First Into Nagasaki (26 page)

It was difficult to persuade the newcomers, once they reached the seawall, to squat down in its cover in the shallow water. Not having heard the Japanese fire while they were thrashing toward shore, they refused to believe that there was already a machine gun set up against them. Several impetuously climbed up anyway, but when one was wounded they floundered back into the water again, and crouched in the lee of the bullet-swept seawall.

The American planes returned again. Beecher gave orders for the strongest men to run up and down in the water, waving their clothes. They ran and waved, and the leading pilot seemed to get the idea. He waggled his wings and flew off.

The Japanese set up systematic foxholes in the bushes, with snipers to cover the seawall. The Americans were then allowed, after a parley, to climb up and rest in the sun, under the eyes of Japanese rifles. Two Marine officers, Major Andrew Mathiesen and Lieutenant Keene, a graduate of South Carolina’s Citadel, approached the JNLPs and explained that the Americans had been without water for two days. There was a small faucet near the Japanese positions. The Japanese allowed them to go to it in five-man details.

Around noon, after the half-naked men had lain in the open sun for about two hours, the Japanese gave orders to them to break camp and prepare to move. The small aid station which had been set up on the seawall by Commander Thomas Hayes was immediately packed into the mess kits and canteens which remained. When the barefoot, sunburned marchers were ready, with two men to help each of the wounded, the Japanese formed a line to guide them. With bayoneted rifles and clubs the JNLPs were placed at intervals of about 30 yards along a crooked line of march a half-mile long to a tennis court about 500 yards back from the seawall.

The long file of men straggled on slowly and weakly. Occasionally the Japanese batted them along, but there were no outright beatings. By about three in the afternoon the last of the bearded and bandaged prisoners were hobbling through the gate of the tennis court which was to be their prison.

It was a concrete court not far from an old Marine barracks, and undoubtedly some of the elder officers had played there in the happy days when service life had been a country club. There was only one court. It was, of course, without shade or shelter of any kind. It had the usual wire fencing strung around, with an unpainted wall about 6 feet high at the bottom. At the side was a tall referee’s platform, and a small water faucet.

This court was to be the new prison for some 1,300 hungry, thirsty, battle-shocked, ill and in some cases wounded men who remained of the approximately 1,615 who had left Bilibid.

T
HEY
stacked their dead at the entrance to the court. They moved the tall referee’s platform to the middle of the court, where it became a kind of lookout and command post. Commander Portz was still nominally senior officer, but so exhausting had been the experience he underwent in the aft hold that both he and Bridget were depleted as well as wounded. Leadership was passing into the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Beecher, whose forward hold had suffered greatly, but relatively not so much.

“We saw that Bridget and Portz were fading,” says one Army lieutenant. “Their throats were almost gone from shouting orders; you could hardly hear them. Both had body wounds, and Portz was wounded in the head, too. I had never seen bravery and leadership in my life like that of Bridget when men began dying in the hold. As for Portz, I had come to think of him as I would of my own father.”

Beecher, sitting aloft in the referee’s chair, had great difficulty establishing quiet and order, even in making himself heard. How could more than 1,300 men be arranged in a single tennis court? It was the problem of the ship holds all over again.

Finally it was managed—the Japanese paid no attention to this, leaving each impossible situation they created to the Americans—that the prisoners would be seated in rows of 52 men. This meant a row of 26 men in each court from the service baseline to where the net ordinarily would be, plus 26 in the same line in the opposite court. They sat as they had in the bays or shelves of the
Oryoku Maru,
with their knees drawn up to their chins. The only possible variant was sitting spread-eagle, with each man’s haunches in the fork of his neighbor’s legs.

The prisoners had barely got seated when they had reason to jump to their feet. A wave of three American planes came over the court. The prisoners crouched again a moment, not knowing whether they would be strafed. But the first plane’s target was the Japanese anti-aircraft gun on a knoll beyond the tennis court. The guns spoke, the plane roared down and silenced the gun, and as it swung up again a tinkle of empty .50-caliber cartridge cases came hurtling down and struck the court’s concrete and a few sunburned shoulders. The second plane hit the
Oryoku Maru,
apparently with a bomb, for a flame leaped up, and the third plane dropped another bomb about 1,500 feet off.

The prisoners, standing tiptoe, supporting each other, saw it all. The
Oryoku Maru,
which had lain all day lifeless in the water, negligently smoking, now burst into flames all over. There was no sign of life on her decks. The ammunition began to go off. She burned and burned, and in two hours she sank. (At the time of Japan’s surrender she was still lying in the same place off Olongapo, with some fifteen feet of water over the tip of her mast.)

“When we saw those Jap
nipa
huts around their guns go up in smoke we liked it even more than seeing the ship go down,” says one Navy man. “We enjoyed the whole scene immensely.”

On the 15-foot wide strip of space beyond one baseline the prisoners established their “hospital.” Hayes was now exhausted and another doctor, Lieutenant Commander Clyde Welsh of Chicago, took over. His next rank, with a similar name, Lieutenant Commander Cecil Welch of South Dakota, had disappeared, reportedly suffocated aboard the ship. The other doctors on the Navy side of the “hospital” were Lieutenant Bruce Langdon of North Carolina and Lieutenant Arthur Barrett of Louisiana.

The “hospital” consisted of two sheets and a couple of raincoats stretched to give protection from the sun. Otherwise it was no different from the tennis court. The Japanese furnished no medical supplies and naturally the half-clothed Americans had none. The first major operation was the amputation of the arm of a Marine corporal named Specht by Lieutenant Colonel Jack Schwartz, the surgeon of the famous Hospital No. 2 on Bataan, who—with another Army lieutenant colonel, James McG. Sullivan of San Francisco—sustained much of the medical burden all the way to Japan. The arm of the Marine corporal was in a poisoned condition, but the doctors had neither anesthesia nor scalpel. Finally they cauterized a razor blade and Schwartz amputated the arm without anesthesia. (The Marine lived for five days afterward on the exposed tennis court, fighting sturdily for life, but he died when the column moved.)

The overpoweringly prevalent disease was diarrhea and dysentery, and there was no drug to check it, nor even food. “The Japs tell us,” the officers announced from the referee’s chair, “that they have no food or clothing for us. We will have to wait until they send to Manila.” The men were now at the stage of nutritional diarrhea when the stomach can hold nothing, even if it is palatable and nutritious. Those who had saved some brown sugar from the wreck found that their bodies could not retain it. There was an unending procession through the court gate to the latrines outside and back again.

There were odd wounds, too. Captain Harold A. Jimerson, a University of Kansas man who was teaching mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona, received a cut from one of the American.50-calibers. Captain William Miner, a midwesterner who had commanded infantry in the Visayan group, got his fingers ripped by an American ricochet.

By now, after a full day’s exposure to the sun, the prisoners were in desperate condition from thirst. They could easily have absorbed four or five quarts of water per man. But the Japanese denied them any water other than the faucet. Only an uncertain trickle came from it. They caught the trickle carefully in canteen cups, and served it with spoons. It worked out to four spoonfuls per man, with the single faucet running constantly. Its stream grew thinner and thinner.

Major Reginald H. “Bull” Ridgely, a Marine named for his thunderous voice, began with Beecher to try to take the roll from the referee’s platform. It was a long and tedious task, with something particularly aggravating about it to the sunburned, hungry and thirsty men who sat in the court waiting for night to fall. A name would be called. No answer. “Well, anybody know what happened to him?” Half the men were not listening, trying in some makeshift way to better their position. “Well, doesn’t anybody know what happened to him?”

A voice would say, “I think he passed out last night. I believe I saw him with the dead on the deck, way down under.” As soon as there was a definite assertion, it would give birth to contradictory ones. “The hell you did! He was in the next bay to me. A bomb fragment got him.” And from someone else, “How could a bomb have got him when I saw him swimming away from the ship?” At that moment the missing man might walk in from the latrine outside the court. Or the questioning might go for minutes longer, establishing something or establishing nothing.

“Take it easy,” came the word from the referee’s chair. “Conserve your strength. Don’t move around.”

As the sun went down the concrete suddenly lost its heat and grew cold. Men whom the sun had skinned red, men who had been putting their hands on their burning shoulders, now were shaken by chills and hugged themselves. Less than a third had shoes; many had only shorts or pants; a few were totally naked. Some of the Formosan sentries had been guards also at Cabanatuan and were known to the prisoners. These “Taiwanis” threw a couple of shirts over the fence, and pushed some casaba melons and a few cigarettes through the wire.

Some men were simply too weak to sit up in the rowers’ formation devised to fill the court, and fell over. Some lines therefore devised a method of all 52 lying down together on the right side, intertwined, and then all 52, at the word “Turn over, boys,” changing the position to the left. Cold, thirsty, hungry, and frequently brought to their feet by the prevailing disease of diarrhea, few slept.

The morning brought a few warming minutes that were neither chill night nor torrid day. Again there began the tedious calling of the roll, a rite always done centrally from the referee’s chair, which took nearly two hours. About six more men had died during the night. A burial detail was named; the bodies were stripped of clothing; they were taken out the gate. Later the Japanese gave permission for them to be buried in an improvised cemetery down by the seawall.

The second day on the tennis court the prisoners received their first meal—two tablespoonfuls of rice, raw. Their standard measure had become the canteen cup for an entire line of 52 men, and the tablespoon for each man.

They asked Mr. Wada why they could not have more food and water. Nearby there was plenty of rice in the JNLP barracks, and water in several buildings. The hunchbacked interpreter would not give them permission to go for the water. As for the rice, he said that he could not get that for jurisdictional reasons. It seemed that while the prisoners were aboard the ship they were in the care of the Japanese Navy. But now that they were ashore again, they were under the Japanese Army. No matter if all 1,300 starved to death, the Navy could not be asked to provide food for Army prisoners.

This explanation seemed to please Mr. Wada; he and Lieutenant Toshino were comfortable and were eating well.

The naked men tried to adapt to the new situation of being fried on concrete by day, frozen by night. Chief Boatswain Jesse Lee, like many others, tore off the bottoms of his trousers to make caps for his friends, giving one leg to Gunner’s Mate H. M. Farrell of Houston—who was still to lose an eye before he reached Japan—and the other to a machinist named Judy. They also got permission to move the worst wounded from the surface of the court to some shade trees outside. Lieutenant Commander John Littig, an intelligence officer who was known simply as coming from a socially prominent eastern family, died of wounds and weakness.

The days went by. On the fourth day since leaving Bilibid they got their first food ashore. On the fifth, as though to offbalance such generosity, there was no food morning or noon, and a light supper of two tablespoonsful of raw rice. Eventually some clothing came out from Manila. There was enough to tantalize, not enough to cover. A man without cap, shoes or socks got a pair of straw sandals; his head and legs remained uncovered. A man without shirt, cap or socks got the socks. A totally naked man got a pair of shorts.

The sixth day on the open tennis court, December 21st, a convoy of nineteen trucks arrived and about half the men were loaded aboard. The same convoy appeared the next day. Both convoys took the prisoners to San Fernando, Pampanga, stopping often under trees whenever airplanes were heard. The first convoy unloaded at the prison, which had been filled with Filipinos; the second unloaded at the theater.

The prisoners were in good spirits. They had lost strength but they had gained eight days’ delay from the Japanese, and MacArthur was still on the way.

T
HE
prison yard at Pampanga is about 70 feet by 60 feet, and a lemon tree grew in the center. The lemons lasted about fifteen seconds after the first prisoners entered; in five minutes most of the leaves were eaten as well. There were two cell blocks a single story high. The elderly officers and the sick were housed in them. The other prisoners lay down as they had on the tennis court, in the sun. There had once been toilets but they were long since broken. The open culvert six inches deep, which ran around the yard, became the latrine. “The flies,” says one officer, “came from all over Luzon.”

About 800 were jammed into the prison, and the other 500 into the dilapidated theater. The amputated Marine corporal Specht died almost on arrival in the theater. But still the prisoners’ hearts were light. For the first time they had hot food. It was only rice and it was brought in on two big pieces of corrugated iron roofing, but it was hot and filling. And they had water, too, all they could drink. What if they had to fill their canteens at the toilet intakes? It was water, and it brought back life to their beady, shrunken stomachs.