First Into Nagasaki (16 page)

Through the bitter winter in the Japanese coal mountains, the only heat provided was in the dispensary. It was freezing from December to May but the Americans were unable to use the coal which they provided by the tons for the Mitsui chain.
Lieutenant Joe Allen of Santa Fe
said, “That green soup made from grass gathered around the camp, with a bowlful of rice, was hardly enough to satisfy a man after twelve hours’ labor in the mine.” Officers were not allowed to go below in the mine and share or even witness the conditions prevailing there.

Sergeant Gilbert Soifer (Philadelphia):
“The worst thing was expecting us to do heavy physical labor on two bowls of rice in the morning, a small box of rice with a pickle at noon, and rice with a bowl of thin green soup at night. But if you were hospitalized you got one-third less food.”

Taking their cue from the tough camp physician, the medicos were Camp #23’s hardiest Americans. After being beaten,
Erwin Kilburn of Lake Placid, New York,
was forced to stand up at attention all day. He became paralyzed and now has “drop foot” making it impossible for him to move without crutches.

Chicagoan Robert Oliver:
“Physical treatment by the Japanese has been reasonably good by their standards, but the food has been very skimpy, and the mine was very dangerous. Several men have been permanently injured by cave-ins.”

Earl Burchard (Janesville, Wisconsin):
“I twice got real beatings for simply not understanding.”

Robert Bartz (Beloit, Wisconsin):
“Living conditions were good, but working was rough, with abusive treatment and long hours.”

Sergeant William Wright (Niantic, Illinois):
“Outside of the food, I’ve got no particular complaint—the Nip who was my boss acted pretty decent.”

Edward Urbaschak (Roxbury, Massachusetts):
“We sometimes averaged fifteen hours a day underground.”

Corporal Peter Jumonville (Baton Rouge):
“I was beaten twice for sore feet. Once the guards lined us up for fun and ordered us to slap each other. When we refused, they went to work on us with clubs.”

Antonio Tafolla (San Angelo, Texas):
“Due to the bullets in my shoulder I worked in the mess hall. The Japanese beat me for not being able to lift more.”

Ruel Lott (Alma, Georgia):
“I’ve seen lots of men beaten, and not more than one-tenth deserved it.”

Buren Jonston (Clovis, New Mexico):
“I got along without beatings or slaps for nearly a year.”

Garley Silverio (Belen, New Mexico):
“I’ve been treated pretty fair.”

Corporal Oscar Look (Addison, Maine):
“My normal weight is 180 and the Japanese beat me for weakness when I weighed only a little over 100.”

Franklin Ivins (Red Bank, New Jersey):
“We used to call going underground ‘getting the axe.’ But I got dry beriberi even above ground.”

Sergeant Ray Tow (Silver City, New Mexico):
“Even well-fed American workmen have cradles to hold a jackhammer above their heads for ceiling work. Despite my weakness, I had to hold my jackhammer up with my arms. In the United States we use water in order to keep digging a hole dry; here they use dust blowers, which saturated our lungs.”

Logan Kay (Clearlake Park, California):
“Coal dust blown back in our faces while we were forced to work invited silicosis.”

Machinist Laverne Dunning (Centralia, Washington):
“The Japanese were unable to repair their own mine machinery.”

Edward Gorda (Fresno):
“My main complaint is the way the Japanese hoarded our medical supplies while men sank.”

Handsome Bataan soldier
William Johnston of Mountain Grove, Missouri,
with his left leg amputated, described how the continual failure of lights in defective mine equipment cost him his leg. “I was working ‘in the loose’—that’s where a cave-in is possible at any minute—when the lights failed and my leg was pinned between two cars.”

Robert Harrison (Wheatland, California):
“I lost half my sight. My left eye was buried during a cave-in, when I was picking coal down in these dangerous tunnels. The Japanese made me keep working in the mine anyhow.”

Corporal Sanford Doucette (Graniteville, Massachusetts):
“I pulled Harrison out from his cave-in, but got hurt myself and began to dwindle away. The Japanese still had me working with that fifty-pound jackhammer in August when I weighed only 90 myself. The war’s end saved my life.”

Izuka, Japan—Thursday, September 20, 1945 0130 hours

Allied Prison Camp #23, Izuka, Kyushu

How the Dutch police head in the East Indies died under Japanese torture, rather than reveal how guerrillas were communicating by radio with the refugee Dutch government, was recounted here by an RAF officer now commanding a Japanese prison camp.

After Java fell in March 1942, Dutch secret police who stayed behind managed to keep a radio set going, but their chief died and the second-in-command, named De Kuyper, succeeded him. Natives who cooperated with the enemy betrayed him. De Kuyper for over two weeks was subjected to the most refined tortures known to the Japanese, who did not realize they were now dealing with the top man because they were ignorant that De Kuyper’s superior was dead. They demanded both the latter’s location and the radio.

The Japanese denied him water, fed him salted meat, and drank ice water in front of him. They denied him sleep. They gave him beatings of many different kinds. When these failed they pierced his eardrums with pencils. Next they brought in his fifty-three year-old sister and caused her to be raped by a half-witted Javanese before De Kuyper’s eyes. At this point De Kuyper’s reason gave way. Finally they gave him the “water cure” of forced feeding, then jumping on his belly until his entrails cracked.

When De Kuyper’s periods of consciousness became so brief and his insanity so evident that further questioning was useless, he was thrown into prison where the RAF officer, who was a surgeon, treated him. De Kuyper had fleeting moments of sanity before death, when he explained what had been done to him.

“Perhaps we might have saved his life, but knowing the Japs would only resume working on him we considered it more merciful to let him go,” the RAF officer told this correspondent. “In order to keep the Japs appeased, we put ‘pneumonia’ on the death certificate.”

IV

Return to Nagasaki

(September 20–25, 1945)

Weller returned to Nagasaki from the POW camps for a week (September 20–25) and found that the U.S. military, including much-needed medical staff—the Navy, not the Army—had finally arrived en masse, five weeks after the Japanese surrender and six weeks after the dropping of the atomic bomb. No longer impersonating a colonel, he wrote more material about the effects of radiation, hoping to be able to get the Navy to transmit all his dispatches and bypass MacArthur’s censors. He was blocked in this hope as well, though they did let through three brief hometown POW stories. Then, trying to catch a medicine ball aboard a hospital ship in the harbor, he injured himself and was put in plaster. Utterly thwarted, Weller decided to leave Nagasaki.

Nagasaki, Japan—Thursday, September 20, 1945

The gulf separating American and Japanese ideas of humanity is both deep and wide, according to Navy Chief Quartermaster Clarence Sosviale of Auburn, Massachusetts. Since his capture while serving aboard one of the “bait boats” for Bulkeley’s PT boats of Bataan, Sosviale spent most of the time working underground in Baron Mitsui’s worn-out coal mine at Omuta in central Kyushu. Sosviale is now forty years old and once took fifty-two blows with a stick from a Japanese guard before losing his senses on Kyushu.

“On my shift there was a Solomon Schwartz of New York City, whose hand was mangled in their defective machinery. For one hour I was refused permission to take him above ground while he bled. When permission came, Schwartz lay on the Mitsui Company’s operating table for another hour waiting for the Japanese physician to arrive. Finally the physician operated but without anesthesia although he possessed plenty, and put the man’s mangled hand back together amateurishly, with little regard to the bones or tendons.”

Japanese reluctance to allow any Americans to leave the mine with less than twelve hours’ daily labor—for which they were paid less than one cent daily—also contributed to the permanent mutilation of John E. Garner of Nacogdoches, Texas. Garner stepped backward into a post and was blocked when trying to escape one of the defective mine’s recurrent cave-ins. Dug out by friends, Garner was found to have a compound fracture of his leg. Yet it was impossible for one whole hour to move him to the surface due to the Japanese obstructing his rescue. In the mine dispensary the Japanese doctor refused to give Garner anesthesia and simply put his leg in a cast without setting the bones, with the result that Garner spent the next six months in hospital in traction trying to straighten his limb.

In contrast is the operation performed by Major Thomas Hewlett of New Albany, Indiana, who was confronted with the problem of saving a man with a ruptured appendix on a prison ship where the Japanese refused all aid. Hewlett made himself a bent needle with pliers and, using an old razor blade for a scalpel and a ship’s hatch cover as an operating table, saved the American prisoner’s life. Hewlett is today a recuperative patient aboard the Navy hospital ship
Haven
in Nagasaki harbor.

Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 22, 1945 1200 hours

New cases of atomic bomb poisoning with an approximate fifty percent death rate are still appearing at Nagasaki’s hospital six weeks after the blow fell, but United States Navy physicians who have examined them report that the death rate is falling off.

Under the authority of Rear Admiral F. G. Fahrion, commanding the rescue task force now anchored in Nagasaki’s bottle-shaped harbor, doctors from both the flagship cruiser
Wichita
and the hospital ship
Haven
have conducted an informal study of deaths from radium burns in this sixty-percent-flattened but uncratered city where, according to Japanese figures, about 21,000 persons died. These investigations support unqualifiedly the statement that the ground has no signs of saturation with dangerous radium rays—as first revealed in the
Chicago Daily News’
original series from here a fortnight ago.

The investigation has been under Commander Joseph Timmes, the flagship’s physician, a Georgetown and Fordham graduate. Earth gathered from the bombed area was scattered on the spotless floor of the
Haven
’s X-ray laboratory for a test of its radioactivity. Commander Norman Birkbeck, a graduate of the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan and the
Haven
’s chief roentgenologist, found that the scorched earth was radioactively lifeless. Moreover, sensitive film found accidentally in the Mitsubishi torpedo plant where hundreds of Allied prisoners worked was revealed to be unaffected.

Whereas formerly twenty patients a day with dwindling hair and their bone marrow affected were coming to Japanese hospitals, the rate is now fallen to about ten. Deaths, which at the time of the writer’s first series of dispatches were eight daily, are now about five or less.

Nagasaki’s medical center, with virtually all its staff, was wiped out by the same blast which laid a heavy hand on the Mitsubishi torpedo plants, diesel motor plants, and shipbuilding yards. This circumstance plus the lack of medicines has slowed any comparison between Nagasaki’s shock deaths, ordinary burn deaths, radium deaths, and disease deaths of which astonishingly few have appeared. What happens in so-called atomic bomb poisoning is now definitely known to be that the bone marrow is paralyzed. Human blood has three solid substances: red cells, white cells, and platelets. Red cells, normally numbered at five million in density, drop to two million or even one. White cells, which are disease fighters, fall from about eight thousand to fifteen hundred and in one case to four hundred. But the effect on the platelets, which are organisms giving blood the power to clot, is not merely to diminish them but to paralyze and apparently kill them.

Ordinarily platelets enable the blood to clot by itself in three to four minutes. The blood of persons exposed to the atomic bomb’s rays, which are mainly of the gamma variety, requires thirty minutes to two hours to clot and sometimes as long as three to four hours. Autopsies have shown the bone marrow’s effort to recover, and its failure.

In the first on-the-spot interviews with Japanese doctors, this writer reported that certain organs, especially the intestine, were affected by hemorrhages. Timmes said today: “Which organ is affected has no particular significance. Hemorrhages may occur anywhere—lungs, kidneys, duodenum. What really happens is that the nature of the entire bloodstream alters and aplastic anemia develops without particular regard for location. These late cases mostly have no external burns, but do have headache, fever, diarrhea, bleeding gums, loose teeth, falling hair, and often throat sores or lip sores.”

Without attempting any large-scale therapy—impossible because Admiral Fahrion’s main task is rescuing Allied prisoners in Kyushu’s prison camps—the Navy is trying to ease somewhat the Japanese doctors’ task by providing modest amounts of those medicines whose expiration date would soon make them unusable anyway. Penicillin has been provided, and given some help in strengthening those cases where infection is present and the patient can be saved simply by strengthening the scavenger white cells. Penicillin is restricted to cases where pneumonia, abscesses, and mouth or throat infections are present.

To meet ravages on the bone marrow by deadly gamma short-waves, the Navy is providing a marrow-building drug, pentnucleotide, in experimental quantities. Its effects are still inconclusive. Pentnucleotide has been used in the United States to revive flagging bone marrow. Pentnucleotide is okay for agranulous cytosis—white cell diminishment—but nearly no help for aplastic anemia.

Loosely summarized, it may be said that Nagasakians suffer from what used be known as “X-ray poisoning.” 21,000 died, however, not because the atomic bomb’s ray is deadly, but because with American planes in full view overhead, the population failed go into air raid shelters and ignored earlier warnings. Mitsubishi plant workers—including Allied prisoners whose camp was in the plant’s heart—were killed when their empty shelters would have saved them, simply because the Mitsubishis chose to keep the war work going with enemy planes overhead. And Japanese doctors are in agreement that losses from an atomic bomb can be more sharply cut by concrete shelters than by any drug.

Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 22, 1945

How the two largest American prisoner of war camps in the Philippines were able to pierce Japan’s blackout on overseas news with tiny secret listening sets operating within the camps was related here today aboard hospital ship
Haven
by a liberated inventor. The sets were developed independently in barbed wire enclosures at Davao in southern Mindanao and at Cabanatuan outside Manila, in defiance of the death penalty.

Not only was each camp ignorant that the other possessed a set, but only a close inner circle comprising the American commandant and inventor in each camp knew that any set existed. The secret was kept from Americans by Americans themselves.

Each inventor thought he alone had outwitted the Japanese. Yet when Davao’s inventor—Bataan death march veteran Captain Russell J. Hutchison of Albuquerque—was transferred by a Japanese troopship hundreds of miles northward to Cabanatuan, he smuggled along parts of his set in corned beef cans and cakes of soap. After working his way into Cabanatuan’s prisoner engineering aristocracy, he discovered that a set built inside a water canteen was already functioning there. What made the hair stand up on his scalp was the unbelievable coincidence that the Cabanatuan inventor was also named Hutchison—Lieutenant Howard Hutchison, formerly a civil engineer in Manila.

The odds against such a coincidence of names, spelled exactly the same but without any known family relationship, defy mathematical calculation. But Davao Hutchison was already heavily under suspicion as an operator of the Davao set, and feared that some leak would occur, imperiling the life of Manila Hutchison as well as his own. The inventor therefore caused the Davao radio set, brought under peril of death from Mindanao to Manila and already secretly operating in Cabanatuan’s Catholic chapel, to be dismantled. It was eventually buried in a latrine at Cabanatuan by the former Davao commandant, Lieutenant Colonel “Oley” Olson. Cabanatuan’s canteen set has disappeared somewhere in the maelstrom of war.

The two radio sets were similar, each being a single-tube affair, but otherwise different because Davao Hutchison depended on a plug-in electric light socket while Cabanatuan Hutchison used batteries. Both sets were used principally at night with an elaborate split-second system of American guards and plausible diversions to keep the Japanese lulled. Davao Hutchison had rehearsed his raid warning system until it was down to fifty-five seconds for a complete dismantling.

Hutchison’s listening post was a watch repair shop run by Air Corps Warrant Officer Jack Day. The guards were two New Mexican Coast artillery captains captured on Bataan: Charles Brown of Deming and Clyde Ely of Silver City. (Ely was afterward one among the passengers on the death cruise from Bilibid to Japan, whose arrival has not been reported.) When Ely whispered, “The Japs are coming,” Hutchison would detach the headphones and pitch them through the window to Brown who would walk to the nearby latrine before the Japanese guard hove into view. He would thus be able to simulate emerging from the latrine when the Japanese arrived.

Once, when Hutchison had stolen a new tube and was entering the camp gate with it concealed in his armpit, the Japanese commandant Major Mayeda brought him to a trembling halt. It developed that all Mayeda wanted was to ask the inventor to make him a souvenir cigarette case.

“Our first big news—that Mussolini had chucked in the towel—nearly wrecked us,” Hutchison said today. “Everybody was told the news under a strict pledge of secrecy to his best friend and soon the Japs smelled trouble. I’d been given four months’ jail after Major Dyess [author of the revelations of the Bataan death march] escaped. The Japs were now certain I was listening abroad. I bluffed them, however, by playing injured innocent and threatening to refuse to repair their own sets if accused again. Actually, their sets were furnishing parts for mine.”

It was necessary to suppress most news received from abroad because any gossip invited Japanese investigation. The set had been built not to pick up news but in order get some advance warning of when MacArthur was approaching. “We felt the Japs would be sure to massacre all the Americans in Davao and in nearby Lasang camp as soon as landing parties came ashore. We hoped to break out from the camp beforehand and evade a massacre by hiding in the hills. The news from Mindanao that a hundred and fifty skulls had been found there confirms our fears and we dread the possibility that many may be our friends. I used to smuggle out intelligence reports to our contact man in Lasang, Lieutenant Johnny Morrett.”

The demounted set was smuggled from Davao to Manila and Cabanatuan in three sealed-up cans of corned beef, and the tube in a can of cocoa. The potentiometer, too big to be hidden in cans, was buried in medicine by the camp physician Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Deter. When an unknown hand opened the food cans and found the parts, Hutchison obtained four bars of laundry soap and buried them in those.

At Cabanatuan, finding a plug-in current in a safe place was a stickler for some time until it occurred to Davao Hutchison that the altar of the Catholic chapel was rarely observed by Japanese guards. He fixed the set so that it could be plugged in from the chapel’s chandelier and hidden among lacy altar cloths. This Hutchison’s “devotions” gained him a brief reputation for piety until the inventor found that Cabanatuan Hutchison had a canteen set already working, and dismantled his.

Nagasaki, Japan—Monday, September 24, 1945

Allied Prison Camp #18, Sasebo, Kyushu

Marines and other forces under Kreuger’s Sixth Army, landing this weekend at Sasebo, the famous Japanese naval base, saw a big (75 feet tall) concrete irrigation dam nearby, but few knew that it was built with American blood. Japan owes the USA more than fifty lives for building this dam, the lives of American civilians captured at Wake Island who were literally starved and worked to death at notorious Camp #18. An imposing array of Japanese admirals and vice admirals who greeted the vanguard of American landing forces said nothing regarding the death camp, of which all traces have now been removed. But in an obscure plot of land on a hill overlooking the dam lie row on row of graves of the Americans who died from starvation, disease and pneumonia that Japan might be strong. Such is Sasebo’s
horio haka,
or prisoner graveyard, of Camp #18.