Belly of the Beast Read online

  Their only food alternative was the Formosan rice provided by the Japanese. It was rough and full of hulls and increased their diarrhea as well. So the men continued stealing and eating the sugar simply because it tasted better. One of the guards had seen a prisoner on deck mixing a handful of the sugar with snow and reported it to Wada. The hunchback interpreter told the prisoners that if the sugar heists continued, he would completely cut off all their provisions.

  As he dozed during the afternoon of January 29, Myers heard wild shouts in Japanese up on deck. A short time later, a chief yeoman fell back down the ladder into the hold, practically landing on top of Myers.

  “What’s going on up there?” Myers asked him.

  “I went up to take a whiz,” the chief yeoman told him, “and I saw the most beautiful icicle hanging, just hanging, all sparkly in the sun. I couldn’t help myself; I just reached up for it. Jap sentry saw me and came at me with his bayonet.” Tears formed in the man’s eyes.

  “I had a snowball for a backup, too, but when that son of a bitch came at me with his pig sticker, I ran. I didn’t get the icicle, and then I dropped the snowball when I fell.”

  He sat down and licked the few droplets of water still clinging to his filthy hands.

  As the ship continued her northerly course, snow fell more frequently. It melted on the deck during the daylight hours and seeped down into the hold, making it treacherously slick. Falling down on the hard steel floor of the hold was painful for these sickly men, but sometimes it had far worse consequences. Since the Japanese refused to allow the prisoners’ three or four benjo buckets to be emptied more than once each day, they were always full. If a man landed in a benjo bucket when he fell, he was destined to remain encrusted in waste. With no water, washing it off was an unfulfilled luxury.

  Myers witnessed one man fall into a benjo bucket. The sullied man refused any comfort from the corpsman. Without a word, he climbed up to his bay, picked up his canteen, and struck himself in the brow with it, slumping over dead.

  On January 30, two men who had been up on deck to relieve themselves spread word through the hold they had seen land. They were positive that the ship must be just off the coast of Japan. Sometime before 2300 hours that night, the silence in the hold was shattered with the sound of American torpedoes. The prisoners had known all along that subs lurked close by, but this was the first time since Formosa that they’d been fired upon. Having already witnessed the carnage from the other American attacks, the pathetic clutch of four hundred ninety men was terrified.

  “Look at the bright side, lads,” a keen sailor near Myers remarked. “If the Yanks are firing torpedoes at the Japanese coastline, the end of the war must be close at hand.”

  A private leaning against a large chief yeoman expressed what they were all thinking.

  “Oh God, we’re so close. We’re the survivors; we’ve made it through everything else. We can’t go down now! And I ain’t even ever been baptized.” He looked at the chief yeoman. “I don’t think they’ll let me into heaven since I ain’t been baptized.”

  The private crawled over to where the two chaplains still alive were lying. They were so weak, he couldn’t make them understand that he wanted to be baptized on the spot. The chief yeoman called him back to where he still sat and offered to perform the ceremony. Neither of them had any water, so they used the only liquid they had available—the chief yeoman’s saliva. The newly baptized man was so relieved that he curled up in a ball and went to sleep. He never awoke.

  At dawn on the morning of January 31, 1945, the Brazil Maru crept into the harbor of Moji, Japan, on the most southerly Home Island of Kyushu. The ship had no more than dropped anchor when a group of Japanese military, their capes flying and polished sabers flashing, came aboard to inspect their recently arrived human cargo. Myers heard the Imperial officers scream down their orders, demanding that the senior American officer present himself on deck.

  Slowly, painfully, the American made the climb out of the squalor below. His hair and beard were clotted with festering scum in which he’d been living for seven weeks. What clothing he had, no more than dirty rags, barely covered his decrepit form. The American gave a feeble salute and sank back, exhausted from the exertion, against the bulkhead behind him.

  The Japanese officials were stunned as they took in the deck scene illuminated before them in the clean morning light. Surrounding the debilitated POW were rank-smelling slop buckets, full to the brim, and a stack of naked, emaciated dead men, some gawking with sightless eyes at their new wardens.

  Unsure of what their next move should be, the officers shouted orders and a cadre of medical personnel materialized. After a brief discussion, the doctors decided the rest of the prisoners should be brought up on deck for disinfection before they disembarked. To convey that order, two lesser-ranking men descended the ladder into the hold.

  Myers and his fellow POWs, whose eyes were accustomed to the darkness of their fetid home, watched listlessly as the two officers paused at the base of the ladder and puffed up their chests with the all-importance accorded them by the Japanese Empire. Moments later, when their eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, the air of supremacy became breathless horror. Another fifty-two more naked corpses were piled off to one side. And the living were the most wretched-looking human beings they had ever seen. The sight and oppressive smell of urine and feces caused the two to stagger backward as if slapped by the flat side of a giant sword. The officials in Moji had expected to find a thousand healthy men, ready for work. Instead, a gaunt, stinking lot languished before them.

  The two officers scrambled back up on deck and shouted down the order for the prisoners to report. The medical detail made ready their disinfectant spray gun and used it immediately on the stumbling, squinting POWs pouring out of the hold. Myers and Tarpy helped load those too weak to walk onto a wooden platform, which was unceremoniously hauled up onto the freezing deck. The corpsmen followed their patients and were instantly hit with the icy blast of liquid disinfectant. Absolutely no attention was given to wounded men’s feeble condition, and they, too, were summarily sprayed.

  The same mingled feeling of dread and curiosity accosted Myers as it had that first day when the Japanese contingent had arrived at the Manila hospital. The frigid wind blew across the harbor and onto the ship, penetrating his drenched and sparse clothing. He trembled uncontrollably, trying to focus on the dock scene beyond the deck. They had finally arrived. Four hundred and twenty-seven men out of an original 1,619 had been delivered from their tormented existence aboard a ship of death.

  Coinciding with the arrival of the Brazil Maru in Moji, Japan, another momentous arrival was underway, as Allied troops stood poised to retake the city of Manila. A riptide of liberators had spread across Luzon, surrounding the Imperial troops with the ultimate goal of concentrating them in the center of the island. In their fight to regain the 450-mile-long Luzon, American forces touched every landmark that Myers and his fellow POWs had passed through on their hellish expedition out of the Philippines.

  After the successful Allied landings at Lingayen Gulf, the troops began moving eastward toward the main Japanese defenses. As with the virtually deserted Lingayen beaches, Yamashita was hardly contesting the route to Manila, either, still holding fast to his plan of the three defensive strongholds. Meanwhile, MacArthur and Krueger continued steady pressure on the Japanese lines.

  On January 24, Krueger’s 40th Division had advanced toward the ridges and hills overlooking Clark Field. His major task was to capture the four airstrips in the area. The battle was fought in short, slow advances in the face of heavy Japanese mortar and machine-gun fire. It took the Americans three days to gain a thousand yards, but by 1800 hours on the 28th, Clark Field was once again in Allied hands.

  Further north, thirty thousand more troops landed at Lingayen on the 27th and pushed their way into Zambales Province without opposition. On January 29, they recaptured Olongapo and the Old Naval Statio
n on Subic Bay. They began an offensive to capture the important road and rail center of San Jose Pampanga on January 30, and on the 31st, the 11th Airborne Division landed twenty-five miles south of Cavite.

  With the Allied troop movements, the Bataan Peninsula was eventually sealed off. For the Philippine guerrillas who were part of this offensive, it was a chance to exact revenge on the enemy. These guerrillas had formed a complex underground network when the Philippines had been wrested from American control three years earlier.

  Throughout the war, the underground guerrillas blew up bridges and railroad tracks and surreptitiously sank enemy boats as they floated in the harbors. They picked up Allied pilots who had been shot down and Allied prisoners who had escaped from camps. They operated weather stations, the information from which helped not only the landing troops but the ships and planes out at sea that were involved in bombing runs against the Home Islands. To assist the Filipino underground, the Americans sent submarines, which brought more arms, ammunition, and medical supplies. The subs brought more spies, too, both American and Filipino.

  The guerrillas’ value was immense, and their heroism often went well beyond the call of duty, even where death was inevitable. It was with great pleasure, then, that these men, who had taken to the hills at the start of the war, were now able to hunt down the one thousand ruthless Japanese soldiers left on Bataan. These were the same Imperial soldiers who had forced the guerrillas’ comrades to make the grueling Death March.

  On the same day, January 30, two prison camps were opened to the outside world for the first time since the fall of the islands. In a daring raid carried out by the guerrillas and a group of American Rangers, five hundred nearly starved Americans were freed from Cabanatuan Prison Camp. A short distance away, reconnaissance units came upon Camp O’Donnell, about sixty miles north of Manila. The Americans surmised that the Japanese had left just the day before, after torching the buildings. Not a living soul was visible.

  Two burial grounds had been established, one Filipino, the other American, each containing more than a thousand crosses. In an effort to affect benevolence, the Japanese had erected a rough cement monument which carried the inscription “In memory of American dead. O’Donnell War Personnel Enclosure erected by Imperial Japanese Army.”

  A few minutes past midnight on February 1, the 1st Cavalry Division was in position on the northern outskirts of Manila. Twenty thousand Japanese troops were prepared to defend the city and had laced the streets with mines. They blew up square miles of the metropolis, including MacArthur’s former penthouse suite at the Manila Hotel. They massacred civilians, whites, and Filipinos alike, determined to wreak as much death and destruction as possible. Under an Imperial military directive, they were to hold on or die trying.

  True to form, MacArthur would not be deterred from his goal of taking back the capital city. “If we run out of bullets we will use grenades,” he told his troops before they began their crusade. “If we run out of grenades, we will cut down the enemy with swords; if we break our swords, we will kill them by sinking our teeth deep in their throats.”

  Two days later, on Saturday, February 3, nine Marine pilots flew over Santo Tomas University, located on the north side of the city, dropping leaflets that read: “Roll out the barrel. Santa Claus is coming to town Sunday or Monday.” But the 1st Cavalry chose not to wait. Moments later, there was a roar of engines and a voice shouted, “Where’s the front gate?” A Sherman tank crashed through the wall and liberated approximately thirty-seven hundred prisoners.

  At virtually the same moment, the 8th Cavalry was seizing Old Bilibid Prison. One thousand twenty-four men were clinging to a meager subsistence. They were the remnants of those who had been left behind, determined to be too sick or disabled to depart for Japan aboard the Oryoku Maru.

  Had they been the least bit capable of doing so, the Brazil Maru’s survivors wouldn’t have bet a plug nickel that the guys they left behind in Bilibid survived long enough to be liberated. Instead, Myers and the rest of the men were still focused on what had been their singular purpose for the last forty-nine days: survival. They were huddled together in little clutches, struggling to share whatever body heat their pitifully gaunt frames radiated.

  Meanwhile, the Japanese doctors had discovered the rampant dysentery that most of the POWs had. All men, they said, had to be tested. A regiment of Japanese corpsmen arrived with cases of glass rods. The rods were inserted into the prisoners’ rectums and samples were taken.

  Simultaneously, the dead were now being brought up from the ship’s hold. The Japanese had been putting the corpses into thin pine-board boxes. But now that dysentery had been discovered, the Imperial doctors ordered that the dead be tested as well. So the rude coffins were opened and the deceased were tested with the glass rods.

  Myers and Tarpy viewed these actions with disgust.

  “What difference does it make if those guys died of dysentery or not?” Myers whispered. “They’re dead either way.”

  “They got names for people who mess around with corpses,” Tarpy whispered back. “I just can’t think of the word.”

  “No talking!” Wada screamed, scurrying over to where the two corpsmen were standing. He pulled out the slender club he had stuck in his belt and swung at Myers. Wada was standing too far away from him to inflict any great injury but caught Myers in the buttocks, which sent him sprawling forward.

  A Japanese officer saw the commotion and strode over to Wada. He looked down on the hunchback and uttered words from deep in his throat. Wada began to shrink back, and the officer grabbed the club with a white-gloved hand and heaved it overboard. Myers hadn’t understood a word the officer said, but judging from Wada’s reaction, he had probably threatened the interpreter with his life should any further damage be done to the already damaged cargo.

  A little clothing was distributed among them, and some shoes, but not nearly enough was provided to completely outfit all of the men. Most stood shivering and barefoot on the snow-covered deck. The last muster aboard ship was called and the prisoners were marched down the dock. As had become customary during the forced marches, the guards ran up and down among their ranks yelling, “Speedo, speedo.” Those who fell and were unable to rise under their own power were beaten with a rifle butt until they either got up or were pulled to their feet by fellow POWs.

  They were marched through the streets of Moji, while Japanese children spat at them, and arrived at a large, empty, unheated theater building. Some blankets and overcoats were handed out to fend off the cold air. The men were so weak and exhausted that they sunk to the floor, caring little that it was bare concrete.

  It appeared that a new exercise in Japanese bureaucracy was being organized, and Myers used the brief respite to consider the consequences of the time the prisoners had spent aboard the Brazil Maru. They had begun with 1,619 men when they left Bilibid. Between Manila and San Fernando Pampanga, 659 prisoners died or were killed. Another 533 lost their lives between San Fernando and Moji. A total of 1,192 men had given away all of their tomorrows in the name of freedom today.

  Myers became cognizant of the activity taking place around him. As with all the previous musters and Imperial organizational activities, the men were not given any food or water before or during the process. They were being sorted into three groups. The first group divided out was the “hospital group,” those who were determined to be too infirm to begin work right away, if indeed they ever would at all. During the sorting process alone, Myers personally tended to three men who died on the floor of the theater.

  The remainder of the prisoners—Myers guessed there to be around three hundred of them—were divided into two groups considered the “well” men. He and Tarpy managed to stand closely enough together to be assigned to the same group. The well men were told to fall in and, as they did so, a fleet of ambulances arrived to remove the hospital group. Myers wondered to himself why no corpsmen had been chosen to go with this group as careg
ivers. The Japanese had steadfastly refused to care for the prisoners any other time, and Myers couldn’t imagine that the status quo was going to change now that they were in Japan. The obvious answer to this pondering was not long in coming to Myers. The hospital group of men were in such dire condition, they were never going to recover. The Japanese probably figured there was little point in wasting able-bodied men by sending them with the doomed. Myers’ conjecture proved to be correct. Of the one hundred men who were taken to a hospital in the nearby town of Kokura, seventy-six never went any farther.

  The prisoners were marched to a train station and loaded into cars with wooden benches. All of the window blinds were pulled tightly shut. Several gutsy Americans managed to sneak peeks at the Japanese landscape. The devastation was tremendous, caused, the men divined, by American air power. As this news spread through the train cars, the POWs could only guess that their guards didn’t want them to get any ideas of impending liberation. As long as the prisoners were kept ignorant they could be forced to continue to submit to their captors’ demands.

  The trip took about five hours, and the men still hadn’t been given any rations. When the train pulled to a halt and the doors opened, the men staggered out onto the tracks. Myers looked up at a sign on a nearby building that had English written alongside the Japanese characters.

  “That says ‘Kashii,’” a tall man beside him said. “I know where we are, I’ve heard of it. This is an industrial area. Manufacturing and coal mines, too.” Myers turned to ask him how he knew so much, but the man blended in with the others stumbling along. He decided it didn’t matter whether the information the man gave him was accurate or not, since it was more information than he’d had.

  From a platform near the long building that ran along the tracks, a man in tattered clothing was speaking loudly, and it took Myers a few minutes to realize the man was speaking in English. The newly arrived men were to stay with their groups. Group One, which had 173 men and included Myers and Tarpy, was to follow him to trucks; the second group was to wait for the other Americans to arrive to take them to another camp.