First Into Nagasaki (37 page)

On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.”

Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (
One hundred million die together!
was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs.

In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination.

A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.

VIII

It is hardly surprising that a prisoner of war about to die from sustained torture on Kyushu in August 1945 and (for example) a political scientist sixty years later may hold a different attitude toward the dropping of the atomic bomb. The Japanese POW camps are one of the great omissions, one of the convenient erasures, of World War II memory. Not in the memories of those lucky enough to survive, but in the collective memory of those who read about the war from an armchair, or learn it in a classroom, or watch its mythologizing in a movie. If the only way to grasp the war’s conclusion is to face, in Weller’s phrase, “the anatomy of radiated man,” likewise it is impossible to understand war with the Japanese without considering their POW camps. They are a chapter of the conflict that is largely ignored, at least in the United States, and especially so relative to the Nazi prisoner of war camps (Gavan Daws’ is one of the few panoramic histories of great depth). As the decades pass, there is less and less motivation in any of the cultures involved to explore what occurred.

Weller’s dispatches remind us of the individuals to whom all this happened. These voices rescued from the past each have their say, and if some seem repetitive that is part of the point. Like the Nagasaki dispatches, the prison camp stories exist as cablese that needed to be fleshed out into proper prose. I have trimmed judiciously, by about eight thousand words—around 20 percent. This was done to avoid highly redundant material, and also to remove the addresses of POWs which Weller included for a readership back home who, in any case, never got to see them. Such details were meant to let them know their loved ones were still alive.

When Weller left Nagasaki and shifted his attention to the camps, he knew they would soon be emptied and the former prisoners, his sources, scattered within days. He found men as eager to tell their sagas as he was to write them down. Weller was also aware there might soon be an internal pressure within the survivors to try to forget what they’d undergone, and their stories’ flush of immediacy would soon be lost.

All the POW camp dispatches appear in shortened form. There are also two articles which Weller wrote just after arriving from Nagasaki in Guam. These exist as finished typescripts, and concern the “theater” put on to fool visiting Red Cross inspectors, and the aberrant Japanese prison camp commanders. Both were mailed not to Weller’s newspaper but to his New York literary agent, Harold Ober, to be sold as magazine features. As best I can determine neither ever appeared. I have placed them among other Omuta stories about Camp #17.

Beyond the deprivations, degradations, and tortures these prisoners endured, each man often recounts how he got to the camps Weller visited. These conflicts, and all they implied, would have been instantly recognizable to the 1945 public. Many of the Dutch and the British, the Australians and Canadians, were taken in the defeats of Singapore (130,000), Java (32,000), and Hong Kong (14,000). Many of the Americans got captured on Guam or Wake; or in the Philippines (75,000), to then endure the Bataan death march, on which one in four died. Some built the Siam-Burma railroad, which claimed yet another 15,000 lives, same ratio. Nearly everywhere, in a hurry, the Japanese won and the Allies lost. The United States saw its navy smashed at Pearl Harbor and its Pacific air forces wiped out in Manila, just before MacArthur got himself safely out to Australia.

This litany of early military disasters added up to astonishing numbers. In a mere six months the Japanese, at a cost of only 15,000 of their own men (deaths and casualties), took 320,000 Allied soldiers out of the war, either as deaths, casualties, or prisoners; over half these were Asiatic. White prisoners, about 140,000 total over the course of the conflict, became slave labor across the growing Japanese empire. (Asiatic prisoners were often turned loose, as good propaganda among the subjugated peoples.) Japan had not signed the 1929 Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of prisoners of war, and a Japanese soldier would sooner be killed than captured: thus every enemy soldier who surrendered was a coward, a cur, a thing. Any notion of “inhumane treatment” toward a surrendered Chinese, much less a white man, was incomprehensible. White men were the foe, so their role was to work, then die. Whether their deaths proved painful did not matter to the Japanese.

Unlike the Nazi POW camps, there were few escape attempts, for it was obvious to any Allied POW in Asia that a white face was an immediate giveaway even had he succeeded, and the Japanese made it clear that they would execute ten men for every man who escaped. Statistically it was seven times healthier to be a POW under the Nazis than under the Japanese. By war’s end, one out of every three white prisoners had died as their captives—“starved to death, worked to death, beaten to death, dead of loathsome epidemic diseases that the Japanese would not treat,” as Daws puts it. Another year of war and there would have been no POWs still alive. (A Japan War Ministry directive of August 1944 iterated that “the aim is to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.”)

Long-term survival amid such conditions, in what prisoners called “the University of the Far East,” differed by nationality, and camps were largely segregated by country. The Dutch, as the only people with generations of experience at staying alive amid Asian diseases, proved most adept as POWs, with a death rate under 20 percent. (This disparity also reflects the fact that relatively few died in hellships.) The British died at around 32 percent, the Australians at 33 percent, the Americans at 34 percent. Some sources put all these figures higher.

Under the Nazis, who rather paradoxically subscribed to the Geneva Conventions, the Allied POW death rate was only 4 percent.

What the men only partially convey in Weller’s camp dispatches were the conditions under which they somehow survived: few if any medical supplies—like anesthetic—or basic tools, even for amputations, because the Japanese refused to share the contents of regularly delivered Red Cross supply boxes; often no regular baths, and no reliable drinking water; little toothpaste or soap, so no chance to stave off the lower-torso diseases that accompany filthy latrines and flies, with dysentery and malaria the worst killers at up to 95 percent infected in some camp populations, plus crotch rot and all manner of vitamin deficiency diseases like scurvy, protein edema, and beriberi in which the body swelled up from giant bags of fluids that choked the lungs; ulcers that ate away the flesh so painfully that men peed in the holes in their own legs or poured in gasoline if they could get it; cholera and dengue fever; or all the inevitable diseases that came with multitudes of rats, fleas, maggots, and lice. For those who worked in the coal mines, standing for hours in water, pneumonia and tuberculosis were constant perils.

They starved, too, as the dispatches attest, on only five hundred to six hundred calories a day—a fifth of what a working man needs. A sad specialty, if it can be called that, of the American POW camps was trading in food futures. A man might trade two dinners against a single extra breakfast, to feel his stomach almost full for once. With everyone malnourished, it was possible to trade yourself into starvation this way. Such a practice horrified the British and Dutch and Australians, but it went on in all the U.S. camps, even when outlawed by the commanding officers. For men with serious nicotine fixations—in World War II three out of four servicemen smoked—trading meals for cigarettes was another way to starve themselves. The practice of self-mutilation, so detailed in Weller’s dispatches, was another particularly American skill, though it often meant the difference between life and death if it bought someone a reprieve from the coal mines. The trick, if you were right-handed, was to be sure the expert broke your left arm, and did it cleanly.

Omuta, a small city and the site of several camps, was about thirty-five miles northeast and across the bay from Nagasaki. It was in the Fukuoka military district, about forty miles due south of that city. Weller possibly stayed in Omuta rather than in Camp #17 or #25, but knowing him it seems more likely he would’ve stayed at each camp, especially considering how much he researched and wrote in a few days.

Camp #7, which Weller identifies as at Izuka (now spelled Iizuka), is today referred to as Futase #7. The much smaller Camp #23, also placed by him at Izuka, is a few miles due south, and usually called Keisen #23. I suspect that Weller visited the Izuka camps with a prisoner recovery team which took him along after emptying the Omuta camps. A week later he accompanied a recovery team out of Nagasaki to visit Sasebo Camp #18, about fifty miles to the northwest.

Omuta Camp #17, which the bulk of Weller’s dispatches describe, was the largest POW camp in Japan, and one of the harshest. Its facilities were somewhat better than others’; there was bathing water at least several months a year. Its thirty-three buildings, originally laborers’ quarters built by the Mitsui Coal Mining Company, had some ventilation—a liability during winter. The coal mines were about a mile walk from camp. Theoretically men were given a day off every ten days, though sometimes they worked for four weeks straight.

The owner of the coal mines, Baron Takaharu Mitsui (1900–1983), a graduate of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and world famous as a philatelist, was head of one of the two most powerful industrial families in Japan (along with Mitsubishi), and among the wealthiest men in the country. His mines produced half of its coal, though those at Omuta had been closed down in the 1920s as unsafe. He was well aware of the work and living conditions of the POWs, having visited the camp several times in his open touring car. Like other companies that used Allied prisoners as slave labor—Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Kawasaki—Mitsui paid the Japanese army a leasing fee per prisoner of two yen per day (above the average Japanese daily income), and the army kept the money. Though the prisoners were supposedly being paid a wage that was a minuscule fraction of this, very few ever received anything.

Because of this prisoner slave labor, such vast companies maintained full production throughout the war. Because of the delay between surrender and the occupation, they were able (unlike equivalent German companies) to obliterate a damning paper trail before the Americans arrived. They managed to persuade MacArthur’s representatives that it was in no one’s interests to slow down Japan’s recovery by holding millionaire industrialists legally and financially responsible for what they had done in wartime—say, to extract the sort of POW reparations that the Dutch managed to. Indeed, many returning U.S. POWs were ordered by intelligence officers never to speak of their experiences at the hands of the Japanese unless they were given military clearance to do so; some were even compelled to sign documents to this end.

I have been unable to clear up the details on censorship of the POW dispatches. Weller arrived at Omuta Camp #17 on Monday, September 10. The fact that late the following night he typed up an emergency dispatch to Tokyo regarding B-29 supply drops to the camp suggests he had some way (perhaps still a
kempeitai
borrowed from the general) of getting messages up to the capital. Or perhaps there was domestic cable service from Omuta itself? Supporting either explanation, the
Chicago Daily News
ran an extremely brief piece on local-son Arthur Wermuth, “the one-man army,” on September 12 (which I incorporated into the later one for this book). No other POW stories appeared around then, so they must have been censored in Tokyo. Had they reached Chicago, lengthy as they are, the paper could easily have edited out the bomb impressions, as per Truman’s secret memorandum, and published just the accounts of imprisonment from each dispatch.

When Weller returned to Nagasaki on September 20 he seems to have made another concerted effort to send off stories or fragments, and succeeded in a minor way via the just-arrived Navy. On September 25 the
Chicago Daily News
published his first POWs dispatch, written two weeks earlier, entirely the remembrances by Chicago servicemen of their captivity plus a few bomb impressions; maybe this was let through as a “hometowner” story. On September 26 the newspaper ran a tiny portion of his long article from Izuka Camp #7, written nine days earlier—the few paragraphs about Chicago-area servicemen. On September 27 they ran his short piece about released POWs going home to the United States psychologically healthy (a preview of the military’s coming lack of responsibility toward these men) and the editors cut Weller’s cynical closing phrase questioning the official wrap-up. On October 1 they ran his short dispatch about the Dutchman on Java in 1942, tortured to madness, and on October 17–18 an abbreviated version of the Wake Island saga. It seems likely that the Navy was willing to send stories that had taken place nearly four years earlier outside Japan, or a smidgin of local-boy news for a Chicago readership, but otherwise little more.