experienced the harsh reality of the Japanese army burning villages and massacring peasants at will. I began to slowly feel that this harsh reality was not only incompatible with the beautiful lies of "love and love of the people" and "benevolence of the emperor" preached by the Japanese army, but also simply ridiculous.
Such questions are even more so after close and direct contact with superior officers who have been praised as "brave commanders."
After I went to the squad station, I met directly with the wing commander and the brigade commander, but only in the process of the sweeping operation. At that time, I had different impressions of the two chiefs. Wing Commander Yamamoto Hirosa, who later became known as an infantry regimental commander on the Burmese battlefield for his "bravery in combat" and "fortitude and courage", was highly praised by the upper echelons of the Japanese Army. In a village on the Battlefield of China, he personally gave a loud order on the grounds that he suspected the villagers of colluding with the Eighth Route Army: "Burn it all." ”
Everyone understands that this means to burn everything that can be burned. When I heard about it, I was shocked. Because it was the wing commander who gave the order directly, the soldiers went crazy and set fire to one peasant house after another. An old woman who remained in the village clutched the feet of the Japanese soldier and begged him to stop setting the fire. The Japanese soldier kicked the old woman to the ground and continued to set fire to the peasants' houses. Seeing that, I couldn't help but wonder, "Is it the right thing to do?"
The first brigade commander, Hideo Yamada, has been the captain of the brigade for two years, and has long become a veteran of sweeping operations, and has always achieved "brilliant results" and has been praised by the front army and the division. In 1942, he became the commander of the First Wing of the Japanese Army's first paratrooper unit. But at that time I thought, with such a big belly, can he fall from the sky with a parachute? When conducting a sweeping operation under the direct command of the brigade commander, if you go to the brigade headquarters set up in a certain village on the way, you can see the peasant with his hands tied behind him hanging from the branches of the tree, and the Japanese soldiers torturing and interrogating the peasant in order to find out the location and whereabouts of the Eighth Route Army. Sometimes, the old man who looked like a common man was hung there, and his pants slid down, revealing his lower body. The captain loudly told the peasant to put his pants on, while the commander tortured him. At that time, I heard for the first time the Chinese Chinese created by the Invading Japanese Army. The interrogation, which was personally ordered by the captain of the brigade, was one of the things that I felt very confused and incomprehensible at the time.
It turned out that the third squadron commander was Lieutenant Masao Ueda of the brigade headquarters, Lieutenant Noburi Fukuda, the captain of the first machine gun squadron, and other older officers, who often talked at the banquet about how to torture the arrestees by various means, and many of them were sexual abuse of women, as if they were specially told to me, a young man who knew nothing. However, the things they say I have not actually seen with my own eyes.
After a day or days of mopping up operations, we returned to the garrison and town. At that time, the Japanese soldiers would definitely be carrying "booty" stolen from non-"security areas", most of which were food and non-staple foods. Of course, robbery is prohibited in and around Jinghe Town.
Sweep back the ghost soldiers
The neighborhood of Jinghe Town is not very large, but as I said earlier, commerce is still relatively prosperous. The Task Force often sent items to the squadron headquarters where squadron officers gathered, such as 200 dumplings, 50 pears, or something. Obviously, those were part of the taxes in kind imposed by the Task Force from the population.
Our barracks is located in the southwest corner of the town, surrounded by earthen walls, covered with turrets, the center of the courtyard is a place for centralized roll call and sword training, and directly below the turret is the sentry post, which is the only entrance and exit to the barracks. The headquarters of our squadron was huddled in this yard, and it was not permissible to go out casually. Therefore, going out to participate in the sweeping operation is a rare opportunity for soldiers to go out. Because the soldiers had the acquiescence of their commanders: once out of the "security zone", they could rob with impunity. Mainly to find and rob all kinds of food.
As I said earlier, during the second half of 1941, when our squadron was stationed in Jinghe Town, it was necessary to dispatch a sweep operation almost every three or four days. A lot of times it's like the one I'm talking about below. The Japanese army received daily information about the Eighth Route Army from the secret agents, special task forces and "policing" maintenance committees of the Japanese army. After analyzing how reliable this information is, the squadron leader will choose who he thinks is suitable to attack and decide whether to go into combat. Once the squadron leader has made the decision to go into battle, first of all, the warrant officer in charge of personnel must make a table to determine the personnel to fight. Our third squadron generally dispatched 40 to 60 men at a time, and the squadron leader was formed into two or three squads below, and I served as the leader of the first squad. The squad consisted of about 20 to 30 men and was organized into two or three detachments equipped with light machine guns and sixty artillery detachments.
We usually depart in the middle of the night in order to approach the targeted villages under the cover of dark night. In many cases, such operations aimed at sneaking up on the Eighth Route Army were not even seen because operational secrets were exposed. Perhaps even in Jinghe Town, there were people who listened to news and ventilated messages for the Eighth Route Army. Moreover, if the Japanese army was operating at night, the dogs on all sides would bark and bark, exposing our secret whereabouts.
The Eighth Route Army also banned dog breeding in areas under its control, and formed a dog killing team to travel between villages to hunt down villagers' dogs. Because dogs not only eat a lot of food, but their barking will also expose the whereabouts of the Eighth Route Army. However, in my experience, in the guerrilla zone between the Japanese-controlled area and the Eighth Route Army-controlled area, the barking of dogs could always be heard in the distance. Therefore, I am afraid that the Japanese army is more likely to be unable to conceal its own whereabouts.
Nevertheless, we cannot fail to admit that the Intelligence Work of the Eighth Route Army was even better. Because the Eighth Route Army had the support of the people. Needless to say, even in the townships and villages of the guerrilla areas, the Eighth Route Army has organized self-defense regiments, further allowing all regions and units to organize a salvation congress. On the walls of villages and houses, large characters were painted with slogans and slogans of anti-Japanese resistance.
Among them, we were impressed by propaganda slogans written in Japanese against the Japanese army, such as "The enemy is the Japanese warlord", "The Chinese and Japanese people unite to jointly overthrow the Japanese warlord", "Do not burn the houses of the Chinese", there are many such slogans.
In particular, there are many slogans and leaflets for Japanese soldiers that say", "No houses are burned", which shows how deep the disaster and suffering caused to the Chinese people after the houses were burned down. This fact and the great shock to my heart when I heard the command of the wing commander to "burn out" have remained in my memory because of this.
In addition, we received orders to arrest and extradite women with short hair to the gendarmerie as soon as they were found in the villagers, supposedly because women with short hair cuts were definitely members of the Women's Anti-Japanese Salvation Congress. When the Japanese army tortured the arrested peasants, they often asked the question: "Are there any people from the Women's Rescue Association?" "But I myself haven't even seen a woman with short haircuts.
Next, I would like to turn to the question of requisitioning war materiel on the battlefield. As I have already said, during the study phase of the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School, we were never educated in wartime international law. Later, while intensively training at the Wing Headquarters, I once saw a secret pamphlet entitled "Outline of Service in Wartime." This pamphlet was written by the Army Education Directorate in July 1938 after the Nanjing Massacre and distributed to junior officers.
The pamphlet explains very simply the difference between requisitioning supplies and looting. Requisitions of materiel can be carried out on the orders of senior commanders (senior officers above the head of division) or division managers and regimental commanders, as well as direct and autonomous actions by the units. The requisition of supplies carried out autonomously by each unit should be carried out in the area designated by the senior commander and under the command of the officers, by a specially formed requisition team. After the requisition of the goods, compensation shall be given or supporting documents shall be given for the purpose of subsequent compensation. In addition, it cannot be regarded as requisitioning supplies, but looting and plundering. If units below the squadron are dispatched to requisition supplies, or corporals, or soldiers to carry out the requisition of supplies at will, of course, it is also robbery and plunder. But I have never seen such a pamphlet in the Third Squadron, nor have I ever seen the physical documents issued for future compensation. Therefore, the so-called "conscription" of the Japanese army was actually robbery. As a daily act of the Japanese army, robbery was connived and tacitly accepted by the superiors.
In the autumn of 1941, when I was in Jinghe Town, the Third Squadron conducted frequent sweeping operations, and the number of operations was quite large. At this stage, the only war dead in our squadron were Ishii Cobia. At that time, Ishii was riding a bicycle at the front of the line, and when he first came to a village, he was hit by a sniper bullet. Subsequently, Nomura Cao's headquarters piled up a hill-like pile of firewood in the open field and cremated ishii's cobia. The first encounter with the reality of the squadron having war dead made me feel the harsh atmosphere of the war.
Because some corporals were killed, the battle report was written with a much larger result than actually. After consulting with Commander Nomura, the squadron leader decided to write down seven or eight captured rifles. As a result, a battle that actually had almost no results in the battle became a boast and exaggeration in the war report that "the enemy abandoned more than twenty corpses and captured eight rifles." As for the captured rifles, our squadron has already prepared a considerable amount of reserves to cope with such a situation.
In this way, I spent 1941 every day from morning to night in a war life composed of garrisons and sweeps, and the Chinese people I came into contact with were only the residents of Jinghe Town.
The residents of Jinghe had to "treat" the Japanese army well and try to "establish good relations" with the special task force. In my spare time, I have also seen the blacksmith shop and the people working in the tofu house, but this is only in the neighborhoods of the "security zone" controlled by the Japanese army. In the "non-security areas" where the Japanese army swept away, it was completely different, the people all fled, and only the elderly, especially young women, were left at home. The situation between "security zones" and "non-security zones" is in stark contrast.
In this way, four months had passed since I arrived in North China, and I gradually became accustomed to the life of the Japanese garrison, which often fought against the Eighth Route Army in the "non-security areas." But is this what militarist education has taught me so far, and I believe in, the "holy war" that I believe in? The distance between education and reality is also too great.
When I was in the third grade of elementary school, there was the "918 Incident" in which the Japanese army launched the war of aggression against China, and the third grade of middle school happened to be the full-scale outbreak of the Japanese war of aggression against China. Whether in elementary school or secondary school, I received a militarist education. This education simply tells me that the war of aggression against China was a war in which the "righteous Japanese army" punished the "evil Chinese army." After graduating from the fourth grade of secondary school, I entered the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School, and militarist education also had a little bit of theoretical color. The mission of the Japanese army is to make the emperor's "might" widely known all over the world, that is, the so-called "eight humerus and one universe", and the war now being waged is the first step taken as that "sacred mission", that is, the "holy war" to liberate the Chinese people from the oppression of the European and American powers. However, the reality of "jihad" is very strange. I have to think that the fact that the Japanese army burned down villages and arrested villagers and tortured them cannot be linked to any words of "loving the people" and "liberating the people" under any circumstances.
Compared with my classmates at the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School, I am afraid that there are still some differences in my feelings. When I entered the preparatory department of the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School, the overwhelming number of my classmates were those born in Yamaguchi Prefecture and Kagoshima Prefecture who were older than me and were determined to enter the Army Noncommissioned Officer School, and the second ronin (that is, those who did not enter the university after graduating from high school and stayed at home for a year or two), and the tenacity and fortitude they showed, which undoubtedly coexisted with their faith and loyalty to the emperor. Therefore, their feelings and the values of the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School that they taught regarded their lives as feathers for the sake of the emperor reached a high degree of tacit understanding in an instant. They regarded the Great Righteousness written by Yamamoto Nakasa as a must-read book, and they never tired of reading it, and they worshiped it as a god. Many of them have indeed sincerely written the bold words "Next time we will meet at the Yasukuni Shrine" in the graduation commemorative anthology. The book "Daiichi" is the posthumous work of Yamamoto Goro Nakasa, who died in the war of aggression against China in 1938, and he devoted himself to Ye Yin [Note: Ye Yin, a famous samurai in Japanese history, made great contributions to the establishment of the samurai's moral code and code of conduct. ] Bushido preached that only dedication to the emperor was the highest virtue of the samurai, and was regarded as a norm that regulated the japanese soldiers' outlook on life and death and values.
However, when I was in the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School, it seemed that it was difficult to be in touch with that militaristic mood and not to contradict it. Because I was born in Tokyo, I experienced elementary and junior high school life in the Metropolis, and I read famous works such as "Complete Works of World Literature", "Complete Works of Meiji Taisho Literature", and "Complete Works of Modern Japanese Literature" collected by my father's library. Therefore, in my heart, there is also the side that is attracted by the ideas and feelings of humanitarianism and human fraternity, and the same militaristic atmosphere as the classmates can not always be mixed.
Perhaps it is precisely because of this humanistic feeling in my heart that I have doubts about the Japanese army's treatment of the Chinese people. However, I also have in my heart the idea that I am a soldier of the Empire and an officer of the Emperor, and I should be ashamed if I have doubts about the Japanese army, and I cannot get rid of this idea for a long time. Being in this dilemma and confusion often makes me feel distressed and confused.
Contracting paratyphoid fever almost killed him
In early December 1941, I was appointed instructor of the Third Squadron in order to enlist the recruits recruited in 1941. Therefore, together with the assistant teachers and assistants designated by the squadron as recruits for enlistment education, they were summoned to the wing headquarters located between the rivers to receive intensive training as recruit education officers.
On the morning of December 8, a few days after intensive training at the barracks southeast of Hejian County, Captain Kazuo Machida, the new aide-de-camp of the wing in charge of training, gathered all the trainees and told us that Japan had declared war on the United States and Britain. However, for those of us who are on the battlefield of China, such important intelligence seems to have a feeling of being far away and not caring about ourselves. At present, the war of aggression against China is getting farther and farther away from the original goal, and it has completely become a long-term war stuck in the mud, and I don't know what year and month it will end. Even as a new officer, I know that the Japanese army has not won the hearts and minds of the people at all, and it is the Eighth Route Army that has won the hearts and minds of the people, so as far as intelligence warfare is concerned, the Japanese army is already at a disadvantage, and from this point of view, it is very difficult for the Japanese army to end the war of aggression against China as soon as possible by stepping up the sweeping operation.
It turned out that the Japanese army regarded the Soviet Union as the first imaginary enemy, so it was always ready to go to war against the Soviet Union. Now that they have suddenly declared war on the United States and Britain, what do they really want to do? This is my frank thought. In any case, the war against the United States and Britain has nothing to do with our army, which is far away from the Chinese mainland. Only the Chinese Second Infantry Regiment of our Twenty-seventh Division occupied the American-British concession in Tianjin without bloodshed, which can be regarded as part of the battle with the United States and Britain.
Since then, I have felt dizzy and sore for many days. So I went to the infirmary of the headquarters of the wing to find the experienced Captain Nagaya military doctor and asked him to diagnose me, and the result was that the body temperature was as high as nearly forty degrees, and the longhouse military doctor lieutenant diagnosed it as deputy typhoid fever as soon as he saw it, and asked me to be hospitalized immediately. At that time, there were many soldiers suffering from typhoid and abdominal typhoid fever in our war zone.
No matter where they are, most of the bacterial infectious diseases are transmitted from water and food, and most people have serious diseases, high fever, especially typhoid fever, the mortality rate is very high. And I got typhoid fever, and it kept getting worse. Although he was admitted to a hospital, this one in Hejian Prefecture was not a field hospital, but there were some simple medical equipment like bandages, which were at best slightly more decent than the infirmary of the headquarters of the wing, and a few doctors were usually sent from the field hospital to see a doctor. After I was admitted to the hospital, I slept groggily for nearly a week with a persistent high fever. Later, when I woke up, the military doctor told me: "Such a critical condition has actually improved, in the end it is young." "According to the hygienist, the amount of medicine given to me is already a record. My arms and thighs, which had been pinned many times, also became muscles stiff and swollen.
The house used for the bandaging is actually an ordinary Chinese-style house, and the so-called ward is just a bed in the room, which becomes a ward for officers. When my illness entered the recovery period, another officer was admitted to the ward, and his illness was scarlet fever. Weak and defenseless, I was immediately infected by him. I had a high fever all the time, a rash all over my body, and my condition worsened again. Because this is entirely the responsibility of the hospital, the military doctor also went all out to treat me, re-drip and inject, and finally helped me pick up this little life. As a result, I lay in my hospital bed and ushered in the New Year of 1942.
Since then, I have experienced a long period of convalescence. The two major illnesses that followed made my body completely weakened. As soon as I entered the recovery period, I asked to be discharged from the hospital earlier. But the medic refused my request. As a result, I lived a tasteless ward life in this troubled Hejian County bandage until the beginning of February 1942.
In mid-February 1942, I was finally discharged from the hospital and returned to the Third Squadron stationed in Jinghe Town. Of course, the work of the recruit instructor has long been handed over to others. The recruits of our Chinese Garrison Infantry 3rd Regiment in 1941 had already entered the 4th Guards Infantry Regiment as a supplementary unit in December of that year, and then took a boat from Yupin to Busan, arriving in Cangxian on January 1, 1942. Recruits of the First Brigade received intensive education in Xianxian County, where the brigade headquarters was located. These recruits later became the main force in the operation of opening up the lines of communication on the mainland, but I had not yet met them when they enlisted and reported to the brigade.
During my hospitalization, the situation in North China also changed a lot. The "public order" situation in the eastern Hebei region deteriorated sharply, and a small unit of the First Regiment of Chinese Infantry Garrison was completely annihilated by the Eighth Route Army. The infantry regiment headquarters stationed in Cangxian county moved to Tangshan to strengthen troops in the eastern Hebei region. The headquarters of our 3rd Chinese Infantry Regiment in Tun also moved from Hejian to Cangxian County, and the area of security was extended to Yanshan County east of the Jinpu Line and Wuqiang County south of the Shide Line.
Although the wing's strength has decreased, the area of security we have assumed has become wider.
Also during the hospitalization, the Pacific War Bureau also made great progress. After I was discharged from the hospital, I saw newspapers from the beginning of the war at the squadron headquarters, saw many reports of sneak attacks on Hawaii, occupation of Hong Kong, attacks on Malaysia and the Philippines, and the capture of Singapore was just around the corner. Although the Japanese army was in trouble in the Chinese battlefield, it was on the southern front [Note: That is, the Southeast Asian battlefield.] But there has been a lot of development.
During our stay in North China, we had a radio in the team headquarters of our Third Squadron, and newspapers were received together for several days. For ease of reading, there are bound copies of newspapers at the squadron headquarters, so that we have the opportunity to learn a great deal about the situation of the war to some extent.
The detachment leader stationed in Liu Wo
As the Twenty-seventh Division adjusted its troop deployment, a detachment was sent from the Third Squadron of our Chinese Infantry Regiment in Tun to Liuwo between Shaheqiao and Hejian County, and in late February 1942 I was appointed captain of this squad of more than twenty people. This was Captain Yamazaki's care for me considering that I had just recovered from a serious illness, because with the squadron, I had to go out to fight sweeps one after another, but as a squad leader, I could more or less live a leisurely life. At this time, while the Japanese army in the central Hebei region was shrinking, the eighth route army's actions also became active, and the first brigade also launched frequent sweeping operations.
Liuwo is a major traffic point located between Shahe Bridge and Hejian County, where the road from Hejian and Cangxian to Dacheng is forked. Here there are the vigilantes of the Policing Council and the Puppet Regime in North China, and their leaders and captains come to me every morning to report on the "law and order" situation, especially the intelligence about the Eighth Route Army. Contrary to the Japanese army, which had an overwhelming superiority in weapons and equipment, the Eighth Route Army attached great importance to political and ideological work. In particular, there are many propaganda slogans aimed at ordinary soldiers of the Japanese army, such as "Our enemy is a Japanese warlord" and "The Chinese and Japanese people unite to jointly overthrow the Japanese warlords and chaebols who are planning to launch a war of aggression.", and the villages we went everywhere were written on the walls. And the activities that I personally experienced about the Eighth Route Army, which were directly directed against the Japanese army, were all learned when I was the commander of the detachment stationed in Liuwo.
In order to prevent the Eighth Route Army from destroying communication lines and lines of communication, it is necessary to have someone on duty all night without sleeping, and every hour they must exchange telephones with neighboring detachments to check whether the communication lines are open.
Because the Eighth Route Army often used the telephone lines of the Japanese army to use Japanese to publicize the Japanese army. The Eighth Route Army connected the Japanese telephone line with a portable telephone, and then used Japanese to carry out anti-war peace propaganda to the Japanese soldiers on duty. Whenever that happened, I, as the captain, always forbade the soldier on duty to answer the call, shouted "traitor" and ordered the soldier on duty to cut off the phone.
Because the people who actually used fluent Japanese to propagate the soldiers were all anti-war organizations formed by the Japanese anti-war alliance in China during the War of Resistance. ] of the <
Japan's Anti-War Alliance
In Jinghe, Chinese farmers also often give us bags of jujubes called "condolence bags," which always contain leaflets about japan's agricultural harvest failures. In addition, sometimes there are letters sent from Japan in the bag, next to the words written by family members about the poor production of rice this year, and in different handwriting, Japanese farmers who are suffering from crop failures and hope that soldiers will stop the war and return home as soon as possible. This may have been the work of the internal staff of the Post and Telecommunications Bureau, or the mail was taken away on the way to the mail, and the above content was added before it was delivered to the Japanese soldiers. In any case, it proves the fact that there are indeed Japanese people helping the Eighth Route Army, that is to say, the Eighth Route Army is actively carrying out anti-war work against the Japanese army.
In turn, the Japanese army learned how important it was for the Eighth Route Army to capture Japanese prisoners.
Our detachment built a bunker in the corner of Liu Wo, and all the members of the detachment were able to shrink inside. One day, the maintenance chief of the village came to the bunker with a young girl and said to me, "Captain, how about this girl being your wife?" "Although this unexpected thing makes me very angry, I know very well that this kind of thing is not uncommon among Japanese officers. I have heard that many of the officers who used to serve in the field did raise small wives in the barracks, which caused great dissatisfaction among the soldiers.
Here, there is one thing that bothers me. There was a veteran of my men who had served for three years but was still a first-class soldier. He was in charge of the cooking class, and often went out casually to socialize with the maintenance club and the guards, and ate and drank with them. Just as I was thinking about what to do to clean up the situation, the veteran was admitted to the hospital in Hejian because of the deterioration of the venereal disease.
I had been the squadron leader in Liu wo for less than a month, and in late March 1942 I returned to the squadron location. From March to April, as a squad leader, I participated in the sweeping operations conducted by the brigade in Liuguanzhuang, Southeast Village, Tianjiazhuang and other places. All these battles were fought without any major success as a result of the flexible guerrilla warfare waged by the Eighth Route Army. This was my last combat experience in the Jizhong region.
In early May 1942, I was appointed assistant to the adjutant at the headquarters of the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Chinese Garrison. So I bid farewell to the Third Squadron and reported to the headquarters of the wing, which had been transferred to Cangxian County.
Because Lieutenant Goro Kinoshita, a special volunteer officer who was the flag bearer of the wing at that time, was about to be transferred, I became his successor as the flag bearer of the wing. The Wing also appointed me as an instructor to prepare the personnel of the Regiment's corporal cadets before going to the Baoding InstructionAlty School of the Japanese Army in the North China Front. In this way, I followed the headquarters of the wing to Yanshan County and Qingyun County on the Bohai Sea.
This desolate land, which smells of sea salt in the air, is completely different from the rich and fertile Jizhong Plain. The activities of the Eighth Route Army were also not very active.
Since Daisa Yamamoto, who had previously been the commander of the 3rd Chinese Infantry Regiment in Tun, was hospitalized, Ono Osamu Daisaku succeeded him as wing commander. Ono Daisaku is a man from the Army Provincial Rewards Division, and he attaches too much importance to personal performance, so the whole team does not evaluate him very well.
In early June 1942, I was officially appointed flag bearer of the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Chinese Garrison. Because the flag does not go with the wing to sweep, but is placed in the wing headquarters, the responsibility of the wing flag bearer is actually equivalent to that of the wing aide-de-camp, and the actual work includes handling confidential documents, recording the "Diary of the Battle" and the "Battle Details". At that time, after the initial recovery of the serious illness, my body was gradually recovering, and I left the fierce march and war, and most of the daily work was desk paperwork, so my body began to gain weight. Judging from the photos I took with my father at the time, my fair skin and chubby face did not look at all like an officer in a combat unit on the front line of the war.
When I graduated from the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School, my father, who was a manager officer, was the head of the tenth section (construction division) of the Army Aviation Headquarters, and because the construction of an airfield was being built in Japan with great fanfare, it was said that my father was the chief-level official who could use the most funds in the national budget at that time. After I set out to arrive in North China, my father became the manager and director of the 41st Division, and also came to Shanxi Province in North China. During the Jizhong sweep planned by the North Chinese Front in the spring of 1942, the 41st Division, as the main force, left Shanxi Province to participate in the Jizhong sweep. After the battle, the 41st Division was in Dexian County, Hebei Province[Note: "DeXian" is the name of the old county, which belongs to Shandong Province. It has now been assigned to Ling County. Divisional headquarters were placed. In early June 1942, my father visited Cangxian in the neighboring area as the manager of the division and regiment, and our father and son, who had been separated for a long time, finally met. My father was surprised to see my fat body, and I told him that I would lose weight once I got back to the front. When I met my father, I don't know who at the headquarters of the wing had taken a picture of our father and son.
Around the middle of June 1942, the headquarters of the 3rd Chinese Infantry Regiment in Tun was relocated to Hejian County for the purpose of conducting a sweeping operation. The squadron deputy of the Eleventh Squadron stationed in Renqiu, Hebei, was my classmate Ishida Hisayuki, who was shot in the abdomen when he led his troops to fight the Eighth Route Army in a village near the garrison when he raised his saber and charged. Badly wounded, Ishida was sent to Kawama, where Nagaya's military doctor operated on him to remove the bullet from his abdomen. Although in our unit there is the following comment: even if you are shot in the abdomen, you can get the best help as long as you let the Longhouse military doctor treat it. However, due to the delay in treatment, it eventually caused Ishida's peritonitis, and after experiencing unbearable pain, Ishida died. At that time, I could only say some words of encouragement, and watched is the soul of Ishida, who could not answer but only groaned, returned home. It was the first time I had seen a living person die in front of me. Longhouse military doctor is a gynecologist who has personally performed and completed many abdominal opening surgeries since the Wuhan war, and is deeply trusted among the officers and men of the company. However, it was too late to start treating Ishida, and the Longhouse military doctor was helpless, so he finally gave up treatment.
Of the five of us who served in the Third Regiment of Infantry stationed in China, four were from the Third Guards Infantry Regiment, and I was the only one from the Fourth Guards Infantry Regiment, so I didn't know each other until I arrived in Tianjin. Of the five of us, Asada was soon transferred to the Air Communications Division, Miyama temporarily returned to Japan after becoming a student at Toyama School, and after Ishida's death, only Kayo and I were left in the wing. Soon, Miyama returned to the team.
The three of us, Kayo, Miyama, and I, all later took part as squadron leaders in operations to open up the continental lines of communication. Sanshan was killed in the Battle of Chaling, and I also switched to serving in other units, so only Kayang stayed in the Third Wing of the Chinese Infantry Garrison, and he finally ushered in the defeat and surrender of Japan as a lieutenant of the wing. In addition, it is mentioned that Kayo joined the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force after the war. In the 1960s, the Ground Self-Defense Forces entertained some researchers and critics at Chitose, and I also visited the Ground Self-Defense Forces observation exercises as an invitee, meeting again with Kayu, who was the commander of the exercises.
The 55th class of students at our Army Non-Commissioned Officer School had just become second lieutenants, and it was also the time of the outbreak of the Pacific War, so the mortality rate of subordinate commanders in combat was very high. When we enrolled, there were 2,400 preparatory students, and after joining the army, they were divided into two parts, the army and the air force, and a total of 973 people died during the war, and the mortality rate was as high as more than 40%.