Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Prologue
- Author's Note
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Setting the Scene
- 2 An Extraordinary Diary of an Ordinary Soldier
- 3 Priming the Country for War: Imperial Rescripts as Fortifiers of the Kokutai
- 4 Out of Landscape
- 5 The Landscape of Deprivation
- 6 Creating an Idealized World
- 7 Re-creating an Emotionally Accommodating Landscape
- 8 Death as Man's True Calling
- 9 Challenges to a Resolve to Die
- 10 Reconciling Death
- Epilogue
- List of Images and Maps
- Glossary of Terms
- Abbreviations for sources held at the Australian War Memorial (Canberra, ACT)
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Landscape of Deprivation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Prologue
- Author's Note
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Setting the Scene
- 2 An Extraordinary Diary of an Ordinary Soldier
- 3 Priming the Country for War: Imperial Rescripts as Fortifiers of the Kokutai
- 4 Out of Landscape
- 5 The Landscape of Deprivation
- 6 Creating an Idealized World
- 7 Re-creating an Emotionally Accommodating Landscape
- 8 Death as Man's True Calling
- 9 Challenges to a Resolve to Die
- 10 Reconciling Death
- Epilogue
- List of Images and Maps
- Glossary of Terms
- Abbreviations for sources held at the Australian War Memorial (Canberra, ACT)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
No Tropical Paradise
Prior to departing Japan, Tamura and his comrades had little idea of the conditions that awaited them. In fact, the general perception in Japan of the physical conditions that prevailed in the South was completely at odds with the stark reality faced by the soldiers. The New Guinea terrain was completely misunderstood, as were the tactics needed to be employed. An account of the road building fiasco between Madang and Lae recounted:
The road building projects were next to impossible for the Japanese to accomplish. Their maps were poor. The routes they selected […] led them through disease-ridden jungles and swamps, over towering mountains, and up and across canyons and gorges. They never had enough machinery and what they had was ineffective. Their trucks, for example, were not sufficiently powerful to climb steep slopes. Their horses fared poorly on jungle grasses. Bridges kept washing away […]. Combat troops were unhappy as labourers […].
A compatriot of the New Guinea campaign, Ide Ninja revealed the extent of the outrageous impressions provided to the troops en route to New Guinea when he wrote ‘the army, advancing by automobiles and bicycles as we saw it in the news in Korea, is a dream’. References to transport were recurrent and reflected the misinformation that had been provided to departing troops. The reality was that
It took combat divisions some time to assemble their forces while such supporting units as engineer, air defense and lines of communication units, because of lack of shipping space, arrived minus motor trucks, road construction equipment, power generating machines, horses and baggage. In addition, the physical condition of the men when they landed in New Guinea was often very poor. For example, 800 men of a convoy of 3,000 landed at Hansa in September [1943] were immediately hospitalized. The majority of these were soldiers who had voluntarily left the hospital at Palau in order to travel with their units to New Guinea but the result of their commanders agreeing to this was that important space was taken up by men who were useless when they arrived.
To some extent, though, the soldiers’ lack of knowledge about the conditions in New Guinea was the result of censorship by the Japanese authorities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing Japan's War in New GuineaThe Diary of Tamura Yoshikazu, pp. 113 - 140Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019