First Into Nagasaki (28 page)

The 234 men on
No. 1
were in a way worse off than those on
No. 2
because they were committed into the hands of their frightened Formosan guards. For the first two days they got nothing at all, except that the guards diverted themselves by dropping cigarettes through the hatch to watch the Americans scramble. Lieutenant Colonel “Johnny” Johnson, one of the few hardworking officers who came through, took firm hold and saw that every scrap of food on hand was rationed. Their first food was the leavings from the guards, and a Japanese guard does not leave very much. It amounted to a teaspoon of rice per man.

Johnson took a teaspoonful to the commander of the guard. He said, “If we must go on like this, my men will all die.” The commander replied, “We want you to die. Your submarines are sinking our ships. We want you to die.”

The Japanese crewmen sold a cheap rock candy to the prisoners for rings and fountain pens.

All sense of disorder and fight was now gone from the men. Johnson had set them off in groups of twenty, by areas. Bearded, dirty, shoeless and sunburned, they lay in their areas, awaiting death in the throbbing hold.

No. 2,
though the newer and larger ship, broke its steering gear two days from the Philippines and had to be towed most of the rest of the way. The convoy reached the harbor of Takau, in Formosa, on New Year’s Day, 1945. In celebration of safe arrival the prisoners aboard
No. 1
received five pieces of hardtack each, their New Year’s feast. About a dozen men had died on
No. 1
and somewhat more on
No. 2.
Older men like P. D. Rogers, once General Pershing’s secretary and later Governor of Jolo, passed away of general weakness, while young men like Captain Alfonso Melandez and Captain James Sadler, both of Santa Fe, died of dysentery and exhaustion. Major Reginald Ridgely, Jr., Beecher’s Marine mess officer, kept up a ceaseless chant of “Take it easy, boys, at ease, now” in his deep voice.

After three or four days in Takau harbor, the Japanese decided to put the two parties together again aboard
No. 2.
The smaller party spent a day and night, in between, aboard a still smaller freighter with a bad list, apparently from bombing. After twenty-four hours without food or water they were moved on January 4th to
No. 2
and jammed down into the midships hold already occupied by about 1,000 men. The next day the Japanese decided to open a forward hold, where about 450 men under Captain Arthur Wermuth of Chicago, the “one-man army”, were transferred.

The prisoners knew that they were now within range of more bombers: the U.S. Air Force in China. Their alarm was increased when a light warship approached and tied itself to
No. 2,
making an inviting double target.

The
No. 2
had already taken aboard two hundred sacks of sugar, which were placed in the lower part of the crowded hold amidships. The prisoners sensed that the moment of departure for Japan was at hand. The 37 British prisoners, with them since Manila, were ordered ashore to join their compatriots in Formosa’s camps.

About eight on the morning of January 6th there was a sudden crackle of anti-aircraft fire. Practice or real? Under the closed hatches the prisoners could not tell. Then bombs began to fall. The first hit the side close by the forward hold, and the ship rolled with the blow. The others—two or perhaps three—hit close inboard.

The first American bomb not only tore at the side of the ship; it ripped holes in the partition between the two holds. “We looked through the holes,” says Theodore Lewin, a big broken-nosed soldier of fortune who had been a reporter in Los Angeles on the
Huntington Park Record
and proprietor of an offshore gambling ship. “We could see bodies in the forward hold, all stirred up and scrambled. Almost nobody was even moving. In our own hold the whole place was covered with bodies. Then from the forward hold Captain Wermuth yelled up, ‘I’m taking charge here. Get us some stuff for the wounded, quick!’”

The wild cascade of hatch planks had felled Major Malevic of the Fourteenth Engineers, but he was still alive. Three Army lieutenant colonels were lying in a row, Peter Kemp, Jack Schwartz and Bill Manning. The outer two had been killed by head blows; Schwartz was untouched. The gallant Marine, Major Andrew Mathiesen, who had helped so many, was knocked from the upper level to the bottom by a hatch plank and later died of shock and internal injuries. Even after the mortal blow he pulled himself up, worked and gave orders normally, but finally collapsed.

“We’re going to need the last clothing you have for bandages, boys,” announced Lieutenant Colonel James McG. Sullivan, a medico. “Tear off your pant legs and shirts. If you’re cold, get a sugar sack. We’ve got to save these men.”

The appearance of the wounded in the middle hold was peculiarly unbearable. The fumes coming from the bilges had made a yellowish combination that the engineers said was ammonium picrate gas. In the pit, the men’s hair had turned an unearthly yellow blond color.

“A Navy doctor only a foot away from me,” says Lieutenant Russell Hutchison of Albuquerque, who had built a tiny radio in Davao to time MacArthur’s coming, “lost his eye right out of his head. I was eating a mess kit of rice at the time. On my left a man had the back of his head blown clean off. There were dark flecks in my rice that had not been there before. I only hesitated a moment, then I ate the rice.”

In this hold amidships, from which come the only coherent accounts of what happened, about 40 were killed and about 200 wounded. In the forward hold, which resembled a human butcher shop, over half the prisoners, more than 200, were dead, and many of the rest gravely wounded.

The Japanese were now in a civilized harbor, with doctors, hospitals, barges, and all other medical services at their disposal. Did they move to help? They did not. The first day nothing whatever was done. The unwounded in the middle hold, where some doctors were still alive, were not even allowed to go above and then descend into the chaos of the forward hold to help. So the first night passed, with the bodies stiffening where they lay.

The second day a small detachment of Japanese Red Cross corpsmen arrived at the ship. They did not even attempt to enter the forward hold. They handed out some medicines in the midships hold, and went away.

By now the living men in both holds were pleading with Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada for permission to lift out their dead. The bodies were swollen and bloated; the stench was beyond breathing. But the Japanese would not allow them to move the bodies. Still another night they spent with their mangled dead and their unrelieved wounded. On the morning of the 8th, two full days later, Toshino and Wada for the first time agreed to have the bodies removed.

Purely as physical labor, it was a task almost beyond the strength of the survivors. To move 300 living men, heavy and helpless, would have been a full job for a large hospital corps with stretchers, slings, and aidemen husky and strong. These men had lost as much as forty pounds each; they had not had a true meal in many months; they were battle-shocked; they had no apparatus; and the dead bodies they had to move were those of their comrades of nearly three years’ imprisonment.

And yet they had not wholly lost the American’s last resource: his humor. As they stripped the bodies of clothing, as they tugged them and stacked them, they laughed at what had happened to a rice-and-latrine detail that was on deck when the bombs struck. Their guard, a Formosan named Ah Kong, hardly heard the whistle of bombs when he dropped his rifle and took to his heels. He ran into a passageway and huddled there. The Americans were scared of the bombs, but more scared that the other jittery guards, seeing them without Ah Kong, would shoot them down. So they picked up Ah Kong’s rifle and poured pell-mell after him into the passageway, where they returned their panting sentry his weapon, pointing it back as usual at themselves.

“We’ll never forget,” said one member of this detail, “when Ah Kong allowed us to walk forward and peer down for a moment through the twisted hatchway of the forward hold. We could see Wermuth standing there, looking around trying to get his bearings. There seemed at least 300 dead around him and about 100 wounded. About 50 men who were whole were still walking around, dazed.”

Beecher took charge in the hold amidships, Wermuth forward. Captain Jack Clark of the Marines, who had kept the list of the dead in the tennis court, was now dead himself, as was also Captain Lee Clark, another Marine. A sergeant of the Fourth Shanghai Marines named Staley had been killed between two petty officers of Ah Kong’s trusties.

Even the Japanese saw that
No. 2
was so hopelessly perforated that she could never make Japan. Light peeked through all her bulkheads. The prison ships had left a long trail of American bodies committed to the sea, but a mass burial could not be carried out in Takau harbor. A barge appeared alongside. The dead were going ashore in Formosa.

Out of the middle hold the dead could be hauled individually, stripped and tied to ropes. For the forward hold it was necessary to rig a broad wire cargo net, on the end of a boom and tackle. Here Wermuth, with the help of corpsmen like Hilton, hauled the bodies like fagots and had them swung away through the hatch by the dozens, hugged within the wire net as if they were bunches of asparagus.

Before a load was lifted, if there was a body in it who had not yet been identified, the question would be asked: “Anybody alive from this man’s bay?” (Silence.) “Anybody know which bay this man comes from?” (Silence.) Some men were unrecognizable even to those who had lived with them.

For the ugly job of loading the dead there was little rivalry. The survivors were weak and extremely thirsty. Though the horses in the same cargo hold had presumably drunk gallons of water, and though the boat was in harbor, the Japanese kept saying, “No water—we have no water.” The wounds were kept from healing and further sapped by abnormal loss of water as well as blood. Then came the command: “We need thirty men to go ashore for burial duty with these bodies. Who volunteers?” Almost every man who could totter to his feet volunteered. His offer was not without self-interest. He hoped that for once, if he went ashore, he could fill up his body with water and renew his thinning blood.

“I wanted to go ashore and try for some water with all my heart,” says one officer. “But I could not move. So I just lay on my back and watched that wire cargo net—it was about twenty feet square when laid out, I guess—going down into the hold empty, being loaded, and then ascending, shutting out the light with naked bodies before it swung away out of my sight.”

At length the barge, overloaded, moved toward shore. Among the ten officers who went were Lieutenant H. B. Wright of the Air Corps, Lieutenant Keene of the Cavite 6th Marines—a South Carolinian—and Major John Fowler, 26th Cavalry. They reached a breakwater, tied up, but found that they were too weak to carry the bodies ashore one by one. They attached ropes to the naked feet, dragged them to the point where the breakwater met the sand, and laid them out in rows. It was a coal dumping yard, and there were black mountains of bituminous coal, thousand of tons, nearby. They left the bodies on the beach that first night, beside the coal.

The second day they again loaded the barge with bodies and brought them ashore, placing them beside their predecessors. Each night the burial party drew up and gave a military salute before returning to the ship. The third day they took all the bodies back to a Japanese crematorium near a shrine, and rendered them into ashes.

By now an evening prayer had become a part of their simple routine. Of the estimated sixteen chaplains in the party, both Protestant and Catholic, only three were to live to Japan. The strongest seemed to be the Army priest, Cummings. One Navy man says, “I shall never forget the prayer that Father asked the first night after the bombing, when the Japs would not let us move the bodies. He had often said prayers before that, at other times. But a lot of men paid no attention, then. They kept on babbling or arguing or cursing. This night, the minute he stood up there was absolute silence. I guess it was the first real and complete silence there had been since we left Bilibid. Even the deranged fellows were quiet. And I remember what his opening words were. He said, ‘O God—O God, please grant that tomorrow we will be spared from being bombed.’ There was just something about the way he said those words that brought the men around. Then he prayed. He somehow managed to say everything that was in our hearts—what we had left as hearts after squabbling with each other. The last thing he did was to lead us in the Lord’s Prayer. I think every man there, even the unbalanced ones, managed to repeat at least some of the words after him.”

The prisoners kept alive partly by trading with the Japanese and partly by stealing sugar from the bottom of the midships hold. The Japanese set every kind of guard, but the prisoners always managed to trick them. The sugar was a two-edged prize. “It saved a lot of men’s lives as food, but it killed more than it saved.” It was coarse and brown. If more than a tablespoonful a day was eaten, it caused severe diarrhea, and brought death. Few men had the self-control to hold down their consumption.

The sugar led to a double drama. Beecher had warned the men: “Don’t eat sugar under the hatch where the guard can see you. Crawl into a corner.” The practice was for two men to eat alternately, one standing guard for the other. In the same way, when the sugar was stolen from below, an officer stood at the hatch where he could signal down into the sugar hold. Marine Lieutenant Keene frequently acted as lookout.

Two of the ablest sugar thieves were a lieutenant in the geodetic survey of the Coast Guard who teamed up with a Catholic Navy chaplain, Lieutenant McManus. They stole many mess kits of sugar before they were caught at last. The Formosans brought them on deck; first they slapped them, then knocked them down with rifles, and finally kicked them systematically. The Coast Guard lieutenant, seeing the chaplain was going under fast, protested that he alone was responsible. The Japanese then released McManus and concentrated on the lieutenant. They said that they were going to shoot him. But after an hour’s beating they pushed him back through the hatch.