Hiroshima Joe (40 page)

‘What are they from?’ asked Sandingham as he helped in the kitchen.

‘A destroyer. Sunk by air action,’ Phil explained. ‘We’ve only had a chance to talk to a few. They were captured a fortnight ago and the Kempetai’s been at them. Some of them are in pretty ropey shape. The boss is in with the commandant now, asking if we can mix with them. Since they arrived, they’ve been under guard in their hut.’

He jerked his thumb at the window and Sandingham looked out. By the door of the barrack was a pair of guards: three or four others walked around the building, ascertaining that no one peered out of the windows. Or in.

‘A couple are in the
eiso.
’

That stopped speculation. The guardhouse punishment cells were terrible. Each was six feet square with a threadbare blanket and a bucket. Without light and without air, proofed against sound, they were the worse form of solitary confinement the Japanese could invent. The loneliness was regularly punctuated by brutal beatings described as interrogations.

The senior officer entered the kitchens. He looked grim.

‘We can’t see them today. Maybe tomorrow. We can take them in food and those who take it in can stay while it is eaten in order to bring out the dishes. They eat after we do. Joe: go to the stores. The QM’s going to issue three pounds of bean curd for them. We can water down the soup a bit and give them that, too. What’s in it?’

‘Purple death, some carrot tops, some crabs from the beach, water, a fish, eight potatoes and three and a half pounds of rice millings. Also a couple of daikon. And, of course, there are soya beans in it too, sir.’

‘Good. Do your best.’

Sandingham was one of those chosen to deliver the food to the new inmates. After swallowing his own meal, he set off with some others for the barrack. The guards pulled the bolts and opened the door.

Inside it was dark. The guards had switched off the electricity. Sandingham lit a peanut oil lamp he had brought with him. Others lit similar lamps.

The Americans were lying around on the
tatami
rows, or sitting of the edges of the bunk and at or on the two tables.

There was not a word spoken until one of them, not seeing clearly who had entered, warned, ‘More goddam Nips, guys. Get yerselves orf yer asses.’

A shuffling of feet followed a desultory straightening of limbs.

‘I’m English, actually,’ stated Sandingham – the last word, which he did not usually use in such a context, somehow comically capping his introduction in his mind.

‘Limey?’

The enquirer was incredulous.

‘Yes. We’ve brought you some food. Not very good, but what we usually have here.’

This information was greeted with a low hubbub of consternation.

Sandingham and the rest of those from the kitchen set the food on the table and began to pour it into bowls. Spoons were handed round. The Americans said nothing, but lined up to collect their servings, then sat down to consume them. Still there was no conversation.

As they collected in the empty bowls an American by Sandingham, who was wearing the remnants of an officer’s khaki naval uniform, took him by the arm.

‘Hey, Joe. We owe ya. Okay?’

Sandingham laughed and, in the dull light, the Americans looked at him with a renewed puzzlement.

‘You got my name right. Joe Sandingham. British Army, captured at the fall of Hong Kong.’

‘Jesus H. Christ!’ replied the American. ‘You been prisoner for two and a half years…’

‘Right,’ Sandingham admitted. ‘Is there anything else you need?’

‘Last month, I was in San Diego with my…’ The American realised the tactlessness of what he was about to say and Sandingham ignored his words in preparation for the noun that didn’t come – wife, or lover, or mother.

‘Yeah. There is something we need. We got a young seaman here who’s hurt bad. You got a doctor?’

‘We have, but we’ve no drugs – or anything else, really – to go with him. But I’ll see what I can do.’

It took the senior officer more than an hour’s humbling discussion with the commandant to get permission for the doctor to enter the barrack. When he did treat the young man he found his main injuries were several broken ribs, a twice-fractured arm, severe contusions and lacerations and a number of burn marks. None of the injuries was typical of those obtained in a sinking ship. The burns were caused by red-hot iron rather than floating, ignited fuel oil.

Three days later, the Americans were allowed to join the remainder of the prisoners and were integrated into work squads and issued with their bango tags, numbers on toughened card discs that had to be worn at all times. Once they were in with the rest the stories started to circulate.

Their destroyer, which for obvious reasons wasn’t named, had been sunk in the most bizarre fashion. At first, many of the prisoners found it hard to believe.

‘What happened was this. We were cruising about four hundred miles east-south-east of Okinawa, about due south of Kyushu. Anti-sub. patrol. Catch them two days outa Kobe. Hadn’t seen anything for several days. Suddenly, the siren goes. All hands to ‘Action stations’ quick as hell. Our captain was real tight on drilling us for this. Radar picked up hostile aircraft. No sweat.

‘AA guns manned, loaded, ready. Bearings given. Then we see the planes. Three of them. They run by us, too close to be clever and at about eight hundred feet. For’ard guns open up. Hit one. He nose-dives. Hell of an explosion. Other two peel off.’

There was nothing unusual in this narrative, Sandingham thought. They’d heard it all before, over and over. Some had experienced it.

‘The two that peel off. They bank up high, real high. Five thousand feet. Maybe more. Too high for a torpedo or bomb run. “Those bastards are gonna spray us!” says the aimer. I gott’ agree – it’ll be tracer shell. Down they start to come, near as dammit vertical. Their range is greater than ours. We wait to open fire. But they don’t first. They jus’ come on down. ‘Wotthehell!’ I heard some guy say. We open up now. Fire fast as hell, aiming quick as hell. Hit one. He trails black smoke for about three hundred feet then – Wham! – one hell of a fireball. Through my mind goes this one thought: how come the guy’s got so much fuel after flying so goddam far from base? We knew there weren’t no carriers out. And since when does fuel ignite like that …

‘The other one’s still comin’ on down. He’s weaving.’

The listeners were with him, in the picture, the fighter coming at the ship, waiting to open fire at the last moment in order to get a good hit on the bridge. Demolish the steering and then go in for a bomb or torpedo run when the ship’s out of control.

‘Then I get it. The bastard’s trying to crash into us. That’s what it was, too. We hit him a coupla times, I’m sure as God knows we did. But it di’n’t stop the plane. Maybe by now the pilot’s dead. The plane ain’t. It comes straight down and hits the ship aft of the funnel. I was up in the bows. Ship shakes on the impact. Count three and then there is one god-awful explosion. The plane was a flying bomb with a poor sonovabitch guy in it guiding it in … No parachute showed.’

It transpired that rumours had been about in the US Navy of the Japanese planning suicide missions, kamikaze pilots who dedicated themselves to their gods and their Emperor and, after a special service in a temple, then set off on a one-way flight, their flimsy plywood aircraft loaded with explosives and insufficient fuel for a return to base. Some of the aircraft were said to drop their undercarriages at take-off, leaving the wheels on the ground to be re-used.

‘What do you make of it, Norb?’ Sandingham asked his pal amongst the long-term Yanks.

‘I guess it’s true,’ the other answered. ‘And I reckon it shows that the Nips are getting pretty damn desperate.’

*   *   *

‘It is true,’ confirmed Mr Mishima, the next day.

‘How do you know?’

‘We have had it in the newspaper and my neighbour, who is called Mr Hoshigima, has his son gone to be one.’

He looked glum and Sandingham guessed why.

‘And your son?’

‘He is on a list for going. Already, he has his cloth –
hachimaki
– to wind around his head. A white cloth…’

For a moment, he watched the boy carrying planks out to a waiting lorry; not wanting to press the point, Sandingham turned back to the planer.

‘You know what they say for the pilots?’ Mishima stared at the spray of sawdust fanning on to the floor. ‘It is an old poem in Japanese. In English it says,

Death is lighter than a feather,

Duty higher than a mountain.

But what use is that to me if my son dies? I have only one son and why should I give him when the war is lost for Japan? If I have no son, my family name dies.’ A plank was slewing awry and he pressed the stop switch on the saw. ‘You know what
“hagakure”
means?’ Sandingham shook his head. ‘It is the code of honour of samurai. It says, “The Way of the Samurai is Death.” All Japanese think of this now.’

The following week they were excused the Thursday from working in the timber yards. It was not a festival or a holy day, nor even a rest day. Whatever the reason, they made the most of it. On returning on the Friday they found a new and large machine installed in the shed. The planer had been moved to one side and the saw shifted.

‘What’s it for?’ Sandingham questioned the
hancho.

He replied through the interpreter that it was a machine for making and shaping plywood.

*   *   *

Garry had been the officers’ mess steward. Nineteen years old, he hailed from Saginaw, seventy miles north-west of Detroit. He had been drafted into the Navy from a set life as a chef in a diner off the highway near Bridgeport and a keen fisherman in Lake Huron. He knew all the best spots to catch walleyes, blue gills and crappies from Whites Beach round to Caseville. His skin was tanned, his young flesh firmly trim, his blonde hair close-cropped in a crew-cut and his stomach badly bruised from the repeated kickings he had received at the hands of the Kempetai who were particularly vicious in their treatment of US personnel in the light of the increased air raids upon the major cities.

When he slept, he chattered with fear but when he was awake he affected a brave face. Sandingham befriended him when he was placed in charge of his well-being and convalescence – the lad was assigned to duties in the timber yard, sweeping up and sharpening the teeth of the band-saw with a shaped file.

It was difficult for Sandingham to watch over the lad. He was unbowed by the bloodiness of his treatment at the hands of the Kempetai and he exhibited an open hostility to their captors. He declined to speak to a Japanese and flatly refused to obey orders unless they were translated for him, feigning ignorance of the most obvious sign language or pidgin-English instructions. This was taken as arrogance by the more hostile guards, especially the Koreans, and he suffered many a slap or punch for his insubordination.

Without success, Sandingham tried to introduce him to Mr Mishima, but it was to no avail.

‘Joe,’ the boy told him quite categorically, ‘I like you. You’re straight down the line. But I don’ give a shit how good a guy he may be. He’s a goddam Jap and the only good Jap’s a dead Jap.’

‘He’s not like all the other Nips – or what you take them to be. Many of them aren’t, as a matter of fact. They don’t want the war and they know they’ve lost it.’

‘Then let ’em surrender. MacArthur’s ready for ’em.’

‘It’s not that simple, Garry. They can’t just jack it in.’

‘Too bad.’

Garry shrugged his shoulders and lifted the broad wooden shovel of sawdust, tipping it into the hessian sack hanging from two nails by the entrance.

His wounds were healing, but in Sandingham’s view he should not have been sent to labouring work so soon. The fractures were mended but the bruises were prolonged by the continued use of the muscles. After ten days Garry suddenly let out a groaning yell and doubled up on the floor of the timber shed. Sandingham and Mishima ran to his aid before the guard arrived.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘My stomach!’ He was choking on the words. ‘It’s like awful cramp. Right across it.’

O God, thought Sandingham, he’s got appendicitis. It was a killer, for there was no way to operate. The expression on Sandingham’s face told the lad more than words.

‘No,’ he divined, ‘I’ve not got appendix trouble. It’s been took out.’

Maybe a hernia, Sandingham said to himself.

They lifted him on to the pile of sawdust sacks waiting to be taken to the camp with the prisoners at the end of the day’s work. Garry lay there on his side in an embryonic crouch while Mishima explained the problem to the two guards and the
hancho.
They agreed to let him stay there as he was.

That evening, the doctor having diagnosed acute cramp, Sandingham squatted by the steward’s
tatame
and massaged the young man’s solar plexus, gently kneading the muscles loose. His fingers pried and smoothed the flesh as his patient lay awkwardly and painfully naked upon his back. They were alone in the barrack. The evening
tenko
was over and the prisoners were left to their own devices. Many were sitting on the parade ground in the last of the sunlight.

‘If we were back in the States,’ Garry murmured, ‘I’d let you do that to me any time.’

‘Relaxes you?’

It being so long, Sandingham suspected nothing.

‘Sure does. And if it didn’t hurt so much, I guess you’d see other muscles tighten.’

His words gripped Sandingham’s mind. Garry was at one with him. An overpowering feeling of companionship came over him, the comradeship that springs between two men who belong to the same freemasonry of sexual attraction. He carried on pressing gently on the youth’s stomach.

After a while, Garry wished him to stop and, with difficulty, tried to raise himself on to one elbow. It stung him deep in the gut and he grimaced. Sandingham put his arm under Garry’s shoulders to help him up.

‘Thanks,’ Garry muttered.

He eased himself round so he could face Sandingham, lifted his right arm and put it around Sandingham’s neck, drawing him down and kissing him on the mouth. His tongue briefly slipped wetly across Sandingham’s lips. For his part, Sandingham made no response. He was altogether too surprised, and moved, and confused.