Horror in Paradise (6 page)

There is no other group of prisoners I know of during World War II which lived in such complete physical and psychological isolation. Anything that the ninety-eight “knew” must be manufactured from whole cloth.

Psychological and social anarchy cannot be endured for long. We can assume that at some point the ninety-eight men, consciously or unconsciously, formed themselves into some sort of social hierarchy. Natural leaders emerged; some men became identified as comics; others became chronic complainers; some withdrew into themselves. But one thing is certain, the group could feed only on itself. Slowly it began to manufacture a “reality” about the outside world. Some men more imaginative and persuasive and glib than the others made guesses as to what was happening outside. Just as in primitive societies the unknown is made known by oracles, so the ninety-eight invented a mythology. As it was passed from man to man it lost the quality of myth; it became a form of reality. When it was repeated back to the original oracles they also believed it. All of them believed for a simple reason: in such awesome isolation man must have something to believe, or go mad.

The tiny world of Wake became increasingly bizarre. The water distillers still worked, and rainwater was carefully gathered, but food soon came into short supply. The Japanese made heroic efforts to supply the island. Surface ships being out of the question, they attempted to send in food by submarine. These supply submarines made a hazardous and slow passage from Japan. In daylight hours they submerged and stopped their engines. At night they came to the surface and went ahead at full speed. They carried a curious cargo. Hundred-pound bags of rice were surrounded by crude latex rubber and made into a waterproof and floatable package. Hundreds of these were strapped to the open decks of the submarines.

When a submarine arrived off Wake, it was still in mortal danger. American submarines constantly patrolled the island, and the chances of being detected were high. To surface during the day, even for a few moments, was to commit suicide. The Japanese submarines and the garrison developed a peculiar technique. At a prearranged time, chosen so that the tide would be favorable and the night at its blackest, the submarine would surface for a few moments. Lining the windward edge of the reef would be hundreds of Japanese soldiers, peering into the darkness. When the submarine surfaced, picked men ran down the decks, cutting the bindings which held the rice bags to the submarine. The submarine skipper then gave a single guarded flash of an Aldis lamp toward the shore. Then he closed his hatches and submerged. As the submarine sank, the rice bags floated from her decks and bobbed on the water.

For the Japanese lining the reef, it was a desperate time. Quite beyond their control their very life was bobbing about in the dark water. The Japanese soldiers, their eyes sharpened by hunger, studied each of the unending procession of waves. There would be a tormented period when they did not know whether tide and wind were favoring them. Then, with luck, the heavy yellow packages would come surging up onto the reef. The soldiers were too desperate to cheer. They fought the bundles free of the surf and trotted them to a central storehouse. The next morning, every foot of the periphery of the island would be searched to see that no bags had been missed. Occasionally, the tides would play a cruel trick, and in the morning they would see a dozen of the bags that had worked around into the lee of the island. They might sit there for days, only a hundred yards offshore, but the Japanese did not dare to put a boat into the water. At night, the more skillful swimmers would venture into the dark waters to try to retrieve the bags. Occasionally, they were successful. Sometimes the swimmers merely disappeared forever into the ocean.

The ninety-eight Americans were aware of a successful submarine delivery only because of the sudden spurt of optimism and good cheer among their captors. Admiral Sakaibara, the officer-in-charge of the island, was too orderly a man to permit an increase in rations. He had some inkling of how far the food had to be stretched. The Americans began to feel the pinch. Their food rations were cut. Ribs began to show on men who had always been fat; thin men became gaunt. When food was divided they gathered and watched quietly, only their burning eyes revealing their intensity.

Very soon, however, even the submarine trips became too hazardous. They were discontinued and the island was on its own. Everyone, including the Americans, now realized that they had to subsist on their accumulated stores plus whatever food the island and its surrounding waters could supply. There commenced one of the most ingenious and thorough efforts ever made to find and husband food. Rat hunting, for example, became an organized activity. The orderly Japanese records indicate that they caught and devoured over 54,000 rats. The thousands of birds on the island were carefully stalked, slaughtered, and eaten. Every crevice, however small, was searched to see if it might contain bird eggs. Land crabs were hunted with a ruthless intensity.

By the end of 1944, there was not a single bird, rat or crab left on the island.

Nothing was wasted. The Japanese discovered that the leaves of the morning-glory vines were edible, and the island was soon bare of these. Too late there was the realization that the very thoroughness of the search was a mistake. By killing
all
of the birds and eating
all
of their eggs they had assured that no new generations of birds or eggs would appear. By killing
all
of the rats they assured that no new rats would appear. By eating
all
of the morning-glory vines they assured that no future vines would grow. It was a bitter discovery. It was also irreversible.

Their wits sharpened by desperation, the Japanese set about to build truck gardens. But how does one build a garden on an island which has no soil? The Japanese extracted the soil from their own bodies. They carefully gathered the night soil, their own excrement, mixed it with sand, and dumped it into great boxes made of brass and iron. This compost was then planted with tomato and squash and melon seeds which came in by submarine. Never were gardens so carefully tended and so carefully watched. The precious water, now in short supply, was sluiced over the plants by the helmetful. Full captains were given formal responsibility for guarding the tiny plots. Occasionally during a strafing, spray bullets would tear into the gardens, tearing plants to pieces, spraying excrement over the containing walls. After a raid each plot was carefully surveyed and salvageable vines were replanted. Bits of scattered excrement were gathered and returned to the plot. Hopelessly shattered plants were used in soup.

The Japanese were used to eating seaweed, and the reef and lagoon were denuded of edible seaweed to the depth that the Japanese could dive.

At first the fish along the reef and inside the lagoon were caught in abundance. But the Japanese made a crucial mistake. They used hand grenades, which could be thrown into a school of fish, and the explosion stunned the fish long enough for them to be gathered. The Japanese did not know, however, that the explosion also killed the billions of fish eggs that accumulated invisibly in the crevices of the reef and lagoon. After a short while, the fish were also exterminated and there were no new generations to replace them.

The ninety-eight Americans watched all of this with a horrified fascination. At some point in 1943, they began to realize that the bombings and the disruption of the island life were making their skills unnecessary. They spent less and less time doing useful work. More and more they talked and watched and returned to their talking. They were tom between hoping that the Japanese would find food in which they would share and satisfaction in seeing their captors grow weaker. For a time they speculated on whether the Americans would reinvade before all of them starved or whether the island would merely be bypassed. Such ambiguity became impossible. They came to the conclusion, and no man dared or wished to oppose it, that the invasion would occur first. In so hermetic an isolation, with hunger beginning to make tempers sharp and rationality difficult, they all sensed that their survival depended on unanimity. A minority view, even a well-considered minority view, was impossible. Those that doubted were silent, and finally even they came to share the view.

The disruption of Wake continued. Once the entire garrison had been tightly bound together by an elaborate communication system. It was gradually destroyed. Now little clots of Japanese soldiers huddled around their gardens, stared hollow-eyed at the ocean, dragged themselves to cover when American planes approached. Once, when soldiers had died, their bodies had been cremated and the ashes returned to Japan. Now they were carefully buried beneath the garden to add nourishment to the soil. There was also a time when the various groups of men had visited with one another. Now this called for too great an expenditure of energy. They beat out signals to one another by banging wrenches against empty CO
2 bottles. Where once the island had teemed with busy men, it now became more roomy. The Japanese were beginning to die from hunger. Eventually half of them starved to death—over two thousand bodies went beneath the garden plots to enrich them. By day the survivors did a minimum amount of repair work. By night they slept. The certainty of doom became a vapor in the air. The private diaries which the Japanese kept were long messages of farewell, written by men who were certain of their death.

But somehow the Americans lived. Not well, but they lived. They grew thinner. Their desperation grew sharper.

The weird life around them drove them into an ever more intense solidarity. They were called upon to do almost no work and knew they were expendable. Their boredom, their ignorance, their shared desperation, their proximity, their gossip made them oddly identical. Rumors became more important than food, were hashed and rehashed, reexamined from different points of view, taken as rumor at first, but quickly hardened into “facts.” There was still a hierarchy among them, but what they thought, the inside of their minds, came to be strangely similar.

They discussed the possibility of capturing one of the boats and trying to escape by night. They debated it endlessly and then one day were given their answer. Three of the stronger Japanese ventured out in the boat to do some fishing. The boat was heavily camouflaged and looked like nothing so much as a piece of drifting seaweed. However, it was no farther than a few hundred yards from the shore when a Corsair came hurtling over the horizon, drew a pinpoint bead on the boat, and strafed it. All three Japanese were killed; the boat sank. The Americans knew that other boats were buried about, and it would probably be easy to steal one, but they knew they would be strafed before they could escape.

They talked again. They racked their brains for solutions. But now the months of isolation, the awareness of the vastness of the ocean about them, and a growing irrationality because of the inadequate diet had reduced their perceptiveness. They dared not even argue among themselves any more. Each man sensed that an argument, an act of selfishness, a misunderstanding might set them at one another’s throats, snarling like hyenas. They whispered gently to one another.

At one point a B-24 bomber bombed Wake and then came in low and slow for a strafing attack. By now long experience and a diminishing supply of ammunition made the

Japanese antiaircraft gunners extremely accurate. They waited and then at the plane’s lowest elevation opened fire. The plane was mortally damaged, made a slow burning circle in the sky and finally crash-landed at the edge of Wilkes. The Japanese commanding officer made a decision. The fliers were tried and then killed, and parts of their bodies were eaten in a
Bushido
ritual. Only the heart, liver and lights were eaten by the Japanese. There were those among them who would have willingly eaten the entire bodies, but they were not given the chance. After the ceremony the remains were given a ceremonial burial.

On the day of October 6, 1943, the tension grew greater, stretching the nerves and rationality of the ninety-eight men to the very limit.

That day American planes, clearly flying from carriers, made a savage raid on Wake. The dive bombers picked their targets at leisure and then dived. The fighter planes shrieked up and down the atoll, shooting at anything that moved or was above the surface. A chance incendiary set one of the buried fuel dumps on fire so that the very coral itself seemed to be burning with an inexhaustible flame.

The Americans peered up at the attacking planes, torn between pride in the bombing and fear of death.

That night the ninety-eight began another, and the last, of their long whispered and very intense conversations. They knew only four facts for certain. First, the fighter planes had stayed so long over the target that the task force from which they came could not be far over the horizon. Secondly, the Japanese were rapidly weakening. Hundreds hung at the edge of starvation. Third, the ninety-eight were now starting to show the signs of malnutrition, and starvation was probably not far away for them. Fourth, they knew that the only feasible location for a landing was on the lee side of the island, with the best stretch being at the channel that separated Wake from Wilkes Island. This is all that the ninety-eight could have known. All other facts were denied to them. The Pacific, unending and silent, told them nothing and allowed nothing to be told.

Sometime during the night of October 6, in their low-pitched but deadly serious conversation, these four facts fused into a common agreement: they were to be rescued the next morning, at the juncture of Wilkes and Wake, by an American task force. So identical had the ninety-eight become, so smooth their method of communication, that their unanimity was as solid as a fused granite boulder. Not a man doubted that the task force would reach them.