First Into Nagasaki (22 page)

George Weller (
above right
), probably with members of a prisoner recovery team. Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

A just-liberated prisoner. Camp #17. September 11 or 12, 1945.

George Weller (
left
) at Camp #17 with ex-prisoner U.S. Marine Sgt. Major James J. Jordan, who also survived the Death Cruise. (see pp. 93 & 230), September 11 or 12, 1945.

Graffiti done by U.S. POWs upon liberation. The “old 500” were the first five hundred prisoners at the camp. (pp. 295-296) Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

A just-liberated prisoner. Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

One final funeral, led by members of a recovery team, as ex-prisoners say farewell to a comrade. Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

T
he
Chicago Daily News
Foreign Service presents herewith the first attempt to recount historically one of the great American tragedies of the Pacific War: how more than 1,600 American officers and enlisted men, prisoners of the Japanese and survivors of the defenses of Bataan, Corregidor, and Mindanao, were reduced to about 300 survivors alive today. These Americans, having lived through nearly three years of Japanese prison camps, died in the course of a broken journey seven weeks long from Bilibid Prison in Manila to a chain of prison camps in Kyushu, southern Japan. They died of Japanese bullets and American bombs, of suffocation, dehydration, disease, starvation and murder. Some went insane.

This series is based on interviews obtained by George Weller of the
Chicago Daily News
during a period of eight weeks’ investigation in the prison camps of Kyushu, in American rest camps, aboard hospital ships in bomb-torn Nagasaki, at Okinawa and Saipan and Guam.

Because an official record of the death cruise cannot be prepared for many weeks, this account must be regarded as a preliminary one in a historical sense. Survivors’ stories conflict in minor details; absolutely reliable lists are not obtainable in the Pacific; in spelling some names phonetic methods had to be used because of the uncertainty of the survivors.

This tragic odyssey was the fourth and last part of the general tragedy of the Philippines, which began with the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, entered its crescendo with the death march of prisoners to Camp O’Donnell, passed its midpoint with their three years of imprisonment, and closed with the death cruise to Japan.

Omuta—Nagasaki—Okinawa—Saipan—Guam
November 1, 1945

T
HIN
from nearly three years’ confinement, guarded by bayoneted Japanese, a column of American prisoners numbering somewhere above 1,600 men shuffled in ranks of four through Manila’s dusty streets on the morning of December 13, 1944, on their way from Bilibid Prison to what in pre-war days had been known as “The Million Dollar Pier.”

They shuffled rather than marched because the sun was hot and many of them were ill. The ragged streetboys of Manila made them furtive
V-for-Victory
signs. In the lace-curtained parlors of the poor Philippine homes the cheap radios were turned on full blast as they approached, then tuned down after they left: an indirect salute of the underground.

Nearly all the prisoners were veterans of the defense of Bataan, Corregidor and Mindanao. About half were officers. They represented about 90 per cent of the field, staff and medical officers who had sustained the defense of the Philippines for six months totally without help from the United States. The officers ranked from Navy commanders and lieutenant colonels of the Army and Marines down through lieutenants and ensigns. Some were civilians who had been commissioned hastily after Japan struck south. Others were civilians who had helped in the defense of Bataan and Corregidor without ever having formally entered the armed forces. There were also 37 British prisoners.

The 1,600 prisoners (the exact number is given by various survivors as 1,615, 1,619, and 1,635) marched slowly through Manila not only because of heat and illness, but because rumor had already spread that they were being sent to Japan. If true, this report meant that their long-sustained hope of being rescued and freed by MacArthur’s forces was ended.

The prisoners thought their journey by sea to Japan might take as much as a week or ten days. Had they realized what lay ahead of them—that some would die of suffocation even before the next dawn—many undoubtedly would have chosen immediate death on the bayonets of the Japanese guards who flanked them.

Many of the prisoners were survivors of the death march from Bataan to Camp O’Donnell, where the willful denial of water and food by the Japanese cost the lives of hundreds of Americans—a trip which for deliberate butchery and needless sacrifice would take its place with the Alamo and the Boston Massacre. These men, including everything from highly trained West Point and Annapolis graduates to hastily registered missionary chaplains, had no inkling that they were setting forth on a journey no less cruel and far more extended.

Instead of lasting ten days, as the prisoners expected, their journey to Japan would last seven weeks. Instead of going the whole distance on the ship waiting for them at the Million Dollar Pier, the prisoners would use four ships, besides motor trucks, railroad freightcars and their own naked feet. And instead of arriving in Japan with 1,600 survivors, they would reach there with slightly over 400 still alive, most of whom would be so far sunken that more than 100 would die soon after being turned over to prison authorities ashore.

About 1,880 prisoners were crammed into Bilibid military prison in downtown Manila when the Japanese decided to move them to Japan. Many, like Commander Warner Portz, the sharp-nosed, kindly former senior officer of the Davao prison camp, and Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Olson who had been commandant there, had been moved northward to Manila on June 6th, leaving in Mindanao a residue of 175 officers of junior grade and about 600 enlisted men in the camps at Davao and nearby Lasang. Even today the fate of these men is only partly known, and the reported finding of large caches of American skeletons in Mindanao leaves it still unclarified.

The prisoners were thin and weak. Their sustaining dish in Bilibid was
lugau—
watered rice made into a thin, gluey substance. So unnourishing is
lugau
that many prisoners descending from the second floor of the Bilibid Prison for their morning dishful on the ground floor found themselves still too weak to climb the stairs to their pallets again. They would remain in the prison yard to await the evening bowlful in order to husband their strength for that ascent of the single flight of stairs.

Against this liability of their own weakness the column of prisoners had an asset: a dedicated group of doctors, both Army and Navy, poor in medicine but rich in spirit. In one of the camps—Cabanatuan—there had existed a group of irresponsible men who lived in part by manufacturing spurious sulfathiozole tablets, stamped with a mold made from a cartridge, and selling them to the Japanese guards. But the Bilibid doctors were superior to that ilk. From May 30, 1942, three weeks after the fall of Corregidor, to October, 1943, the naval medical unit at Bilibid had been under Commander L. B. Sartin of Mississippi, who was then succeeded by Commander Thomas H. Hayes of Norfolk, Virginia. Hayes was marching through the Manila streets now with the column, marching toward the death that was waiting for him in Formosa.

The Japanese had made plans for evacuating the Americans sooner, but Manila was under almost constant air bombardment. They had not dared to bring in ships of large enough tonnage to carry so many men. From the upper levels of Bilibid the Americans had watched the American carrier planes dive bombing the harbor. Their hopes rose that the American dive bombers would be able to keep the harbor clear of shipping long enough so that the Japanese would not attempt to evacuate them.

For some reason, however, the American air attacks stopped suddenly on November 28th, giving the Japanese their chance to sneak their freighters into Manila. As with dragging feet the prisoners marched their last miles on American soil, they feared that for them MacArthur would come too late.