First Into Nagasaki (15 page)

Fireman Leo Hughes of Dayton, Washington,
captured at Fort Hughes: “I’ll never forget July 17th, 1944, when the Japanese put 1568 men in a hold forty by fifty feet, four levels of bunks deep, for the trip from Manila to Japan in the
Nissyo Maru.
When men passed out they simply carried them on deck, then put them below again.”

Radioman William Laplante (Grafton, North Dakota):
“The boat ride here knocked my weight from 140 to 100 due to weakness, and I’ve never recovered.”

The average weight of an American laboring for the Mitsuis in the coal mine, computed according to age/height charts, should be just under 153 pounds, but for the entire camp period it is 123
¹
⁄
₂
.

Corregidor
Marine Corporal James DeNixon (New Orleans):
“I started out yapping back at the Jap straw bosses regardless of how much they beat me. It was tough going, but finally I convinced them I was crazy.”

Marine Corporal
from Corregidor,
Edward Howe (Beverly Hills):
“Many Americans burned themselves with battery acid or anything else handy in order to escape underground work. On the surface the Japs were halfway human, but underneath they became beasts.”

Machinist Albert Roberts (Brookfield, Illinois):
“I’ve done all sorts of work. They had Americans doing airport building, farmwork, a coal mine. I’ve been beaten in the mine with a pick handle, an axe handle, a saw, a timber. I’ve been kicked in the shins, spat on in the face, and had coal thrown at me.”

Sergeant Glenn Wayman of Paola, Kansas,
captured on Bataan: “In nine months underground I never got anything more serious than cuffs and slaps. Then I was beaten above ground for protesting about the day guard making noise while the American night shift slept.”

Donald Versam (Bloomington, Nebraska):
“I got only two cuffs, for not extinguishing my cigarette when the Japs rang their bell. I was wise enough to take my blows without flinching, as the Japanese demand. But Chester Williams of Fresno, who erred by turning his head, was made to kneel on cement while they burned him with bamboo.”

Corregidor
Marine Corporal Franklin Boyer (Philadelphia):
“I got slapped around so much in the mine that I began keeping my ulcers open in order to keep above ground. But the Japanese caught on.”

Monford Charlton (Denbo, Pennsylvania):
“I went from 145 to 102. So I dropped a rock on my hand, mashed it, and got eighty-nine days of sick rest. When that was gone, I spilled acid on this scarred foot and got forty-nine days more. Guys would plead for someone to do a fracture job for them. Chicagoan Albert Roberts obliged four fellows that way, but the best deal he could get was three rations of rice for a breakage fee when he wanted the same done to himself.”

Raised in Fort Dodge, Iowa, a resident of Long Beach, California, the longest-term prisoner is
Chief Pharmacist Fred Roepke:
forty-four months in Japanese hands since Guam fell on the third day of the war. “We had sixty self-inflicted wounds in one year among 190 Americans. They took turns fracturing bones and pouring acid. I’ve seen a Jap walk through a hospital and slap every man. My worst job was when the whole Guam medical team was summoned by Japs from the Zentsuji model prison camp in Shikoku Island to care for an arriving Allied ship. It proved to be the
Shonan Maru
from Singapore, with 250 Englishmen of whom, despite all our efforts, 127 died in six weeks from dysentery and malnutrition.”

Corregidor
Marine Sergeant Potter Sillman (Burr, Nebraska):
“My normal weight of 185 hit 85 on Bataan from malaria, and 90 in Japan from malnutrition.”

Seaman Edward Walaszek (Holyoke, Massachusetts),
captured at Fort Hughes: “I got my only beating when I tried to prevent a guard from making off with my shirt. I finally was forced to donate it anyway, then got beaten by another Japanese who accused me of black market trading.”

The Mitsui coal mine had its own gallery of thugs whom the American prisoner miners named the Beast, the Pig, Tom Mix, and the Dripper, so-called because he was personally so filthy.
Sergeant Hubert Barber of Williamsfield, Illinois:
“For eight months in the mine I was the pet peeve of a straw boss we called the Cobra. He would throw coal at me too close for me to duck, sometimes within three feet of my face. Once he wrestled and threw me down because I was so weak.” Medico Vernon described Barber as having “a severe case of malnutrition, beriberi, and edema.”

Pharmacist Thomas Locklear (Powderlee, Alabama):
“We called our bossman the Gorilla because of the way he would jump around, clawing at us, trying to get us to fight him.”

William White (Kingsbury, Indiana):
“What was toughest for me was being sent back to the mine by the Jap doctor after a cave-in injured my shoulder. My inability to work put a heavier burden on my buddies.”

Sergeant Forest Swartz (Sacramento):
“When my weight reached 103, the Japs allowed me to work in the kitchen instead of the mine.”

A Marine from Corregidor,
Sergeant Charles Eckstein (San Francisco):
“There was an old camp commander we called Emma or Dreamy Eyes. When three prisoner rooms were in disarray, he lined up seventeen room-heads and punched each personally in the jaw. I believe the Japs are the lowest people on earth, and I would rather have spent my three years on Alcatraz.”

Corregidor
Marine Herbert Klingbeil (Minneapolis):
“I was lucky enough to make the same camp as my brother Arthur, who’s already en route home. When Arthur tried to ease his heavy burden of mine timbers in a rising tunnel and was beaten with a saw handle across his arms and face, the overseer found me resting in my bunk with my sandals on and beat me twenty-three times across my face until it swelled up.”

Bataan prisoner
Freddie Ray (Erico, Oklahoma):
“My worst experience was on the Bataan death march, when I had to go seven days without food and water. With my own eyes I saw at least fifty men shot, and forty to fifty bayoneted. I saw men drink water from ditches where dead Americans and Filipinos lay. When the Japs caught you asking for water, they’d throw a bucketful in your face.”

Corregidor
Gunner George Beuris (Hazard, Kentucky):
“My worst time was from May 7th until May 22nd, when the Japs kept us in the broiling sun on Corregidor all day.” Beuris has a mangled finger which was operated on without anesthesia by a Japanese doctor.

Captain James Corrigan (Wichita):
“Just for pausing a moment in order to watch a Japanese beating up a Dutchman, I got a punch in the jaw.”

Corregidor
Marine Corporal Clarence Thompson (Commerce, Texas):
“I got several slappings—though no beatings—for no apparent reason other than the disagreeable Japanese temperament.”

Woodrow Wilson (Poplar Bluffs, Mississippi):
“Lots of my friends have been seriously beaten, but I’ve had only casual blows.”

Sergeant Hubert Seal (Rupert, Idaho):
“In eight months I’ve been beaten quite a lot, but starvation was what really hardened my heart toward the Japanese people. Before the war my weight was 175. At the surrender I weighed 112.”

Sergeant Joseph Fragale (Buffalo):
“The Japs would beat us for putting our hands in our pockets anytime, and they were harder on Americans than on the Dutch. I got the worst beating of my career as a prisoner for taking some squash seeds out of the garden because I was very hungry and didn’t realize it was forbidden. They beat me until I could no longer hear, and until I had a big boil on my back. I’ll never forget the day of that beating. It was August 15th—the day the war ended.”

Izuka, Japan—Tuesday, September 18, 1945 0900 hours

Allied Prison Camp #7, Izuka, Kyushu

Unflaggingly bold as a prisoner of war, just as when he was a jungle sniper on Bataan, Chicago’s Captain Arthur Wermuth, the one-time “one-man army,” remains in the history of the Pacific War another man to whom the same aphorism is applied as to MacArthur: “Some like him, some don’t like him, but even those who don’t like him respect him.”

His rough and tough tactics of personal leadership gained him the respect of the Japanese, for the Nipponese admire daring and cunning above all other characteristics. Friends of his with whom the writer has talked say that American estimates giving the stocky Chicagoan over a hundred Japanese scalps were exaggerated, but that the number certainly was at least sixty. They add however that much credit should be given to the Filipino scouts who went everywhere with the Chicagoan and who “got the Jap who would have got Wermuth, while the one-man army was getting his.”

How Wermuth gained the admiration of enlisted men even during his prison days was explained by Navy Pharmacist T. E. Locklear of Powderlee, Alabama, who recounted a clash at Camp Cabanatuan between the one-man army and a vicious Japanese sentry called Laughing Boy.

The Japanese forced ailing amoebic dysentery patients in groups of four to carry loads of 600 pounds of manure. When Laughing Boy refused to lighten the loads, Wermuth cursed him openly, took a spade, and fell to, saying, “I’ll lighten their loads myself.”

For this defiance, Laughing Boy began his punishment by kicking Wermuth’s shins and making him kneel. Then Laughing Boy, with two other Japanese, beat Wermuth’s face and buttocks, leaving him with blackened eyes and a visage covered with bruises—but more popular than ever with G.I.s for having attempted to defend the prisoners’ cause.

Gene Riding of Whitehall, Illinois remembers “seeing Captain Wermuth after having been kicked and beaten in the face at Cabanatuan. Three of his ribs were supposed to be fractured. Ordinarily he did everything himself, but this time he asked me to carry a bucket of water which he was unable to lift.”

Wermuth later saved many lives by his coolness aboard a bombed Japanese freighter carrying American prisoners. The bomb fell in the forward hold, full of ailing Americans, while the Japan-bound freighter was in Takau
^*
harbor, Formosa, on January 6th of this year. Approximately 371 Americans were killed, including many officers who had served both at Corregidor and Bataan.

After the bodies had lain untouched by the Japanese, who refused to allow them to be moved from the hold, Wermuth seized the situation below decks. Despite light shrapnel wounds in both legs, he was able to organize a burial detail for the bodies piled under a hatch. Wermuth also smuggled a note asking for medicine up through hatches guarded by the Japanese and, with the aid of former Los Angeles newspaperman Theodore Lewin, was able to get medicine from the crew in return for keepsakes of the men killed.

His insistence on reestablishing cleanliness in the body-strewn forward hold of the freighter saved many lives after the Japanese allowed the bodies to be taken ashore and cremated.

Izuka, Japan—Wednesday, September 19, 1945

Allied Prison Camp #23, Izuka, Kyushu

The miracle of a Japanese prison camp where nobody was beaten to death, and cuffs and slaps took the place of the usual torture, was revealed here when Camp #23, with all American prisoners, was liberated today. It is another worn-out coal mine in the Mitsui chain that was abandoned till U.S. prisoners arrived. By American standards, Camp #23 was one where the treatment of prisoners would call for stern investigation with blue-ribbon juries and special committees. But by the standards which Americans learned from the Japanese on Bataan’s death march, it was almost comfortable. Stick beatings were relatively rare. While one Japanese doctor withheld medicine provided by the Red Cross from medical officer Major Kenneth Hagen of Fresno, another physician named Shigata secretly opened the forbidden boxes and sneaked him drugs. Hagen himself was beaten up “two or three times” by a Japanese who called him contemptuously “Bamboo Doctor.”

Hagen told the Japanese camp physician, “Unless these men get help they’ll die,” and the latter replied, “Sick men die, okay okay.” Patients were often slapped for being too weak to be able to descend in the mine, but never were deliberately starved to death in confinement as they were by the notorious Captain Fukuhara at Omuta. Sometimes the mine authorities gave extra portions of rice to supplement the thin gruel of ordinary fare. Yet Americans from Bataan and Corregidor whom this writer interviewed, like pharmacist Dudley DeGroat of South Bend and Thomas Boyle of Mason City, Iowa, showed marks of malnutrition, Boyle having fallen from 216 pounds to 109 pounds at his worst. Beatings were common enough for the Japanese clubs to gain the name “‘vitamin sticks’, because when you’re weak they pep you up.”

The fact that only 5 out of 200 Americans at Izuka have died is proof enough of the Japanese government’s direct responsibility for the much higher death rolls elsewhere. This Mitsui mine is extremely dangerous like all the others in Kyushu, which had been dropped as economically unprofitable until the Americans came with their one-cent-daily labor. It is a “wet mine”, with roofs mushy and constantly falling. The American prisoners were actually chipping at the coal pillars which alone supported the ceiling in this stripped mine. And yet here the death roll was lower, due to the absence of constant beatings, than in other mines even though the same dangerous conditions prevailed and the food was almost the same. Here the Americans were provided with overcoats, which lessened the toll from pneumonia even though most worked in winter in straw sandals or rubber split-toe sneakers. Elsewhere many were forced to work barefoot. Here only about two percent of the prisoners’ injuries were caused by the Americans voluntarily breaking their own limbs or pouring acid on themselves to escape going underground, whereas in Camp #7, about five miles away, conditions were so cruel that one-third of the Americans broke their feet or arms, put their hands in conveyor machines, or poured acid on themselves to get relief from the mine tunnels.

The Japanese camp commander at today’s parting from Captain Marvin Lucas of Albuquerque voluntarily presented him with a four-hundred-year-old samurai sword. Of the ex-commander,
Captain Frank Turner of Gallup, New Mexico,
said, “Nakamura was all right, and although the guards were often rough, all our Japanese commanders have been generally just.”