First Into Nagasaki (17 page)

265 Americans captured on Wake Island while working for the Pacific Naval Airbase Company, many of whom had gallantly served on guns in helping Marines to defend the island to the last, were brought to Sasebo on October 13, 1942. They were the less prepared for what the Japanese Navy was to do to them because their treatment by Japanese jailers on Wake itself during the first ten months of their captivity had been reasonable. The only execution was of Julius Hofmeister of San Francisco, who was publicly beheaded before all the other prisoners on May 10, 1942, as an incorrigible troublemaker. Other treatment, however, was relatively mild, and leftover American stores maintained the prisoners’ health for the first months.

American workmen at Sasebo, mostly past military age, came under a Japanese Navy sadist named Egawa Haso who specialized in what Americans bitterly called “floor shows.” The “floor show” meant arousing men from a dead sleep—which followed twelve hours’ daily work on the dam—and lining them up, kneeling with their buttocks exposed. The men were then collectively beaten until their flanks purpled with clotted blood, they vomited and finally fainted. This punishment was applied to all prisoners when any single one was caught “garbaging”, that is attempting to buy the offal rice left uneaten by Korean coolies. “They’d simply race up and down, clubbing us until we fell over,” said Harry Forsberg of Clayton, Washington. When his weight fell to 100, Forsberg was still compelled to carry 110-pound cement sacks.

When G. W. Huntley of Billings, Montana, was reeling with pneumonia, the Japanese forced him at gunpoint to continue shoveling sand for the dam’s concrete. On the following day Huntley died. Lester Meyer of San Francisco became unbalanced under continuous Japanese mistreatment and lost his eyeglasses, on which his vision was dependent. One day Meyer walked past a guard the prisoners had nicknamed Frisco Sailor, failing to salute the Japanese because he never saw him. Meyer was beaten for three days straight: knocked down with fists, clubbed with rifles in the head, finally kicked into unconsciousness and eventually death.

Both Huntley and Meyer were thirty-one years old and survived relatively long. Forty-six-year-old “Captain” Gehman of Boise, Idaho—in bed with pneumonia aggravated by starvation from January 19–21, 1944—was finally kicked from his bunk by the Japanese. “We had to help him to his feet so he could walk,” said Logan Kay of Clearlake Park, California. “The next day he was unable even to walk, and at eleven o’clock he died.”

Gehman was particularly
persona non grata
with Japanese naval wardens because when the higher Navy officers inspected the camp, all the sick prisoners had been taken up the hill near the present graveyard and there confined in order that their condition not become known. In some way Gehman, crazed with fever, managed to escape and descend the hill, tottered into the bunkhouse and fell to the floor before the inspector. In two hours he was dead.

All punishment was collective at Sasebo Dam. Earl Wilson of Olympia, Oregon, said: “We had no soap for the first year and then finally one-quarter of a bar each. I felt so filthy I stole a piece of Japanese soap. We had almost no medical treatment but the Japs announced that it would be totally abolished unless the thief gave himself up. I stepped forward and they had me hold buckets full of water at arm’s length, and beat me whenever my arms lowered. Finally they beat me with their heavy fencing sticks for two and a half hours.”

The men were housed in an old cement shed whose floor, usually flooded with water, accounted for their lung diseases complicated by malnutrition. They slept on boards covered with rice sacks, and in the winter got straw underneath. None were allowed to lie down and rest during the day if sick, unless absolutely unable to hold themselves erect.

The camp’s good samaritan was Robert Neylan of Oakland, California, who connived with guards at the risk of his life to get medicine and save elderly men stricken with stomach diseases or beatings.

Twenty-six-year-old Robert Harrison of Wheatland, California, said: “We had old men who could not learn Japanese, and they received terrible beatings simply for not understanding. The Japs also had one or two stooges whom they’d offer extra cigarettes for giving them the numbers of the men who loafed whenever the guards’ backs were turned. At parade drill their numbers would be called out and the men were beaten without a hearing.”

Three night guards required that a prisoner report before going to the latrine, and be fully dressed.

Walter “Red” Thompson of Boise, Idaho, a former world’s champion cowboy, was totally unable to learn Japanese. For misunderstanding an order Thompson was beaten with a split-toed
tabi—
a Japanese work sneaker—till he was “a mass of bloodshot beef.” Unable to endure the pain any longer, Thompson tried to attack the guard but was restrained by his comrades.

Fifty-one-year-old Claude “Curly” Howes of Portland, Oregon, devised an electric cigarette lighter. The Japanese discovered it in a shakedown raid and claimed it would have interfered with the camp’s lighting system if used, then summoned all the prisoners and gave them a general beating.

Frank Burns of Spokane, Washington, was among those prisoners most frequently beaten for stealing food to supplement the three bowls daily of rice, “fluffed in, not packed down”, which were the prisoners’ fare.

When the camp was one year less three days old—October 10th, 1943—the Japanese Army took it over from the Navy, providing their own sadist, Lieutenant Ikagami. The prisoners had passed their first bitter winter with the meagerest of clothing. Weakening with cold, E. H. Knox of Cuba City, Wisconsin, made himself a shirt from a camp blanket. Ikagami had him thrown into a freezing jail with nothing on but the shirt, then regularly drenched him with water. Prisoner squad leaders plucked up courage and went in as a body to see Ikagami and said that Knox was dying. Ikagami said, “Let him freeze to death and die.” When Ikagami visited the suffering prisoner in the guardhouse he said to Knox, “You are going to stay here until your mind freezes numb.” Forty-two-year-old Knox died on January 15th.

C. A. Scott of Sacramento, California, was jailed with Knox in his last hours for having picked up an orange peel, which constituted “garbaging”. Scott had been beaten until his eyes were swollen almost closed. The Japanese, seeing that Knox was going die from pneumonia, gave him one blanket. Knox told Scott, “When I go, you take my blanket.” A little while later he was dead.

The Japanese insisted that American workmen stand at attention while being beaten. Tom Gillen of Portland, Oregon, “broke a finger trying to ward off the blows.”

Fifty-six-year-old Walter Gell of Wadena, Iowa—both his pipe-stem legs swathed in bandages from foot to thigh—said: “If one man fouled up, everybody got it, with anything from a broomstick to an axe handle.” Another prisoner told about carrying Gell unconscious from the line after the collective chastisement of all for some single infraction.

George Dillon of Metaline Falls, Washington, was beaten by a snooping elderly Japanese whom the prisoners called “Grammo” for grandma. Dillon returned to work but sagged, and drew another beating. This time he struck back. All 250 men were called off work and given a mass beating. Dillon was removed and tried; he is believed to have died.

Sasebo’s roster was 210 when the dam was finished in April 1944 and the prisoners were scattered among other camps. (The death list for eighteen months’ work on the dam comprises twenty percent of the men who participated.) The burial details were headed by Ora Johnson of Boise City, a preacher. They were rewarded by extra rice balls, which the Japanese enjoyed tossing at will among them in order to watch the ensuing scramble.

Off Nagasaki, Japan—Tuesday, September 25, 1945 1500 hours

Aboard hospital ship
Haven

Puzzled service psychiatrists rearranged their theories about mental complexes among prisoners of war as this new Navy hospital ship bore homeward the last load of liberated POWs from Japan. Less than three percent of patients aboard showed any serious psychoneurotic effect from an experience which in many cases had seriously harmed their physical health. Their mental attitude, far from requiring coddling or understanding, was found to be self-confident, normal and fully sane. The paradox that Japanese prison life is turning out men unafraid of the post-war world is explained in their common phrase: “If there’s anything tougher ahead than three years in a camp under the Japanese after Bataan and Corregidor, we cannot imagine what that might be.”

Psychiatrists say that acute collective normalcy among ex-prisoners is due to the fact that psychoneurotics waned away and died and are returning home cremated in boxes of ashes, and that others who harbored such inclinations in the United States, where they gain sympathy, threw them off in Japan. In the prison camps all were really alike, and therefore it was useless for an individual to develop his “social protest” because nobody was any better off, and nobody would listen. So that’s how Japanese wardens cured decadent America, but lost the war—or so it says here in fine print.

V

The Two Robinson Crusoes of Wake Island

Weller (l.) & Logan “Scotty” Kay at the liberation of POW Camp #23, Izuka, Sept 19, 1945. The helmet bears the names of Wake Island dead.

For reasons impossible to determine at this point, the Navy did agree to transmit Weller’s extended story of two civilians who managed to survive in the austere brush of Wake Island for al most three months after it was taken by the Japanese soon after Pearl Harbor, December 1941. The gallant, futile defense of the island itself has been chronicled many times, but—perhaps for space limitations, perhaps because the saga was nearly four years old—the
Chicago Daily News
chose to heavily cut this improbable tale of survival and hiding, and the odyssey of Scotty and Fred is virtually unknown. The fact that these pages were transmitted, apparently in favor of Weller’s far more timely POW dispatches and one day before he left Nagasaki, suggests that they were all he was permitted to send.

Nagasaki, Japan—Tuesday, September 25, 1945

“T
HE
T
WO
R
OBINSON
C
RUSOES OF
W
AKE
I
SLAND
”

Opening the doors to Prison Camp #23 at Izuka in central Kyushu has revealed the unbelievable story of how two middle-aged American construction men lived in Robinson Crusoe style for seventy-seven days on tiny Wake Island after the coral speck fell to the Japanese. Though other Americans have lived on large islands like Guam while they were held by the Japanese, none ever succeeded under such hairs’ breadth terms as “Wake Island Scotty”, who is fifty-five-year-old Logan Kay of Clearlake Park, California, and his pal Fred J. Stevens, forty-nine, of Sioux City, Iowa.

Wake Island is only four miles long and less than a third of a mile across. It is so flat that seas sometimes wash over its beaches, being only twenty-one feet at its highest point. There are no caves and no coconut groves. Yet Wake Island Scotty and his pal, by creeping from one rabbit’s nest to another in bushy thickets, managed to keep the Japanese outwitted from December 8th, 1941, when the Japanese first bombed Wake, until March 9th, 1942. They lived on the hopes of seeing American warships steam in and recover Wake and set them free—dreams never realized until after six months’ labor on Wake and nearly two years of bitter servitude in Japan, including a period at Death Camp #18, building the dam at Sasebo where twenty percent of 265 Wake Island Americans died.

Wake Island Scotty has survived to return to his beloved wife Fritzi and his soldier son Howard in California, and Stevens is en route to join his wife and three children. But their days of being hunted while hiding literally in a Japanese backyard on Wake live again in the diary kept by Wake Island Scotty and made available by him to a
Chicago Daily News
correspondent. This diary—written while the two men were ill, thin, afraid and on the run—has been buried and redug many times. It has been searched for by dozens of Japanese sentries in camps where merely possessing any writing materials was a capital crime. Yet it has prevailed with its full record of hope, disappointment and faith, together with the human will to live and even some sparks of humor.

Wake Island looks like the open jaw of an alligator, with a lagoon as the inside of its mouth which, before the war, was intended by the United States as a submarine base. The ends of both the upper and lower jaw are broken off into separate islets, the upper being Peale and the lower Wilkes. Scotty and Stevens both served on the guns with Marines on Peale before becoming fugitives. Their hideout eventually was in skimpy thickets which lie on the inner side of the upper jaw along the lagoon, but by night they wandered in other parts of the island searching for food and water. From their thicket hideout looking southward across the lagoon, they were able to watch Japanese planes take off and land on the single American-built airfield on the southern or lower half of the jaw a mile away. Scotty noted down all such movements in hopes of aiding the naval rescue party which never came.

Stevens had served on Wake for nine months and Scotty for only five weeks when Japan struck. They were two of eleven hundred men hired by the Morrison Knudsen Company of Boise City, Idaho, one of six contracting firms joined to build the government airfield and the submarine entrance under the name of the Pacific Naval Air-bases Company, with its main offices in Alameda, California. Salaries averaged two hundred dollars monthly, with up to ninety dollars’ bonus for prolonged service. The Panair Company already had Clipper service, with buildings on Peale Island, while the government had a single Marine flying field on the lower jaw of Wake. The Wake workmen first knew something was amiss when a Clipper—after taking off for Guam at seven in the morning—returned, jettisoned some gas, took Panair personnel aboard, and departed for Honolulu.

[Wake Island Scotty’s journal is given here with brief interpolations in brackets by Weller in order to explain the captives’ situation more fully.]

S
COTTY
’
S DIARY
:

Dec. 8 1941

We were bombed at 11:55 AM by eighteen planes which we heard came from Marshall Islands 600 miles south of Wake. 27 killed, 130 injured. Panair buildings on Peale entirely demolished and seven marine planes. Clipper left one hour after bombing for Honolulu with white personnel.

Dec. 9

Eleven planes bombed company hospital and new warehouse on Wake. They also set afire six of our barracks.
[These buildings were on Peale, the northern or upper jaw.]
Ground batteries got one plane; scouts got one plane.
[That day Scotty found Stevens sick with stomach poisoning and hid him in a dredge pipe against the bombings. Scotty made his way to the demolished Panair hospital and found an untouched bottle of physic in the ruins, returned to the dredge pipe and treated Stevens.]

Dec. 10

10:40 AM—one hour earlier than yesterday—planes came in high and got our powder storage on Wilkes Island.
[This powder was being used to blast a new mouth through the eastern end of Wilkes, 500 feet long and 30 feet deep, to permit submarines after entering the fringing coral reef to pass through Wilkes Island to the deeper, northwestern end of Wake’s central lagoon. It was two-thirds done when taken by Japan.]
Planes and land batteries claimed two bombers down.

Dec. 11

Were shelled from ocean at 5:45 AM by destroyers. American subs and land planes got four or five boats and transports.
[The estimate was later raised to eleven enemy.]
One was sunk by a direct hit from our five-inch guns in powder magazine. Planes got one and sub got the rest, all sunk.
[That day civilian workmen abandoned all their smashed new buildings on the northern jaw, carrying their wounded around a bend in Wake’s horseshoe to the eastern end of the Marine airfield. There they improvised a hospital in the abandoned concrete ammunition magazines.]
Planes came at 9:50 but did no damage as batteries kept them away.

Dec. 12

I helped move guns last night as bombers had our old positions spotted.
[Scotty and other workmen took the anti-aircraft battery which had been in the middle of Peale and moved it to the northeastern end, then camouflaged the old position to resemble guns and try to draw Japanese bombs. The dredge pipe where Scotty lived with the invalid Stevens was located on Peale about a quarter-mile from the inlet separating Peale and Wilkes.]

Dec. 13

Quiet all day no bombers. One observation plane shot down by our scouts at 5:30 AM. Buried forty-two of our boys today.
[About thirty-five were civilian workmen, the remainder Marines and Navy sailors. Stevens, now recovered, was serving on the same anti-aircraft gun with Scotty.]

Dec. 14

Bombed at 10:45 by twenty-seven German Heinkels
[as they appeared to Marine fighters].
Lots of damage and some dead. Built bomb shelters for air crews. One of our three last planes cracked up taking off. Now have two left which will fly.

Dec. 15

Had breakfast and moved back to barracks
[from the dredge pipe on Peale where he had been living with Stevens].
Japs came at 6 PM. No great damage and no casualties.

Dec. 16

Eighteen bombers came at 1 PM got old camp one
[at the western end of the airfield, on Wake’s southern jaw]
and oil storage.

Dec. 17

Planes came at 5:50 PM—dropped a few bombs and machine-gunned camp. We went inside concrete pipe. Panair was given another dose of bombs.

Dec. 18

Went over to Panair and got medical supplies
[from the ruins]
for our doctor
[Dr. L. Shank of San Diego].

Dec. 19

Bombers came at 10:30 AM. Not much damage, burned a small amount of fuel.

Dec. 20

Rain all day. No bombers today. PBY
[a PBY Catalina, i.e. a flying boat]
came in with brass hat aboard. Looks like we may get some help.

Dec. 21

Dive bombers came in flocks at 9 AM and gave us hell, just about ruined us. PBY left just before raid and took our commanding officer with him to Honolulu. Twelve o’clock high bombers came and bombed our barracks so we moved back to Panair. Dive bombers got one of our range finders and crippled gun
[where Scotty was serving as ammunition loader].
Our first sergeant was killed on range finder.
[Scotty never knew his name but says, “He was a very brave boy.”]
^*

Dec. 21

They came in today and stayed a half hour. Leisurely bombed and gunned our camp. Got our last little plane. We have no range finder left, and are now practically down to rifles, one for each two men on island. All they have to do now is land and take over whenever they want to. Got small piece shrapnel in back of right shoulder. Doctor says will get it out in day or two. Does not hurt more than sliver so will not
worry about it. They bombed for an hour in getting our range finder, also both our last planes. We are now sure out of luck.

Dec. 23

Jap fleet moved in and after many signals opened up on our batteries
[only three remained on Peale]
making a direct hit on the first emplacement, blasting it out, then ceased firing. At dawn dozens of planes started bombing and things were in a panic in camp, and Pat
[Patrick Herndon of Fox Park, Wyoming]
deserted our dredge pipe. Fred and I found a hole right in the middle of camp and crawled in.
[Marine officers who that day came to the construction camp notified the homeless among the ruins that the Japanese were about to land, and warned them to avoid being caught with rifles because the Japanese would shoot any thus captured. Fear grew in the trapped men, who saw themselves unable to fight any longer to hold Wake.]
Later the bombing stopped and everything got quiet except enemy planes flying low all over island. At 11:30 I looked out carefully and will never forget the sight. About five hundred of our company men were being herded past stripped down to nothing but shorts and being headed towards Peale. Looked like brick wall
[a firing squad]
for these men. Fred and I sat tight.

Christmas Eve

Jap sentry almost found us last night. Was within five feet but missed us. We hope to escape tonight if there is a chance. We had a close call but something attracted sentry’s attention. If we can hold for two hours more until darkness we will move out of here and hide in brush. We will not give up without a fight as we think the other boys were stripped for firing squad. Japs working frantically everywhere to set up guns. If we can make the brush
[from their dugout in the center of the camp’s ruins]
we can live until we are found. As food is scattered all over island water is our problem once out of the woods. Getting dark now—we are waiting for cloud to cover moon.