No Surrender Read Online Free Page A

Shigetomi, was considered to be one of the toughest officers there. His motto was “Better to sweat on the training ground than to bleed on the battleground,” and he drilled his fifty soldiers constantly in suicide-attack maneuvers. Shigetomi’s favorite expressions were, “You’re stupid” and “You’ve got everything backward.” These were usually bleated out to the accompaniment of a sharp slap on the mis-doer’s face.
    I learned from Captain Shigetomi what military training was and what it meant to be a soldier. He also taught me spiritual discipline. Soldiers, I was told, are always goofing off or making excuses, but such conduct is not permissible for officers. In our school, the worst disgrace was to be caught unprepared or uninformed. Nothing should be handled in slipshod fashion, no matter how trivial it might seem. Captain Shigetomi made me into an officer, and it was my pride as an officer that sustained me during my thirty years on Lubang.
    On March 5, 1944, when I was out on maneuvers, a message came telling me to return to the base on the double to see a visitor. I ran all the way back; the visitor turned out to be Tadao. When he saw me, he said, “What happened to you?”
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    â€œYou look like a real man now,” came the reply.
    My brother had been attached for temporary duty to a division command in Korea and had been in Pyongyang for a while, but as of March 1, he had been ordered to Twenty-third Army Headquarters in Kwangtung. He was to take aplane from Hakata in a day or two, but he had found time to come to see me. We talked for a while, then just as he started to leave, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Be strong! It won’t be long before you’re going to need all the strength you have.”
    I said firmly, “Don’t worry, I’ll die like a man.”
    â€œWell,” said my brother, “there is no point in rushing off to get killed. But you’d better be prepared to die in case your turn comes.”
    I walked with Tadao to the front gate, and just before we got there, he turned to me and asked in a low voice, “Have you ever had a woman?”
    I just smiled at him without answering. Our eyes met, and he said heartily, “Well, this is it. Take care of yourself!”
    He started to walk away, but at just that point I mustered up the courage to say, “Give me fifty yen to remember you by.”
    I suppose he had been expecting a touch, because he good-naturedly took out his wallet and started riffling through it. Grumbling that he had no small money, he handed me a hundred-yen note and said with a grin, “I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask for my change.”
    I thought to myself that this was probably our last good-bye. Once more he told me to take care of myself, and then he marched off with great strides, his spit-polished boots glistening in the sun.

    In August I finished officers’ training and became an apprentice officer. I would have to remain in this status another four months before my commission as a second lieutenant became official. The usual procedure was for apprentice officers to go back to their former units. As it happened, the war situation in the Pacific was so serious by this time that half of the men whohad come from China were to be reassigned to units of the Western Army in Kyushu. Since I was not included in that group, I was looking forward to going back to China. I was joking with the others about how great it would be to be filling up on that wonderful Chinese food again when suddenly I was called to headquarters.
    There the message was, “You are hereby ordered to the Thirty-third Squadron in the Eastern Sector.” This was a unit I had never heard of, so I asked the officer, “What does the squadron do?”
    â€œI can’t tell you.”
    â€œWhere is it stationed?”
    â€œAt a place called