Belly of the Beast Page 21

  The unmarked freighters were sitting ducks in the Takao Harbor, and had been for eight days. Thus far, they’d been left untouched. But the prisoners knew that was just a matter of time before the ships would be selected as targets. When, in the late afternoon, one of the men assigned to empty the benjo buckets returned with the news that a destroyer had tied up alongside them, the POWs figured that time was about to run out.

  About 0800 hours on January 9, just as the prisoners were finishing their morning rations, the distinctive sound of anti-aircraft fire shattered the icy air. Shortly afterward, the drone of plane engines became audible. The Enoura Maru and the destroyer tied up next to her were the pilots’ targets. Almost simultaneous with the engine sounds came the whistle of falling bombs. The first bomb to hit the ship ripped down the bulkhead between the forward and amidships compartments. Seconds later, two more bombs fell directly on the forward hold, crushing fragile bodies like eggshells under the weight of fragmented wood and metal.

  Myers and Tarpy had both been knocked to the floor of the hold from the first bomb’s concussion. After the second one hit, Myers was knocked out cold for a few minutes. When he came to, he moved his extremities in an effort to check his condition. Everything worked, and aside from some lacerations on his arms and legs, he appeared to be uninjured. He pulled himself up to his hands and knees. Other men were stirring, too, among inert bodies and torn, bloodied parts of bodies. He was facing in the direction of the forward hold and he strained through the dust to survey the bombs’ devastation. He saw no movement, only corpses.

  Myers heard moaning, and then a voice in the forward hold yelled, “Get us some bandages!”

  In the amidships hold, those who were able pulled themselves to their feet and began to pick their way through the debris toward the sound of the voice.

  “We need everybody’s clothing for bandages!” came another shout. “Rip off your pants legs and shirts. If you’re cold, get a sugar sack.”

  Moving automatically to the hoarse order, Myers and the other men did as they were told. He only had one pants leg left; the other had been donated for bandages days ago. As he ripped the pants leg into sections, Myers realized an eerie yellow glow was rising through the hold. It was clinging to the hair and skin on the guys around him. The thought that maybe he was dead and looking through some kind of celestial mist crossed his mind.

  “What the—” Myers began.

  “It’s ammonia picrate gas!” a man next to him yelled. “The horse pee in the bilges musta caught on fire.”

  Myers floundered through the wreckage toward the forward hold with his bandage contribution. This could not get worse, he thought to himself.

  A pile of debris blocked his progress, making passage into the hold impossible. Looking into it was not. And that was when Myers saw Tex. His friend was lying on his back, close to the hole that the first bomb had blown between the two holds. A mammoth wooden beam lay across Tex’s midsection and the expression on his face was one of peace: his eyes were closed, his mouth relaxed. A shock of black hair had fallen onto his forehead, as it always seemed to do. He looked as if he was sneaking forty winks amidst all the death and destruction.

  Myers tried futilely to shove aside the splintered beams to get to Tex. But he couldn’t muster the strength to make any headway. He sank to his knees, feeling impotent, and began to cry. Such a good man, such a god-awful waste.

  “I need help here!” a man yelled, his voice cracking in desperation.

  Myers dragged himself up and mumbled, “I’ll be back for you, buddy.”

  The survivors in both holds were helpless to aid any of the wounded who had more than minor injuries. It was a bloodbath, the screaming and groaning of those trapped beneath debris bouncing eerily off the metal bulkhead of the stricken ship. Myers thought it was surely what the gates of hell must look and sound like.

  It was hours before the POWs could do a final tally. Forty men had died in the amidships hold, another 200 were wounded. Half of the men in the forward hold, 250 in all, had been butchered, jumbled together with the rest, all of whom were gravely injured. Nearly all of the medical corpsmen and doctors in the forward hold had been killed, drastically diminishing the number of men capable of providing any kind of relief to the other survivors. Their number had now been diminished to 850.

  Chapter Fourteen

  From One Benjo to Another

  In the hours following the harbor attacks, the Japanese showed no interest whatsoever in assisting the POWs. Takao, Formosa, was a fairly substantial city with doctors and hospitals. None of these were offered. The prisoners would have been helped immensely with any kind of medical supplies, even minimal contributions. But none were forthcoming.

  The prisoners’ injuries ran the spectrum of what an emergency room doctor might see during an entire career. There were fractures of femurs and crushed vertebrae. There were hundreds of less serious breaks, such as arms and ankles. Some men had been struck with fragments of flying wood and steel, splinters from the ship’s hull and bulkhead. Myers figured that the wounds were so numerous and severe from the bombings, they would have been beyond the medical staff’s capabilities even if they had been fully supplied.

  There were only a few medical personnel in the forward hold. Although the Japanese had ridiculously ordered the prisoners in Myers’ group not to try to communicate with or even look at POWs in the forward hold, Myers did anyway. One doctor was working frenetically one minute and keeled over the next. A corpsman tried to revive him until he realized the doctor undoubtedly had internal injuries and, knowing he was dying, had kept on, literally working himself to death. The only other doctor Myers recognized appeared to have sustained some kind of shrapnel wound to the back of the head. Blood dripped down his neck and shoulders, but he pressed on helping those in far worse shape than he was.

  Passage between the two holds was not possible because of the rubble. The only way the corpsmen and doctors could get aid to the survivors in the forward hold would be to enter from topside. But the Japanese resolutely refused to allow the prisoners on deck. Nor would they allow the Americans to remove their dead from the holds. Several prisoners who were alive after the bombing died tortured deaths before sunset.

  For Myers and Tarpy, who had suffered facial lacerations during the carnage, caring for the men in their hold meant not much more than a comfortable position for them and soothing words. The corpsmen were able to stop hemorrhages with dirty strips of clothing taken from the dead. They used the same cloth for dressings. Fractures were splinted with pieces of the fractured timbers. But there was no morphine to ease pain and no water for dry lips.

  The next day, January 10, a small group of Japanese medical department corpsmen arrived at the ship. They didn’t attempt to go into the forward hold. From their expressions and agitated chatter, Myers gathered that the bodies and rubble were too offensive to them. But they did descend into the middle hold and ordered that all those with minor wounds line up and pass by for dressings. They stopped after giving only half of the men in line the promised bandages. They would not work on the seriously wounded at all, but before they left the ship, the corpsmen sent down a few boards to be used as splints, a dozen roller bandages, a bottle of iodine and another of mercurochrome, three triangular bandages, and less than a pound of cotton. These would be the last medical supplies issued to the prisoners on board the ship.

  There was no way of knowing for sure, but it seemed to Myers that at least two thirds of the men in his hold were suffering from dysentery. He and Tarpy were fortunate: thus far they’d managed to avoid it, but he was certain they’d be doomed to contract it now. Between the flies, filth, and lack of water to clean anything, he told Tarpy, he’d be surprised if every one of them didn’t catch it.

  It was now mote than twenty-four hours since the ship had been hit, and the corpses of those who’d died immediately had become bloated, the stench unbearable. The POWs pleaded with Wada for permiss
ion to remove them. He went off to confer with Toshino but didn’t return to the hold the rest of the day. The prisoners spent another night amidst their mangled, decaying compatriots. It wasn’t until the morning of January 11, two full days after the harbor attacks had occurred, that the captors agreed to let the prisoners bury their dead.

  Gaining permission, however, was only a part of the problem. The removal of hundreds of swollen bodies would have been a challenge even for healthy men under favorable conditions. These survivors were malnourished, disease-stricken, and in shock. They had no equipment with which to lift the bodies the twenty feet up to the ship’s deck. The Japanese guards tossed down some one-inch-thick ropes, but nothing more.

  Details of the most able-bodied corpsmen took up the gruesome chore, which they began in the amidships hold. The more frail among the prisoners first removed any remaining scrap clothing from each corpse, which would later be redistributed to the living. Next came identification, which frequently proved to be a near impossible task. Not only were the men emaciated shadows of who and what they had once been, many of the bodies had been mutilated in the bombing, and were in an advanced state of decomposition.

  Corpsmen down in the hold then tied ropes to the stripped corpses’ ankles while others on deck pulled the bodies up one by one through the hatch and laid them gently on the ship’s deck. The grotesque sight of naked, emaciated, blood- and feces-smeared bodies, twirling upside down at the end of a rope over their heads, broke even the most intrepid officers in the hold.

  Removing the dead from the forward hold was going to be more difficult because of the sheer number of them. Hauling them out singly wasn’t an option, so the prisoners were given a wire cargo net to haul them out in batches. Myers and Tarpy were on deck for this operation, and it was sheer agony for them to watch the group of corpses, including Tex, to be hauled up. Not that it would make any difference to their fallen friend at this point.

  “I’m not sure who’s the luckier,” Tarpy huffed in exhaustion after they’d laid Tex out on the deck, “him or us.”

  “Don’t do that to yourself,” Myers snapped at him. “And don’t do it to me.”

  Soon the stack of bodies topside took on titanic proportions. There were three hundred and fifty dead men in all. While those who had died previously on the journey had received a burial at sea, such a ceremony was now not practical. The Allied bombing had made certain that the Enoura Maru was no longer seaworthy. She had sustained hits to her stern as well as to her forward and amidships. Some of the more senior Navy men said they thought she was already sitting on the bottom of the shallow harbor. It was obvious to both the Americans and to the Japanese that she could not be moved.

  Mass burial in the Takao Harbor was out of the question since such a vast number of decomposing corpses would surely trigger the spread of disease, and the Japanese feared disease almost as much as Allied gunfire. The only solution was to organize a POW burial detail and take the bodies to shore. Wada announced that thirty men would be allowed to volunteer for the detail.

  Myers volunteered and so did Tarpy. Like every other man on the burial detail, while they were sincere in their desire to provide the dead men an appropriate farewell, each hoped there might be an opportunity to get something to drink.

  A barge came alongside the Enoura Maru, and as many corpses as possible were loaded onto it. The barge traveled to the breakwater, and from there the prisoners were ordered to carry the bodies ashore through the waist-deep water. The suggestion was ludicrous since it was questionable if the men on the detail possessed enough stamina to wade through the water at all. As distasteful and disrespectful as it seemed, the burial detail finally decided to drag the corpses to the breakwater.

  They made two trips that day, loading the bodies onto the barge, dragging them to the breakwater, and hauling them up on land to be lined up in neat rows. At sunset, the ragged detail saluted in unison and began the barge trip back to the crippled vessel that was their prison.

  A couple of guys crouched on the barge deck near Myers and Tarpy asked them if they knew a guard on the ship named Ah Kong.

  “Yeah, I know which one he is,” Tarpy told them.

  “Well, I was on chow detail the morning of the attack, see,” one of the men said. “And Ah Kong was supposed to be guarding us. Except when the bombers started dropping their eggs, he drops his gun and takes to his heels to hide. Murph, the guy with me, says, ‘Holy shit! Those Japs see us without a guard and they’ll mow us down for sure!’

  “So I grab the rifle and run after Ah Kong. You know where I found him?”

  The men shook their heads.

  “In the latrine, between the crappers, peein’ his pants. He puts his hands up when he sees the rifle ’cause he thinks I’m gonna shoot him.”

  “Yeah, and you should have, you moron,” the man’s buddy chimed in.

  “Right, and when the Japs found me they would have killed me for sure. I walk over to Ah Kong and give ’em back his rifle. Then I tell him to get his ass back out on deck and guard us like he was supposed to do.”

  The men smiled; they were so exhausted from the work it was the most they could muster. This story gave birth to others.

  “I was just about to take a bite of my morning rations,” a man said. “The guy sitting next to me got hit. Top of his head was blown clean off. Little bits of bone and pieces—I don’t know, skin or brain, or somethin’—landed in my rice.” He paused, closed his eyes, and shivered. “I looked at my rice, but I was so hungry I gulped it all down before the next bomb hit. It didn’t even matter. I probably ate part of his brain along with my rice.”

  On the morning of January 12, the burial detail made a final barge trip with the remainder of the corpses. Then they loaded them all onto wagons and hauled them to a nearby crematorium. The detail gave a final salute and rendered the dead men to ashes.

  Had the landings at Lingayen Gulf occurred on December 20, 1944, according to MacArthur’s original schedule, Myers would never have been part of the burial detail at Takao Harbor. There would have been no need for burials. The Japanese would probably never have been able to move the POWs off Luzon. Although some prisoners may have become victims of friendly fire in the Allied arrival, others would have been spared the tormented existence and agonizing death aboard the Brazil Maru and the Enoura Maru. But fate chose to play a different hand, and the POWs’ futures, including those of Myers, Tarpy, and Tex, were radically altered.

  According to the new schedule, the Lingayen Gulf landings were set for January 9, 1945. For their success to be realized, two significant military goals had to be accomplished in the first eight days of January.

  Of primary importance was the continued Allied bombardment of Formosa from the air bases that had been established in China. The Imperial Air Force used Formosa as their staging ground for all replacement planes heading to Luzon. Despite the huge losses of aircraft in 1944, and Allied bombardment of Japanese industrial cities, their factories still churned out planes at a steady rate—fourteen hundred in the month of January 1945. The kamikaze pilots flew the planes from Japan to Formosa, where they awaited their target assignments.

  The American 3rd Fleet, now the most powerful naval force ever assembled, mounted the Formosan attacks. The fleet was also charged with pinning down Japanese airpower on Luzon itself, especially those Imperial planes on their way to attack supply convoys prior to and during the Lingayen landings. Planes from the 3rd Fleet kept up the bombing of both Luzon and Formosa throughout December and January, but still did not shut down the kamikaze operations entirely.

  MacArthur’s second goal was to establish a beachhead on the northern shore of the Philippine island of Mindoro, fifteen miles to the south of Luzon. Control of the entire island was strategically important to the Allies; it would allow sea traffic on its way to central and northern Luzon to pass between the two islands, saving both distance and time. The northern Mindoro beachhead was secured on Januar
y 2, placing American troops just ninety miles from Manila.

  As powerful as the 3rd Fleet was, the ships were not impervious to the disastrous effects of the kamikazes. For five days, until January 7, the suicide pilots struck cruisers, carriers, and destroyers. But while all of these attacks took place miles to the west of Luzon, the Japanese completely ignored the forty-mile-long convoy cruising along Mindoro’s northern coastline before it turned northward and on to Lingayen Gulf.

  At 0700 on January 8, the largest group of American military personnel ever assembled in the Pacific stood ready to retake the island of Luzon. Preliminary bombardments of targeted beaches along the gulf were successful, and at 0930 on the ninth the landing of more than two hundred thousand Allied troops began.

  Thirty days had passed since Myers and Tarpy had been marched out of Bilibid and been forced into the hold of the Oryoku Maru. When they left Manila, they had numbered slightly over sixteen hundred. Now, sitting in a crippled ship in a Formosan harbor, a little over eight hundred remained. Nonetheless, the journey would continue.

  Wada ordered that all the POWs, regardless of their physical condition, be transferred by barge from the Enoura Maru back to the Brazil Maru. Even for those who were not wounded or deathly ill, the transfer would be difficult. But for those who were in the severest shape, moving meant taking a step closer to death.

  To make the transfer as gentle as possible, the corpsmen fashioned a bos’n’s chair out of the same ropes they had used to haul out the bombing victims. They then began lifting the living skeletons out of the hold. Those who were unable to sit upright were tied to a plank and pulled up horizontally. The men were all loaded onto a waiting barge to be taken the short distance to the Brazil Maru.

  The wounded men screamed, some even slipped into a coma from the bouncing and jerking, while those moving them exerted themselves to capacity. It took hours to get them aboard the new ship and into the hold and was a nerve-wracking experience for the corpsmen as they listened to the bones of the fracture cases grating against one another. Fourteen men never made it into the hold, dying on its deck instead. The rest of the wounded were lowered into their new prison in the same way they had left the last one.