Baa Baa Black Sheep (45 page)

There were fights among some of my nerve-racked people, and I had to settle them, and I had to keep some of them from stealing each other’s food, and I had to be the interpreter with the guards, translating when my boys got in trouble. Yet, strangely, I found that the biggest curse, or the biggest threat, I could give any of my group who were troublesome was to say: “Listen, when we get out of this and back to the States, I’ll never speak to you again.”

In one case I still have lived up to that threat, for the officer deserved it. I still do not want to see him or speak to him again. He did steal fellow-captives’ food, and also let others be beaten up for something he himself had done.

Most of them kept on going somehow and became ashamed immediately for something they had done. And once it was my turn to feel very sorry. It was a sorrow that came from my own inadequacy to keep one poor little fellow alive.

There is nothing of the chaplain about me, God knows, but a chaplain’s duty became mine too. This was thrown in with the rest, and especially during those hard closing weeks of the war. The night I failed at this job, or at least the night I remember failing the most at this job, was when I just simply seemed unable to “will” one of my younger boys to stay alive.

I wanted him to pay attention to me long enough to hold on for one more month—just one more month. But he would not eat. I would scold him, but he still would not eat. The fight for survival had gone completely out of him in his weakness. So I tried to force food down this poor little soul’s throat, and then I would scold him again for not trying.

Finally, after many attempts, he looked up at me and said: “Please, Greg, don’t scold me.”

That evening we posted a guard to stand by and watch
him. I had told him, then, to try to get some sleep. I was to have the first watch over him. It was about seven o’clock when everyone turned in, and I was going to have a four-hour watch. About nine o’clock the little fellow died.

And yet just one month later it was all over, and he would have been free. But, of course I realize that it is not up to me to make such decisions, and therefore I should not worry about them.

Because in the next great war we are destined not to know what will hit us, and because in the next great war we are destined not to see or hear ahead of time whatever it is that will destroy us, this report about being on the receiving end of our own B-29s already seems obsolete and far away.

We prisoners in this new camp first heard about the B-29s from the guards, but they also told us that the planes were all being shot down as fast as they came over, or even before they reached the coast of Japan.

Not having seen a B-29, and not even having known of this new ship’s existence, all I could do about these first rumors was to remain as baffled as the Japanese must have been. And then one day, a surprisingly short time later, I saw for myself, my first B-29s. There were four of them, all flying high, and from that moment on I had no doubts whatsoever that the Nips were really in for something.

I happened to be out working on a coal-dump when I saw these great ships. They were flying so fast and so high that the few Japanese planes sent up to intercept them were immediately out of sight. All I could see of them were their vapor streaks up there, but periodically I could hear some of the firing, and then down came the immense bombs.

From then on, day after day, as the B-29s kept coming over, we special prisoners were given a new type of work to do, but a work we really relished. Our work consisted of going out early each morning into the city streets on the outskirts of Tokyo and Yokohama and picking up what the B-29s had laid down. Where the bombs hit, everything was knocked or burned flat. We had to take the heavy pieces, like cement blocks and pieces of metal, and lay them in neat rows along the city streets. Then we burned up the wood and trash. Then we had to mattock the ground surface, which had not had anything planted in it for, I imagine, a thousand
years. It was really rough work at that time, and I was back again to my original starvation weight.

But work, almost no matter what kind, was better than being made to sit in a cell doing nothing. And this is what had happened to us during the first month in Camp Omouri. We had not been able to do a thing, and every time any guard came in, we all had to jump to attention and bow.

When I was a little fellow, I was told a few things about the Japanese. One thing was how they would take off their shoes before entering a house. I found that to be very true. I was also told that they had advanced so far that they no longer used human excretions for fertilizer. But that is not so. It is not so because I had to carry many buckets, just like a coolie, of human crap and urine to put on this garden or that garden. We would have to go around to collect this fertilizer from the toilets of bombed-out houses. The buildings were completely gone, but the toilet-like affair is just kind of a cement bowl under the ground, and we dipped this human crap out of these old toilets. I think that is what is wrong with my sense of smell now. I used to have a keen sense before the war, but now I can smell hardly anything, all of which was probably nature’s way of taking care of me during those assignments. Not to forget some of the foul-smelling joints I sold beer to for over six years after the war.

The Japanese certainly must be the world’s greatest gardeners, because some of this soil was practically half masonry and the rest volcanic ash. But with their means of fertilizing and watering we grew some beautiful vegetables with that prisoner work. The only trouble was we did not get enough of them to eat.

Some of the guards, of course, were better than others, and when the vegetables started growing, some of them let us steal the vegetables and cook them on fires in back lots. These good guards told us to be careful that none of the officers saw us do it, so we would keep boys posted, and when we saw an officer coming down the street—they usually came on bicycles—we would ditch the stewpot, which had nothing in it but green vegetables. An exceptional stew was one in which we put radishes or turnips or anything solid. Occasionally a good guard would get some fish from some of the civilians and let us throw that in. This was really Number One, as we called things out there.

During the last four and a half months we had B-29s coming over daily and nightly. We were not allowed to get into air-raid shelters because we were still “special prisoners.” We would have to sweat it out on top, but, even so, each raid was just so much more good news to us. And even though not allowed the protection of an air-raid shelter, these ragged, starved prisoners had a hard time concealing their delight from the Japanese. We realized that we had to go through so much in order to get out of there. We knew that some of us would be killed, but that the majority of us would get out.

To prevent the Japanese from understanding what we were talking about, we called the B-29s coming over “The Music.” We originated the term from the sound made by the siren warning. Also, the prisoners would bet a part of their meager rations of food that “The Music” would come before such and such a time. This meant we were betting mighty high stakes, in as much as we received only a three-quarter ration of what was received by the regular prisoners of war.

During one of these raids I was returning from the latrine to the room we were kept in, and a dive bomber hit the causeway between the sandspit our camp was constructed on and shore. A tremendous piece of concrete—it must have weighed a half ton—sank into the roadbed about twenty feet in front of me. There was nothing I could do, I was not allowed into any shelter, so I just had to walk calmly into where the rest of the prisoners were being held under guard at bayonet point. There I sat down and started talking with the rest of the prisoners in a low voice. For we did not want to show any signs of excitement when a raid was going on. Any time we were caught smiling, during one of these raids, we were hit with a rifle butt or called to attention and struck in the face. And sometimes we were just slugged because feelings were running a bit high.

Months or weeks afterward, on being brought back to the United States, I was to learn how much confusion had been in the minds of the people here as both wars neared their ferocious close. And so it was in Japan, too. Rumors were followed by denials, and then by rumors again.

I must say, though, that even if we prisoners were not allowed any military information from the Japanese, we were nevertheless able to follow the war rather closely. We received some of it from the new prisoners who came into the camp, men who were just recently captured. We were not supposed to talk to any of them but managed to do so now and then secretly. Our main source of information was, of all things, the Japanese newspaper.

During our almost two years of being captives we finally had learned how to read a few printed characters in the Japanese language. Some of the boys were better than others, and they became more or less our official code breakers. They didn’t deliver us the daily paper, or anything as easy as that. But when we cleaned out the Japanese living quarters each day, we would pick up the papers the officers had been reading. They were one or two days old, and we would smuggle them out to some secluded place, away from the guards, like in the toilets, and there we would get our code-breaking staff together and pore over these papers.

We found, as a general rule, that the first paragraph or so in each article, whenever there was an Allied victory, was perfectly correct. Then the articles would go on at great length to say: “The great Japan will shove them back off into the sea; we will counterattack.…” and so forth. But during the next two or three days we would see nothing in the paper about anybody being shoved back into the sea, so we knew it
was the same old story again. Our people had gotten on another piece of ground closer to Japan.

The articles the Japanese papers printed on Germany were always true. There was no camouflage whatsoever. The articles told the actual facts, naming the towns, showing all the fronts, having the casualty lists, even diagrams we could follow to show us what was going on in the German theater. We got the word when Germany went out of the war. In fact, we knew just about everything that was going on. We never were in the dark, even though the Japanese were not allowed to give us any military information. But some of the better-educated Japanese had secretly given us their own predictions. This had occurred at many points all along the line, even as far back as Truk. An educated interpreter told me then that if we survived our own bombs we would be free men in a year and a half. The time, of course, was a wee bit longer than that. But just the same, it seemed at the time a funny prediction for him to make because the campaign in the South Pacific was going slowly for us then. We were behind schedule in everything we did, and there had been no second front in Europe. We figured, well, at least three years of this.

In Camp Ofuna, the civilian cook, Curly, spoke to me the night before I was taken away to Camp Omouri. He was well educated but had not talked to me about the war during the whole six months I had worked in the kitchen with him. That night he told me that there would be a lot of war in the next four and half months, and he added: “It will be all over and you can go back to your mama and papa.”

At another time, just one month before the end of the war, another informed Japanese called me to one side and asked me how my morale was. I told him it was fine. He said: “Well, it will only be another month or so and the thing will be all over. I will be just as happy as anybody in the world, myself.”

Meanwhile the final bombings of Japan were something to behold, great hordes of silver B-29s coming over in the daylight. They looked beautiful. Occasionally we would see some lone Japanese fighter plane try to tangle with them. It would come streaking down in flames, and we could hear it crash to the ground. Then the beautiful silver things would start releasing their eggs, and the ground would shake. The
windows would tremble and shake, and the sills on the doors would creak back and forth. Yet this was not so bothersome as at night, when the B-29s came over low, at around four to six thousand feet. We could hear them swoop down and dive, the engines roaring. We didn’t know where they were, didn’t know when to duck. We could just put our faces down into our cotton blankets—and hope.

About a month before the end of the war we were taken off our garden work and the clearing of debris and were set to digging huge tunnels in the hillsides on the outskirts of Yokohama. We worked at this twelve hours a day, just like muckers in a mine. I was familiar with this sort of labor, for I had spent a summer vacation while going to college working in a gold mine in Golden, Idaho. These tunnels were two hundred feet under the surface of the earth. One of the guards told me this was to be an air-raid shelter, but I couldn’t imagine what kinds of bombs were going to be dropped to necessitate a tunnel two hundred feet underground.

Then one day a non-commissioned officer tried to tell me about the atomic bomb. He could speak no English, it was all in Japanese, and I couldn’t fathom at first that it was only one bomb he was talking about. I thought it was just some more Japanese propaganda. But he said no, that his family had lived in the city of Nagasaki, and that only one bomb had been dropped on the city. He said that people were still dying there, and that he had not been allowed even within the city limits to look for his lost family.

I had no conception of what kind of bomb it might be, but I knew that it must be something horrible the way we were being rushed on digging those tunnels. I didn’t fully believe this story about the atomic bomb, even though I was helping to dig the tunnel. I didn’t fully believe it until after the war.

On my way from Japan by DC-4, after the surrender had been signed, I was thumbing through some current magazines left aboard the plane, and there it was—pictures and the works. The atomic bomb was no myth.

It has often puzzled me how I could figure out some things so easily, while others never dawned upon me with all the evidence apparently staring me right in the face. The truly master puzzler of mine was alcohol, but I have come to find that I am far from being alone in my past bewilderment,
because approximately 5 per cent of the world’s populace shouldn’t drink at all. But this atomic puzzler was staring me in the face as well.