"Perhaps He Is Human"

The six miles from Massacre Bay to Chichagof Harbor, on bleak and barren Attu, are a five-hour walk. Covering this distance in the wake of the Japs' last stand at the end of May, TIME, Correspondent Robert Sherrod gained a gruesome insight into the nature of the enemy in the Pacific. In a two-mile stretch there were 800 Japanese dead. Many of them had killed themselves. Reported Correspondent Sherrod:

The results of the Jap fanaticism stagger the imagination. The very violence of the scene is incomprehensible to the Western mind. Here groups of men had met their self-imposed obligation, to die rather than accept capture, by blowing them selves to bits. I saw one Jap sitting impaled on a bayonet which was stuck through his back, evidently by a friend. All the other suicides had chosen the grenade. Most of them simply held grenades against their stomachs or chests. The explosive charge blasted away their vital organs. Probably one in four held a grenade against his head. There were many headless Jap bodies between Massacre and Chichagof. Sometimes the grenade split the head in half, leaving the right face On one shoulder, the left face on the other.

Ironically, these Japanese killed them selves before they had fully carried out their mission. They were supposed to kill as many Americans as possible and kill themselves only when all hope of killing Americans was gone. But examination of the bodies revealed that many who chose death probably were not even wounded. They could have kept on fighting. They had plenty of ammunition left. They had raided American supply dumps for food. But so eager for death were they that they could not wait. The grenades they could have thrown against Americans were pressed against their bowels in honorable hara-kiri fashion.

"Blood Like Wine." In their madness some of the Japanese armed themselves only with bayonets tied to sticks, but most of them had rifles and plenty of ammunition and pockets full of hand grenades. Some soldiers heard the attackers shouting: "Japanese boys kill American boys! Japanese drink blood like wine!" But for their wild, weird screams, the Japs might have killed many more Americans in their sleep. The Japs brought 40-ounce sake wine bottles with them.

Captain Ritchie Clark described the initial attack on the command post on the plateau: "The Japs would come at us yelling like Indians and our men would shoot them at 30 or 40 yd. Whenever one was wounded he would grab a grenade and blow himself up. There were about 200 of them up here and the Americans killed around 130 in that first charge. The other 70 came back Sunday morning and we were ready for them. They saw it was hopeless and began holding grenades against their stomachs and blowing their guts out. In all we lost about 40 men."

Companionship of Death. In a burned tent about two miles from Massacre, I found eight grotesque little Japanese bodies, clothes burned off, arms reaching outward or upward--where there were arms. Two bodies were burned to crisps, one atop the other, fused into one charred hump.

Within a hundred yards there were 45 more Japanese bodies. Four were in one foxhole; in death the Japs seemed to seek companionship wherever they could. Another body, its red and yellow and blue entrails spilling out like yeasty dough, lay atop the mound outside the hole. Twenty yards from this foxhole there was a little brown-skinned hand, blown there after it had pressed a grenade against the stomach. The glove encasing the hand was only slightly torn.

Next to a mountain stream which runs down the steep slope were nine more bodies within a 25-yd. area. There were plenty of bullet clips in the little leather cases which hung on the wearers' belts. Near the bottom of the slope lay the body of a Japanese captain. His silk white handkerchief was centered by a lewd ink sketch. A couple of hundred yards down the valley we found a dead Japanese officer who carried, like most Japs, photographs of his wife and children. It had rained the previous night, so the officer's open mouth was half filled with water.

It was easy to distinguish those who had used our grenades. Their chests and stomachs were both gone. Our grenades, which probably accounted for half the Japs we killed on Attu, carry a much more powerful charge. The Jap grenade is vastly inferior. Some Jap bodies were found beside three or four duds, indicating that the victim had had an exasperating time killing himself.

Pattern of Frustration. The fantastic Battle of Attu may be a pattern in our war against Japan. The suicides obviously were an act of frustration. When the Jap knows he is hopelessly beaten he tries to kill himself, after killing as many of us as he can. But in his anxiety he presses the grenade to his stomach before the plotted time. The ordinary, unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing on Attu indicates it.

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