Belly of the Beast Page 25

  All during the sorting process in Moji, the train ride, and now on their way to the trucks, the Japanese guards brandished their weapons as if the men might at any moment rush and overpower them. The concept was ludicrous given their physical condition, but evidently this hadn’t registered with the guards. Again shouts of “Speedo!” rang out as the men were herded into the trucks.

  News soon spread during the short truck ride that the Americans at the train station were POWs captured at Wake Island. The group was on its way to the camp known as Fukuoka #1. Shortly after nightfall, the trucks arrived at the camp. The new prisoners were issued overcoats, courtesy of the American, British, and Australian Red Cross, and then taken to another large, unheated building. The building was fairly new, the first new structure Myers and Tarpy had been in since becoming prisoners.

  But that wasn’t the most surprising thing about their first night in Japan. A meal arrived a short time later, the best they’d seen in a long time, including cooked rice, hot soup, and warm Japanese tea. Myers fell asleep soon after he’d finished his meal. It was the first time in weeks he didn’t feel that the weight of other men’s very survival rested on his shoulders.

  There were twenty-four camps named Fukuoka, after the prefecture in which they were located. Each was numbered one through twenty-four, and some of the camps had been given additional names, denoting the area in which they were located. Myers and Tarpy’s new camp, Fukuoka #1, had had three different locations during the war, and as many names. It had first been situated in Kashii, where their train ride had come to an end. Then the camp was moved to the airport outside of Kashii, and in January 1945, the camp was relocated a final time, slightly north of and inland from the city of Fukuoka. Because of the surrounding grove of pine trees, the camp became known as Pine Tree Camp.

  Fukuoka #3 was located in Yawata, near the Dai-ichi Seiko steel mill. Roughly one hundred Brazil Maru survivors made the one-hour trip from Moji to #3. Fukuoka #17 was at Omuta, home of the Mitsui Coal Mining Company. Ninety Brazil Maru survivors, mostly enlisted men, were sent there, although twenty-four died shortly after their arrival, despite the fact they had been part of the prisoner group who were considered “well.” Number 17 quickly built a reputation for being the roughest among the Fukuoka camps.

  Pine Tree Camp was located about a quarter of a mile from the main-line railway that had brought the prisoners from Moji. It was very close to a new Japanese military installation and within a few miles of coal mines. The camp compound measured 1,000 by 300 feet and was surrounded by a wooden fence topped off with electrified barbed wire. Like all of the other buildings and modes of transportation with which Myers and his fellow prisoners had come in contact, there were no markings anywhere in the camp that might indicate that it housed POWs.

  Pine Tree Camp was a melting pot of nationalities. Aside from the men who arrived with Myers from Japan, there were another 300 Americans, four of whom were civilians captured on Wake Island. The camp’s population also included 150 British, 250 Dutch, and 20 Australians, military personnel all, bringing the total population to 913.

  The camp’s buildings were crude, despite the fact that they were relatively new. Some were even still under construction. The twelve unheated barracks were framed of native lumber and bamboo with tar-paper roofs, and each housed between forty-eight and sixty prisoners. The buildings were sunk four and a half feet into the ground and had sand floors. The portion of the walls that stood aboveground was covered with mud plaster.

  The barracks were divided on the inside by a long passageway on either side of which were the narrow sleeping bays measuring just two feet wide per prisoner. There was no heat in the buildings, but each man was issued six tattered blankets with which to make his bed. There was only one small light in the barracks and the prisoners were only allowed to turn it on after sundown. At all other times, the barracks remained in a shadowy gloom.

  Because of the dire conditions aboard the Brazil Maru, Myers thought Pine Tree Camp might be tolerable, beginning with the fact that the entire group was allowed to remain in bed for the ten days after their arrival. On their eleventh day in camp, an Imperial doctor came through the barracks and again the prisoners were sorted by who was fit for labor and who wasn’t. From that time on, those who were considered to be well were required to rise at 0630, eat their morning ration, fall out for bangou, and remain outside of the barracks until 1630 hours, with the exception of thirty minutes at 1000 hours and sixty minutes at noon.

  The work details at Pine Tree Camp were identical in the fact that they all entailed ten hours of hard labor. The officers among the prisoners were not required to work alongside their men. Rather, their duties included the upkeep of the camp garden, although most of them were so incapacitated they were hospitalized a great deal of the time.

  The three remaining doctors and a handful of corpsmen still functioning, including Myers and Tarpy, were assigned duty in the camp hospital. Only those POWs who were unconscious or dying were brought to the hospital, a structure that was a carbon copy of the barracks. The hospital had no beds; rather, each patient was allotted floor space about two feet wide and six feet long. Each was given four Japanese army blankets and a pillow bag filled with rice husks. As was the rest of the camp, the building was inadequately heated, and it seemed to Myers as though he was as cold inside as he was out in the compound.

  The hospital only had the capacity for fifteen patients and it was filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Since that meant a great many men who should have been hospitalized had to remain in their barracks, Myers’ and Tarpy’s patients were in both the hospital and the barracks. This was relatively inefficient since it never seemed like they had what they needed where they needed it most.

  The upshot was that there weren’t many supplies, anyway. The fact that the building was even referred to as a hospital was a joke to Myers. Like every other situation he had been in as a POW, this hospital was very ill equipped to treat the kinds of injuries and ailments from which these patients were suffering. There were no surgical facilities and very few medicines and dressings. Many of the doctors who’d been there previously were sick themselves, and the arrival of the needy from the Brazil Maru strained the facility even more.

  After a few days at the camp hospital, a representative from the prison camp headquarters in Fukuoka arrived to inspect the facilities and the prisoners, and he inquired what they might need. The doctors drew up a list of medical supplies and stressed the need for additional food. If Red Cross packages were available, they suggested, this was the time that they would do the prisoners the most good.

  The representative’s visit netted the prisoners one small Red Cross package for every three men, all of which were immediately placed under the control of the camp’s Japanese medical officer, Dr. Masato Hata. He was incompetent, inconsiderate, and particularly brutal. Only after the most insistent pleadings would he allow the prisoners any additional supplies, appearing to take great pleasure in forcing the Allied medical personnel to literally beg for what they needed.

  “Hey, Myers,” Tarpy called to him one afternoon after they’d been in camp for two weeks. “There’s a guy over there, third from the left, second row. Says he was sent over to the warehouse connected to Hata’s office. Says that slimy Nip’s got boxes of Red Cross medicines that he’s hoarding.”

  Myers thought for a minute and answered, “We have to get the doctors to write scripts for the drugs before Hata’ll give ’em to us, right?”

  “Right,” Tarpy answered.

  “Why don’t we double up on the number of scripts we have the docs write. You know, instead of sulfa for one guy, we’ll say there are two guys. If Hata’s got it maybe we can get enough that way.”

  Myers took his idea to the doctors, who thought it was very clever and implemented it. But even the double dosages didn’t seem to help the men. It was always too little and too late for many of the prisoners, particularly those who
had survived the hellacious trials aboard the Brazil Maru.

  In fact, the ship’s survivors were in such horrid shape when they arrived, the men who had already been interned at Pine Tree Camp were shocked at their appearance. They were even more shocked at their mortality rate. Malnutrition was so chronic in all prison camps it was barely given notice. But these men had each lost between seventy and ninety pounds. In addition, they suffered from a variety of injuries and complications. One doctor counted twenty-three streptococci infections on his own legs and body that ran with blood and pus.

  About the end of February, a Japanese colonel came to inspect the camp and asked to meet with the doctors and corpsmen outside the hospital. Myers and the other men shivered in the cold while the colonel took his time finishing a cup of tea in the office of the camp commandant, First Lieutenant Yuichi Sakamato. When he was ready, he faced the Americans to give a brief introductory speech.

  “We wish all prisoners to be cared for. Men need to work and we have work for them to do. But they must get well.”

  So you can work them or beat them to death, Myers thought. As soon as he had been ordered out of his sleeping bay ten days after his arrival, Myers witnessed the guards’ brutality. In some cases it was even worse than what he had seen up until this point. After a prisoner received his beating for his rule infraction, he was tossed into an unheated guardhouse for a period of solitary confinement. In the near zero temperatures, with little clothing and no body weight to warm them, POWs often never left the guardhouse alive.

  The Japanese colonel continued his speech to the medical staff. “We will supply you with what you need to make these men well.” He then asked each medical officer what recommendations he might have to rally the languishing patients. The responses were unanimous and no different than they had been to prison camp representatives: food and medicines. This time, the doctors thought if they were more specific, their needs might be met. They requested meat, milk, and butter, and again asked for Red Cross boxes which would contain medical supplies.

  The colonel’s answer was not surprising. “We understand that you need those things, they are very important but difficult to have during war. And we cannot give you Red Cross boxes because you are so hungry now. If we give them to you, the men will eat the food too quickly and waste them and they will do you no good.”

  He moved on to the corpsmen and asked for their recommendations. Few if any had suggestions, but Myers spoke up. “Sir, the men need more blankets to keep warm during this cold weather.”

  The colonel countered with the fact that Japanese soldiers are only given five blankets and the POWs already had one more than that. Myers figured it was useless to pursue the argument, despite the fact that logic dictated men as emaciated as the prisoners had no body fat to help protect them against the chilling northern winds. It was the old argument all over again: what was good enough for Imperial troops was more than sufficient for prisoners, regardless of the other hardships they suffered.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Pain Among the Pines

  By the beginning of 1945, Japan’s industrial foundation was crippled and her military had begun to crack. A British War Cabinet paper had even boldly stated that “Germany would probably lose the war because she had factories and no raw materials, but Japan would lose because she had raw materials and no factories.”

  Early in the hostilities Japan had secured what the Imperial military strategists had called the “Southern Resources Area,” namely Malaya, French Indo-China, and the Dutch East Indies. But the Japanese lacked the time and means to develop these areas so as to make use of their resources. In addition, by 1945 the Allies had regained a significant number of Pacific islands formerly in Imperial hands and the shipping routes between them. Significant sea blockades were set up and the inflow of raw materials and supplies to Japan slowed to a trickle.

  Aside from the lack of supplies, Japanese industry itself was in trouble. Critically important factories and manufacturing centers were packed tightly together on this island nation. That made them easy pickings for the nearly constant B-29 bombardments the Americans began unleashing late in 1944 from air bases in China, Saipan, and the Marianas. Furthermore, because Japan had sent most of her able-bodied men into the fighting arena, most recently as kamikaze pilots, production in the factories had begun to seriously lag behind the endless demands. Children and the elderly had already been recruited as workers, but still more labor was needed.

  Japan drew their needed manpower from their large wealth of Allied POWs. By 1945, there were more than one hundred seventy-five POW camps in Manchuria, Korea, and on the Home Islands. The prisoners shoveled coal and repaired railroad tracks. They operated blast furnaces and loaded cargo. They worked everywhere their captors ordered them to: in mills and foundries, in mines and on piers. The hours were long, the days off infrequent, and the conditions harsh. There were very few medical supplies and very little food.

  Since Japan was unable to sufficiently feed her own population, the prisoners were given only the most meager rations. For those men who had fought and been captured on Bataan, they were beginning their fourth year of chronic starvation. There were almost no animals left in Japanese zoos; they had all been eaten except for a few surviving elephants. Sumo wrestling had been cancelled. The official daily calorie count for Japanese civilians fell to below two thousand, not nearly enough to maintain the sumo’s weight for competition.

  There was not enough fabric to make kimonos, so the women wore mompei, working trousers, instead. There was no sugar and no tobacco. Even Mother Nature added to the travails by sending strong, cold winds blowing across the Japanese Home Islands that winter. The cold affected prisoners and citizens alike; there was no oil for heating homes and no gasoline for powering vehicles.

  The Japanese military leaders told the struggling nation that they were making the sacrifices necessary for the continuation of their race. They were assured that the war was going Japans way and that, in the end, the sacrifices would be worth it. Imperial citizens were forewarned that if the evil white invaders arrived on the Home Islands, they could expect massacre, rape, and pillage. The Emperor, they were told, expected them to resist to the end. One hundred million people were ordered to all die together.

  The militarists at the helm of the Japanese government were more than a little accurate regarding their admonition about an attack on and invasion of the Home Islands. The Allied leaders felt that, given the tenacity the enemy had exhibited thus far, it was the only way that complete submission could be exacted from them. The invasion plans called for the operation to be divided into two parts, code-named Olympic and Coronet. It would begin on November 1, 1945, with the island of Kyushu. Nine Army divisions would be devoted to the cause, along with five thousand planes and six thousand ships. Luzon would be the supply base and staging area for the upcoming attacks.

  General MacArthur was well aware of the importance of securing the Philippines. After the arrival of his troops in Manila on February 3, and their ensuing liberation of the prison camps in and around the city, MacArthur declared the city secure on February 7. Though it may have been secure, it was not surrendered. Japanese navy Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabachi was in charge of the Special Naval Base Force and had been given orders to defend the city. He and his twenty thousand troops had every intention of carrying out the order, especially since they had no means of escape.

  Throughout the month of February, the Allies made building-by-building searches, fighting constant skirmishes with the Japanese. In the process the city of Manila was completely destroyed. Three quarters of the residential district in the southern part of the city had been leveled. Utilities were almost nonexistent and the business district had been wiped out. The government buildings, the churches, and the historical structures and walls of the Intramuros were obliterated. Philippine death counts topped one hundred thousand.

  The island of Corregidor was also still in Japanese hands
and being defended by five thousand naval troops. Because of the already successful corralling of Yamashita’s troops on Luzon, the island’s military value was superfluous. But it had symbolic value to MacArthur.

  On February 16, twenty-four B-24s, forty-two medium-range bombers, eight cruisers, and fourteen destroyers bombarded the island. By the 24th, the United States controlled all of the island except for the last three thousand yards of the “tail.” On the morning of the 26th, in a desperate suicide attempt, the remaining Imperial troops detonated an underground arsenal. This resulted in the death of two hundred Japanese and fifty Americans, and the wounding of another one hundred fifty Americans. But it was the final act in what had become a very long and tragic struggle. The next day, the Stars and Stripes were once more raised over Corregidor.

  The same day, February 27, 1945, MacArthur officially restored the Philippine Commonwealth government to its rightful president, President Osmeña, who responded by saying: “We shall be redeemed from slavery. As a crowning glory to Philippine-American collaboration, we shall become a full member of the concert of independent nations.”

  While the fighting was winding down in the Philippines in February 1945, it was just beginning on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It would be from these islands, which lay 800 and 350 miles from Japan respectively, that the Allies would launch their invasion of the Home Islands.

  The Allies began the bombardment of Iwo Jima with B-24s and B-25s flying out of the Marianas. The missions began in late October of 1944, seventy-two days before the landing took place, making this the longest bombardment of any island in the Pacific war. To understand the translation of the island’s name is to understand the significance of the attacks. Translated from Japanese, iwo and jima mean “sulfur island”; seven and a half square miles of volcanic remains. The Japanese had transformed the island into a veritable web of interconnected tunnels similar to Corregidor. The tunnels and bunkers had walls four feet thick, made from a combination of the volcanic ash and cement. In addition, natural caves were abundant on the island, some large enough to hold up to four hundred soldiers.