First Into Nagasaki (38 page)

Once Weller left Nagasaki by ship for Guam via Okinawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, he immediately wrote a short story on board which takes place in a camp evidently modeled on Omuta #17. “Departure, with Sword and Ashes” was sent to his agent Ober from Guam. It was published by the
Saturday Evening Post
in the issue of March 23,1946. This popular weekly magazine, a top-paying market, frequently carried Weller’s fiction and journalism, yet the delay suggests that editors thought it better to wait before running such material. The five-thousand-word story includes details of the camps after the recovery teams arrived that did not make it into any of the dispatches, written now not with a reporter’s but with a novelist’s eye.

For example, it describes the Baron Mitsui figure (here called Baron Satsumai) asking the prisoner recovery team over for tea; Major Toth, the senior officer among the prisoners, naturally refuses to go, and the head of the recovery team cannot understand why. These teams, to Toth, seem to have arrived from another planet—their hair “thick with an almost artificial brushiness . . . a hint of unexpended violence in their purposeful walk.” An ex-prisoner named Mendoza has lost four fingers working in the coal mine: “Among the ulcers on his legs Toth recognized the old one which Lieutenant Bernstein, the medical officer, had nourished and kept alive with cap-lantern acid, so that Mendoza, after his amputation, would not have to go down the shaft again. It was the most famous of Camp 34’s many acid-fed ulcers; it had flourished nineteen weeks, and even in its present fossilized or emeritus condition it still had an eye like a devilfish.”

There is also, notably, a discussion of the food-trading among U.S. prisoners which so shocked other nationalities of prisoner and which Weller only mentions, I believe, once in his newspaper dispatches (“‘Halborn owed me four rice rations and two cigarettes . . . it’s a legal debt’”). Toth reflects: “By sale, theft and compromise, Japan had crept in and occupied the fortress of each man’s body. The Christmas before last, when he had had diarrhea, Borum had sold his own knife and fork for three rations of rice for him . . . Often he caught himself thinking whole sentences in Japanese.”

But his greatest scorn is for the baron, trying to ingratiate himself with the POW officers ever since the news of Japan’s surrender: “Disgust turned in Toth’s stomach. ‘Two weeks’ admiration, after two years’ starvation,’ he said with unashamed bitterness. ‘You know what we call that around #34? We call it atomic love.’”

He is aware that soon all this will disappear, will not be retained by either the Americans or the Japanese, eager for their own reasons to forget: “What the hell, who could come from outside and see the baroness pouring tea . . . and even the
kempeitai
ducking their little shaven heads, and believe it ever happened? All the most feared guards had disappeared—Fishface, the Growler, Donald Duck and the Fresno Kid—with their
kabokos
and their whips of motor belting and their challenges of ‘
Sabis?
’ (‘You want a gift?’) followed by a bone-breaking blow. Gone, all gone.”

The airdrops mentioned in Weller’s dispatches were on a massive scale, parachuted from B-29s flying out of the Marianas. The drops began over the Japanese prison camps soon after the surrender on August 15, and they were a skill unto themselves. Location was everything. Thousands of pounds of canned food in crates on wooden pallets, or fifty-five-gallon drums, could easily kill if they crashed through the roof of a prisoner barracks or slammed into a farmer in a rice paddy. One camp was torched by a crate of matches that self-ignited on arrival. Many loads blew up on impact or even on the way down, and in fact more POWs were killed by unfortunate airdrops than by the atomic bombs. At Camp #17 one man was killed by a supply of fruit salad. The last Marine survivor of the heroic battle for Wake Island to die in the war was felled by a load of SPAM.

While this book was in preparation I received letters from former POWs at Camp #17 who, six decades on, recalled my father’s arrival. Charles Balaza, who survived Corregidor, Camp Cabanatuan, Nichols Field, a hellship, and two years in the mines at Omuta, wrote, “I remember him as an angel that God sent, telling us that the war was over.” Another, the late Billy Ayers, often joked with his nephew that “while he was saved by the bomb, he was rescued by a reporter.” When Weller arrived, it was now eight days since the treaty and twenty-five days since Japan’s capitulation. But the POWs did not know this. Balaza explains in his memoir why the men didn’t leave the camp: “I got up one morning and discovered that the gates of our prison were wide open . . . A strange feeling came over me . . . Could it be some kind of trap? No one made a move for the gates, fearing the Japs may have machine guns lined up ready to fire . . . Trying to escape would have given them a very good excuse to kill us.”

James Bashleben—quoted in Weller’s first POW dispatch—wrote me the following account, sixty years and six weeks later.

I was a POW in Camp 17 and recall the day your father entered the camp—it was after the war ended. We were not aware of this, even though we were no longer working in the coal mine. Also, Red Cross boxes had been distributed, and we had been given new clothing. We suspected something was happening.

     Another POW and I were near the front gate to the camp when a person in light khakis entered unescorted and went directly into the camp commander’s office. We were stunned! The person was George Weller.

     Shortly afterward we were told to assemble in an open area within the camp. There a large platform had been erected. [Four or five feet above the ground, remembers Major John Perkowski; it was around noon.] We lined up on one side facing the platform and the Japanese guards lined up on the other side. We noticed at once that they carried no rifles.

     The camp commander [Isao Fukuhara], an interpreter and George Weller took the stand, and the commander began his speech. The only sentence I can recall is when he said, “Japan has laid down its arms in favor of a great nation.” I do not remember any great emotional display at that moment. After years of our determination to beat the hell out of these guys, we just stood there speechless.

     It was then that George Weller took over, and spoke to us. Sixty years is a long time ago, but as near as I can recall he told us about the A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also, that the war was over and troops were already occupying Kyushu.

     “The 21st Cavalry is already flying in troops and supplies from Okinawa,” he said. “I have no authority to tell you what to do, but why should those planes go back empty?” Immediately, a couple of POWs took off for Kanoya field.

     The following day a small plane flew over the camp and dropped a message it was OK to come down. I, along with a couple other POWs, tossed some Red Cross food in our shirts and took off. We reached the 21st Cavalry, boarded an “empty plane” and flew to Okinawa. Thanks to a subtle hint from George Weller we were on our way home!

Another POW, Wesley C. Browning Jr.—one of the original “old 500” prisoners at the camp—wrote me:

I remember very well one of the things that your father told us. It was: “I am a civilian and cannot tell you what to do, but if I were you, this is what I would do. About a hundred or so miles south of here is Atsuga Air Field, where our planes are coming in around the clock with men and supplies and are leaving empty. If you were there they would be glad to take you south to Manila.”

     After your father finished his talk Lieutenant Little, a Naval officer, proceeded to tell us, “If any of you leave this camp without my permission I will court-martial you.”

     As it turned out, Little was the one that was court-martialed. The next day three friends and I departed Camp #17, walked to the train station and found our way to Atsuga Air Field and were flown to Manila after a stopover at Formosa.

This incident is referred to in Weller’s twelfth POW dispatch.

Among his Nagasaki papers I found a large sheet of lined paper handwritten in pencil, as if by a schoolchild, in English, and signed
The Camp Commander at Fukuoka,
which was Omuta’s military district. It is impossible to say if this is the translated statement by the commandant of Camp #17, the much-feared Fukuhara, as scrawled out by the interpreter and read aloud just before Weller spoke. But its tone is probably not unique:

I am pleased to inform you that we received military orders for stoppage of welfare [!] on Aug. 18th.

     Since you were interned in this camp you have doubtless had to go through much trouble and agony due to the extension of your stay here as prisoners of war. But you have overcome them and the news that the day for which you longed day and night, the day on which you could return to your dear homeland where your beloved wifes [
sic
] and children, parents, brothers, and sisters, are eagerly awaiting you, has become a fact is probably your supreme joy.

     I would like to extend to you my most sincere congraulations [
sic
] but at the same time I sympathize most deeply with those who have been inable [
sic
] due to illness or some other unfortunate reason, to greet this joyous day.

     By order, we the camp staff, have done all in our power towards your management and protection, but conditions here, we regret that we were unable to do half of what we wanted to do for you. But I trust in your great understanding on this point.

     Several days ago at one camp the prisoners presented the camp staff and factory foremen with part of their valuable relief food stuff and personal belongings. This I know is an expression of your understandings open hearted gentlemenliness [
sic
] and we the camp staff are all deeply moved.

     Until you are transferred over to Allied hands at a port to be designated later you will have to wait at this camp. Therefore I sincerely wish that you will wait quietly for the day when you can return to your homeland, behaving according to camp regulations, holding fast your pride and honour as people of a great nation and taking care of your health.

The Camp Commander at Fukuoka

One of Weller’s photographs shows the judgment of Fukuhara’s earliest POWs, the original “old 500” in Camp #17. On a wall has been written, in careful, large capital letters: “THIS
WAS
THE H.Q. OF FUKAHARA, [
sic
] ONE OF THE MOST VICIOUS AND INHUMANE PRISON COMMANDERS.” Fukuhara was found guilty of war crimes and hanged in early 1946.

Others, also guilty, even more vicious and inhumane, were luckier. Like the masterminds of Unit 731 of the Japanese army, near a Mitsubishi factory in Manchuria, who spent years performing imaginative experiments on white and Asian POWs, to learn how much suffering humans of all varieties could take before they died—atrocities to rival or surpass anything the Nazis thought up. MacArthur felt the U.S. military had use for such invaluable research in the coming fields of biological and chemical warfare, not to mention torture, and he provided dozens in Unit 731 with immunity in return for information. Many went on to become successful politicians and scientists, even millionaires, in Japan and in the United States.

IX

“The Death Cruise” would not exist had Weller never interviewed scores of prisoners. At some point early in those weeks he realized he had stumbled on another significant piece of history that was unwritten. Despite its descriptions of murder, cannibalism, and POW deaths by friendly fire, the story got through. This may be because the text was not delivered in cablese to a censor’s office in Tokyo, but was sent from Guam, where Weller got accredited to Admiral Nimitz and the Navy. He finished the typescript on board the ship that carried him, encased in plaster, away from Nagasaki, and mailed it back to the
Chicago Daily News.
Neither his original nor his carbon bear a
Passed By Censors
stamp, nor is there any mention of censors in the correspondence. Yet alone of the 1945 material in this book (except for a few of the POW dispatches), it actually got published—albeit incomplete, with many of the more repellent passages omitted. It is also virtually the only wartime material here that exists as finished prose rather than as compressed cablese. “The Death Cruise” has never appeared complete, with all its hardships unsanitized, until now.

It is not so surprising that the two-hundred-plus Japanese hellship voyages have entered neither the general cultural memory, nor the cinema mythology, of World War II. They were unwaveringly horrific, and the deeper one goes into the details of each, the worse it all becomes. Though there have been books on the subject over the decades, those survivors still living quite reasonably feel their suffering has been neglected by the public and even by historians. The 102-volume official Japanese military records of World War II, for example, do not mention the ships at all. Nor do the U.S. records treat them as a separate area of study, deserving their own archival harbor. Yet more than a third of all Allied combatants taken prisoner rode at least one hellship.

Besides the documented voyages there were dozens of other hellships, for the most part undocumented, that are rarely mentioned because so little is factually known about them—like the ones that carried the 139,000 “comfort women,” sexual slaves, all over the Japanese empire, or those that slogged Asiatic male prisoners as movable, expendable slave labor. These people suffered and died in their own hellships, too; no one speaks for them.

The ships were mostly merchant vessels (Mitsubishi owned and ran at least seventeen) used to transport Allied POWs from Malaya, Burma, the Netherlands East Indies, Borneo, the Philippines, and so on, either to elsewhere in the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or to Japan, to be crammed in prison camps and put to work. A single journey often involved several ships. As James Erickson points out, “Some of the
Oryoku Maru
survivors had been on six hellships; one to Davao, two back to Manila, and then the three to Japan.” At war’s end the Japanese were careful to eradicate a great deal of relevant documents.