Ghosts of Bungo Suido (42 page)

“That camp was dedicated to the production of coal and nothing else. I was singled out for special treatment. They’d yell at another POW if he did something wrong. I’d get hit with a shovel. The guards were not too bright. They were glad to be assigned at home and not starving on some hellish island, but coal was everything—even they knew that if they beat us down too much, they’d be hauling coal.”

“Did anyone try to escape from this camp?”

“Not that I know of, sir. There really was nowhere to go. We were already starving, and most of the Brits were also seriously ill. No one had enough energy to even try.”

“Gentlemen,” the president said, “let’s get back on track. Commander Hammond has been accused of collaborating with the enemy. Anyone have a question directly about that?”

Neither of the other two captains said anything.

“Lieutenant Commander DeVeers, Mister Falcone, you are allowed to bring witnesses to support Commander Hammond. Do you wish to do that?”

“Yes, sir,” Sharon said. “I would like to have Vice Admiral Lockwood testify, please.”

“Um, Commander, that’s—”

“I believe he has information relevant to this accusation. The rules allowing the accused to present evidence on his behalf make no mention of rank.”

“That would be highly unusual,” Captain White offered. “Perhaps Commander Hammond’s division commander, as his immediate superior in command, could be made available, but ComSubPac himself? That’s reaching pretty high.”

“Commander DeVeers, I tend to agree,” Captain Martell said.

“Then deny my request, sir,” Sharon said.

That gave Martell pause. If he decided not to let Gar call Admiral Lockwood, Gar’s lawyers might claim he wasn’t given a fair hearing.

“I’ll take your request under advisement,” he said finally. “I want to talk to the members about this.”

Captain Hooper, the ex-cruiser skipper, raised his hand. “Nothing to talk about. I say bring him in.”

Captain Martell looked to his left at Captain Wilson, who nodded agreement with Hooper. With the members obviously not going to support him, he conceded. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll call the admiral to testify. Captain White, can you arrange that for tomorrow, please?”

White nodded glumly.

Sharon leaned closer to Falcone. “We have some work to do, shipmate,” she said.

THIRTY-NINE

Uncle Charlie did not look pleased when he entered the courtroom at 1000. Everyone stood up when he arrived, and he kept them standing while he went to the front of the room and took a chair. He was in dress khakis, and his golden three-star shoulder boards glinted in the morning light. Rear Admiral Forrester came in with him and took a seat in the spectator gallery at the back of the room, along with a captain from the CincPacFleet staff. Sharon told Gar that he was the public affairs officer.

“Admiral Lockwood,” Martell began, “thank you for coming so quickly, sir. We know you’re a busy man.”

“Good,” Lockwood said. He hadn’t even looked at Gar and his attorneys. “Let’s get on with it.”

“Commander DeVeers, Mister Falcone, are you ready to proceed?”

“Yes, sir,” Sharon said, standing to address the admiral. She introduced herself as Gar’s co-counsel and then asked the admiral if he had had a chance to read the transcript of Gar’s testimony. Lockwood said he had. Sharon picked up a piece of paper, on which she had a list of questions.

“Admiral, did the submarine force train its officers on the matter of surviving a Japanese prisoner of war camp? I’m talking formal training, not just people discussing it.”

Lockwood had to think for a few moments. “Formal training? Syllabus, trained instructors, practicals? No, we did not. Everyone knew the drill—name, rank, and serial number—but no, there was no formal, schoolhouse training on that.”

“There a reason for that, Admiral?”

“Yes,” he said. “If one of our boats tangled with a Jap warship and lost, there were usually no survivors, so formal training didn’t seem cost-effective.”

“Cost-effective?”

“Not worth establishing a formal course at sub school or out in the fleet. Like I said, everyone knew the basic rule.”

“The basic rule being driven by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war?”

“Correct.”

“Were you aware that the Japanese never ratified the convention?”

“Yes, we all were aware of that. I thought that was a great incentive never to be captured.”

“Would it be true to say, then, Admiral, that Commander Hammond, who
did
become a prisoner of the Japanese, had no formal training or guidance as to what he could say if the Japanese applied force majeure?”

“I think he knew what
not
to say—that he should try to reveal as little as possible that could be useful to the Japanese.”

“But if they began to kill fellow POWs in front of him and told him that they’d keep doing that until he talked, would that in your opinion constitute sufficient reason to go ahead and talk to them, beyond name, rank, and serial number?”

Again Lockwood paused. He appeared to be choosing his words very carefully. “I think each individual would have to decide when enough was enough.”

“But it is true that you, as commander of all submarines in the Pacific, never specifically issued guidance to your officers, even along the lines you just mentioned, i.e., when enough was enough, as to what they were supposed to do when faced with overwhelming force?”

“Yes, technically, that’s correct. Look, miss, you haven’t walked in their shoes, or mine. We did not dwell on matters of POW behavior. It was, I think, simply understood. You resist doing any harm if they capture you, as best you can.”

“Do no harm, sir?”

“Yes. Do no harm. It was also understood that your chances of being captured were nil—we lost fifty-two boats and over thirty-five hundred submariners, and we had very few submariner POWs. So there it is.”

Sharon studied her list for a moment before continuing. “Commander Hammond has testified that when he did give them information, it was to discourage them more than benefit them, tactically speaking.”

“Such as?”

“He told them that we could ‘see’ their mines underwater, that we could penetrate their minefields with impunity.”

Lockwood seemed surprised. “That’s a significant revelation, I think.”

“Could you elaborate, Admiral? How would that benefit the enemy?”

“Well, toward the end they were using their minefields principally as defensive measures, specifically against submarines. Now they’d know that their defenses had been weakened.”

“And what could they do about that, sir? I’m talking about the minefields—what could they do differently to counter the fact that we had a sonar that could ‘see’ the individual mines?”

“I don’t know, double the size of their minefields? Triple the size? That sonar wasn’t perfect, and it was no cakewalk to get through a minefield even with the FM sonar.”

“As Commander Hammond did.”

“As Commander Hammond did. That was a major accomplishment, and what
Dragonfish
did at Kure was an equally major accomplishment. Captain Enright told me that the only reason he got a shot at
Shinano
was that she wasn’t making full speed. The Japs must have been beside themselves when they realized what had attacked their naval arsenal. But I think it would have been even scarier if they could not figure out how that boat got through.”

Gar began writing something on his pad of paper.

“So in your opinion,” Sharon continued, “he
did
collaborate with the enemy? I’m talking technically here, putting aside his reason for talking, to stop the murder of any more prisoners. Do you feel that he did harm to the American war effort?”

“It didn’t help.”

“Did any more submarines attempt to penetrate Japanese minefields after
Dragonfish
?”

“Yes.”

“Did they get through?”

“Most of them did.”

“Did you detect any changes in the way the Japanese deployed their minefields after the
Dragonfish
mission?”

“I’d have to research that. I don’t think we did.”

“So what harm ensued from Commander Hammond’s revelations?”

The admiral said nothing.

“And morally?” Sharon continued. “Given his reason for agreeing to talk to their interrogators in the first place? That other prisoners would be shot until he did agree to talk to them?”

“I guess I still can’t answer that, counselor. Each officer has to react to his own moral values, I suppose. I wasn’t in a prison cell watching Jap guards murder prisoners. I was here, in Hawaii, safe and sound. I can tell you that those moral values you’re harping on vary with rank. Sometimes we, or I, sent boats and crews on missions or into places where their chances of surviving weren’t good at all, but where the potential for hurting the enemy seemed to justify the risk.”

“To them, not you?”

Lockwood gave her a pained look but did not reply.

“Submarines were expendable, then?”

“Not in so many words, Miss DeVeers, but they existed to go on the offensive against Japan. Their mission was not to preserve the boat. It was to attack the enemy’s shipping. If we had a boat go out on patrol and come home empty-handed, we usually replaced the skipper.”

“And everyone understood that, correct?”

“After a while they did,” Lockwood said.

“But some missions were extremely dangerous? Over and above the usual hazards of submarine operations?”

“Yes.”

“Was
Dragonfish
’s mission into the Inland Sea one of those?”

“Yes, I suppose it was.”

“Is it true that you had previously proscribed the Inland Sea as an operational area?”

“Yes.”

Gar passed a note to Falcone. He read it, nodded, and handed it to Sharon. She glanced at it for a moment before resuming her questions.

“Was there more than one mission involved in
Dragonfish
’s Inland Sea operation?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Minoru Hashimoto, sir.”

“Oh, that. That was some kind of a sideshow, in my opinion. We weren’t told why PacFleet wanted him returned to Japan, nor were we encouraged to ask questions. Commander Hammond told me later that he thought it had something to do with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.”

“Did his instructions prioritize the elements of his mission?”

“The sealed instructions? I never saw them. Those came from Nimitz, CincPacFleet. We were focused on getting that carrier.”

“Would you be surprised, then, to learn that the sealed orders told Commander Hammond to get Hashimoto ashore
before
he attempted any other elements of the Inland Sea mission?”

“I guess I would. Would you be surprised to learn that Commander Hammond initially refused to do the mission if he had to take a Jap on the boat with him? I watched Admiral Nimitz convince him otherwise, but, again, I viewed it as a sideshow. The mission was the
Shinano
. After that, it was to escape back to sea.”

“Attack the carrier as best he could, and then escape?”

“Yes. And that’s another thing—it seems to me Commander Hammond had a couple of opportunities to escape, and for some reason decided not to try.”

“But the reason Commander Hammond was captured a second time was that he felt he could not expose Hashimoto to the threat of capture or exposure by continuing to hide in the village. He basically instructed Hashimoto to ‘catch’ him again and hand him over to the authorities.”

“If you say so.”

“Commander Hammond says so, sir. And it was because the sealed orders made it clear that whatever Hashimoto was supposed to do, it was actually more important than the
Shinano
. Which brings me to my question: He basically allowed himself to be captured again. Did this act constitute, in your opinion, collaboration with the enemy?”

“He made his decisions and he had his reasons,” Lockwood replied, angry now. “You’re new to this navy business, miss. Decisions have consequences, especially in wartime. Earlier in the war we had a submarine division commander intentionally go down with a badly damaged sub when he could have escaped, rather than expose himself to the
possibility
of being captured and tortured and then giving up crucial intelligence information. No one required him to do that, which is why
he
got the Medal of Honor, and probably why Commander Hammond got a court of inquiry!”

“Was that what drove your decision, Admiral?”

“What?”

“The case of Captain Gilmore and the
Growler.
Is that what drove your decision to let the court of inquiry proceed after Commander Hammond had requested an admiral’s mast to resolve this matter?”

Lockwood stood up, visibly furious. “Young lady, I do
not
have to justify any decision I make in the matter of an admiral’s mast. Not to you, not to Hammond, not to anyone. Besides that,
I’m
not on trial here. Commander Hammond is. You’re supposed to be finding out what
he
did and why.”

“No one is on trial here, Admiral,” Sharon said, smoothly. “But I think you just hit the nail on the head: what he did and why. And I would add one more dimension to this inquiry: what real harm did he do. You brought up his ‘failure’ to escape. After the bombing at Kure he was picked up by some guards and thrown in with a bunch of British prisoners. Because of this, he did
not
get taken to Ofuna, where the real interrogators and torturers worked. Naval interrogators, experts in making naval people talk. He ended up in a coal mine, doing slave labor. Was this a better outcome them his ending up in Ofuna?”

Lockwood slowly sat back down. “I suppose it was,” he said. “Are you saying that he did this on purpose? To avoid being sent to Ofuna?”

Gar had had enough. He stood up to face Lockwood. “I did not do that on purpose,” he said. “The Jap officer I called the Priest had just finished emptying a pistol at me. I was floating at the edge of a flooded dry dock, having been pummeled by a few hundred thousand-pound bombs and the exploding magazine of a destroyer fifty feet away. I was deaf. I was in shock. My brain had been turned to mush. I thought maybe I had died. When I realized otherwise, I wanted to die. Then some guards hauled my bloody ass out of the water and threw me in a truck. They took me to the nearest POW detention facility and threw me into a railroad car. That’s how I avoided Ofuna, Admiral. One more thing: That officer who’d tried to kill me in the water saved the last round for himself. He did that because I’d driven him crazy—he even said so. I didn’t collaborate with that guy. I drove him to suicide.”