Escape From the Deep (24 page)

Every one of the survivors was now focused on just one objective: finding enough food to stay alive, no matter what form it came in, stolen or otherwise. Obtaining extra nutrition, any kind, was all that mattered. As they were learning, the alternative was death.

To compound the brutal psychological effects of slow starvation, some of the Japanese guards would flaunt choice items from the Red Cross packages they had raided. It made the prisoners’ blood boil, sending some close to the edge of insanity as they lay awake at night, their stomachs cramping, shivering even as the nights got warmer because most had no body fat left to act as insulation. Once proud physiques were now reduced to skin and bone and their muscles atrophied to the point of immobility.

Bill Leibold and Floyd Caverly, having kept each other alive in the water when the
Tang
went down, now conspired to keep each other from dying of starvation. One day, the pair was cleaning a passageway when they came across what appeared to be a locked storeroom. There was no guard in sight, so they forced a sliding door off its track. Inside were stacks of Red Cross packages, boxes that had been withheld from the men in the camp. It was an infuriating discovery. Had the men been given the parcels, they would have been in far better shape.

Suddenly, a guard appeared at the end of the passageway. Leibold and Caverly staged a fight, Leibold punching Caverly. Caverly fell against the door. The guard broke up the fight and railed at them for knocking the door open.

A few nights later, Caverly and Leibold snuck out of their cells, lifting planks in the floor, and returned to the stash of Red Cross boxes. Using stolen side cutters, they opened a large box bound with wire. “We took two small boxes and switched the large box to the bottom of the stack with unopened boxes on top.”
¹²
The other inmates were soon doing likewise.

Eventually, the camp authorities discovered that the confiscated boxes had been raided. Punishment was sure to come. On April 5, after breakfast, the
Tang
survivors and others were lined up in front of their barracks and accused of stealing the boxes. Leibold, Caverly, and others responsible did not confess.

The Japanese made the men stand at attention. “We stayed this way all day without lunch,” recalled Jesse DaSilva. “Come dinner time, they made us get into a pushup position and if anyone moved, a guard would hit them with a club across the buttocks. This didn’t seem to work so they took us back inside the barracks and lined us up in the center and asked again who was responsible. Still no answer. Then the guards took turns and whacked us across the buttocks with a large club several times each. Still no answer.”
¹³

Not one of the men cracked under the strain. Finally, their silence and their solidarity forced their tormentors to relent.

A FEW DAYS LATER, the
Tang
survivors learned to their enormous relief that they were going to be sent to a regular POW camp. Nearly five months of hell in the “Torture Farm” were over. Because of the influx of downed B-29 pilots and other new POWs who needed to be interrogated, the camp administration had decided to transfer them to another camp in the Tokyo area.

Major Boyington was selected as the leader of a group of transferees that included all of the
Tang
’s enlisted men.
¹⁴
On April 6, Boyington led these men out of Ofuna, under armed guard, toward a train.
¹⁵
As he left the “Torture Farm,” Boyington looked back one last time at the squalid camp. At last, he could turn his back on a place that he would always remember as being full of pain—and ugly. “I wasn’t conscious of the [surrounding] quiet wooded scenery,” he recalled. “I saw no beauty [there].”
¹⁶

Some of the men in Boyington’s charge were dressed in rags. Others could barely walk. But they all summoned the necessary energy to march away from Ofuna. At the nearby railway station, they took a tram to Yokohama. They then walked through the ruined city to an area known as Omori on the western shore of Tokyo Bay. When they crossed a long wooden causeway that led to a small man-made island, they entered another, larger POW camp.

Omori
means “great forest” in Japanese, but precious few trees were on the island when the Americans arrived. “It was mostly sand,” recalled one of the prisoners. “The camp, surrounded by a six-foot fence, took up most of the island. On the other side of the fence [there were] big holes in the ‘beach,’ where the prisoners charged with cleaning the latrines dumped the human excrement. Thousands of flies hovered over this sickening, open sewer.”
¹⁷

Until the war was over—or until they died—the stench of feces would engulf them. For the lucky POWs who would survive, the smell would never leave them, seeping into their very consciousness it seemed, a constant reminder of how worthless they were in the eyes of the Japanese.

13

The Last Stretch

O
MORI’SCOMMANDANT walked into the open ground at the center of the camp and addressed the new arrivals. They were war criminals, he explained, so they were going to be kept separate from the other prisoners in the camp. If the Japanese lost the war, they would be executed. With that, guards marched the new inmates to their new home.
¹

Many of the men were relieved to find out that they would not return to solitary confinement, even in this new camp. Solitary confinement was a punishment, as they had learned, harsher even than random beatings or slow starvation.

The men were in a pitiful condition as they settled into their new “home,” a flimsy, cramped barracks with a dirt floor and wooden platforms for sleeping. Jesse DaSilva remembered that all of the
Tang
survivors now suffered from diarrhea. Several had beriberi, caused by lack of B vitamins; the most painful symptoms were cramping of the thighs, extreme soreness in the leg muscles, and a burning sensation in the feet. Their daily sustenance was half a cup of low-grade rice and a small bowl of watery soup, served at breakfast, lunch, and supper. There was no meat, no source of life-saving protein or essential vitamins to prevent diseases such as beriberi and scurvy.
²

Dick O’Kane was in the worst shape. And his men were increasingly concerned. Wracked by pain in his feet from beriberi, suffering from jaundice and painfully thin, he was so exhausted by the daily battle to survive that he even let his stubble grow. On the
Tang,
he had railed against facial hair of any kind, but now that priorities had changed, foraging for food seemed more important than whiskers. “He grew the prettiest red beard you ever saw,” recalled Floyd Caverly.
³

O’Kane was at least grateful to be out of Ofuna. He was no longer being beaten, tortured, and questioned endlessly about the
Tang.
He later explained that the change to Omori was “like surfacing after an all-day dive.” But the fact remained that he and the other
Tang
survivors were still extraordinarily vulnerable. The men were still “special prisoners” and not registered as POWs with the Red Cross. No one would be the wiser if, on some dark night, they were taken out into the ruins of Yokohama and shot, their bodies disappearing into a vast, rubble-strewn graveyard. And if they were not killed in a fit of vengeance by their guards, they would surely not escape the fate of so many Japanese civilians, being bombed night after night.

A week after the men arrived in Omori, there was a huge raid on Tokyo that lit up the entire bay and night sky. The firestorm could be seen by the prisoners. The following night, other cities were targeted—Yokohama, Omori, and Kawasaki. Shrapnel pinged off barrack roofs. Flimsy wooden homes nearby were raised in seconds. “When the fireworks started, the Japanese boarded up all the windows in the barracks, then they went to the air raid shelters,” recalled Clay Decker. “We were left exposed. . . . It was frightening as bombs were dropping all around. Some fragments ended up in camp.”
⁴

The ground shook. Some of the prisoners could feel the heat from the massive fires caused by the raids. One saw a wall of fire, three hundred feet high, spreading for miles. Every factory in the area appeared to have been hit. “They bombed the hell out of the place,” recalled Floyd Caverly. “We saw flames and then the smoke came. We damn near choked to death from the smoke.”
⁵

Pete Narowanski and a fellow prisoner managed to find an empty shelter. To their delight, they discovered some abandoned packages of noodles in there.
⁶
The bombing was good for one thing at least—it had bought Narowanski and his buddy a few more days of life.

When they woke the next morning, the prisoners saw that the nearby city of Omori lay in ruins. Even though the Omori camp was just eight hundred feet from the mainland, no bombs had fallen on the prison grounds.

THE SPECIAL PRISONERS, which included the
Tang
survivors, were kept inside Omori throughout April, while other prisoners left on daily work details. Major Boyington tried to persuade camp officials to allow the special prisoners to join the work gangs so they could, at least, “get out in the sunshine and get some exercise.”
⁷
The Japanese finally relented. And so, at the start of May 1945, the
Tang
’s crew crossed the causeway leading to the mainland and were put to work clearing bomb wreckage.
⁸

They had a seemingly endless job ahead of them. By now, most of industrial Japan lay in smoldering ruins. And there was no sign of an end to the bombing. In just over a month, every major industrial city in Japan would be destroyed. Almost thirteen million Japanese would be homeless. Around two hundred Allied POWs would be killed in the raids.
⁹
Perhaps a hundred B-29 pilots would be shot down and then brutally killed, often beheaded after extreme torture. The vast majority of victims, however, were the hundreds of thousands of civilians, most of them burned to death, often to cinders, in the most lethal bombing raids in history.

One morning, Clay Decker tagged along with Pappy Boyington on a work detail into a nearby area to clean up after the silver B-29s had dropped their loads. “Our boys would drop one incendiary bomb and it would knock seven blocks out, just like that,” he recalled. “We loaded dead bodies on flatbed trucks, and then we’d clean up the areas. It gave us something to do. We were glad to do it.”
¹⁰

Pappy Boyington also persuaded the guards to let the men plant a vegetable garden in a bombed out area of nearby Yokohama. Since Jesse DaSilva was now too weak to perform hard labor, he volunteered to carry drinking water to the garden each day and distribute it to the men when they needed it.

“I remember once when one of the guys slipped off to the nearby fish market,” he recalled. “I don’t know where he got the money, but he bought some fish and I boiled them in the can of water. We tried to sneak them back into camp for our evening meal, but the smell of the cooked fish alerted the guards. They took the fish away and our group leaders were punished.”
¹¹

DaSilva also scoured ruins for “choice items” of discarded food like fish heads. “When you’re starving, anything tastes good,” he recalled. “One time we were all sitting around on our tea break when an old dog strayed by and we sat around discussing the possibility of eating it. But none of us had the heart to kill it.”
¹²

DaSilva couldn’t stop thinking about the three apple pies in the
Tang
’s galley that he’d noticed as he rushed to the forward torpedo room. Pete Narowanski remembered the turkeys that were thawing for the Thanksgiving dinner that was to be held on their journey home. “I knew if I ever got back home, I’d never starve again,” vowed DaSilva.
¹³

BACK IN AMERICA, for at least one of the survivor’s wives, there was suddenly reason for hope. An officer named Dusty Dornin, one of O’Kane’s friends working in naval intelligence, decided to ease Ernestine O’Kane’s misery. “He wrote that a garbled message had been received via radio listing some men as present in a prison camp in Japan,” she recalled. “Among the names was a Jed O’King and the only person the U.S. files could come up with was . . . my husband.”
¹⁴

There was no doubt in Ernestine’s mind. Her husband was alive.

14

Liberation

T
HE WAR WAS NEARING A CLIMAX. The Japanese appeared to have only two choices—surrender or die. At stake was unfathomable national pride: Never in its history had Japan been occupied by foreigners.

The nature of the men’s work changed as it became clear that the Japanese were going to bunker down and resist until the last man, woman, and child. “About a month before the end of the war,” recalled Pappy Boyington, “we were taken off our garden work and the clearing of debris and were set to digging huge tunnels in the hillsides on the outskirts of Yokohama. We worked at this twelve hours a day, just like [miners]. These tunnels were two hundred feet under the surface of the earth. One of the guards told me this was to be an air-raid shelter, but I couldn’t imagine what kinds of bombs were going to be dropped to necessitate a tunnel two hundred feet underground.”
¹