WAR WITHOUT MERCY

So it went for three months. The Americans used flamethrowers. During one four-day stretch in June, the men of the 713th Armored Flame Thrower Battalion poured 37,000 gallons into Japanese-filled bunkers and caves. "It was very inhumane but effective," says Dencker. "No one was squeamish about what was ethical then, that's for sure. Anything to kill Japs and stay alive. Our motto was 'The only good Jap is a dead Jap.' That's the way it was."

It is jarring to hear the use of a racial epithet many years later, but the Japanese at the time were routinely referred to by Americans as "Japs" and "Nips." There was tremendous racial hatred on both sides, a fact that is sometimes forgotten or brushed over today. (In both Japan and the United States, there are teenagers so ahistorical that they are unaware that Japan and the United States fought a war.)

For the invasion of Japan, scheduled for the autumn of 1945 and spring of 1946, both sides loaded up. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the American Army Air Corps commander whose "burn jobs" had incinerated roughly a third of urban Japan and killed nearly a million people, had 5,000 B-29 bombers ready to go. To greet a half-million American invaders, the Japanese had at least 6,000 kamikaze planes and 2,350,000 regular troops, not to mention an enormous citizen militia of some 30 million. The women were given sharpened bamboo spears and were trained to use them (some of them practiced on dummies of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill). On July 21, a U.S. Fifth Air Force intelligence circular declared: THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF JAPAN IS A PROPER MILITARY TARGET... THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN.

Among the more exotic tokko ("special attack") units were the Fukuryu, or "Crouching Dragons." These suicide frogmen were to creep along the seafloor until they spotted American landing craft cruising above them. Then they were to jam bamboo poles wired with explosives against the bottom of the boats, destroying the invaders and themselves. Takaichiro Monna, 76, is the retired editor of a small publishing company and a university graduate with a degree in Russian literature, but as a 16-year-old he had wanted to be a kamikaze pilot. In April 1945, his flight school was shut down and he was assigned to a Fukuryu unit. "I thought I was going to die sooner or later anyway," he recalls. "I hated the idea of running around to escape from the enemies and die a useless death. I wanted to die a cool death. I was always told not to disgrace the family name."

He recalls traveling to his training base on a train with shuttered windows--probably to spare the young recruits from seeing the fantastic ruins wreaked by American bombers. Monna heard a rumor that one explosion could kill other frogmen on the seabed nearby. "I was very troubled," he recalls. "That was not the way I planned to die." He resolved to be the first to charge the American landing craft.

On Aug. 15, as he was awaiting his final command, he was instructed to dress in his formal black uniform and appear before a table covered with a white cloth. On top of the table was a radio. Monna was instructed to bow reverently. Over the static-filled airwaves, he heard the thin, reedy voice of Emperor Hirohito, saying something about "enduring the unendurable." Hirohito was announcing Japan's surrender after American A-bombs had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Monna had heard nothing of these events, and the radio was being jammed. He thought the emperor was saying, "Work much harder. Do your best and fight a good war." But then others came running, saying that Japan had lost the war. Monna did not know what to believe. He hoped for another divine wind to blow the enemy away.