Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths

Shigeru Mizuki is one of the great manga authors, but is rarely translated into English. This is one of his classic stories, based on his personal wartime experience.

A platoon of Japanese soldiers is assigned to defend a beachhead near Rabaul, in what is now Papua New Guinea. They are subjected to a terrifying air assault followed by a landing of marines supported by tanks. Hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, their rations dwindle to nothing, and their pitifully low weaponry is useless against the Americans.

Against all advice, the platoon commander decides that the platoon must perform a death-or-glory suicide charge to pay homage to the honour of their ancestors. Since the order is to suicide, anybody who survives and gets back to show more base is considered a traitorous insubordinate and subjected to the most severe discipline.

The hardship and brutality that the soldiers experience at the hands of their own officers is reminiscent of the wanton waste of life that heedless British commanders wreaked during the trench warfare campaigns of World War 1. It is a reminder that extreme suffering and gross disregard for human life is seen on all sides of a war. show less

A beautifully drawn testament of Japanese soldiers' lives in WWII. The raw emotion captured in the sharp contrast between hyper-realistic and cartoon-ish panels makes Mizuki's story more sympathetic. It's easy as a Westerner to sometimes forget that the opposing sides are fought by real people who have war thrust upon them just as suddenly as the "home team," and this book humanizes them in a beautiful and tragic way.

Geoff Dyer has noted that, thus far, the best accounts of the ongoing wars in the Middle East are non-fiction, while the most successful accounts of World War II (from the allied side) are novels. With the publication of Shigeru Mizuki's autobiographical work recounting his service in New Guinea during World War II, one sees that another form will have to be taken into account: comics. Brilliantly drawn and told, Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deathsgives those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced anything like such horror a powerful draught of the pain and futility of war.

magnificent illustrations and a touching story that reveals a lot on how the Japanese soldiers dealt with that war and the rigidity of the army rules