What would you do if you were in high school and they made you go into the battlefield
to take care of wounded soldiers?
Himeyuri (ひめゆり) translates to Princess Lily.
It refers to the white lily flower, which people associate with purity and rejuvenation.
This white flower would be painted red in the Battle of Okinawa in WaWa2.
The year was 1945, and the fighting in the Pacific was heading towards the main Japanese
islands.
Allied forces wanted to use the island of Okinawa as a base for a land invasion of the
main Japanese islands.
The Japanese Imperial Army was hell-bent on stopping them at Okinawa, so they sent a bunch
of troops to the island to prepare for the coming battle.
The army took over schools and school hours were reduced as they taught the students how
to be of use in battle.
That’s right, students.
When I was in high school, the biggest thing I had to deal with was wondering whether or
not Allison liked me when she sat next to me at lunch and ate food off my plate.
She didn’t.
She was just poor and hungry.
They taught boys things like fixing bridges and running supplies.
They taught girls a crash course in nursing.
Now the stories these girls told about what they went through were amazing.
Pretty sure this video will be demonetized because YouTube likes to do that to every
video about WaWa2, but I was researching this and couldn’t wait to talk about it.
To be fair, we do go into some heavy stuff.
On March 23, 1945, the Japanese military organized high school students from the top two all-girl
schools in Okinawa into a medical unit.
They were called the Himeyuri Student Corps, and their symbol was the white lily.
222 high school girls and 18 teachers marched to a field hospital in a town called Haebaru.
There was actually an additional 79 students and 3 teachers from other schools, but they
were assigned to other units.
The students were all 15 to 19 years old.
So these girls all thought that going to a hospital meant going to a clean, well kept
building, fully stocked with sterile equipment and medicine.
You know, a typical hospital.
When they got there, it was literally a cave.
The field hospital was a whole network of caves dug into the mountains, halls of dirt
and rock around 6 feet high, often lit by candles.
The girls got in and got ready.
But none of them were ready.
On April 1, 1945, a ground force of US Army and Marines landed on Okinawa and the surrounding
islands, kicking off the Battle of Okinawa.
It would later be called the Typhoon of Steel, the last battle in the Pacific, and the most
bloody.
Imagine being in high school, some girls were barely in high school, and being thrust into
a warzone.
These were upper class high school students.
They probably had never seen a dead body before.
They waited in their caves.
Some were scared, some were excited to serve their country and their emperor.
When the fighting began, the wounded started pouring in.
Horror came with them.
Military doctors ordered the girls around to help with this and that.
Take care of this soldier, feed that soldier, pick maggots from that other soldier’s dying
flesh.
I’ll be reading a lot of testimonies from these girls because man their words are brutal.
They really give you a sense of what these HIGH SCHOOL girls went through.
Yabiku Toshiko, 17.
“The stench was unbearable, so it was almost impossible to nurse the wounded or tend to
their wounds.
I can still hear the cries and shrieks of those soldiers in the throes of death during
surgical operations.
It was hell itself.
We didn't have enough anesthetic, so doctors administered it just enough to ease their
patients' tension.
One patient begged desperately, ‘That's enough!
Doctor, kill me!
Just kill me now!’
‘Shut up!
You can't put up with this much pain?!
You're a Japanese soldier, aren't you?!’
the surgeon shouted at him.
By mid-May, you could tell the condition of the patients had gotten really bad.
All of them were smeared with pus, and lice crawled all over their bodies.
The number of brain-fever and tetanus patients rapidly increased.
Completely deranged, brain-fever patients were really terrible.
They'd suddenly stand up and start walking, trampling seriously wounded soldiers lying
in the cave.”
All the while the battle happened around them.
Remember, they weren’t in some green zone away from the fighting.
They were right in the middle of it.
The bombs and gunshots rang right outside their caves.
Even so, the smell of rotting flesh and bodily fluids was so strong that many of the girls
risked leaving the cave’s protection anyway when they had the chance, just to escape the
stench.
Yabiku Toshiko again.
“Tetanus patients developed cramps in their legs and arms, finally getting lockjaw.
When they reached that point, they could no longer even eat the cream of rice gruel.
Such patients were taken to a narrow isolation ward enclosed by wooden shutters.
They kept their eyes wide open and just stared at us as if to implore us to get them out
of there.”
Food was an issue.
There wasn’t much.
No meat.
Vegetables, rarely.
They mostly had rice.
So they made rice balls, onigiri, for the soldiers and themselves.
The food situation got so bad, soldiers would beg for them to cook amputated limbs for food.
They didn’t do it, that I know of.
Speaking of amputations, there was a lot of that too.
Kishimoto Hisa, 17.
“I held down the arm a doctor was going to cut off and encouraged the patient to endure.
That was really frightening.
The amputated hand still clutched my hand.”
Surgery without anesthetic was common.
“For an operation on the shoulder, a soldier was told to sit in a chair.
He was a sergeant who'd been shot through his shoulder.
He was operated on without any anesthesia.
His muscles were cut about three centimeters deep and ten centimeters long, with a special
pair of scissors, in about ten cuts.
He didn't scream, but his brow was sweating and tears streamed down his face.
I tried to hold his hand, but he wouldn't let me.
Instead he held his own hand to bear the pain.”
For 2 months, the Himeyuri students did their jobs.
Most girls said they stopped having their periods because of stress and bad nutrition.
And the bugs.
Oh god, the insects and maggots and all kinds of things with too many legs.
Imagine sleeping in those caves.
It was clear the battle was not going their way.
Then on May 25, 1945, the girls and everyone else in that field hospital were ordered to
evacuate the caves.
The enemy was coming and they had to retreat south.
Everyone packed their things and left the safety of the caves.
Well, not everyone.
Those who couldn’t walk, including students, were poisoned.
Why?
Maybe to help them escape the pain.
But also maybe to prevent them from divulging information to the US forces.
So the soldiers, students, and teachers moved out in the open, hiding behind what little
cover was left after the constant firebombing.
They were in the midst of bullets now.
They headed south, moving from cave to cave, and these brave girls kept doing their jobs
caring for the wounded.
Luckily it was an area with many caves, but that was probably the only luck they had with
them.
On June 18, when defeat was inevitable, the Japanese Imperial Army disbanded the Himeyuri.
They were free from their service.
But free to do what?
Where would they go?
Well, that was their problem, because the soldiers forced them out of the caves.
The caves were overcrowded and they were for the Imperial Army, not civilians.
Now you may be saying, “What the hell, that’s a dick move, cave soldiers.
These girls took care of you and worked alongside you for months, and now you just kick them
out?”
Well, you see, it was a military operation and you don’t want civilians hanging around--
Yeah, you’re right, it was a huge dick move.
This actually happened a lot.
There were civilians on the island, and many of them hid from the fighting in their own
caves.
There were reports of Japanese soldiers kicking Okinawan civilians out from their caves so
the soldiers themselves could use them or hide in them.
However, we do know of one report that a Japanese doctor chased some of the girls out of his
cave because he feared for their safety.
The Americans were about to raid his cave.
Anyways, the students were released into the battlefield, no military escort, no weapons.
And now things get worse.
Shockingly, up until this point, not many of the girls died.
They were in caves and were under military protection.
There were student deaths of course.
We don’t know the number, but apparently it wasn’t that many.
That would change.
Surrender was forbidden for loyal subjects of the emperor.
The girls were even told that they would be tortured or worse by the Americans if they
surrendered.
So the girls had to navigate the battlefield and find their own shelters.
This is when most of the deaths happened.
The official count was 219, which is clearly wrong because we know of many more survivors
than that would suggest.
Someone smarter than me went ahead and combed through the text and arrived at 123.
The actual number was probably around there.
Which is still a LOT.
There were soldiers who helped some of the girls out.
Miyagi Toyo, 20 years old, tells us about one.
“Two soldiers happened to pass by, so we told them we were looking for refuge and asked
if they could take us to a cave [...]
When we got there, an Okinawan man and a boy about fourteen or fifteen, apparently his
son, were sitting at the entrance of the cave.
Suddenly, one of the soldiers started shouting at the father and son, brandishing his sword
at them.
‘Anyone who does not obey military orders, I'll cut him down,’ he growled.
In other words, he was trying to drive them out of the cave in order to make room for
us.
The four of us were really frightened and said to the soldier, ‘Please, soldier, we
don't want to get in the cave by driving them out!’
But the frightened father and son jumped out of the cave and ran away before we knew it.”
Some groups were less fortunate.
Kaneshiro Kikoku, 16.
“We stuck to Taira-sensei and kept on fleeing along the shore.
By then our group had been reduced to twelve.
Enemy ships would come close to the shore, broadcasting calls to surrender:
'Americans will protect you. Come aboard as soon as possible’ […]
We could see their faces clearly.
That made us even more scared.
Tanks were approaching with flame throwers.
I felt more dead than alive. [...]
‘Taira-sensei, let’s die before it’s too late!’ some demanded.
‘Sensei, let’s do it immediately!’ others prodded the teacher.
Taira-sensei looked quite disturbed because he, as our teacher, had the responsibility
to protect our lives and was determined to do so.
I had a hand grenade he had given me.”
The story of Kaneshiro Kikoku’s group is heartbreaking.
Someone suggested that they sing to cheer themselves up, so the kids sang.
But the singing quickly devolved into crying.
The Americans kept calling for them to surrender through the loudspeaker.
The girls saw a Japanese soldier raise his hands and walk to shore,
right before getting shot.
Later on, an American soldier found them and fired into the group.
Taira-sensei took the grenade and ran into a cave where 9 of the students hid.
Out of mercy, he pulled the pin from the grenade and killed himself and all 9 girls.
Now I don’t want to paint American soldiers as all terrible.
One girl talked about an American soldier who gave her water and helped her to safety,
even though she thought he was going to kill her.
The Battle of Okinawa ended on June 22, 1945.
Three months of the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific.
Even when the news came around that the battle was lost, some girls showed their devotion
to the Emperor by refusing to surrender.
But eventually they all did.
Thing is, the nightmare was not over.
100,000 survivors were put in concentration camps.
Janice Suetomi, still alive today, said that her camp was dirty and did not have enough
food.
So many people died from malaria and starvation that they had to bury them in large graves.
Janice herself would’ve died of malaria if it wasn’t for a soldier who took care
of her.
She reunited with her family afterwards and went back home.
Unfortunately, their house was occupied by strangers who refused to let them in.
They said it was wartime, and there’s no such thing as a home that’s yours anymore.
She and her family had to live in a barn for a time before the people in their house finally
left.
I could probably make a whole video where I just read the words of these high school
students, they’re that compelling.
What really killed me was finding out that, before it all started, the girls thought that
they would be called on to help out for a few days, then go back to school.
The girls didn’t want to fall behind in class, so they brought books and school supplies
with them to study and do homework.
Something about seeing a student’s backpack in the middle of a cave of dead and dying
soldiers, jeez.
Back during the battle, there was a cave where a group of 51 students and teachers hid.
46 of them died in a bombing.
Today, the Himeyuri Peace Museum sits at that very spot to remind us of the horrors and
sacrifice of these high school girls and teachers.
In the museum, there’s a room with pictures of all the Himeyuri girls who lost their lives.
Looking at them, it really hits home that these were just kids, put in a situation that
kids should never be put in.
Oof.
Alright, this was a serious video.
What do you guys think?
If you liked it, consider throwing a few bucks to my Patreon.
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I wanna thank our new patron this week, Danielle Bissonette.
Thanks, Danielle, you’re the best.
Alright much love, you guys.
And spread the knowledge!