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
- 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
The diary ends on about 8 December 1943. We can only presume what happened to Tamura after that time. Tamura's family received notification that he was killed in battle in March 1944 at Biliau, New Guinea.
In late December 1943, the 41st Division was moved from Wewak to defend Madang. Historian John Miller's account of the march details the terrible conditions the Japanese troops had to endure:
The retreat to Madang, almost two hundred miles away by the coastal route, was another of the terrible Japanese marches in New Guinea. The troops struggled through jungles, across rivers, and over the awesome cliffs and mountains of the Finisterres. Fatigue, straggling, disease and starvation characterized the retreat. ‘The men were no longer able to care for themselves and walked step after step looking ahead only a meter to see where they were going’. The two divisions [41st and 51st] had totaled twenty thousand in December 1943; only ten thousand wearily entered Madang in mid-February.
The fact that 20,000 set out, with only 10,000 completing the march, provides some clues to the enormous difficulty of the manouevre. An Australian report of the Finisterre range states that ‘The country in the Finisterre Range is rugged, steep, precipitous and covered with dense rain forest. It rains heavily almost every day thus making living conditions uncomfortable. By day it is hot, by night three blankets are necessary. There is, therefore, a constant battle with mud, slush, rain, and cold’. Miller concludes:
Yet that the ten thousand made such a trip and that the Japanese could make such marches in retreat and in the advance are tribute and testimony to the patient fortitude and iron resolution of the Japanese soldier.
The Allied forces lost some 12,000 troops during the war in New Guinea. Around 223,000 soldiers and sailors of Imperial Japan perished as a result of artillery bombardment, strafing, and bombing by the Allies but also from starvation and exhaustion by the roadside, where their bodies were left. Having made the arduous journey from Wewak to Madang, over the very mountains which we saw were a source of contentment for Tamura, we can only contemplate that Tamura perhaps finally received the ‘glorious’ death in battle to which he had aspired. This study, by its nature, can only provide the information that Tamura's diary gives.
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- Writing Japan's War in New GuineaThe Diary of Tamura Yoshikazu, pp. 299 - 306Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019