First Into Nagasaki (14 page)

As the Grunt’s obsession grew, the games got longer and longer. There was no regard for innings. When the last out of the ninth was played, and the gloves slipped limply from the hands of the players, the coach often ordered, “No stop—play extra innings.”

Murao’s teams were particularly weak because the rice ration descended for hospitalized men to one-half of the ration for the able-bodied, who went into the mine. Moreover, the military executives of the mine began taking away his stronger players to dig coal. He would hardly build up an infield of sound invalids than it would be ordered underground. He soon found a way to keep his squads normal, however. Whenever a miner pleaded illness, even though an obvious malingerer, the Grunt would ask, “You pray basebawr?” If he did, he went to the hospital. It was a game. The mine robbed the hospital and the hospital robbed the mine.

A time arrived when Murao considered that he had a first team capable of beating outsiders. He had already found a squad in a nearby town which he considered suitably unfit to meet his tottering Americans. Before bringing the visitors to the camp, he explained to them that all his players were “from the hospital”. He apologized in advance for the poor game they would offer. It was his one act of frankness. Privately he was sure that his own cripples would clean up, because he had plugged the worst leaks in his infield with an able-bodied doctor and a mine corpsman.

The game was an unspeakable reversal of ordinary baseball, with the errors greatly outnumbering the chances accepted. In the ninth inning the physician-coach was confronted with a question of sporting ethics. He had a run on third—a potbellied skeleton with acute edema and a xylophone breast development—and he needed a clean hit to bring the near-cadaver home. His other players were lying on the sooty clay of the mine-yard, hollow-eyed, panting, and collapsed. He needed a pinch-hitter able to run at least as far as second, and the hospital rolls were exhausted.

But the Grunt had a card still unplayed. There was a prisoner who worked in the mine, who had once played semi-pro baseball around Denver, but whom the Grunt had never been able to make into a hospital patient because he refused to apply for treatment. He preferred slaving in the tunnels to participating in such a macabre parody of a game he loved. The card Murao held was that once, months before, this man had served as assistant in an emergency operation in the hospital.

He ordered the ex-player, who was off-shift and asleep, summoned. The game was stopped. At length the ringer arrived, yawning with sleep and dazed. Murao explained to him what was expected. When the visitors saw his practiced and relatively virile swing, they protested. The Grunt sweetly produced testimony that the pinch-hitter had actually been a hospital assistant.

The ringer hit a clean single, the skeleton galloped home with a gaunt giraffe-like step, and the game was won. The ringer went back to his cot and sleep immediately, and when he was roused by starlight for his shift in the mine, he remarked, “Funny what you dream in a camp. I dreamed Murao had me playing ball for him.”

As the sharp Japanese autumn verged into winter, the prisoners nursed a hope that the doctor’s passion would wear off. The patients were playing in thin cotton clothing, bare-legged and with straw sandals. The wind coming down from the mountains cut their lungs and set them coughing. The field was hard and icy, and sometimes snow fell.

Instead of halting, the coach intensified his training. “Pray harder, you keep warmer,” he said. The patients played from the cold winter sunrise until the sorrowful sunset. A man tagged with a ball simply fell over as though clubbed. Murao, feeling that hardening exercises were called for, introduced a new training program. Under this system, patients were called from their wooden pallets at 5:30 in the morning, when it was dark and frosty, and given a half hour of calisthenics to toughen them for the winter baseball season.

At the same time, however, conditions were deteriorating in the mine. Cave-ins were frequent. Miners began to turn themselves into baseball players. The hospital doubled its patients, then doubled them again. Captain Yuri had gone and the new commander was Captain Fukuhara, an unpliant personality. He was heard to complain to Lieutenant Murao that extending the influence of baseball was cutting down coal production by encouraging men to aim at avoiding the mine. “Hold more men above ground!” retorted the Grunt in Japanese rather wildly. “Hold five hundred! Hold a thousand! We’ll have a baseball league—maybe two leagues!”

Murao eventually did overreach himself. He proposed that several new hospital buildings be built, and drew up plans. If carried out, his camp plans would have changed the entire coal mine into a gigantic hospital, completely girdled with ball fields. He also demanded more gloves, mitts, balls and bats. At this point the Army officers saw that they had an empire-builder on their hands, though of a peculiar order. They decided to get rid of him.

The Grunt was hustled out of camp without even a chance for a farewell speech to his squad. The same afternoon the new commandant went through the hospital swinging a large
narugi,
followed by several guards with
kibokos.
They cut the squad. Later Murao’s diamond was dug up into air raid shelters, and just in time too, for the first B-29 raids were beginning.

An American officer of one of the prisoner-recovery teams, coming up from Nagasaki after the surrender, reminded the men in this camp that the World Series would begin soon back home. “They reacted a lot different in this camp from our boys on Honshu,” he remarked, puzzled. “Instead of wanting to know all about who was playing and so forth, they looked at each other and gave a kind of shudder. I guess they must’ve had some experiences so terrible they just couldn’t talk about them.”

Izuka, Japan—Monday, September 17, 1945 1800 hours

Allied Prison Camp #7, Izuka, Kyushu

All names herewith exclusively obtained by myself, being the first correspondent to reach this camp.

Two Mitsui coal mines, Shinko and Honko—the scene of bitter toil by 186 American, 360 Dutch, and 2 British prisoners for the past year—limped along on Japanese labor today while eager prisoners, hungry for home, waited for a typhoon which has grounded transport planes to blow itself out.

Men were paid ten
sen
daily, non-coms fifteen; that’s about seven-tenths of one American penny, and a cent and a quarter, for twelve hours’ work. Beatings were frequent but, unlike the Mitsui mine at Omuta where five Americans were “executed” thus, none of the beatings were prolonged. However, one American weakened by malnutrition was beaten enough to bring about his death.

Fifty-four Dutch died, having passed away with pneumonia before camp physician Captain Sidney Vernon of Willimantic, Connecticut, arrived with the first sulfadiozene.

The Japanese here introduced two types of speed-up days or
odashis.
On big
odashi
days prisoners got worked one hour beyond the normal twelve, and received one potato as a bonus. On little
odashi
days they worked one hour extra and got nothing.

The camp is commanded by a Dutchman, Captain Willem Andrau, who before the war was the Dutch East Indies representative of the Universal Oil Products Company, a Chicago builder of international refineries.

Joseph Matheny of Zanesville, Illinois,
a member of the 192nd Tanks, said that Maywood Company “was hit harder than any other and I cannot believe many are alive. I’ve been trying to find them among Kyushu’s prison camps, without success. My best buddy, a Chicagoan, died in O’Donnell. [
Correspondent’s note: Names are
known here but cannot be released until confirmed by the War Department.
] Our company was one-quarter Chicago boys, and I cannot remember a single one who’s still alive.”

Pharmacist Kenneth Moffat of San Diego
was more hopeful, saying: “I saw Chicagoan Steve Gados and the whole crew of his suicide tank alive at Cabanatuan between April and July of last year. I also saw the Japs force another Chicagoan, from a tank battalion, to hold his hands aloft while they beat him severely with bamboo sticks. They then had him lower his hands, and they beat his head until it was covered with swollen knobs.”

Moffat gave a moving account of how five Americans (Emery of the Quartermaster Corps, Smith of the 200th Coast Artillery, Gustafson of the 31st Infantry, Adams of the Air Corps, and one other believed to be from the 192nd Tanks) were executed by a firing squad in August 1942 when the Japanese detached a bridge-building party to Calumpet in Bulagan, thirty miles from Manila. The Japanese at first refused to allow Moffat to give medical care to the party, but when all but ten of 120 were down, they permitted him to open an infirmary but denied him medicine. Four cases died from appendicitis within three months because the Japanese doctor who came every ten days from Manila refused Moffat’s pleas to remove them in his empty truck. In the face of a death penalty for any absence from camp, Moffat used to swim nightly across Pampanga’s river to receive gifts of medicine from Filipinos who “pledged us twenty percent of their wages for medicine but actually gave us nearer sixty percent.”

The showdown came when “Adobe Citizen”—an American, Gottlieb Neigum of the 31st Infantry, who was living Philippine-style—escaped despite a warning from the Japanese lieutenant, Watanabe, that ten Americans would be killed if one departed. Watanabe lined up the Americans and informed them that because he was generous he had decided to shoot five instead ten. Neigum had been holder of camp number #120. Watanabe announced that under the presumption of having influenced or known about Neigum’s escape, two numbers below and three above Neigum’s—the holders of #118, #119, #121, #122, and #123—would be executed. Having been accidentally next to Neigum in the lineup, but otherwise not even acquainted with him, these five Americans were completely innocent of any complicity. Nevertheless, without any religious rites, the Americans were immediately led by an improvised firing squad of camp guards to a schoolhouse across Pampanga’s river.

“Only one accepted a blindfold,” said Moffat. “They’re buried in unmarked graves which I visited. Three had been sick with malaria and diarrhea. The four whose names I know represented the 200th Coast Artillery, the 31st Infantry, the Air Corps, the Quartermaster Corps, and I think the fifth was from the 192nd Tanks. Just the day before, everybody had taken up a collection of sixty dollars for one of those executed who was low with malaria but without the money for black market quinine.”

En route to Japan, Moffat had suffered a beating from a guard which deprived him of his hearing for several weeks. After about seventy-five blows on the head, the Japanese compelled him to kneel motionless on a hatch cover for two hours.

The above reprisal shooting is additional to the one which occurred at Lumban, Laguna, southwest of Manila, in June 1943, when the Japanese exacted a full toll of ten American lives, a massacre celebrated by the prison camp bard Raymond Russel of Pittsburg, Texas, in a long homespun ballad famous among prisoners.

Sergeant William Snyder (Cairo, West Virginia):
“I was with the Philippine guerrilla bands under Lieutenant Arnold in northern Luzon for about a year as one among about thirty Americans who’d formerly run an air raid system. We had to break up into separate bands because of a lack of food. One day we destroyed nine Japanese truckloads of equipment and three field guns, killing around two hundred Japs. After that it became too hot and I had to give in.”

Administrative officer of the camp, here by way of Bataan,
Captain Roscoe Price (Lasalle, Colorado):
“The Japanese never recognize officer status. I was forced to work in the garden, to clean the latrine. Once all the officers were lined up and slapped because we allowed the men to get up five minutes later than the fixed rising time.”

Medical Officer Vernon said that the camp developed two new diseases: colon malnutrition, evidenced by a burning sensation in the feet which failed to respond to thiamin chloride but only to more food and which affected at its peak one-tenth of the camp; and what he calls “pseudo-adolescent mastitis” which involved thirty percent of the camp and “resembles transient breast enlargment at puberty.”

Addressing this writer in the camp’s infirmary, Corregidor
Marine Corporal Harry Douthit of Dalles, Oregon,
said: “That oily smiling Jap doctor right across from you sent me back to work with my calf swollen enormously from this infected ulcer.” The Marine showed me fifty old scars.

Prisoners from
Tyler, Texas, Sergeant Robert Coley
and
Lloyd Durbin,
are both Corregidor veterans. Said Coley: “The Japs wouldn’t recognize that losing sweat deprives the body of salt and causes weakness. I got caught taking salt from cattle on the farm, and our former Japanese commander stood me up and beat me uninterruptedly for forty-five minutes.” Said Durbin: “I was beaten, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. They seemed to be reacting to outside events rather than anything we did, and it was noticeably worse just before the surrender.”

Corregidor
Corporal Fred Patrick (Sherman, Texas):
“We lived on thin soup, rice, occasionally a little fish, wheat, soybeans. It seemed the Japs were trying to starve us to death.”

Marine First Sergeant John Coe of Saltyville, Virginia,
also out of Corregidor: “I weighed 210 prewar and fell to 103 working in the mine. But pneumonia and the onset of dysentery gave me three months in the infirmary, which saved my life.”

Nick Page (Los Angeles):
“I’d been in bed for nine weeks with pneumonia. I wasn’t supposed to get up. The Jap doctor refused to see me unless I came to the infirmary, so two corpsmen supported me to get there. On returning I collapsed on their shoulders from sheer weakness, and this Jap administrator we called Napoleon overtook me in the corridor and gave me a thorough kicking from behind.”

Tall Marine drum major captured at Corregidor,
Jackson Rauh of Mission Beach, California:
“I’m closing out the war very short of teeth, because I lost my uppers en route to Japan in a packed ship’s hold where the Japs jammed us, and my gold-filled lowers disappeared during a Japanese shakedown of prisoners’ bunks.”