First Into Nagasaki (7 page)

Both those Mitsui mines worked by Americans and those worked by Chinese are defective, “stripped” mines, dangerous to operate because their tunnels’ underpinnings have been removed to obtain the last vestiges of coal.

Another Chinese camp is known to exist somewhere in Kyushu and is being sought by a party headed by Medical Warrant Officer Houston Sanders, of Hartwell, Georgia.

Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945 0230 hours

Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu

For hundreds of Americans held in Kyushu prison camps, the atomic bomb bursting over Nagasaki in full view was a signal of their liberation from serfdom in Baron Mitsui’s cruel and dangerous coal mine. Some Bataan and Corregidor prisoners were worked to death here. Captain Robert W. Schott, an energetic dentist from What Cheer, Iowa, has succeeded the Japanese commander. Here are G.I.s’ comments on their coal mine slavery, and on the bomb ending it.

James Small (Gate City, Virginia):
“The mine was hard not because of the work, but because the Japanese insisted on our carrying impossible burdens. Many times we took beatings just in order to have two men carry one roof support.”

Sergeant James Bennett (Monongahela, Pennsylvania):
“I lost my thumb trying to protect my detail from being beaten up by a Japanese soldier. Rushing things to make the Jap cease his beating, I fell forward and a mine car rolling forward caught my hand.”

Corporal Junious Carroll (Thornton, Washington),
who had his hearing impaired by an explosion on Corregidor, has lost his left leg at the shin: “A Japanese overman borrowed my cap lantern, leaving me to go through the tunnel to get another. Seeing no light where I was, the mine train ran over me.”

Joseph Valencourt (Lawrence, Massachusetts):
“After the atomic bomb I saw a cloud lit up like a sunset over Nagasaki. But not understanding, I paid no attention.”

Corporal Gerald Wilson (Clovis, New Mexico):
“The atomic bomb cloud looked like a giant thunderhead. It kept boiling, getting larger.”

Corporal Richard Burke (Chicago):
“The atomic bomb cloud seemed to me like the dying embers of a sunset, but all in one spot.”

Elmer Swabe (San Francisco),
captured on Wake Island: “I’ve been in Japan for three years and had just one letter—from my wife.”

Sergeant Gail Herring (Los Angeles):
“Most of my outfit, the 60th Coast Artillery, have had at least one letter since being captured on Corregidor. But I’ve had none.”

Robert Fortune (San Francisco),
captured on Wake: “I worked for twenty-six months in a steel mill at Yahata near the camp at Moji and got pneumonia and beriberi. But since coming here in January I’ve gained some weight.”

Larry Sandoval (Albuquerque),
his right leg missing two inches from the knee, is one among the American prisoners who paid for the Japanese insistence that this old and dangerous mine be exploited. “I was building a supporting wall opposite the coal face when the ceiling came down.”

Robert Case (West Terre Haute, Indiana)
is another victim of Baron Mitsui’s enterprise, with his left leg gone between knee and ankle. “I got caught in a coal-carrying transmission chain, and was carried into the motor.”

Edgar van Imwagen (Palmyra, Ohio),
with his left leg amputated two inches above the knee: “The Japs always shoved us in against the coal face without testing whether it would hold, because they wanted to not lose any time. Last December 12th, when I weighed 100 pounds after forty-five days in the mine, the overseer shoved us into an untried coal face. The roof’s pressure, being unbraced, blew the wall in on us. I was bending over, shoveling, and got buried completely. A half hour later the Japanese doctor took off my leg, which healed in sixteen days. A whole bunch of Koreans were buried alive the year before in the same place, and are still there. When Japs came to my bed at Christmas and offered me a gift of two cigarettes, I just lay there and laughed.”

Sergeant Calvin Elton (Dividend, Utah):
“I live in a mining town and I knew for all my two years around the Mitsui mine that the Japanese were just using Americans to remove the pillars from an old mine, leaving tunnels unsupported. Accidents were the natural result of such dangerous work.”

James Voelcker (Wetmore, Texas):
“In February I got so weak with diarrhea I couldn’t work, and mine overseers handed me over to the military who threw me into the
aeso—
that’s Japanese for guardhouse. It was cold and the Japanese made me carry water for them. My feet were always wet and finally froze. Gangrene set in and an Australian doctor had to amputate all my toes and both feet.”

Kenneth Vick (Oklahoma City):
“I’ve been able to run the camp toolroom, working above ground, because I got hit by three machine gun bullets on Bataan.”

Air Corps Sergeant Ben Lowe (Knoxville, Tennessee),
captured on Bataan, who lost his right leg halfway between the hip and the knee: “Our Buntai Joe—that means overseer—refused to go in under this bad coal face, but sent my crew in to dig. When the coal fell the first nuggets knocked me down, then the whole face buried me. Three weeks later Captain Hewlett amputated my leg.”

Alfred Schnitzer (Portsmouth, Virginia),
captured at Corregidor: “I’ve always tried to give the Japanese my best, and when the military put me in the guardhouse, the sentries refused to punish me.”

Sergeant James Justice (Gaffney, South Carolina),
taken on Bataan: “I was lifting a heavy coal trough when the foreman began yelling at me. I made some remark in English. He hit me with a piece of coal. I knocked out two teeth on him. He reported me to the military, who slapped me and beat me with a board. Captain Hewlett got me declared unfit for underground work. Two months ago the camp commander beat my head with a two-by-four for not replacing a door after a typhoon blew it in.” Justice is wearing a bandage on his head, where Captain Hewlett took out four stitches.

Earl Bryant (Anaheim, California):
“I saw what might have been the first atomic bomb, in the direction of Hiroshima. It was a white cloud, big at the top and narrow at the bottom, on what seemed a bed of black smoke.”

Corporal Dale Frantz (Canton, Ohio):
“I missed Nagasaki’s bombing, but I saw the cloud in the opposite direction, toward Hiroshima, on the first bombing. The cloud started small but built up high and fast. It was pure white, with a pinkish tinge. I could see airplanes circling between me and the cloud and suppose now that they were photographic planes. At the time we were puzzled by the whiteness of the smoke and supposed that it must be from a chemical plant.”

Charles Butler (Smithdale, Mississippi):
“It was a clear day, with other clouds all high strata. We could see this unnatural thunderhead with straight sides instead of being pyramidal-shaped, and airplanes seemed be circling around watching it.”

George O’Brien (Wascott, Wisconsin):
“I saw a reddish glow in the sky over Nagasaki and at first I thought it was a fire after the bombing. But it lasted too long for just Japanese shacks, and I was puzzled.”

Joseph Collins (San Antonio),
captured on Corregidor: “The next morning after the noonday bombing of Nagasaki, I climbed on a waterboiler platform with Stanley Peterson of Los Angeles, and we could see flames over in Nagasaki, leaping up and dying and rising again like an oil fire, but with a peculiar absence of black smoke.”

Corporal Lee Dale (Walnut Creek, California),
who visited the Nagasaki atomic bombsite: “Those flattened buildings made you want to cry, not on account of the lives lost, but because of the destruction involved.”

“T
HE
J
APANESE
L
ITTLE
T
HEATER
G
IVES A
R
ED
C
ROSS
B
ENEFIT
”

Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu

A cold brook runs through the tunnel of the Mitsui coal mine at Omuta, on Kyushu, but the air 1,440 feet underground is thick and hot. Your feet are ankle-deep in the rushing, icy water; at the same time your head swims with fatigue, and the sweat-towel around your brow is soaked with perspiration. “For almost two years we worked here twelve hours a day,” the G.I.s tell you. “We got a little less than a cent a day. Pretty good for the Mitsuis. Till we came along, they never thought the mine could be made to pay again. Our officers only knew about the mine what we told them. The Japanese never let them go down.”

But how about the neutral inspector from the International Red Cross?

“They never let him go underground, either.”

Whenever a new shipment of American prisoners was seen shambling down the tunnel to work, backs bent under the low ceiling and cap-lamps bright, the weary old shift would break away from the “long wall”—the most advanced face of coal—and ask those arriving, “What’s new topside?”

The incoming shift, skinny-legged and pale as the old on the same three half-bowlfuls of rice a day, would say, “Nothing, same as usual. Except the Japs strafed the new Red Cross packages today.”

“What’d they get?”

“They took all the meat and fruit cans, and the condensed milk and most of the chocolate.”

“What’d they leave?”

“Same as usual: the raisins and the prunes.”

“Whatsa matter with those raisins and prunes? Why do they always leave them?”

“Search me.” A minute of wordless thought on both sides; being a prisoner is submission, but sometimes you have to remind yourself. “Any ceilings fall today on anybody?”

“Not yet, but look out for that mushy one over there. She shifted twice this afternoon. Our
shotai Joe
made us work under the cracked beam, but she’s just about ready to let go and come down.”

Stripping the abandoned mine of the Mitsui barons, removing its last supporting coal pillars, was work for men who had already written off most of their future. But that did not mean that they had surrendered the present. Nothing that Captain Fukuhara, the camp commandant, could do was able to silence the horselaugh that rippled through the tunnels every six months or so, on the day after the visit of the International Red Cross inspector.

Underground in the mine you could always tell when the B-29s were making a visit overhead. The main power plant on the surface closed down, the weaker auxiliary pumps went into action, and the air grew gluey and hard to breathe. In a slightly different way you could tell, while underground, when the Red Cross man was making a visit. From every section gang the strongest American was told off and ordered to take the mine train to the surface. He had ceased being a miner; he was now an actor. He had a role in a play that the mine authorities were going to put on for the benefit of the audience of one: the Red Cross inspector.

Two or three days before the Red Cross man—usually a Swiss or Swede—actually arrived, secret rehearsals had already been begun by what might be called the leads: the Japanese authorities of the camp. But for the real fibre of the performance the Japanese counted on their unrehearsed extras, the Americans.

Show day comes. A one-shot performance can be as good as its scenery, rarely any better. What is this extraordinary change that has overtaken the filthy little clinic, where operations without anesthesia have often taken place? It is transformed. Not only ether and morphine, but other medicines have appeared, the very medicines that were unobtainable 24 hours ago . . . . And look at the notice board! What are those neatly typewritten sheets fluttering from its black surface, now suddenly innocent of punishment records? It is the
Daily News Bulletin,
no less. (“We do what we can, Mr. Inspector, to satisfy the extraordinary American curiosity about current events.”)

And here comes the Red Cross visitor, walking like a prisoner himself in a phalanx of potbellied Japanese colonels and majors. Has he been underground? He has not. Will he get a view of the barracks? Well, a quick one, maybe. But first he is shown documents for three hours, till his eyes ache. Then the place for him to go is to the hospital. After all, a hospital is the great index of humanity. If the hospital in a prison camp is all right, everything else must be all right, too.

And everything in the little hospital
is
right, as superlatively right as the last canto of Scrooge’s Christmas. Just the entrance alone is beautiful. On each side of the door, Red Cross boxes are piled tastefully in twin pyramids—medicines, food, a cornucopia of abundance. The military interpreter opens the door and the inspector enters. Order and cleanliness, a lovely sight. The faces of the men on their cots are turned toward him. Sick? If these men are the sick, confined to the hospital under medical treatment, then it is hardly necessary to see the healthy, now working down in the mine. For these men, as prison standards go, are not badly off at all. Their faces—though wearing a peculiar quizzical, stolid expression—are round and full. Their eyes are clear. A Japanese doctor would call them robust.

The visitor, stroking his moustache, turns to the Japanese nurse, one of several chubby little starched creatures who have been placed at even intervals the length of the ward, like markings on a clinical thermometer. “How are the prisoners doing?” he inquires through the interpreter. “Oh, very well, very very well,” she says, with a shining nursely smile.

The inspector observes there are white sheets on the mattresses. Really not bad, altogether. Each man has a can of salmon or of pears at the same geometrical point near his bed. Not quite within reach, perhaps, but nearby.

Gently Captain Fukuhara suggests that perhaps the official party had better not delay too long in the hospital. Luncheon is already waiting. Would the inspector like to see what the prisoners are eating? The party passes rapidly through the kitchen to the mess hall, where the prisoners are lined up, waiting to be seen. Their faces still bear looks of unmistakable pleasure and anticipation, in which a sharp eye might detect strong traces of astonishment. There is no doubt that this is a happy camp. Look at the faces of the prisoners as they scan the miracle that lies waiting for them in their wooden mess gear: three camp rolls with a dab of margarine, bean soup with a bit of pork, a spoonful of Japanese red caviar, and a baked apple.