First Into Nagasaki (27 page)

An Army lieutenant colonel, Harry J. Harper, well known at Cabanatuan, died at Pampanga.

On the night of December 23rd four Red Cross boxes came down from Manila. For the needs of 1,300 men the drug quantities were minute, but they gave hope. On the same night several of the most ill were evacuated back to Bilibid.
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The handful taken included, as well as survivors can remember, a lieutenant commander known as “Bull of the Woods” Harrington for his heavy voice, and a Marine lieutenant colonel who in Cabanatuan earned the nickname of “Caribou Sam” for his ability at rustling meat under the eyes of the Japanese field guards.

At three in the morning of the day before Christmas, the prisoners were routed out of the prison and theater and marched to the railroad station. An aged locomotive, whose multiple bullet holes testified to what the American planes were doing to Japanese rail traffic, awaited them with an inadequate string of 26-foot freight cars. The wounded were piled on top. The merely ill were packed in below. Curtis, the automobile agent, counted 107 men in and on his car alone. Mr. Wada soon explained why the wounded were placed on top. “If the American planes come,” he said, “you must wave to them and show your bandages.” The train, thus “protected” by its prisoners, was loaded with ammunition and supplies for two way stations along the line. “Wave white clothing,” said Mr. Wada encouragingly, “so that your friends up there will recognize you.”

The heat in the closed boxcars was so terrific that conditions soon equalled those aboard the
Oryoku Maru.
Perspiration plastered the rags of the prisoners to their bodies. But outside they could hear the indefatigable Filipino urchins yelling to the wounded on top, “Merry Christmas! Merry Chree-eestmas!”

The rumor spread through the train that they were going to be taken back to Bilibid to be clothed. But in mid-morning an air fight broke out overhead. They watched American planes dive bombing the Manila airfields. The train stopped amid wreckage that was still smoking. “We sweated out being raided again,” says Major F. Langwith Berry, who was seated on the top of a boxcar with a fractured arm, “but fortunately the show was over.” No man could get down even to relieve himself; the urinal was a canteen cup passed from hand to hand.

As night fell the train was still crawling northward. At three in the morning it reached the town of San Fernando del Union, on Lingayen Gulf. The freight doors grated open and the filthy, cramped men tumbled forth. They sprawled on the station platform, slumped in sleep. It was Christmas morning, 1944.

At daylight the Americans were marched to a single-story trade school on the outskirts of the town. A bush with green leaves and red flowers stood by the gate. They ate the leaves by handfuls. They lay there all day. The menu of their Christmas dinner was one-half cup of rice and one-third canteen cup of dirty surface water. They pulled up grass for beds and the soldiers gave them some disinfectant. At about 7 p.m. they were counted off by sections of 100 men, then marched three miles (nearly all were barefoot) over a coral shell road to a beach overlooking the Japanese anchorage.

Lingayen, being more than a hundred miles north of Manila, was freer from American fighter attacks. The docks were loaded with supplies recently arrived from Japan, and there were several ships winking their lights in the harbor.

The sand was bitter cold. The naked men shivered and pushed against each other for warmth. At least two died, one of them Lieutenant Colonel Edmundson of the Philippine Scouts, who had been suffering from acute diarrhea. A West Pointer, Captain Wilson Farrell of the 31st Infantry, who had organized a “swing shift” of cloth-wavers to get air into the suffocating boxcars, labored hard to encourage the downhearted and keep their heads up. But it was bitterly clear to all that they had been moved once again beyond hope of rescue by MacArthur. They were going to Japan.

The officers of the 200th Coast Artillery, almost all outdoorsmen from New Mexico, got together and began to lay plans for an escape. They would steal a rowboat and make their way up the coast. But Lieutenant Colonel John Luikart of Clovis, who was to die within a week, forbade the plan. He reminded them that on Bataan the Japanese had shot at one time several fellow officers—Major James Hazelwood, Captain Ray Gonzales, Captain Eddie Kemp, Captain Raymond Thwaits—along with Sergeant Barney Prosser and Charleston Miller, a Navajo Indian—simply for deviating from the line of the death march to O’Donnell in order to trade. “You cannot expose the lives of these other prisoners to reprisal,” Luikart said.

Again the burning sun came up. Again the skins of the weakened men began to curl with sunburn. Commander Bridget begged and begged the Japanese to give water. A rice ball was issued for each man, but discipline was cracking again. Some got two; some got none. Bridget and Beecher then secured permission from the Japanese—Major John Pyzig of the Marines shared interpreting duties with Engelhart—for the men to enter the water and bathe their blisters.

They were allowed five minutes in the water, barely enough time to splash themselves. Many were so dehydrated that they scooped the salt water into their mouths. When they came out Bridget renewed his pleading for drinking water. An Army captain of engineers from Hope, Arkansas, lost his head, leaped up, and dashed into the water, drinking like mad. The Japanese raised their guns to fire, but he was pulled out in time. Finally the Japanese issued water: one canteen cup for twenty men. It worked out to four tablespoonsful for each thirsty mouth. But there was a rotation. After ninety minutes more in the sun you could have another four tablespoonsful.

Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada had seen how the American planes spared the prisoners on the tennis court and atop the train. Here at Lingayen they put this immunity to use. “We want you to be warned,” said Mr. Wada. “You are sitting on a gasoline dump. If we are bombed—well . . . .”

All that day they did not believe him. But toward nightfall a detachment of soldiers drove up, unlimbered shovels, and began to dig. Mr. Wada, for once, had been telling the truth. Drum after drum of gasoline was uncovered directly under them, loaded and driven away. “You see?” said Mr. Wada. “We lose our gas, then you lose something else—eh?”

Again they lay down on the cold sand, shivering, thinking of Christmas at home; too hungry, thirsty and cold to sleep. Somewhere between midnight and dawn Mr. Wada again stirred up the sentries, who ordered the Americans on their feet. They marched along the waterfront to a dock loaded with Japanese supplies. It was still dark and the guards could not watch all 1,300 men as they moved between high piles of boxes. Hungry, the prisoners plundered some of the boxes. They found some aerial film, pulled it out and exposed it. The New Mexican artillery officers found bran and a little dried fish, which they parceled out among those who had shirts to conceal it.

The Japanese were suddenly in fearful haste. Lieutenant Toshino would scold Mr. Wada in Japanese, and the hunchback would say, “Get in the barge, quickly, quickly! You must hurry, hurry!” Some prisoners were literally pushed off the dock and fell in the barge’s bottom. “Speedo!” shouted the guards. “Speedo, speedo!” With rifle butts and the flats of their swords they pushed back the fallen in the barge. “Back, back! Speedo, speedo!”

The sun was just coming up as the prisoners climbed on sunburned feet the iron side-ladder of their new vessel, whose propellers were already impatiently turning over. All this haste was for a good reason. Ordinarily, in wars hitherto, ships have considered themselves in danger from air or submarine attack only by day. If armed, they have felt themselves fairly safe against submarines except at the weak visibility hours of sunrise and sunset, when the low profile of a submarine gives it an advantage.

The American submarines, however, became specialists in night attacks. Thus the Japanese shipping controls were always in a dilemma: whether to face the subs by night or the bombers by day. Where they were within range of both, as at Manila, there was simply no answer but to take advantage of any bad weather and hope for stormy cover, which makes either torpedo or bomb sighting difficult. At Lingayen, however, more than a hundred miles to the north, they were out of range of scourging air attacks by day—though a long-range raid was always possible. And if ships sailed by day and lay up by night, they had at least a fighting chance to beat the American submarines, whose deadliest strikes were made by darkness . . . . The Japanese wanted to get out at dawn and widen the aircraft range as much as possible the first day, thus halving their possible antagonists.

Two freighters were leaving, a big one of about 8,000 tons marked
No. 2
on its superstructure, and another of about 5,500 tons marked
No. 1
on its funnel.
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The first bargefuls of men were crowded aboard the
No. 2
in the midships hold, which had two levels. But as the nervous captain watched the rapidly rising sun, he lost patience with the slow crawl of tired prisoners up his ladder. Once the thousand-man mark was reached, he lifted anchor and the last batch climbed up while the freighter moved down the harbor. The remainder, some 234 men and a few Japanese wounded and sick, were hustled aboard
No. 1.
On the morning of the 27th both vessels set forth along the coast of northern Luzon. That same evening a submarine fired two torpedoes at
No. 2.
Both missed, and exploded on the Luzon shore.

The last cargo which
No. 2
had carried was horses. “The hold where we were,” says a prisoner, “was like a floating barn, full of horse manure and the biggest, hungriest horse flies I ever saw. They immediately set to work biting our backs and legs. Then more flies came and covered our mouths, ears and eyes. We smelled already, and our smell drew them.”

It was the Japanese practice to save the horses’ urine for some chemical use, bringing it back to Japan in the bilges of the ship. “An overpowering smell like ammonia came up from the bilges,” one man recalled. There was a ventilating system installed to keep the horses alive, but with Americans in the hold the Japanese shut it off.

The prisoners placed their wounded on the upper of the two decks in the hold, where the odor was less. The two Army doctors, Lieutenant Colonels North and Schwartz, were in charge of this sick level. In delirium several men fell or rolled off into the lower level that night. Below, in the fetor of the hold, Commander Bridget, almost indistinguishably hoarse now, was in charge. Beecher handled negotiations with Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada.

The pit on
No. 2
was about 60 feet square, with bays 10 feet deep on two sides and bays about 4 feet deep on the other two sides. The horses had left scattered feed in the crevices of these stalls. The prisoners scraped up the remnants and ate them, mixed with the bran stolen on the dock.

The Japanese crew of this vessel seemed willing to give the prisoners rice and water. But Mr. Wada and Lieutenant Toshino and the Formosan guards were afraid to let the prisoners on deck. Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth “Swede” Olson, a regular Army finance officer who had been camp commandant at Mindanao, climbed up boldly and faced the hunchback. “These men are hungry and thirsty, Mr. Wada,” he said. “They are dying. Sick men won’t be any good to you. Dead men won’t help you. Give us a chance. We’re not afraid to work for our lives. All we want is a chance.”

Finally Toshino and Wada relented. They allowed the crew to send down food, and eventually allowed the prisoners to send six-man chow details on deck to the galley. The prisoners each had rice and a quarter canteen cupful of hot soup. But the Japanese would not allow them to keep the rice buckets long enough to pass around; they had to send them up again immediately. So they dumped out the rice on dirty raincoats and on the manure-scattered pit. “The lineup was something to see,” says one prisoner. “We were barefooted, bearded, dirty and full of diarrhea. We ate from our hats, from pieces of cloth, from our hands. You would see an officer who once commanded a battalion with a handful of rice clutched against his sweaty, naked chest so the flies could not get it, eating it like an animal with his befouled hands.”

Again death was moving quietly among them. Of dehydration or diarrhea, or old wounds, a man died almost every hour. From the Japanese galley they procured rice sacks for shrouds. When a man died his body was stripped of useable clothing, bundled in a sack, and hoisted out. Tying up the bodies was the job of boatswains like Jesse Lee and corpsmen like Patrick C. Hilton of Pratt, West Virginia: “The trouble was that the second day we ran out of sacks. I would tie a running bowline around the feet of the corpse and a half hitch around his hand, then say, ‘All right, take him away’. He would rise up out of the hold, and his friends could see him for the last time against the sky, swinging back and forth against the side of the hatch as he went out of sight.”

Most of the chaplains were by this time beyond doing any duties, but a Catholic Army lieutenant, Father William “Bill” Cummings of San Francisco and Ossining, New York, who in a sermon on Bataan had first uttered the phrase “There are no atheists in foxholes”, often managed to say a few words of blessing as the body rose through the hatch. A Navy chief carpenter named O’Brien, for example, stricken on the beach with nutritional diarrhea which not even food could check, passed his final moments and was eased by Cummings. An Air Force sergeant named Brown, however, who jumped overboard off northern Luzon at night, was followed only by the scattered shots of the Taiwani guards.

Captain John Presnell, a graduate of the University of Maine, tried to climb the iron ladder to the deck, and was shot dead by the guards.

A
S
the ships drew away from the Luzon coast it began to grow cold. The men who had broiled now shivered both night and day. As their losses increased the Japanese made a rule that bodies could no longer be hoisted out of the hold immediately after death. They had to lie out on the bottom of the hold in full sight of Lieutenant Toshino or Mr. Wada when they glanced into the pit. Once there were six or eight bodies, Wada would give permission for a general hoisting of corpses. The horse troughs around the hold were now latrines. “You could watch a single fly go from the latrines to the bodies, and then from the bodies to your rice,” says a prisoner. Captain Jack Clark, a Marine, kept the death roll for Beecher.