Escape From the Deep (25 page)

The inhabitants of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, two cities that had not yet been burned to cinders, were about to find out.

Unknown to the men in Omori, the Allies had decided at a conference code-named Terminal to try to force a quick end to the war. On July 26, the Japanese were ordered to surrender unconditionally or, they were warned, suffer “prompt and utter destruction.”

The Japanese did not respond fast enough. On August 1, the utter destruction began: 836 B-29s—the largest number ever gathered in the air at one time—dropped more bombs on the cities of Honshu and Kyushu in one day than had ever been dropped in a twenty-four-hour period in history. Five days later, on August 6th, a B-29 bomber, named
Enola Gay,
dropped a single bomb called “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. More than a hundred thousand Japanese were killed, most horribly burned to death, others literally atomized.

The giant mushroom cloud had barely settled when President Harry Truman once more demanded surrender. Otherwise the Japanese would “face a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.” But still the Japanese fought on. Three days later, on August 9, another atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” exploded over Nagasaki, killing about forty thousand civilians instantly, as well as over one hundred American POWs located in camps in and around the city.

Out of the ruins of Japan’s incinerated cities now poured hundreds of thousands of refugees, looking for somewhere to hide from America’s “rain of ruin,” places like the mines where O’Kane and the
Tang
survivors were working—the last shelters for the seemingly condemned populace.

ALL THAT MORNING, radio broadcasts instructed the Japanese people to gather and listen to a speech from their emperor at noon. It would be the first time they would hear his voice. Listeners were instructed to stand during the broadcast.

At noon on August 15, most of Japan gathered around radio sets. They heard the national anthem, then a strange voice spoke in an old-fashioned language that many ordinary Japanese found hard to understand.

In the caves being dug on the mainland, across the causeway from Omori, Dick O’Kane and other survivors also listened as Emperor Hirohito’s voice was broadcast over a public address system.

Hirohito began by stating that the terms offered by the Allies for surrender had been accepted and then gave several reasons why this had been done. “The enemy,” he added, “had begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight it would not only result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. . . . We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering the insufferable.”
²

Dick O’Kane and the
Tang
survivors understood one thing. The war was over.
³
They could tell by the expressions of the Japanese gathered around the public address system. It was clear from the looks of defeat on their faces and their hunched shoulders that Japan had surrendered.

Anxious moments followed. Would the guards take out their defeat on the prisoners? Thankfully, they were too stunned to react violently. The
Tang
’s survivors laid down their tools and returned to the Omori camp.

Senso owari
.

The war is over.

That night, according to O’Kane, “The Japanese slaughtered an old horse at Omori and carted it with them as they went over the hill. But our resourceful cooks scrubbed out the intestines, [and] chopped them up.”
⁴
Celebrating that night, the survivors feasted on corn and horse-gut stew. Victory tasted sweet.

The celebration did not last long. Later that night, some drunken guards, plastered on sake, threatened to kill all of the special prisoners, including the
Tang
crew. They yelled abuse and waved swords about. The seventeen special prisoners feared they would be beheaded in some ghastly orgy of killing meant to avenge Japan’s defeat.

A sympathetic guard—one of the few who remained sober—tried to reassure the prisoners.

“The guards are getting very drunk,” he said. “Some are threatening to kill all the American prisoners. Here’s a hammer and some nails for you to nail your door closed. And don’t worry because I’ll protect you with my life—because that is my duty.”

The doors were nailed shut. It wasn’t long before the survivors recognized the drunken voice of a Japanese guard.

“Let me at the captives,” said the drunken guard. “I’m going to kill all of them. I’ll prove to them that Japan is greater than the United States. Let me at them.”

The survivors looked through the cracks in their cell walls. They could see the Japanese guard staggering around outside. The friendly guard tried to restrain him but he broke away from his grip and slashed the air with a double-handled samurai sword. He then began to beat on the survivors’ cell door, trying to smash it open. Pappy Boyington stood, holding the hammer, ready to strike.
⁵
Finally, after some terrifying moments, the guard gave up and collapsed somewhere, dead drunk.

AMONG THE FREED ALLIED PRISONERS who had been so ritually abused, surprisingly little retribution was taken against their captors. Men who had fantasized for months about getting back at their Japanese tormentors were mostly too exhausted to summon the energy needed to inflict revenge. One of the senior Japanese officers at Omori complained that one of the prisoners had defecated in one of his boots and urinated in the other.
⁶
But this appeared to be the extent of any reprisals.

A different kind of bombing now began. American B-29s arrived to save the POWs from starvation, dropping fifty-five-gallon drums of food and supplies from just a few hundred feet. They dropped so many vegetables, recalled O’Kane, that the camp soon looked like a “giant salad.”
⁷

The friendly bombing was so intense at one point that POWs had to place a sign in the compound telling the pilots to drop the supplies outside the camp.
⁸
But still they dumped their loads in the Omori compound, forcing Boyington and some of the
Tang
survivors to take to an air-raid shelter one day.

“Why don’t you stay out here and get some of this stuff?” a prisoner asked Boyington. “You can watch these things come down and they won’t hit you.”

“Nuts to that,” replied Boyington. “After living through all I have, I’m damned if I’m going to be killed by being hit on the head by a crate of peaches.”
⁹

THEY WERE AMERICAN SHIPS. They were flying the Stars and Stripes. There was no mistaking them, even in the far distance, across Tokyo Bay. It was August 28 when the men in Omori saw salvation arrive in the form of a destroyer task group, led by Commander Harold Stassen. As the ships came closer and finally anchored off Omori at dusk, they knew, finally, that rescue was at hand.

Higgins boats soon approached the Omori camp. Pete Narowanski was standing on a pier wearing nothing but a loin-cloth as they neared the beach. When he smiled, his fellow survivors could see that several of his teeth caps had been knocked out under torture.

One man in the jubilant throng could not wait a moment longer. He dived into the sea and began to swim toward his liberators. But fifty yards from the shore his atrophied muscles gave out and he needed to be saved. His head had been shaved, so Stassen’s men grabbed him by the ears to yank him out of the water.
¹⁰

The Higgins boats pulled up onto the beach. Men disembarked and some of them planted flags into the sand. Three flags unfurled slowly—the Dutch, British, and American. Boyington and many others saluted their respective national flags.

Navy photographers recorded other moving scenes. POWs waved homemade flags and cheered. Hundreds of men, including Jesse DaSilva and Clay Decker, climbed up on the pilings of the wharf and began to shout and cheer. Others were soon swarming around Stassen, the former governor of Minnesota, who had resigned his office in 1943 to serve in the navy.

“God sakes, we didn’t know you were alive,” said Stassen.
¹¹

An officer on Stassen’s staff walked over toward Pete Narowanksi and others.

“Alright boys, get ready—we’re going home!” shouted the young officer.

The Omori camp’s most senior officer, a six-foot-four-inch colonel, ran down to the beach, and over to Stassen.

“You can’t do it,” said the Japanese colonel. “I have no authority from Tokyo to let any of these people go.”

Stassen grabbed the hulking Japanese by the front of his tunic and lifted him off the ground.

“I have no need for orders from Tokyo to do what I want with these American prisoners.”
¹²

In case Stassen hadn’t settled the issue, one of his officers then stuck his revolver in the colonel’s face.

“This is your Tokyo!”
¹³

NOT FAR AWAY, Clay Decker stood beside Floyd Caverly and Bill Leibold, watching as more of Stassen’s rescue force arrived on the beach. “It was a great sight. It was a powerful moment,” recalled Caverly. “We had been looking forward to it for some time. We saw our flag—which had been forbidden.”

Decker turned to Caverly.

“Come on, the Higgins boats are here,” said Decker. “We’ve got to get down there. They’re filming the liberation for newsreels.”

Decker rushed off and was soon being filmed and photographed. Caverly did not follow him down to the boats at first. He and some others had been taking care of a young POW who was lying on the ground nearby, close to death. Caverly wanted to make sure the man got some medical treatment.

“Let’s move him out,” said Leibold.

Caverly turned to the man. “The U.S. Navy is here,” he told him. “They are rescuing us. We’re going to get a stretcher for you.”

The man appeared to understand.

Caverly and Leibold went down to the beach to find a stretcher. When they returned with stretcher in hand, it was too late—the other men had left the young POW unattended because they were so excited.
¹⁴
He had died.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Leibold.

STASSEN WAS PLANNING to start evacuation the following day but the conditions in Omori were so deplorable that he began to move men off the island immediately, despite the fading light.

Dick O’Kane was so weak he could not walk without being helped. Someone found a litter for him and he was placed with other severe cases of malnutrition on a section of the beach.

A doctor and medics from Stassen’s force began to examine the sickest men. The doctor had to determine who should be evacuated first. When he checked on O’Kane, he turned to some litter-bearers.

“We’ll leave this one,” said the doctor. “He’s not going to make it.”

Dick O’Kane had barely enough strength to speak.

“There’s no way I’m staying here,” he protested. “I’ve come this far . . . I’m going to make it the rest of the way.”
¹⁵

The doctor relented and O’Kane was among the first to be taken off the beach.

Throughout the night and into the next day, men were evacuated to the ships of the Third Fleet now gathering in Tokyo Bay for the formal surrender, which was to take place on September 2, 1945. So began an intoxicating transition, from hell to heaven for many men: “Coffee and doughnuts and ice cream and Coke from Red Cross girls . . . white hospital ships, shining bright, with wonderful names,
Samaritan, Hope, Benevolence
. . . filthy prison camp clothes stripped off for burning . . . stinking bodies into the hot shower . . . the clean sweet scent of American soap, a delousing with DDT, penicillin for whatever might ail them, fresh new clothes—white men again in a white world.”
¹⁶

Floyd Caverly and Bill Leibold were separated but were later reunited on the same hospital ship, the USS
Benevolence
, as were Clay Decker and Jesse DaSilva.
¹⁷
They were given quick medical examinations and then sent to a mess hall to eat. “We ate until we got sick,” recalled Caverly, “and we heaved it up and turned right around and went back down to that crazy chow line again.”
¹⁸

Only one of the
Tang
’s survivors was in critical condition
¹⁹
—their captain, Richard O’Kane. He was drifting in and out of consciousness in a stateroom on the USS
Benevolence
. The doctors gave him only a fifty-fifty chance of making it.

Bill Leibold first learned from a pharmacist’s mate that O’Kane was on board.

“Where’s he at?” asked Leibold.

The pharmacist’s mate took Leibold to O’Kane’s room, where he was being fed intravenously. There was an empty bunk in the room. Leibold decided to stay with O’Kane, using the spare bunk.

Leibold was not able to stay long with his captain. He was told by navy personnel that he was to be evacuated back to the States by air.

“What about the skipper here?” asked Leibold.