First Into Nagasaki (23 page)

The Japanese had divided them into three groups. Group One, which numbered about 500 superior officers, included ranks from Navy commander and Army or Marine lieutenant colonel down through major and Navy senior lieutenant. Group Two had a few majors, all the rest of the junior officers, and some Navy medical corpsmen attached to their respective doctors, and numbered about 600. Group Three included all non-commissioned officers and enlisted men, a few medical officers, about 50 American civilians, plus the 37 British. This last group, comprising some 520 men, was in the charge of Chief Boatswain Clarence Taylor of Cloverdale, Virginia, and Long Beach, California, who had been executive of the naval receiving station at Cavite. In marching toward the pier the prisoners were further broken down into sections of 200 men, and provided with a small ration of soap and some toilet paper.

Sympathetic Filipinos were frequently rapped back with rifle butts for getting too close to the prisoners. The column reached the Million Dollar Pier at about 2 p.m. The pier was crowded with Japanese civilians by the hundreds, all well dressed, with wives, babies, luggage and often large casks of sugar to take with them. At the pier was the
Oryoku Maru,
a passenger and freight ship of 9,000–10,000 tons, built in Nagasaki in 1939.
^*

On hand to supervise the prisoners were several Japanese whom the prisoners knew. There was General Koa, who was in charge of all prisoners in the Philippines, and also Lieutenant N. Nogi, director of the Bilibid hospital—a former Seattle physician who customarily had been kind to Americans. The prisoners mounted by single file the gangplank to the ship. The Japanese sentries all had
narugis,
clubs. The Americans were already showing signs of straggling from weakness and frequently had to be touched up with a blow of the
narugi.

The Japanese elected to fill the aft hold first, and to put aboard the highest ranking officers before the others. It was this circumstance which was to make the death toll heaviest the first night among the top officers, men who had commanded regiments and battalions in the hopeless struggle for Bataan and Corregidor. The aft hold’s hatch was cut off from free circulation of air by bulkheads fore and aft of it. A long slanting wooden staircase descended some 35 feet through the hatch, down which the prisoners weakly crept.

When the first officers reached the bottom of the ladder they were met by a Sergeant Dau, well known at Davao, who wore a sword and had several privates under him armed with brooms. Dau used the sword to direct the privates, and the privates used their brooms to beat the American officers back as far as possible into the dim bays of the hold.

“We had to scamper back in there,” one officer describes it, “or get a crack from the brooms or Dau’s sword. There was a platform about five feet high built over the hatch above, and so the little light that came down in mid-afternoon was deflected. Long before the hold was filled the air was foul and breathing was difficult. But the Japanese kept driving more men down the ladder from the deck, and Dau and his men kept pushing the first-comers farther back into the airless dark.”

This hold’s dimensions none of the prisoners could then estimate, because it was already too dark, at three in the afternoon, to see its limits. The loading in this hold alone took 1½ hours. The first officers who had descended were sitting down in bays, a double tier system of wooden stalls something like a Pullman car. The lower bays were three feet high. A man could neither stand up nor extend his legs sitting down in them.

Each bay was about nine feet from passageway to rear wall. The Japanese insisted that the Americans could sit in rows four deep, each man’s back against his neighbor’s knees, in this nine-foot depth. The elder officers who were forced back in the rear almost immediately began to faint. Instead of making more space in the center under the fading light of the hatch, the Japanese insisted that the men in the center should not even sit down, but should be left standing, packed together vertically.

When the Japanese on deck looked down through the hatch they saw a pit of living men staring upward, their chests and shoulders heaving as they struggled for air and wriggled for better space. “The first fights,” says one officer, “started when men began to pass out. We knew then that only the front men in each bay would be able to get enough air.”

While the early struggles were beginning in the aft hold, the Japanese were herding the endless line of embarking prisoners forward to the bow hold. Here they managed to force down the ladder about 600 others against the 800 already under decks. The air here, too, was foul. Finally the last party to board, approximately 250 enlisted men and civilians, got the only fully ventilated hold of the
Oryoku Maru,
the second hold forward.

About 5 o’clock the
Oryoku Maru
cast off, and headed down the bay. Now the prisoners discovered into whose hands their lives had been committed. Their guards were mixed, some Japanese but mostly Formosans, or as they were taught to call them, “Taiwanis.” The whole party was in the charge of Lieutenant Toshino, a Japanese officer of somewhat Western and Prussian aspect, with short clipped hair, spectacles and a severe manner.

Though Toshino was nominally in command, the real control fell, as it often did in Philippine prisons, in the hands of the interpreter. In the prisons of Luzon and Mindanao, as everywhere from Japan to Java, the treatment depended on the interpreter more than on the commanding officer. Toshino left as much as possible to the interpreter, and his interpreter was a Japanese no survivor will ever forget.

Mr. Wada was a hunchback. He hated the straight-backed world, and all his hatred had turned itself on the Americans. He had been an interpreter at Mindanao, and already laid up for himself an unusual record as spy and stool pigeon. The blood of the Americans who were to die needlessly between Manila and Moji is on the hands of all Japanese into whose care they were committed. But if you believe what the survivors say, the man whose hands are most ineradicably smeared is Mr. Wada. (There was something about him that made him always be called “Mr.” Wada.)

The
Oryoku Maru,
as it moved down the harbor, became part of a convoy of five merchant ships, protected by a cruiser and several destroyers and lighter craft. They moved without lights, their holds vomiting forth the hoarse shouts of the Americans. Discipline had begun to slip in the struggling pits of the No. 3 and No. 1 holds. As air grew scarcer, the pleas for air grew louder and more raucous. Before long the Japanese threatened to board down the hatches and cut off all air.

As the cries of struggling men persisted, the Japanese lowered down into the complete darkness of the pit a series of wooden buckets filled with fried rice, cabbage and fried seaweed. In the stifling darkness, filled with moans and wild shouts, the buckets were handed around. The officers who had mess kits scooped in the buckets; the others simply grabbed blindly in the darkness, palming what they could. Some ate, but those in the rear ranks—if conscious—got as little as if they had fainted.

Fear was already working its way on the bowels and kidneys of the men. Asked for slop buckets, the Japanese sent them down. These buckets circulated in the utter darkness far less readily than the similar food buckets. A man could not tell what was being passed to him, food or excrement. In their increasingly crazed condition, men would tell their neighbors that the one bucket was the other, and consider it uproarious if a hand was dipped in the toilet bucket, or the food bucket was befouled by a man who had no way of knowing what he was doing.

Mr. Wada was very dissatisfied with the clamor issuing from the struggling pits of Americans. “You are disturbing the Japanese women and children,” he called down from the top of the hatch to Commander Frank Bridget, who was shouting himself hoarse trying to keep order among the suffocating men. “Stop your noise, or the hatches will be closed.”

The noise of the crazed men could not be stopped and the hatches were closed. That was at about 10 o’clock. Then some of the men crept up the ladder and parted the planks slightly, so that a little air could get through. Mr. Wada came again to the edge of the pit. “Unless you are quiet I shall give the guards the order to fire down into the hold.”

A kind of relative quiet had settled on the hold—the quiet of exhaustion and death. The floor was covered with excrement and urine. Almost all the officers had stripped their bodies, so that the pores would have a chance to breathe what the lungs could not.

Occasionally an American would awaken from a stupor out of his mind. One began calling, around midnight, “Lieutenant Toshino, Lieutenant Toshino!” The others, fearful of Japanese repercussions, shouted, “Knife him, knife that son-of-a-bitch!” Someone said, “Denny, you get him!” There was movement, a struggle, and a scream in the darkness. Then somebody else called: “Get Denny, he did it, get him!” and there was another struggle.

Then came foreboding quiet, with all who had heard wondering what had happened. Men who owned jackknives unclasped the big blade, prepared to fight if they were attacked.

Around midnight the convoy ran into difficulties. American planes were sparing Manila Bay by day, but their submarines were still patrolling by night. The night attack, a specialty of the American underseas fleet, was at its high point of the war. Prisoners who crept up the ladder to open the planks for air reported that an enormous floating fire had broken out on the horizon at the point where the Japanese cruiser had been.

The
Oryoku Maru
crept through the mouth of Manila Bay and turned northward in the darkness, hugging closely the Luzon shore so that the remaining vessels in the convoy could protect her. Meantime death strode through the fetid, slippery bays, taking impartially soldiers old and new. Major James Bradley of Shanghai’s famous 4th Marines passed away. Lieutenant Colonel John Bennett of the 31st Infantry was suffocated. So was Lieutenant Colonel Jasper Brady of the same outfit. The Army Lieutenant Colonel Norman Simmonds, who had the curious record of once having been middleweight boxing champion at Annapolis, went down and did not arise. Major Houston B. Houser, an outstandingly capable figure who had organized M.P.s of a sort to keep order in the darkness, who busied himself running up the ladder to plead with the Japanese and cleaning up excreta in the darkness, was felled with exhaustion and later took the short way home. He had been [General Jonathan] Wainwright’s adjutant during part of the battle for Bataan. Major Maynard Snell, a veterinarian who had been a professor at Louisiana State University, also did not last till morning.

But in the darkness few knew that these men had died. It is even possible that some of them did not actually pass away till the next evening. “Once you passed out, you were gone,” as an officer says, “but only those near you could tell that you were dead. The temperature down there must have been 130 degrees at least, and it took a long time for a body to grow cold.”

Major Howard Cavender, Dollar Line representative in Manila and manager of the Manila Hotel, was among those who succumbed but were not recognized till light came.

“The worst thing,” according to a major of the 26th Cavalry, “was the men who had gone mad but would not sit still. One kept pestering me, pushing a mess kit against my sweaty chest and saying, ‘Have some of this chow? It’s good.’ I smelled of it and smelled what it was. It was not chow. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you don’t want it I’m going to eat it.’ And a little while later I heard him eating it, right beside me.”

There was a tendency on the part of men near the border of madness to get up and wander around, as though to get assurance where they were. “You would meet one of these men. He would seem to talk perfectly normally. But all the time he would keep putting out his hands, placing them on your shoulders in the darkness, running them up and down your arms as though trying to make sure that you and he were alive, and that you both were real. If you stepped away, he would follow you, pawing and trying to put his face close to yours, to make sure you were there.”

After the hatches were closed the Japanese refused to allow any more
benjos,
or slop buckets, to be handed up the ladder. Overfull as they were, the buckets still circulated. A man would be heard saying, “Someone take this thing, for God’s sake. I can’t hold it and I have no place to put it.” He would be ignored, because nobody would be willing to give up space in order to take the
benjo.
If angered or irrational, the badgered and weary man might simply overturn the mobile toilet on his neighbors.

As the first faint light crept down through the parted planks of the hatches, the men in three holds looked about them. Some men were in a stupor, a few were dead, a few were mad. The first step was to get the insane under control. In the pit of the aft hold, which was the worst affected, there were two decks and a bottom hatch, leading into the bilge. The most violent of those who were mad were lowered into this sub-hold.

It was hot. The labored working of hundreds of lungs had expelled moisture which clung to the sides of the bulkheads in great drops. Men tried to scrape off this moisture and drink it. Naked, sitting like galley slaves between each other’s legs, they looked at their hands. Their fingers seemed long and thin and the ends were wrinkled as though they had been soaked a long time in hot water. But their throats were sandpaper-dry. They were in the first stages of weakening through dehydration, aggravated by the loss of body salts, the sparks of energy.

D
AWN
came slowly and at first almost no light filtered back into the rear bays, where most of the dead lay. Chief Warrant Officer Walter C. Smith of San Diego had found himself a tiny shelf beyond the last tiers of the suffocated. “I was jammed all the way up against the rudder. I could hardly see daylight at first.”

Again the gray-haired, indefatigable Commander Bridget took charge. Under medium size, about one hundred fifty pounds, he had a fighting build, with a thin face and marked bow legs. To the few who were not naked—some had kept on their clothes even in the dripping heat, as protection against being pawed by the wandering insane men—he said: “Take off all the clothes you can. Don’t move around. You use up extra oxygen that way and you sweat more. Use your shorts to fan each other.”