Belly of the Beast Read online

  The defenses the military had seen in Tarawa in November of 1943 had seemed rugged, but compared to Iwo Jima’s defenses they had been child’s play. When American Marines first landed on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, harmless-looking, earthen mounds on the beach suddenly exploded with enemy gunfire. Beside these camouflaged pillboxes, the ground was sown with thousands of land mines.

  On February 23, the American flag was raised on the Marines’ first goal, Mount Suribachi. The fighting didn’t end until March 26 and Iwo Jima was in Allied hands. The taking of this tiny morsel of real estate went down in the history pages as the bloodiest battle in the history of the United States Marine Corps, costing 6,821 American lives.

  While the battles raged on land in the Pacific, the Allies continued blasting away at the Home Islands from the air. The winter winds and heavy cloud cover over Japan in 1945 diminished the effectiveness of the American high-altitude precision bombing. So in March, the B-29s commenced low-level bombing of smaller industrial targets. On the 9th of the month, the planes began a run of attacks, dropping incendiary bombs on Japanese cities, an event that drastically changed the strategic nature of the air war.

  The next day, March 10, three hundred thirty Superfortresses attacked Tokyo. Sixteen square miles of the capital, nearly forty percent, burned to the ground. Eighty-five thousand people died as a result of the ten thousand tons of ordnance that were dropped.

  The Allied pounding continued, and the tempo and size of the raids increased. After the Tokyo firestorm, 285 bombers struck Nagoya, then Osaka, Kobe, and Yokohama. The buildings in these cities, made primarily of paper and wood, burned instantly. Three hundred thousand people were left homeless.

  American plans called for an April 1, 1945, landing on Okinawa. Because of the island’s proximity to Japan, the Allies expected to encounter the most savage defense. This, in a war that had already been extraordinarily lethal. March 1945 had been the costliest month in battle for the United States with a loss of twenty thousand servicemen, an average of nine hundred per day. The war had taken a huge toll on Japanese lives, too. By the end of the same month they had lost two men for every one American, a total of three hundred thousand since the war began.

  The Allied military leaders planned to use everything they had learned thus far in the war about assault landing techniques to take Okinawa. For his part, the Japanese commander on the island, General Mitsuru Ushijima, was determined to make his stand the most high-priced campaign of the war in terms of American lives.

  The main American assault began with the April Fool’s Day landing. Knowing that the Allies would be well equipped, the Japanese employed their one remaining strategy: suicide. Kamikaze drafts were formed at every Japanese air base. No one could refuse the assignment. Despite propaganda that insisted they had volunteered, the pilots were forced to choose either duty or the firing squad. Because many of these pilots were novices without much training, the kamikazes were often inaccurate in their deadly runs. But there were hundreds of them, and their sheer numbers made up for the inaccuracies, hitting even a hospital ship as well as their military targets.

  Another ominous weapon of war was unleashed for the battle of Okinawa. Three hundred and fifty suicide boats, an assortment of small wooden craft, were heavily loaded with high-powered explosives. The boats’ captains were expected to ram the sides of American ships, blowing themselves up in an attempt to sink the larger vessels.

  From all appearances, the Japanese were committed to a last-ditch defense of their Empire. General Ushijima told his fighting forces that each man was to trade his life for the lives of ten Americans or one American tank. The landings on the north and south end of the island went well, as did the next four days. At that point, the Allied troops ran into the greatest concentrations of Ushijima’s forces, and two things became evident. First, the Allies were going to have to slog their way across the island, taking inch by bloody inch. Secondly, the Japanese aimed to employ their strategy of suicide in every element of their stand.

  Besides the kamikazes and suicide boats, the Japanese were willing to risk the lives of every one of their soldiers on Okinawa if it meant they could take the lives of Allied fighting men. The Japanese went so far as to plan a suicide for the pride of their navy. The Yamato was given only enough fuel for a one-way trip to Okinawa. When she arrived, she was to turn her guns on American ships while kamikazes attacked from above. A single kamikaze plane would be held in reserve, and when the Yamato could no longer fight, it was to sink her where she sat.

  Throughout the months of April, May, and most of June, the Americans hammered at the Japanese lines. They retreated begrudgingly, until Ushijima reached his last stronghold. The Americans asked him to surrender but the Imperial general refused, committing harakiri on June 22. By the next morning, Okinawa was secured. Although Ushijima had lost the battle, he succeeded in achieving his goal. The Americans lost 20,195 men in the taking of Okinawa, while the Japanese lost a staggering 110,000. The fighting on Okinawa was indeed the most costly of the war and one of the most costly in history.

  The POWs at Pine Tree Camp were well aware of the bombing runs occurring around them. Some of the prisoner work details were ordered to build bomb shelters in the Fukuoka area. When the air-raid sirens screamed, announcing potential death from the skies, the prisoners on work details outside the camp watched as terrified Japanese citizens fled into the sturdy shelters. The prisoners, meanwhile, would be herded into nothing more than flimsy shacks.

  Other prisoners worked long, arduous days in the coal mines. Then, after returning to camp at day’s end, they were made to dig graves, carry coffins, or take part in other cemetery duties. Almost all of the POWs were forced to work beyond their physical capabilities and were beaten for lagging behind.

  After a couple of months at Pine Tree Camp, it struck Myers that his function in the hospital there was not unlike what it had been in the Bilibid Prison hospital. Living corpses arrived daily at the hospital, mostly from the coal mines. Feeble and sick, they could scarcely walk in under their own power. Human dignity and decency were absent from their lives and their feeling of self-worth had disappeared. They had been forced to become animals, with the single goal of surviving just one more day. An officer Myers had met aboard the ship from the Philippines was interned with him at Pine Tree Camp. He told Myers one day that the camp’s conditions were so bad, “a healthy pig would have died.” Myers didn’t disagree.

  In addition to guard beatings, slow starvation, fevers, and pneumonia, the Pine Tree Camp prisoners also had to contend with the camp commandant, Sakamato, who was as odious as Hata, the camp’s doctor. Sakamato had no reservations about delivering beatings to the prisoners, whether for “just cause” or for sport. Nor did he do anything to prevent the prisoners from being stoned by civilians as they plodded on their work details outside the prison walls.

  Pine Tree Camp’s hygiene facilities were a vast improvement over anything Myers and Tarpy had on their journey from the Philippines. But Myers decided they still were a long way from anything even the most underprivileged American had lived with during the Depression. The camp’s latrine facilities were adequate although they were nothing more than straddle trenches. There was also a bath-house; it was unheated and contained five large, square vats made of wood with metal bottoms. The vats were ten feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep, and the water they contained was heated through the use of a fire pit beneath each of them. This was where all the men bathed, the infirm as well as those with only a meager clutch on life. Soap was only rarely furnished, and when it was it usually had to be shared between four or five men.

  The bath water was changed weekly, which meant that it was fairly polluted most of the time. When Myers and Tarpy had first arrived during the coldest months, they avoided it altogether, as did most of the medical personnel.

  “Don’t get in that tub,” Myers warned a man one day who had just recovered from a long bout with pneumonia
. “You’re already pretty weak. You catch a chill from getting wet, and you won’t be long for this world.”

  “But the guards just changed the water this morning,” the prisoner argued. “It’ll be clean, and it feels so good. It warms me right down to my bones.”

  The prisoner took his bath, fell ill again within a day, and was dead by week’s end.

  As it had been everywhere else during their captivity, the prisoners’ diet at Pine Tree Camp consisted primarily of rice, about three quarters of a canteen cup of rice daily. Here it was mixed with koreon, a small grain that resembled broomcorn. The rice was digestible, but the men saw the broomcorn pass through their intestinal tracts nearly unaltered.

  Their daily ration also included half a cup of soup, with pieces of daikon, a large white radish, swimming around in it. Occasionally a small bun was added, and the evening meal included a few grams of dried fish. A major problem the POWs faced was a lack of salt, and the craving for it became almost unbearable. Fortunately, the men didn’t sweat in the winter months, thus preventing an even greater depletion of their salt supplies.

  Myers was treating a man in one of the barracks one evening and passed several prisoners bent over a small cooking fire in the compound. He stopped and asked what they were doing.

  “Found some salt out near the manure piles we were working in,” one of the men told him. The Japanese used their animals’ manure to fertilize their crops, and the POWs had the unpleasant job of collecting and spreading it.

  “Must’ve been left from when they salted the animals,” another man added.

  “You gotta be sure to remove all the manure,” Myers told them. “We’re already so full of parasites it’s a wonder we’re surviving at all. But you sure as heck don’t need to pick up anything new.”

  “That’s what we figured,” the first man said. “So we separated it from the manure real careful and now we’re dissolving it in boiling water. We figure we’ll let it stand until all the dirt settles to the bottom and we’ll use it on our rice.”

  Human ingenuity never failed to impress Myers.

  In the absence of a mess hall, a prisoner representative from each barrack was sent to fetch the food caldrons from the kitchen and then distribute the food to the best of his ability and moral integrity.

  One night during their evening meal, Myers and Tarpy were discussing that the food at Pine Tree Camp was better than they’d had since leaving Manila.

  “That’s not saying much for what you been through,” another prisoner remarked.

  “There’s not much that can be said about it,” Tarpy answered him.

  The scant food and inadequate supplies continued to take their physical toll on the POWs. But in April of 1945, the physical deprivation took a back seat for some men and psychological deprivation became their greatest nemesis. The length of time they’d been prisoners, combined with the stress of not knowing how many more months of the deficiencies and brutalities stretched in front of them, created a very different atmosphere than that which Myers and Tarpy had experienced at Bilibid. There was no quanning, no making fools of the guards, no entertainment of any kind. Myers observed that they were all just barely hanging on. And when some went beyond hanging on, when the mental stress and the lack of even the most primitive comforts became too much for them, they adopted a defeatist attitude and faded away.

  Dark thoughts invaded Myers’ mind as well. But they were more of a pragmatic nature than panic-driven. By April he had been watching broken, ailing men come into the hospital for three months. And when they left, if they left at all, they weren’t much improved. Not because nothing could be done for them, but rather because they were still facing such overwhelming shortages in medical supplies. Myers figured that at any given time, the death rate among them was about twenty-five percent. At that pace, none of them would be alive to see another year.

  Word reached the camp on April 14 that President Roosevelt had died a day or so earlier. The strain of the past four years combined with his failing health made him yet another casualty of the war. On the heels of that announcement, a group of prisoners, mostly officers, were rounded up for transport to another camp. The scuttlebutt was that this group was headed for more coal mining duties in Manchuria by way of Korea. As always, both those going and those remaining behind wondered if things would be better in new surroundings. Given their past experiences, most POWs agreed that taking a chance on something new was pretty risky.

  The firebombing over Japanese cities continued. The POWs anxiously watched the aircraft crisscrossing the sky over the camp, but thus far none of them had dropped any of their deadly eggs on the prisoners. They felt the bombs’ impact anyway, though. The guards at the camp were building tremendous resentment against the POWs for the pounding the Home Islands were taking as a result of the American bombing runs. They readily took their anger out on the prisoners.

  The brutality of the guards at Pine Tree Camp reached an extreme in the late spring of 1945. Prisoners were beaten and tortured regularly. One man who tried to escape was hung alive on a barbed wire fence. There, he begged for water and mercy over the course of several days before he died.

  Myers saw men every day who had suffered gruesome injuries at the nearby coal mine, where men descended six thousand feet into its shaft to perform suffocating and harsh labor. The mines were still privately owned, and therefore privately run. These civilians, too, had a hateful attitude toward the Americans and often abused them more aggressively than the camp guards did.

  One night a man fell into a sewage ditch and broke his leg. He was informed that until the leg healed, he would not have to go back down into the mine again. With the revelation that an injury meant no work, self-mutilation became a part of life at the camp. For Myers, trained in caring for the sick and injured, and witness to the horrors inflicted on the POWs by the Imperial troops, the self-mutilation was a new abhorrence the men were thrust into.

  Myers treated men who had asked to have their arms and ankles broken by their fellow prisoners. If none was willing, they did it themselves. He saw other men who had taken battery acid from their mining headlamps and introduced it into their open sores. One man had deliberately stared at his welder’s torch to flash-burn his eyes. Another set off a detonator in his hand.

  In response to the increasing frequency of the requests, the camp soon had two professional bone crushers. For a fee, they would administer clean breaks. And while one of them asked a higher price, he included carrying the victim out of the mine as a part of his services.

  The element that these men failed to consider ahead of time was that the doctors and corpsmen still had no supplies with which to treat injuries, accidental or self-inflicted. Men’s hands, mangled from mining tools and coal cars, were never given antibiotics or any other medically proven treatment. All that was available was hot water, in which the injury was soaked to kill as many bacteria as possible. After that, Myers would tell them, it was in God’s hands.

  The number of men starving to death was holding at a fairly steady rate and kept the burial crews busy. As midsummer settled over Japan, the men at Pine Tree Camp struggled to stay alive and keep the flies away. Myers and Tarpy figured out that of the original group of 173 who had arrived with them from the Brazil Maru, 52, nearly thirty percent, had died since their arrival in Japan six months earlier.

  Germany had surrendered on May 7, 1945, but the news never reached the prisoners at Pine Tree Camp. The Allies had called on the Japanese to surrender at the same time, but the man now in charge of Japan’s third wartime government, Admiral Baron Kantaro Suzuki, ignored the Allies’ ultimatum. This left the Allies with no choice but to continue the bombardment of Japan.

  To prevent as many civilian deaths as possible, planes dropped leaflets over the targeted cities ahead of time, urging evacuation. From the middle of April to the middle of June, Allied fire raids hit the targets called the Big Six—the cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Y
okohama, and Kawasaki.

  The night of June 20, 480 bombers flew over Fukuoka, destroying nearly a quarter of the city. Nine days later, 487 bombers dropped their loads on Moji, destroying more than a quarter of it. The prisoners at Pine Tree Camp heard the thunder and saw the flashes of the firestorm glowing in the summer night air. Given what they could see even from a distance, they knew that should they be hit, they didn’t have a chance.

  As June drew to a close, the island of Kyushu was rendered useless by Allied air supremacy. The currents of heat that arose from the conflagrations tossed the planes as they flew away from their bombing runs and actually tore helmets from the heads of crew members.

  Meanwhile, American mining of Japanese ports was so intense, it completely overwhelmed the enemy’s minesweeping force. After having sunk one minesweeper, an American P-38 pilot sent what was probably the war’s most mellifluous message:

  Saw steamer … strafed same … sank same … some sight… signed Smith.

  As a result of both the bombing raids and Operation Starvation, the Allies’ shipping blockade, Japan’s five great ports were now handling less than one eighth of their 1941 trade. The secondary mode of transport, the rail system, had been reduced to twenty-five percent of its carrying capacity. Three quarters of the Japanese fishing fleet had also been destroyed. The country was so hard up for oil that their planes sat empty on the airfields. When the Allied bombs struck them, they didn’t even blow up.