In Manchuria (33 page)

Amazingly, given that Red Guards had smashed Wasteland's traditional Chinese tombs, the Japanese cemetery remained intact through the Cultural Revolution. Yet, in order to make way for a reservoir, the graveyard was moved to its present site in the
1980
s. A massive carved marble tablet inside its entrance announced that the cemetery was a “provincial-level protected heritage site” (not a patriotic education base). In
1984
the remains of five hundred settlers who committed suicide were moved here from Jixi, the railroad town taken by the Soviet army after it overran Akira Nagamine's garrison.

The Sino-Japanese Friendship Garden cemetery also held the remains of Chinese families who had adopted Japanese orphans. A Japanese officer, expressing guilt for the children left behind, wrote that “the Chinese raised the children of the burglars who had robbed them.” But in interview after interview, the foster mothers said that the babies were just like they had been: powerless.

Their charity was enshrined in pavilions painted with images of the Great Wall and Mount Fuji. Cement walkways led through the pine grove to two low concrete domes entombing the ashes of the dead. Folded paper cranes—their silk ribbons wishing, in Japanese and Chinese, for everlasting peace—decorated the pines' lowest boughs, left by Japanese visitors. “We have to ask them not to plant any more trees or we'll have to expand the cemetery,” the live-in caretaker told me.

It was a lovely, peaceful place, silent but for the magpies. The
feng shui
was sound: a slope of cornfields shielded the tombs from the malevolent northern wind, and they faced water-filled paddies below.

I had arrived in August to meet a group of descendants traveling from Japan for the grave-sweeping festival. But the war did not end in
1945
. The previous week, five Chinese nationalists who met online arrived at the cemetery carrying hammers and a bucket of red paint. Their target: a newly erected monument listing the names of
229
Japanese settlers who were among the thousands who starved to death in Fangzheng. The men crossed the names out with red brushstrokes and chipped at the stone. Internet chat rooms spread the news; within hours a bulldozer plowed the monument's rubble into a hole guarded by forty men. The Japanese grave sweepers canceled their trip. “Our economy profits thanks to people who went to Japan from our county,” a local shop owner said, “and I support promoting friendship between China and Japan. But some people criticize residents of our county as if they were traitors.”

I rattled the cemetery's locked iron gate. The caretaker warned that he had been told to call the police when visitors appeared.

“
Mei guanxi,
” I urged. It doesn't matter.

“I have to call the police.”

“
Mei guanxi.
” All is well.

The caretaker pulled out a cell phone. History was closed today.

 

I rode the train
250
miles south of Wasteland to Shenyang to peek through blue tin sheeting that masked another wartime relic. I spied a smokestack, dilapidated barracks, and then the muzzle of a lunging guard dog. Once this site had been an Allied prisoner of war camp. On this date, August
16
, in
1945
, seventeen hours after Japan surrendered, a young American and four other operatives raced here to save hundreds of lives.

“I was the fourth one out the B-
24
's jump hole,” Staff Sergeant Harold “Hal” Leith told me. “I had the feeling of floating rather than falling.” It was his first glimpse of Manchuria. He looked down and saw cabbages.

Now age ninety-two, Leith remembers the day clearly. “The next sound I heard was applause and happy yelling from below. It was a bunch of Chinese farmers who had been working in fields where we were landing. They seemed to be enjoying the air show. It was quite a lot of fun floating down. I hit the dirt fast, tumbled, and spilled the chute.”

His mission: liberate
1
,
443
Allied prisoners of war held around Shenyang (then called Mukden). Also: beat the advancing
1
.
5
million Soviet soldiers in securing “vital documents and personalities both Japanese and puppet.” So came the order from the operation's overseer, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of today's Central Intelligence Agency.
Dubbed Operation Cardinal, it was one of eight sorties planned that day for strategic targets in China, Laos, and Vietnam. The other mission in Manchuria, code-named Flamingo, was scrapped when the Soviets reached Harbin first.

One of these OSS operations would end with the execution of a missionary turned operative named John Birch. He was to travel overland in coastal China to scout former Japanese airfields that could be used to evacuate POWs. Chinese Communist forces were angered by the Yalta agreements that returned Manchuria's railroad and Port Arthur to Soviet control. A People's Liberation Army detachment stopped and disarmed Birch. “What is the matter with you, anyway? Are you bandits?” he asked his captors in Chinese. The Chinese member of his team told Birch to not antagonize the soldiers, to which he replied, “I want to find out how they intend to treat Americans. I don't mind if they kill me. If they do they will be finished, for America will punish them with atomic bombs.” The soldiers opened fire, striking his Chinese colleague above the knee, and Birch in the leg. The soldiers bound his arms and feet, then bayoneted him to death, mutilating his face in an attempt to destroy his identity. The Chinese team member lay beside him, playing dead, until a passerby helped him escape during the night. Birch would later be lionized as the “first casualty of the Cold War” by the right-wing society named for him.

Operation Cardinal was the most dangerous of the OSS missions: Hal Leith and five operatives—armed only with pistols—would jump into territory occupied by thirty thousand Japanese troops about to face a tidal wave of Soviet soldiers. No one knew how the Japanese army would react to the news—if it had even heard—of Japan's surrender. The American POWs could be used as human shields, or as evidence to be liquidated. The nearest American forces were stationed nine hundred miles away.

The war's abrupt conclusion had surprised the OSS: one day after the agency's head, William Donovan—the founding father of American intelligence—arrived in the central Chinese city of Xi'an on August
8
,
1945
, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchukuo. The next day the second atomic bomb fell, on Nagasaki. “If we are not in Korea and Manchuria when the Russians get there, we will never get in,” Donovan cabled. “Although we have been caught with our pants down, we will do our best to pull them up in time.” He ordered his agents to locate American property, prepare dossiers of “potential agents, informants and sympathizers” for the United States, and to secure information on Russian support for Chinese Communists, who were about to engage in full-scale civil war with the ruling Nationalists, the side backed by the U.S.

Operation Cardinal took off at
0450
on August
16
,
1945
.

For much of its existence, the Shenyang camp had been unknown to the Allies. Its POWs included American, British, Dutch, and Australian enlisted men and officers, including survivors of the Bataan Death March; British lieutenant general Arthur Percival, who had surrendered Singapore; and American lieutenant general Jonathan Wainwright, who had surrendered the Philippines at Corregidor. The survivors of that battle had been shipped to Taiwan—an American submarine fired torpedoes at the vessel, missing both times—before being packed in the holds of “hell ships” that carried them to the Korean Peninsula. There, the men were divided: some were sent to forced labor in Japan, and some were put on trains north to Shenyang, where
260
prisoners died the first winter from disease and cold. Japanese stacked their frozen bodies in a storage shed until the ground thawed. An improved camp named Hoten was built the next year, in
1943
, where press-ganged prisoners worked in a tannery and made munitions at the Manchurian Machine Tool Factory.

The Japanese considered Hoten a model camp, with frequent visits from the Red Cross, bearing mail and supplies. Men still tried to escape. The camp commander, Colonel Matsuda, a short, scowling, bald-headed man who wore thick glasses, addressed the assembled prisoners after three prisoners were captured trying to break out. They were executed.

“It is entirely out of my expectations to see the betrayal, the most outrageous and unfortunate trouble that has been caused recently,” Matsuda read in English from handwritten notes. “Under the vast virtues of his Majesty the Emperor, all the personnel here have treated you with sympathy. But the very three escapees that have dared to go against my wishes may well be said to be absolutely inhuman . . . You yourselves have quitted your fortune and thrown yourself into the state of Hell.”

In photographs before his capture on Bataan, Brigadier General W. E. Brougher looked like a jovial, pipe-chewing hell-raiser. The Mississippi native's diary—hidden inside hollowed bamboo and buried under the barracks—recorded his and the prison camp's deteriorating conditions in
1945
. “I am down
14
pounds in three months,” read an entry from July. “No meat fats or sugar. Food very poor—everybody hungry.” Prisoners' clothing had been reduced to tatters, and the camp guards ordered the digging of more air raid shelters.

On August
8
, two days after the bombing of Hiroshima—unknown to Brougher—he noted, “No flags up for first time.”

On August
9
, when Nagasaki was bombed: “Air raid alarm this morning—men apparently not going to work at factory. Wonder what's up?”

August
15
: “Many rumors of approaching end of war. Men being brought in from branch camps. All men discontinuing work at factories.”

August
16
: “Wildest kinds of rumors all day of end of war. Parachute landing observed near the prison camp about
11
:
30
am . . . [M]any wild rumors were circulated as to their identity.”

Hal Leith looked nothing like Captain America. He was slight, red-haired, and bespectacled, and only selected for Operation Cardinal because he spoke Chinese. After enlisting three years before, the Army had noted his autodidactic fluency in German, French, and Russian, and shipped the Coloradoan to the University of Chicago to learn Chinese for a year. An OSS recruiter visited the campus, soliciting volunteers. Leith was one of a handful of recruits who made it through training on Catalina Island that taught lock picking, message ciphering, and hand-to-hand combat. One look at a USO hostess named Helen disarmed him. He married her, then almost immediately sailed to Melbourne and onward to Calcutta before boarding a train to Burma and the “hump” flight to Kunming that brought him to Xi'an, and, six hours later, down through the Manchurian sky and into a cabbage patch.

“The first thing I said to the farmers was, ‘
Women shi meiguoren,
'” Leith told me. “‘We are Americans. Do you know where the Japanese are?' We didn't have a compass, or any intelligence, really, not even the name of the camp commander. Our plane turned and started dropping food parcels and supplies, and a Japanese fighter intercepted him and missed. A farmer pointed us in a direction—we hadn't ruined any of their cabbages—and we set off walking. It started raining, and then the Japanese found us.”

At the sight of the dozen soldiers, the Chinese member of the team turned and ran. Now Cardinal was down to five. The team's doctor, a Nisei Hawaiian, ordered the Japanese to surrender. They, in reply, clicked their rifle bolts and ordered the Americans to put their hands up.

“No one was yelling,” Leith recalled. “It was a quiet exchange. We were the first active American soldiers these men had seen. They didn't know the war was over.”

The Japanese took Cardinal's pistols, blindfolded the men, and loaded them in the back of a truck. The engines fired. When the truck stopped and his blindfold was removed, Leith saw not an execution ground but the entrance to the Japanese secret police headquarters. “We were offered sake and whiskey. The head of the police admitted that he had heard a rumor about surrender but didn't know what to do. He knew the Russians were on their way: they were
120
miles north, and closing. He agreed to let us make a quick trip to the prison camp.” The Japanese driver said to Leith in English, “I hear you lived in Los Angeles. I've got a brother in LA and wonder if you know him?”

The Cardinal team was lodged in the South Manchuria Railway hotel. The official transmission of surrender arrived from Tokyo the next morning. The highest-ranking Japanese officer asked Leith to witness him commit hara-kiri.

“I asked him not to,” Leith said. “I needed him to assure his soldiers that the war was over.” The officer turned the camp over to the five OSS operatives. Elated, if emaciated, prisoners besieged Leith with pats, handshakes, and questions.
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