Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  “They are absolutely not winning this war,” Gar said.

  “Bravo,” the doctor said, glancing out the window at the two guards. “And we are all dying, literally in some cases, to hear the latest news. But do not for one moment allow that notion to surface in front of even the lowliest Jappo out there. Understood? You get stroppy, we might all die.”

  Gar nodded. “Got it. I’m new to all this, and you guys obviously know how to play this game. I will do my utmost not to cause trouble, but someone’s going to have to educate me on how to act around the Japs.”

  “Fear not, Commander,” the doc said, indicating the guards outside with his chin. “You will receive daily instruction.”

  * * *

  The resident POWs, some twenty men, came out of the coal mine a half hour later. They were indistinguishable from the coal they’d been working all day. The new prisoners watched as they passed through a barbed wire man-gate, where they were given a cursory search and then sent through a small fire-hose station, where a bored-looking guard hosed them down one by one. It was a small fire hose, maybe an inch in diameter, but the men were so weak they had to hold on to the wire to keep from being knocked down by the stream. Their soaking-wet clothes highlighted their skeletal frames, and about a third of them had to be helped by one of the others just to make it down the hill from the mine and into the barracks enclosure. Even after everything this new crew of Brits had endured on their long voyage from Southeast Asia, they looked to be in better shape than these poor bastards. The new prisoners moved away from the windows and clustered at the back of the barracks among the empty bunk beds.

  The “residents” trooped in a silent single file up the steps between the two sneering guards and into the common room of the barracks. They went to the three tables grouped together in the middle of the room and sat down, side by side, on long wooden benches. They gave no indication that they’d seen the new people, and they looked to be so exhausted it was possible that they didn’t even know others were there. Each man sat hunched over the wooden table, his forearms on the table, hands splayed out in front, head bowed, as if in communal prayer. Even from across the room Gar thought they smelled of near-death. Then one of them, an older-looking man in the first seat next to the doors, gave a quiet order.

  “You lot back there,” he said, in a fairly refined British accent. “Don’t move.”

  Okay, so they did know there were new people, Gar thought. There were no lights on in the barracks, only the glow from some of the perimeter spots out along the metal fence. Then the front doors opened, and a tiny old man came into the room with a basket filled with rice balls. He set the basket on the table nearest to the door and scuttled back out. He returned carrying a galvanized 2-gallon oilcan with a long, flexible metal spout, which he also put on the table. Then he left, muttering to himself, and the guards pulled the doors shut behind him.

  “Rations,” the older man said. He picked up the basket, extracted one rice ball, and passed the basket down the table. Each man took one ball of rice and began to eat it, holding it in his blackened hands and nibbling the individual grains, chewing each grain slowly as if it hurt his teeth. Once everyone had finished his rice, two men got up and between them carried the oil can down the line, allowing each prisoner to have two audible gulps of whatever was in the can—water, Gar presumed. It was almost ritualistic, what they were doing, but it was clear they could all see that the resident prisoners’ individual focus didn’t go past the next moment. Rice. Eat. Water. Drink.

  “Benjo detail,” the older man said. Once again, two of the healthier-looking men got up and helped two very sick-looking men to the front door. The guards opened the doors and let the four of them out. The older man looked over at them. “Anyone needs the loo, now is the time,” he said. About half of the new group started forward toward the doors, but the older man put up a hand. “In ranks, single file, heads down, hands flat at your sides, wait at the doors until they tell you to come out, and then go out one at a time. Do not look at them.”

  The new prisoners looked at each other and then formed the single line. They’d already found two piss-tubes in the back of the barracks; benjo detail was for more serious alimentary functions, especially for the men who were experiencing severe GI problems. The two men being helped out to the latrines were skeletal in the spotlights. Their skin was jaundiced and stretched across their cheekbones like parchment. Several of the others weren’t in much better shape. Considering what they’d been through, and for how long, Gar realized that his captivity so far, beatings and bombings included, had probably been a cakewalk.

  The original group of prisoners left the tables and hobbled to their racks. Major Morris took Gar over and introduced him to the older man, who turned out to be another army major, Willingham by name, an artilleryman from a Yorkshire regiment. Gar’s rank as a navy commander was theoretically equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the army, and thus he was now the senior officer in the camp. Theoretically.

  “Congratulations,” Willingham said with a weak smile. “Do you have the vaguest idea of what you’re supposed to do?”

  “None whatsoever,” Gar said.

  “Lovely,” he said with a sigh. “What do you think, Dr. Morris?”

  “I think we should leave things just as they are,” Morris said immediately. “You are look older than the commander here, and the Jappos respect age more than some table of equivalent ranks.”

  “I agree wholeheartedly,” Gar said before Willingham could say anything. “I know nothing about what to do here. I could get us all killed.”

  Willingham gave him a long stare. He was thin as a rail and weary beyond measure. His eyes were hollow and rheumy. There was coal dust in every seam of his face and hands. He looked to be in his seventies but was probably only a few years older than Gar was.

  “Are you quite sure, Commander?” he asked. “As Senior One, you would have some protection from the more sadistic of the guards. As the lone American, well…”

  “I understand, Major,” Gar said. “For a little while they thought I was going to be useful to them. I was being taken to some place called Ofuna, near Tokyo, but after the Kure bombing, I think I got lost in the shuffle.”

  “Ofuna is the navy’s POW center. It has a rather harsh reputation. You won’t think so, but you’re probably better off here.”

  “Even when the commandant uses us for a urinal?”

  “That wasn’t the commandant. That was the political officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kai. Kempeitai bastard. Fanatical like the whole lot of them. The commandant is Colonel Kashiwabara. Southerner. Has his family in Nagasaki. Not fanatical, which is probably why Kai was assigned.”

  “He looked ready to pull that sword and make all our heads roll.”

  “He is always ready to do that. Has Major Morris explained to you about the order to execute all the prisoners when the invasion begins?”

  “He has.”

  “Do you have any idea of when an invasion might come?”

  “Okinawa, any day now,” Gar said. “The Philippines are back in human hands. Guam, Tinian, too. Your guys have most of Burma back in the British fold. The Home Islands, late this year, early next year.”

  “Okinawa could be considered a home territory,” Morris said. All Gar could do was shrug. Okinawa was a thousand miles from Japan proper.

  Senior One asked how Gar came to be captured, and he related what had happened to him since they were surprised near Bungo Suido. As they were talking, men began returning from the benjo detail, and a guard started yelling into the barracks. Senior One put up his hand and told Gar and Major Morris to get the new people into bunks.

  “We’ll talk more later,” he said. “Sorry about no food. There’s a water pipe in the back of the barracks. Don’t let the guards see you using it.”

  “Why no food?” Gar asked.

  “You haven’t earned any,” he said. “Yet.”

  * * *

  Their day began at da
wn. They’d be rousted out of their unheated barracks and given one golf ball of pasty white rice and two swallows of warm mystery fluid masquerading as either tea or soup—they could never tell which, but they consumed it religiously because that was going to be it until evening. The mine was bored into a high ridge that lay between them and the northeastern environs of Hiroshima City, which was just on the other side. Unbelievably, the guards would make them do morning calisthenics, if one could call it that. They were a squadron of wobbly skeletons going through the motions of flapping their arm and leg bones in the morning twilight while the guards did the real thing, constantly mocking the prisoners as they flailed weakly, trying not to fall into each other; the really sick ones lay back against the outside walls of the barracks, leaking at both ends. This was followed by the daily bowing ceremony, where they were forced to bow to a highly stylized picture of the emperor mounted in a boxy little shrine outside the commandant’s office. Anyone not bowing “sincerely” would be hustled off to the punishment cells by two guards. They’d pass a stick between the prisoner’s legs, jerk-lift him onto it, and trot across the grounds to the steel-sided building, making sure to keep their arms nice and rigid in the process. Earlier in the war officers had been exempted from slave labor, but things were very different now.

  The POWs would then be marched, sometimes through snow, to the mine entrance, where everyone was searched. They never figured out what the Japs were looking for, but they were always searched, going in and coming back out. Then they’d crawl into enclosed transporter cars hooked together in a train, where six of them would be squeezed into a tiny compartment made for four Japanese, requiring them to bend their heads onto their knees. The train was parked on a slight incline leading down into the mine, so a guard would simply release the brakes and it would start moving down into the dark and the heat, eventually to the accompaniment of squealing brakes as it gathered speed. The tunnels were wide enough for two sets of tracks but only 5 feet from floor to ceiling. Once they got to the coal face, they’d crawl out and then lift the cars of the people-carrier from one track to the one alongside so that it could be pulled back up. The next train down would bring the regular mine workers and more guards.

  The day consisted of using picks and shovels to gather up the coal that had been blasted by the all-Japanese night shift, prisoners not being trusted around explosives. They’d load individual coal skips, and then four of them would push the loaded, half-ton cars back out to the main chamber, where an engine would then take eleven at a time back out to the mine entrance. To Gar’s surprise, most of the main tunnels in this mine were unsupported, which led to a lot of cave-ins, usually when they were blasting. The Japs were apparently used to that. The night shift would get trapped behind a rockfall. The prisoners and other Jap miners would clear it all out, and the night shift would come out looking none the worse for wear. It scared the hell out of the prisoners, of course.

  There was little forced ventilation down there, so it was always hot and wet. During the winter, that was better than wet and cold, but by the end of July those of them who could still stand and work were on their last legs. Initially they’d been beaten for any infraction, real or imagined. As the summer wore on and the effective working numbers shrank, the Japs stopped doing that, probably because they realized why production was falling. Senior One’s prediction about Gar being the lone American turned out to be spot on, as the Brits would say. It was bad enough for the Brits and the few Dutchmen in their group, but the guards made sure Gar knew how happy they were to have a Yank in the mix. A couple of times he was beaten senseless, only to wake up down in the mine, where he was expected to immediately get back to work. There were times he couldn’t even stand up. The guards would then drag him over to the coal-skip rails at the head of the tunnel. He’d either move himself or be run over. He learned to just lie there, resting, until he felt the thrumming vibrations in the steel tracks that told him a train was coming down. Then and only then he’d crawl off the tracks. The guards would laugh, and money would change hands. The whole thing had been a bet.

  TWENTY-NINE

  At the end of his first month in the camp, Gar had a near-fatal confrontation with the guards at the face. He’d started work as usual but then realized four guards were watching him and talking something over, which sounded like they were working themselves up to a little fun with the American prisoner. The shortest one, who looked like a caricature of a Japanese soldier on an American propaganda poster, wandered over and demanded something in Japanese. The other POWs pretended not to notice, mostly to avoid a stick across their backs. Gar had no idea of what the man wanted, so he stood there, head down, not looking at the increasingly agitated soldier. One of the other guards came up behind him and whacked Gar’s hands with his baton where they held the crude pick. Gar dropped the pick and folded his stinging hands into his stomach. The guards then indicated he should get back to work, but using his hands rather than a pick to claw down bits of coal from the seam.

  Gar tried but made no headway. The coal wasn’t very good quality, but he could not force any of it out of the seam. The guards laughed at him and “encouraged” him to try harder with their bamboo batons. He didn’t know what to do, which was probably the whole point. The little soldier was the most aggressive; he kept badgering Gar with his stick and then with his boots until Gar snapped. Whirling in place, he landed a right cross to the soldier’s face that almost snapped his neck and certainly broke his jaw. The soldier went flying across the workspace and lay still in a heap under one of the coal carts.

  For one moment there was stunned silence, but then the remaining guards, all yelling at the top of their lungs, converged on Gar with their sticks. Gar rolled into a ball and then scuttled under a second coal cart to escape the beating. He wasn’t thinking anymore, just reacting. Suddenly the beating stopped and hands were grabbing at his legs. He kicked back at them, but it was no use. He simply wasn’t strong enough. When they pulled him out from under the coal car, one of the Jap sergeants was standing there with a pistol in his hand. Gar figured this was it and, at that juncture, almost didn’t care. The other prisoners had stopped working when Gar had cold-cocked the little Jap.

  The sergeant said something to Gar in Japanese. One of the Brits, who apparently understood, told Gar to stand up. He did so, slowly, alert for another bashing. The sergeant said something else, indicating with his pistol that Gar was to turn around and start marching. Gar couldn’t figure out which way the sergeant wanted him to go, as there were four tunnels converging at the coal face, so he picked the main tunnel going back up to the mine entrance. The sergeant yelled at him and indicated he was going the wrong way. He then pointed his pistol down a side tunnel leading away and down from the coal face. Gar complied, stepping over the narrow-gauge tracks and their ties. The sergeant remained behind him, well out of range of any tricks Gar might try, as they crunched their way deeper into the tunnel. The lights strung overhead became more infrequent, but Gar had no illusions about getting away from the sergeant.

  Finally they came to what looked like the end of the tunnel. Gar stopped up against the rock face, hands at his sides, waiting to see what would happen. He half-expected to hear the pistol and feel a bullet drilling through him, but then he felt a strong hand grab his hair from behind and an even stronger knee in his back, bending him backward like a bow. He windmilled his arms instinctively trying to stay upright as the sergeant pulled him backward to one side of the tunnel. He could smell the man’s fishy breath as he leaned in close, his pistol barrel digging into Gar’s neck. The sergeant said something in a low, incomprehensible growl, then at last jerked Gar to the right and kicked his feet out from under him. Gar felt himself dropping into darkness and then colliding with a steep slope of rock and gravel as he continued falling, accompanied now by a small avalanche of gravel and dust. After what seemed like an eternity, the slope began to flatten out until he was brought up short against a rock wall. His friendly avalanche pr
oceeded to bury his lower legs before subsiding into silence and total darkness. Then the guard up at the top started shooting.

  The tunnel did strange things to the sound of gunfire, but the bullets whacking into the surrounding dirt and howling off the rock walls as they ricocheted in the darkness sounded just like bullets. He felt a tug on the fabric of his right sleeve, and another one on his left leg, blunted by the fact that there was nearly a foot of dirt and gravel on top of his leg. Then he heard a yell from way up above and realized that something was coming down. Instinctively he jerked his feet out of the scree and slithered across the bottom of the hole until his face whacked into solid rock. A moment later something heavy arrived at the bottom in a second hail of loose rock, gravel, and coal dust, followed by the unmistakable sound of a bone snapping in the darkness. The snap was punctuated by a loud scream. Then silence.

  Gar didn’t know what had happened or what to do next. He couldn’t see a thing, and every breath he took was full of dust. Then he realized his eyes were clamped shut. He opened them cautiously, still flattened against a solid rock wall. He had to blink several times to get the dust out of his stinging eyes. Then he thought he heard something. He listened carefully. Something was down there with him, moaning occasionally. He looked in the direction that he thought was up and discerned a grayish circle at the very top of the shaft. His eyes filled with tears as the coal dust irritated them, and his vision began to swim. He blinked rapidly until it cleared again. Then came another moan from somewhere in front of him. He finally figured out what had happened: Some part of the hole had caved in, and the sergeant had joined him at the bottom of the pit.