Some Give Up

Was the Japanese conception of morale, which includes a devoted belief in suicide rather than surrender, beginning to crack? Some observers who had seen Japanese blow themselves up at Guadalcanal,

Buna, Attu or Tarawa thought that perhaps it was.

Reports last week from Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, said that 150 Japanese had surrendered there. Some of them stood beside a road until a U.S. truck gave them a lift to prison camp.

It might have been that the Japs at Hollandia were only supply troops (i.e., scrubs of the Japanese Army) and not the fighting garrison General MacArthur expected to find. It was too early to generalize. But obviously not all Japs yearned to die with their colonel (see p. 20).

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