First Into Nagasaki (24 page)

He showed them how the little air that came down the hatch could be fanned with easy motions back into the rear bays. Some of the officers in the rear bays, lying in a stupor between suffocation and life, came slowly alive. Others did not stir. The Japanese lowered a little rice, and it was distributed by Warrant Officer Clifford Sweet of the U.S.S.
Tanager.
Water there was none.

Smith surveyed his tiny post on the vibrating counter of the ship. In a 10-foot circle around him were five officers. They sat, naked and doubled up, like white-skinned fakirs praying. But they were cold and dead. He wondered particularly what had happened to one big man who kept walking around all night, stepping indifferently on bodies and followed by a train of curses. For a time he had stopped by the rudder and insisted on sitting across Smith’s stomach. This vagabond kept getting into fights wherever he roamed in the fetid dark. In the faint light Smith could see the big man, crumpled on the filthy deck, now dead.

He recognized another young man whom he knew, went to him, felt his heart and got no answer.

Bridget was a fountain of hope. He climbed to the top of the ladder into the very muzzle of the Formosan guard. He talked to the Japanese and persuaded them to allow three or four of the unconscious elder officers to be carried up the ladder and laid out on the deck. None of the dead were allowed to be removed. As soon as the unconscious men revived they had to go down the ladder again to make way for others.

Lieutenant Toshino, in charge of the prisoners, and Mr. Wada, the hunchbacked interpreter, learned what was happening in the pits of the holds.

In the growing light, with the unbalanced men out of the way and the dead no longer taking their share of air, and with everyone sitting down and none wandering around, it was possible for the officers to take cognizance of where they were.

“The whole space in the aft hold,” according to Major John Fowler of Boston and Los Angeles, a 26th Cavalryman taken at Bataan, “looked about a hundred feet long by about forty feet wide. There were thirteen bays or little compartments on each side, and two across. Each bay was double, above and below, and the average was about eight feet by eleven and a half feet.”

The
Oryoku Maru
coasted slowly and uncertainly along the edge of Luzon. In the morning, summoned perhaps by the submarines which had attacked the convoy during the night, American planes appeared overhead. Soon they began their attacks.

Bridget, completely cool, sat at the top of the ladder. Like an announcer in a press box, he called the plays. “I can see two planes going for a freighter off our starboard side,” he would say. “Now two more are detached from the formation. I think they may be coming for us. They are! They’re diving! Duck, everybody!”

The Japanese gun crews opened fire, and a wild cacophony of gun dialogue went back and forth.
Thump,
went the shock as the bombs hit the water. The bulkheads shook. The naked men lay flat on the filth-smeared planks, trembling.

Lieutenant Colonel Elvin Barr, executive of the 60th Coast Artillery on Corregidor, who had fought his guns magnificently until silenced by the crossfire of Japanese artillery and dive bombing, stumbled up to Fowler. Fowler was on the cargo deck; Barr had been in the well-deck.

“There’s a hole knocked in the bulkheads down there,” Barr said. He had a wound in his side that ran from armpit to hip. “Between thirty and forty majors and lieutenant colonels have already died down where I came from,” he added. Though neither of them then knew it, Barr himself was to die from this wound, and from disease and neglect, before reaching Japan.

Out of bombs but not out of gas or bullets, the planes returned and began to strafe the ships. “It sounded like a riveting machine, running the whole length,” recalled a survivor. These attacks could not sink the ship, but they raised havoc with its gun crews. First one crew was spattered to death, then another. There was nothing wanting in Japanese courage. An artillery officer says: “They were magnificent. As soon as a crew would be wiped out, another would take its place.”

The half darkness that still reigned below decks gave a strange phenomenon. Bridget would announce a dive bomber, “Here comes one now!” and the prisoners would hear the scream of wings. Then, lying flat but with faces turned sideways, they would hear the crunch of the striking bomb. And suddenly the whole side of the bulkheads was alive with sparks. The bomb’s concussion, causing the plates to scrape together, would throw off such will-o’-the-wisp flickers, by which blue glow they could see each others’ faces and the dead around them.

Though the American flyers brought terror to the prisoners, they also brought two gifts: light and air. In the shock and disorder, the hatch planks had become disarrayed. Each party of United States Medical Corps men, when allowed to take up an officer who had fainted, made use of the confusion to open the planks more. At length Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada gave permission for some of the suffocated who were dead to be brought up on deck.

Bridget’s cool example, plus air and light, brought an improvement in morale and partial recovery of discipline. The situation was not altogether hopeless. If it grew better, they would live. If it grew worse, and the attacks continued, the Japanese could not send them to Japan, and they would be rescued by MacArthur after all.

Bridget and Commander Warner Portz, who as senior officer was nominally in charge of the whole party, took advantage of the slight lift in hope to order a roll call. Some sobering discoveries were made. The madness induced mainly by lack of air, and partly by lack of water, had caused men to pair off by twos in the night and go marauding. If they could not have water, they would have blood to drink; if not blood, then urine. There were slashed wrists. And “Cal” Coolidge, a large, fat former Navy petty officer who had been proprietor of the Luzon Bar in Manila, was found choked to death. There had been murder, then; the prisoners accepted that, too, with what distaste they could muster, but it seemed a natural part of the whole.

A food detail that was allowed to go up the ladder and forward to the galley reported that a big ship was burning in the convoy, and that the course was turning back toward Subic Bay. The Japanese captain sent word that if they were badly stricken in another attack, he would give Bridget and Portz the word when to bring up the prisoners, which side of the ship they should go over, and how far it was to nearest land. Through Lieutenant Colonel E. Carl Engelhart, the American interpreter, the Japanese sent down this warning: “If anyone other than an officer in charge so much as touches the hatch ladder, he will be instantly shot.”

Among the 2,000 Japanese civilians there was terror and confusion. From the forward hold, where Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Beecher was in charge, the Army physicians Lieutenant Colonel William North and Lieutenant Colonel Jack W. Schwartz, along with several doctors and corpsmen, were summoned on deck to take care of the Japanese wounded.

Especially in the aft hold, blood seeped down through the hatch planks and gave the naked, panting men a spotted appearance.

In the middle hold, where approximately 250 men were under Commander Maurice Joses of Santa Monica, there was plenty of room and enough air to maintain discipline. This group even had resourcefulness enough to keep back the wooden buckets that the Japanese sent down with food. By retaining one each time, they were able to accumulate enough toilet buckets for themselves. By now, in other holds, men were using their mess kits and their hats for
benjos,
being denied buckets by the Japanese.

Men in Hold No. 2 who got a peep over their hatch reported seeing “a tall lighthouse” on the shore. “That’s Subic,” said the Navy men with relief.

Between three and four in the afternoon the
Oryoku Maru
edged close to shore. The captain sent down word that he was going to disembark all passengers. The American prisoners would be disembarked too, as soon as guards were arranged on shore to keep them from escaping.

Suddenly there was a sandy, grating sound. The liner had run aground. Immediately the ban against going on deck was strictly enforced. For the next three or four hours, until well beyond sunset and the fall of gloom into the holds, there was a scraping of chains and spitting of winches as the captain strove to free the
Oryoku Maru.
It was foul, filthy and airless in the forward and aft holds; again discipline began to crack.

About 8 p.m. the
Oryoku Maru
floated free once more, moved in toward the American naval base at Olongapo, and at about ten began to discharge her Japanese passengers. Now the Japanese, knowing the conditions in the prisoners’ holds by the number of dead already stacked on the decks, were fearful that a break for shore would take place. Below decks the sane prisoners were almost equally fearful that the unbalanced would unite against them and rush the ladder; they posted guards.

There were approximately sixteen chaplains in the three holds, and most of them carried Bibles or breviaries. A few other men had prayer books or religious works. Some read them aloud. A Navy Lieutenant O’Rourke, who had been on the Chinese river patrol, took out his prayer book and read a few words to those around him in the cargo hold in the stern. Suddenly he stopped and began tearing pages out of the book and scattering them. Then without warning he made a dash for the vertical iron ladder beside the wooden stairs, and began to climb up. A big chief boatswain, Jesse Earl Lee of San Diego, pulled him back before the guard above could draw a bead on him. They tied him to the ladder until he quieted down.

During the first night his fellow pharmacist mates had taken care of Chips Bowlin, who had become unmanageable. They saved him from being forced into the bilges with the miserable wretches whom no one could handle, but this second night he managed to creep away from them, made a furtive dash for the ladder and climbed up it before he was missed. They heard a sentry scream something, then three shots and finally Bowlin’s voice: “The only thing I ask of the Japs is that they give me a decent burial.” They never saw him again.

Bridget never left his post on the wooden ladder. His voice was hoarse, now, from continual shouting. He was relieved occasionally by an officer of the 4th Marines, Major Andrew J. Mathiesen of Los Angeles. Mathiesen had a cool smile that never came off; even in the darkness, hearing his unruffled voice, the prisoners imagined that they could see that smile. “Not going to Japan, boys,” he would say. “Still right off old Subic. Not going to Japan.”

“For God’s sake, boys,” Bridget would rasp, “keep fanning. Don’t leave your place. Every move you make generates heat. There are men in the back bays who are going to die unless you sit still and keep fanning.”

Some obeyed Bridget and Mathiesen, but not all. Some could hear, or imagined they heard, men plotting against them in the darkness. They unclasped their knives. Chief Pharmacist’s Mate D. A. Hensen worked his way across through the foul and steaming aisles to a little cluster of chief warrant officers. “Look,” he said, “I’ve lost my nerve. The fellows over in my bay are plotting against me. They are going to kill me.” His friends allowed him to stay until he felt better, told him he was talking nonsense and that he must follow the general order and go back to his bay. In an hour he was back again, full of the same fear of murder. Again they told him it was a hallucination, and sent him back. In the morning he was found dead, his belly slit open.

There was Lieutenant Bill Williams, an Army engineer, who took the same line in talking aloud as Bridget and Mathiesen: if not sunk, they would get away; if sunk, they would land on Luzon and the Japanese would never again be able to get together enough ships to take them to Manila.

But there were also nuisances like the doctor who kept imagining he had to see someone in the next bay. He spent the whole night crawling back and forth, and could not be dissuaded from his empty errand.

Some who were visited by illusions seem to have been protected rather than harmed by them. One seaman medico says: “All that second night it seemed to me that I was not on a ship, but in a big hotel. I could hear people talking in the lobby. Right near me was a man who had suffocated, tangled with another who was also gone. Other people kept trying to move them toward the ladder to be carried up. I knew this and saw this and it still seemed to me that I was in a hotel . . . .”

Captain James McMinn of Carlsbad, who was to survive and reach Japan, had the idea that he was still in Bilibid Prison and kept visiting a friend, suggesting a game of cards.

After the
Oryoku Maru
dropped anchor almost no air came down the hatches, which were about 14
^×
14 feet. There were no ventilators; animals could not have been shipped under such conditions and lived. Besides thirst and lack of air, the prisoners were suffering from something known to Christmas shoppers in a mild form—crowd poisoning. Crowd poisoning takes two common forms: the body may burst out in excessive heat, causing a swoon, or it may turn to a cold sweat, with dizziness and vomiting.

A medical aideman had received a back full of shrapnel on the open deck during the strafing. He had lead in his lungs. “Two fellows began to follow me around in the darkness. I knew they were out to get me, because I had turned one of them in for selling narcotics in Bilibid. I overheard them planning to knock me out with a metal canteen full of urine. I began wandering around trying to shake them off. Once I had to relieve myself and could not look for a bucket because they were following me. So I relieved myself right where I was. I felt wild and yet I knew what I was doing. I scooped up the excrement and threw it over the men around me. They raised hell. So just to show them, I scooped up some myself and rubbed it in my hair. Then I started fleeing again, trying to shake off my two enemies. When they got near me they would gouge at the wounds in my back. Finally I shook them off. I ended up against a bulkhead that was sweating. I collapsed at the bottom and it was cooler there and I enjoyed the drops from the bulkhead falling on my face.”