First Into Nagasaki (29 page)

However, the sugar thefts went on. Each morning when the Japanese sentries descended, another sack of sugar would be missing. But no Formosan sentry could be found who was willing to spend the night in the putrid hold under the prisoners. Finally Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada came to the edge of the hatch and looked down into the pit. “Who has stolen the sugar?” demanded Mr. Wada. No answer. Mr. Wada had a consultation with the spectacled lieutenant, then made a stiff announcement. “Unless the thieves give themselves up immediately, we will cut off all rice and all water from both holds.”

The silver-haired Beecher called a general meeting. He said, “This isn’t a question of finding who has been taking the sugar. It’s a matter of saving the lives of men who will die unless they have rice and at least a little water. We’ve got to have two men who are willing to go up and offer themselves as hostages for all the others. I don’t have any idea what Toshino and Wada will order done to those two men. They may have them shot. I just don’t know. The only thing I can promise them is this: if they survive whatever the Japs do to them, I will see to it that they are taken care of and don’t go without food the rest of the trip.”

There was an English sergeant aboard named Trapp, husky and of medium height, who had not gone ashore when the 37 Britons were taken over the side to the Formosan camp. Trapp had known several of the 4th Marines during his duty in China, and he had made new friends on the road from Bilibid. And there was a husky medical aideman, an Ohioan, Sergeant Arda M. “Max” Hanendrat of the 31st Infantry, who had qualified for honors on Bataan by carrying a wounded man on his back for thirteen miles. Trapp and Hanendrat volunteered.

Everyone waited, penned below, listening for such volleys as had already killed several prisoners. None came.

The Japanese psychology is peculiar. Whereas the caught thief may lightly be killed, the uncaught one who confesses his crime may in some cases escape with his life. When corpsman Patrick Hilton was allowed to go up the ladder to empty a
benjo,
he saw the two men, marked with blows and faint, kneeling between guards. Every time one reeled and fell over, the Japanese would slap him to consciousness again. But they still lived.

Eventually the two sergeants were pushed back into the hold. They lived to clamber aboard the boat that took them to Japan. But, great-hearted men that they were, in the end both died.

No. 2,
it was clear, could not reach Japan in her present perforated condition, and the Japanese were stubbornly persistent that to Japan the prisoners must go. The morning of January 13th, two weeks after the arrival in Takau and a week after the American bombing that had cost approximately 350 American lives, Toshino ordered the remaining men to move to another ship that lay a few hundred yards off.

Between 800 and 900 men were now alive of the 1,600 plus who had marched out of Bilibid precisely a month before. Many of them, however, wounded and untended, were at the very gate of death. To move them was to doom them. But the Japanese wanted them moved, and not slowly, but as fast as possible. Once again the sentries’ cry was “Speedo, speedo!” A barge was brought alongside, like the barge that had taken the 350 to the beach and the crematorium. “Speedo, speedo!”

There were intestinal hemorrhages, extreme shocks, amputations: how could such men be moved? Corpsmen like Hilton figured out a bosun’s chair to get them out of the hold. He put a Spanish bowline around each leg and a square knot around the waist to steady the torso, and up went the groaning man, hauled by sixteen of the pairs of hands still able to tug. When it came to moving the men who could not be held upright, the corpsmen took a hatch plank, tied the wounded man to the plank, fixed a scaffold knot around each end, and slowly tugged him through the hatch.

“In a way this was the most terrible job of all,” says one officer. “For the first time we had to cause pain to ourselves, and we could not avoid it. What I remember most clearly was the smile on Mr. Wada’s face as he watched us.” A Navy pharmacist named Hogan died the moment he touched
No. 2
’s own deck.

When the barge reached the new ship, another obstacle awaited the wounded. On the side where the accommodation ladder had been lowered there were already a couple of barges tied up, whose decks had to be circumnavigated with each wounded man before the ladder was reached.

The ups and downs of this slow trip brought many of the worst wounded into coma. “I’ll never forget,” says one officer, “seeing Captain Walter Donaldson, a 200th Coast Artillery officer from Deming, New Mexico. He could not walk, but he could crawl, and he crawled the whole way. He had two sprained wrists and two fractured ankles, but he could still creep on his elbows and knees. He crawled all the way around the barges, up the ladder and onto the deck.”

Approximately fourteen men who reached the new ship never saw its hold. They passed away on its decks immediately. But they were not taken ashore to be cremated; they waited, like the others, to make at least a start on the journey toward Japan. Dead in port, they were to be buried at sea.

On the new ship, an undersized freighter, the shrinking party was again forced all into a single hold, the next to the last one aft. The bays here were divided stanchion by stanchion and about 15 feet long by about 10 feet deep. Each bay accommodated around twenty men, counted off by Lieutenant Colonel Johnson. Two positions were possible: to sit with legs extended, or to lie down with knees drawn up. Standing, or lying down at full length, was impossible. Rapidly though the party diminished, the Japanese always managed to see that the men’s pits were too small for their numbers.

After sundown on January 13th, the ship weighed anchor and slipped out of Takau. But her course did not turn toward Japan, but to China.

By now it was apparent that only the strongest would endure and live. The little food was rationed carefully, but not equally. The medical corpsmen, who were doing most of the physical work, did more and got more, by common consent. And the details which carried the slop buckets on the decks had opportunities for trading not given to those lying below decks.

The death rate took a wild jump upward. George Curtis says: “I counted 47 dead in all on the first day out.” By now the Japanese also were calling the roll, standing like little gods at the edge of the hatch against the skyline for as long as two hours at a time and monotonously droning forth the names of the Americans. When one did not answer, they did not ask any questions; Mr. Wada simply drew a line through his name. Less and less was seen of Lieutenant Toshino. He may have been slightly apprehensive that his superiors would not be fully happy over his stewardship. After all, though, over half the Americans were still alive.

I
T
immediately grew colder. A few straw mats were in the hold, but only enough for about a third of the men. Friends tried to huddle together under a single dry mat, while the cold wind swept under them. From the first day a bitter draft began to suck through the hold. It came from the ventilator in the Japanese quarters just astern, sucked through the stern bays on the starboard side of the prisoners’ pit, swept across the opening in the middle and up through the hatch. On this wind of death the lives of many Americans rode their way out.

More than once Beecher pleaded with the Japanese to allow the prisoners to stuff one of their straw mats in the ventilator. The Japanese always refused. And so the wind of death brought pneumonia, a new visitor.

The hatch in the center of the hold, covered with tarpaulin, led to the deck below and was never opened. It lay there, bare to the sky, with the cold draft sweeping and swirling over it. The rain and later the snow and hail fell through it, fell on the bodies of those who lay exposed on the hatch.

The hatch was the center of all their life, and since their life pointed always toward death, it was natural that the dead should be piled there. Things were reversed from the other ships, where to be under the hatch was a favored position. Here, if you moved to the hatch or were moved there by the corpsmen, it was the equivalent of euthanasia or mercy death. It meant that you were so far gone that the food of those who might still be able to live could no longer be spared for you. It placed you neighbor to the dead whom you would soon join.

The dying on the hatch were also looked on covetously by the shivering men in the bays who were already mentally dividing up their clothes. A medical committee for clothing—itself grotesquely naked, a kind of skinny parody of such social committees at home—was supposed to handle the equitable division of clothes. But men died at night, and the committee members could not always get to their feet, and there was connivance. The ladder guard—the man who had been placed to keep the demented from climbing the ladder and being shot by the sentries—might look away. When he looked back, a man not yet quite dead would have lost his shirt, and no questions asked.

A few life-preservers, the kapok-stuffed vest kind, torn and dirty, overlooked by the Japanese in their final search of the hold, lay in the far corners of the bays. Immediately the prisoners tore these open and pulled out the wadding. They parceled out the kapok. The few rolls of it were stuffed into the few pants that still had full legs and the few shirts that still had arms. “The luckiest ones walked around looking like fat teddy bears,” says one survivor. “But they never stopped scratching. The kapok was a hive of lice, and the lice never gave them any peace to enjoy their warmth.”

It was unmistakable from the beginning that the Japanese had not lost their intention of killing their prisoners by thirst. Here was a freighter fresh from the principal harbor of Formosa, whose water tanks should have been filled to the brim. Of rice the prisoners received a one-half canteen cupful daily, but of water they received less than they would have if cast away in an open lifeboat. The ration was 2 to 4 spoonfuls daily.

“If you forgave the Japanese everything else,” says one survivor, “I cannot see how you could forgive the way they denied us water all the way from Manila to Japan. Some starved, some were suffocated, some were shot by guards, some died of sunstroke, some died of cold; all things that were deliberately caused and avoidable. But everybody was thirsty, and everybody was kept thirsty all the time.”

They soon found that they were in a submarine zone. Three days from Takau they picked up a crippled, torpedoed ship and towed it for a day. Their steerage way was barely five knots. Then the prison ship was ordered to turn back for another distressed ship. They towed that one for two days. Then they began to approach the islands off the China coast. “We passed unholy looking little islands, ugly and completely bare,” recalled one man. “The water around them was a nasty yellow. I supposed we were at the mouth of the Yangtze or the Whangpoo. But if you’d been on deck and seen the water, there was something you dreaded almost more than dying: the idea of being slipped over the side and descending into that yellow Chinese sea-mud.”

The Japanese had no water to give, but they had plenty to sell. At the rear of the two passageways between the bays there were two open gratings, through one of which swept the so-called “wind of death”. These gratings were the trading center. By now the Americans had little left to offer. The keepsakes a man parts with last began to go.

The Japanese liked American wedding rings, the solid gold kind. For a thick, heavy one a Japanese would bring you five canteens full of water. Annapolis and West Point rings, the most valued possession of the professional officer, were always bad seconds to wedding rings. They never brought more than four cigarettes, and an early glut brought them down as low as two. For a pair of shoes you could get two cans of tomatoes or salmon, or a handful of tangerines. For a heavy Navajo turquoise ring, Lieutenant Russell Hutchison gained two straw mats, enough to save his life and that of another officer. A wristwatch—rare indeed—would get you an old rice sack. Captain William Miner saved his life and that of Major F. Langwith Berry by trading a fountain pen for a straw mat. “We considered that a tremendous bargain,” says Berry.

The clothing issued on the Olongapo tennis court had been
skoshi—
insignificant in amount—but the cold Manchurian winds blowing out of the Yellow Sea did not induce the Japanese to issue any more. The prisoners lay huddled as far back in the bays as possible, staccato coughs coming from their parched throats. The icy wind seethed and sang through the cracked partitions and swept the bare passageways. Once Lieutenant Colonel Johnson said to a Japanese officer who knew a little English, “Listen, if our men don’t have at least some more water, they will die
—die,
I tell you!” The Japanese looked him over calmly and said, “Everybody
potai
(dead)—okay, okay.”

As the freighter wound her way through the desolate islands off the Chinese rivers, hiding by night against prowling submarines and proceeding by day, the prisoners began to die at the rate of twenty or more daily. A man whose husky constitution made him a body collector says, “Every morning was the same. The ladder guard would waken me and say that it was time to get busy. I would take a small handful of sugar and swallow it for breakfast before I touched the bodies. Then I would slowly make the circle of the bays. I didn’t make any pretense of being dignified or tender. I would just stop at the bay and put my head in and say, ‘Got any stiffs in there?’ They might say, ‘Yes, we’ve got a big one this morning.’ ‘Well,’ I’d say, ‘get him out to the edge here. I haven’t got all day.’ Sometimes they would help me, but sometimes they would just say, ‘Come on in and get him yourself.’ That would make me sore. I would dive right in there and knock them over until I got what I was after. I’d haul him out. Nine times out of ten he’d be stripped naked already and there’d be nothing for the clothing committee. It must sound callous to say so, but death meant nothing to us. If you made it, you made it; if not, you died. That was all there was to it.”

The bodies were hauled up, feet first, with a rope around their ankles. Then every prisoner listened for the succession of scooting whishes as each comrade was slipped over the side. The Japanese kept the hatches closed, and shoved over the bodies themselves.