Straggler's Ordeal

THE EMPEROR'S LAST SOLDIERS by Ito Masashi. 191 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

For most Japanese, World War II ended in 1945. Not, however, for Sergeant Ito Masashi, a machine gunner in the Imperial Army. Separated from his unit during the American invasion of Guam in July 1944, Ito fled with two comrades into the jungle--and hid there until 1960, convinced throughout that a Japanese task force would soon arrive to drive the enemy away. This book is his account of his 16-year struggle in the jungle and his torment upon return. It is disjointed in places, and it suffers somewhat from a translator bent on changing Ito's rural Honshu argot into phony British slang. But nothing can destroy its authenticity as one of the toughest survival stories that any man has lived to tell.

Disguised Footprints. At first, Ito and his fellow stragglers ate raw breadfruit and coconuts and lived in a cave. None of them was a woodsman, and none had gone through even a basic survival course in the Imperial Army. (Ito was the son of a well-to-do farmer and had an eighth-grade education.) Slowly they learned to adapt themselves to jungle life, and their habits changed.

They figured out a way to make a cooking fire by rubbing a steel cord across a log and then pouring gunpowder on it. After months of experimenting, they discovered how to distill pure salt from sea water, then used the salt to preserve the meat of cows and wild pigs that they occasionally managed to kill. They kept an eye on the U.S. base --and on its garbage dump, which they sometimes raided for supplies. Using discarded tools and old tires, they fashioned round, oversized sandals that both protected their feet and ingeniously disguised their footprints. Deciding that a cave was too obvious a hiding place, they slept under rudimentary lean-tos in jungle thickets, constantly changing locations to avoid discovery by the one enemy who knew the jungles as well as they did: Guam's native Chamorro tribesmen, whom the Americans had assigned to clear the island of Japanese holdouts.

Tongue Clicks. Gradually, Ito says, he began to acquire the instincts of an animal. The slightest change in the jungle's normal sounds would send him scurrying from his shelter into the brush, and he and his companions worked out a code of tongue clicks to warn each other of approaching danger. As Ito soon found, no place was really safe. The Chamorros, always armed and forever prowling through the jungles in search of stragglers, discovered his hiding place three times. They killed one of his mates in 1948 and nicked Ito himself with a bullet in 1957. Finally, seven years ago, a Chamorro band caught his last companion climbing a coconut tree, and Ito decided he could go on no longer. Rather than face the jungle alone, he turned himself in at the U.S. garrison on the island.

Ito's ordeals are still not over. In the U.S. military hospital in Guam, nothing could convince him that the war was over--or that the Americans were not somehow rigging a trap to kill him. Repatriated to his village in Japan, where his father had erected a monument, Masashi found it impossible to shake off the instincts of the hunted animal. Every sound in the night awakens him in panic. "I understand well enough that there's not the slightest element of danger," Ito writes, "but my senses won't acknowledge this conclusion. Once it has taken hold, the jungle will not so easily let go."

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