Weller's War

by George Weller

  Anyone who crawls through the Infernal Gate with grease in his mouth and mud in his hair is a soldier, a war correspondent, or crazy. Any two guesses are right.

  *Japan's justification for World War II—to dominate China, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, and the rest of the Pacific, thus creating an Asia for Asians. Publicly announced in 1940, the policy had been in force for years.

  *Supreme Allied commander of the Southeast Asia Theatre.

  XX

  Japan Defeated

  Weller was in Chungking, China, when both atomic bombs were dropped (August 6 on Hiroshima, August 9 on Nagasaki) and Japan surrendered (August 14). He hurried to the Philippines, along with hundreds of other reporters, to join MacArthur's invasion force for the treaty signing. He almost immediately ran into trouble with the general's censors—a blockade over his story (now lost) about Corregidor, a Gibraltar in the mouth of Manila Bay. Many American servicemen had been killed or captured bravely trying to defend this U.S. base for five months in 1942 (see Chapter XI). When it was finally taken back by MacArthur's adroit paratroops in February 1945, thousands of enemy died in tunnels dug at the top of the island. Weller, in Manila, fell afoul of a captain in charge of censorship:

  “Having seen and described Japanese skulls from Buna to Myitkyina, I saw no harm in mentioning that there was one skull still underfoot in the exploded tunnels of the Rock. ‘You can't mention that skull; it would allow the enemy to know we have not been able to bury their dead respectably,’ said this unusually deft player. ‘But there is no enemy,’ I said, a little wildly, perhaps. ‘Japan caved in early this month. Didn't the news come through channels yet?’ The censor, without replying, took a nice easy stance and thudded my Japanese skull into the corner wastebasket. The perfect ending to four years of censorship.”

  The August 22 dispatch (“The Iron Curtain of Censorship”) was also totally killed. It provides a preview, only a week after Japan had caved in, of MacArthur's muzzling of the press as a fundamental technique.

  More complicated questions are raised by Weller's first dispatches from Tokyo, “an ashtray filled with the cigarette butts of buildings.” These dispatches, from September 1, were passed by the censors but never published by his newspaper. One was about the radiation effects of the atomic bomb; another would have been the earliest on-the-ground graphic descriptions of the fire-bombings of Tokyo, here described by Weller as a frying pan. (Despite what some historians have suggested was a conspiracy of silence, accounts of these fire-bombings did appear in the mainstream American press a week later.)

  Following the treaty signing in Tokyo Bay on September 2, Weller was the only correspondent who flew south to an island kamikaze base near the southern tip of Kyushu on September 3 to ostensibly cover the landing of American forces. He sent one dispatch the next day, turned in another late the following night to be transmitted, and before dawn on September 5 got a boatman to take him across to the mainland. Then he caught a succession of trains to Nagasaki, where—posing as a U.S. colonel—he spent four days exploring the ruined city (September 6-9).

  On September 10 he made his way north forty miles to Omuta and the largest Allied prison camp in Japan, Camp #17, with seventeen hundred American, British, Dutch, and Australian POWs who had survived years of malnutrition, disease, torture, and forced labor in coal mines. Though some prisoners had seen both atomic bombs explode, Weller's presence was their first proof that the war was over. These events are all recounted in his censored dispatches, in First into Nagasaki. I have included one POW dispatch found after that book's publication.

  I have chosen to conclude this volume with a short story that Weller wrote after leaving Nagasaki by ship for Guam via Okinawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima. It takes place in a POW camp evidently modeled on Omuta #17. “Departure, with Swords and Ashes” was sent to his agent, Harold Ober, from Guam, and published by the Saturday Evening Post in the issue of March 23, 1946. This popular weekly magazine often carried Weller's fiction and journalism, yet the delay suggests that editors thought it better to wait before running such material. The five-thousand-word story includes details of the camps after the recovery teams arrived that did not make it into any of the dispatches, written now not with a reporter's but with a novelist's eye.

  Omuta #17, which the bulk of Weller's censored POW dispatches describe, was one of the harshest such camps in Japan. Its facilities were somewhat better than others'; there was bathing water a few months a year. Its thirty-three buildings, originally laborers' quarters built by the Mitsui Coal Mining Company, had some ventilation—a liability during winter. The coal mines were about a mile walk from camp. Theoretically, men were given a day off every ten days, though sometimes they worked for four weeks straight.

  The owner of the mines, Baron Takaharu Mitsui (1900-1983), a graduate of Dartmouth and world famous as a philatelist, was head of one of the two most powerful industrial families in Japan (along with Mitsubishi), and among the wealthiest men in the country. His mines produced half of its coal, though those at Omuta had been closed down in the 1920s as unsafe. He was well aware of the work and living conditions of the POWs, having visited the camp several times in his open touring car. Like other companies that used Allied prisoners—Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel—Mitsui paid a leasing fee per prisoner of two yen per day, and the government kept the money. Though the prisoners were supposedly paid a wage that was a minuscule fraction of this, very few received anything.

  Because of this prisoner slave labor, such vast companies maintained full production throughout the war. Due to the delay between surrender and the occupation, they were able (unlike equivalent German companies) to obliterate a damning paper trail before the Americans arrived. They persuaded Mac Arthur's representatives that it was in no one's interests to slow down Japan's recovery by holding millionaire industrialists legally and financially responsible for what they had done in wartime. Indeed, many returning American POWs were ordered by intelligence officers never to speak of their experiences under the Japanese unless given military clearance; some were compelled to sign documents to this end.

  The story is rooted in actual events. For example, it describes the Baron Mitsui figure (here called Baron Satsumai) asking the prisoner recovery team over for tea; Major Toth, senior officer among the prisoners, refuses to go, and the head of the recovery team cannot understand why. There is also a discussion of the food trading among U.S. prisoners that so shocked other POW nationalities and which Weller mentions only once in his Chicago Daily News dispatches.

  JAPS, YANKS BEGIN TALKS

  Manila, Philippines—August 20, 1945

  Talks between MacArthur's staff officers and Japanese military envoys, which recessed at noon today, are reducing to military terms the political problem of a peaceful occupation of Japan.

  The talks are being conducted in Manila's former City Hall, one of the less shell-smashed ruins of public buildings. These talks are on what might be termed a police level between Japanese forces and the Allies, with Americans in the leading role as negotiators. Although focused into perhaps unnatural brilliance by being the first contact between victor and vanquished, the talks do not pretend to touch on the central political issues which will eventually determine America's future in Asia. It is as though police chiefs of two rival towns with a long record of hotheaded rivalry were meeting so that the next encounter of explosive forces can be managed with the fewest possible broken heads.

  It is neither a peace conference, a political conference, nor even a surrender conference, but merely a preliminary to a surrender conference. The business of the talks is merely to determine how the U.S. forces shall enter that strategically no longer very important part of East Asia which comprises the Japanese home islands. America's main geopolitical question remains how to control Japan's relations with the Asiatic nations, but it is uncertain whether any progress has been made on this point. While the protection of U.S. interests in the triangle of Korea
, Manchuria and North China is still militarily obscure, the home islands at least may be said to be already under MacArthur's control.

  While businesslike and straightforward in tone, without recriminations or emotions, the two days of talks have been shadowed by future uncertainties. No foreign nation has ever occupied Japan before. In the delegates today there was nothing submissive or broken. These Japanese, although they talked frankly—“sincerely” was the adverb used by one MacArthur spokesman—conducted themselves with the same air of being spiritually intact as characterized by the Emperor's statements and the Domei News Agency's self-righteous broadcasts.

  [With a punctiliousness more appropriate for the victor than the vanquished, Japan informed General MacArthur by radio tonight that Allied parties bent on rescuing prisoners and internees in Mukden, Kijo and Hong Kong have been “made to return to their base.” The Japs coolly suggested that “visits by Allied officers and men before arrangements are made, even if notified in advance, are likely to hamper the realization of our desire to effect smoothly and satisfactorily a cessation of hostilities and a surrender of arms.”]

  These two days of technical military talks have been merely a red, white and blue version of Wainwright's surrender of U.S. forces at Corregidor and Percival's of British at Singapore. What the Americans are after politically in Asia is as foggy as ever, and—judging by the behavior of these delegates—Japan is whipped but does not consider herself tamed.

  THE IRON CURTAIN OF CENSORSHIP

  (This story was never published. Weller scrawled on it:

  “Killed by censorship.”)

  Manila, Philippines—August 22, 1945

  The iron curtain of censorship was clamped down today at MacArthur's headquarters on all details regarding the coming occupation of Japanese-held territory. In the meantime, Tokyo Radio and the Domei News Agency continued to pour forth a flow of purported details of how, when, and where all Japanese-held territory was destined to be occupied.

  This curious situation of the vanquished announcing the details of a coming surrender which the victor grimly refuses either to confirm or to deny can be considered typical of the Pacific situation today. Whereas in Germany, British, American and Russian armies did their occupying first and their talking afterward, Japan seems to be—at least in the eye of MacArthur's headquarters—just as much a problem in logistics and military secrecy after the “unconditional” surrender as before.

  In some senses, this attitude of supersecrecy is undoubtedly justified. Never conquered before in her history, Japan is still a land of the unpredictable. But the paradox has arisen that while MacArthur's planners have been forced to put most details of the forthcoming occupation in Japanese hands in order to insure their success, they cannot—for reasons which may well be good and sufficient—reveal them publicly.

  Meantime, without hindrance or even rebuke, Japanese Radio continues broadcasting to the world that the first American party will land by plane at Atsugi Airdrome on the west side of Yokohama next Sunday, and that the main naval landing will occur on Tuesday at Yokosuka. Because—by reason of many imponderables—responsibility for security has shifted to the Japanese, the initiative for announcements is also theirs, causing some observers to inquire: “Say, who's surrendering here, anyway?”

  [The rest of the dispatch is missing.]

  FREEDOM AT HAND FOR POWS

  Manila, Philippines—August 25, 1945

  Freedom itself will be enough for 32,000 Allied prisoners about to be released in Japan, but hundreds of officers and men are now working to make that freedom sweeter for their comrades awaiting liberation.

  On a cool green hill twenty miles from the dusty chaotic rubble of ruined Manila, a camp of green tents is growing. It is quiet and beautiful. Visiting there today, the writer found the hills like the rolling country of Wisconsin or Michigan. A Dutch prisoner of war—an officer who escaped from Java by submarine at the same time as the writer—thought the countryside was more like Java. Either way, it is perfect because at the 29th Replacement Depot some 7000 Americans will taste liberty in company with some 5000 Dutchmen. Down the road about a mile is the 5th Replacement Depot where some 15,000 British, 5000 Australians and 1000 Canadians will go. These “repple depots” now converted into “recovery centers” face outward on beautiful Laguna de Bay, a freshwater lake about fifteen miles across. Smoky blue mountains shoulder themselves up against the horizon and a delightful breeze never stops blowing.

  Pitifully little is actually known about who or where our prisoners are in Japan. Some information is on hand regarding the location of prison camps. Nearly half those in Japan are within two hundred miles of Tokyo. But due to Japanese noncooperation, almost nothing is known about which soldiers are where.

  The Japanese have offered to assemble all prisoners in seven camps at key points. Whether this offer will be accepted is unknown. One high officer in recovery duties told me today that otherwise the recovery from the Japanese islands might take forty-five to sixty days from the American landing on Sunday.

  Our records on prisoners are naturally fragmentary because of the circumstances under which we lost the Philippines. For example, the writer has searched for two days to find the names of Maywood's famous 192nd Tank Battalion. The best available information here is five names of officers, but none of enlisted men. Their location is simply unknown and will not be disclosed until Japan and Asia itself are searched.

  The men who head the recovery teams and the transit camp to American soil are unsparingly energetic and imaginative. Many tents of this “Freedom House” are pitched on Japanese cement. The enemy selected this site above the lake for a medical supply base. Each of the four battalions in the depots has about 180 men and officers, and can care for 5000 ex-prisoners—but it won't be for long. The aim is that none will stay more than five days before being hustled off to the United States. Everybody is expected to eat from five to eight meals daily—or upward. Originally the mess tables were corrugated in order to keep the boys from dreaming over their coffee. But now, by order of Captain Edward Healy, they are being flattened out. “Let 'em dawdle all they want,” says Healy.

  BOMB'S FATAL EFFECTS CONTINUE

  (This dispatch is stamped Passed By Censors, but was never published.)

  Tokyo, Japan—August 31, 1945

  The atomic bomb holds first place over any other element as the cause of Japan's decision to surrender, according to Japanese civilians with whom I've talked.

  At first the authorities held down newspapers from announcing the bomb's effect on Hiroshima, but leakage began after four or five days. Now the newspaper Asahi, with two million circulation, is planning a book detailing the bomb's effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Japanese censorship was doubly effective because internal circulation was almost halted, and therefore refugees from Hiroshima—and therefore the truth—could not reach Tokyo masses even by gossip.

  When authorities decided to inform people of what might be in store for them, [Japanese] Army members of the Censorship Board had cushioning stories released saying that people in white shirts with sleeves escaped burning, and also that those underground went unscathed. The last story was partly true since the only survivors came from dugouts.

  The government was compelled to release the truth by the fact that many who escaped—as they thought—the effect of the atomic bomb with light wounds went to live with relatives in other cities and died as much as a week after.

  Sadao Maruyama and Keiko Sonoi, an eminent stage actor and movie stage actress, were living in Hiroshima. Both escaped. Maruyama came to Tokyo. After three or four days he began claiming that he felt excessive warmth in his stomach. After five days, the warmth had turned to burning. At the end of a week he suddenly cried to the friend with whom I talked, “I feel as though my insides were burning out.” He rushed to the bathroom, guzzled water and stepped into a cold shower where he abruptly died. An autopsy showed his entrails eaten away.

  Actr
ess Sonoi, after Hiroshima, went to Kobe and telegraphed Tokyo, “I am happy to have been saved.” She had only a small swelling of her wrist. But the swelling spread and soon covered her whole body. Her hair fell out. In approximately a week, she too died.

  These seemingly healthy persons who died many miles from Hiroshima many days afterward were the actual breakers of censorship, who compelled the military to allow the truth to be told about Hiroshima. Small wonder that some Japanese have been asking correspondents: “When will we get scientific equality?”—meaning the secret of the atomic bomb.

  TOKYO IN RUINS

  (This dispatch is stamped Passed By Censors, but was never published.)

  Tokyo, Japan—August 31, 1945

  With American troops still confined to their perimeters around Yokohama and the Yokosuka naval base, the occupation is still not being felt by Tokyo and the rest of Japan. MacArthur and his host generals—like George Kenney, Carl Spaatz, and Lt. General Robert Eichelberger—spent their second day in Japan establishing headquarters on “Consular Row” in Yokohama. With Japanese coastal emplacements now nullified, the prohibition on residences overlooking this magnificent harbor has become a dead letter, and several generals and admirals acquired seaside villas. Businesslike machine guns guard the approaches to these streets, but the air of tension has almost dissipated. Every one of MacArthur's six-foot paratroopers has a post, but the powder keg feeling has gone away.

  The Japanese fear of the American occupation was due to governmental propaganda emphasizing that Americans plundered and raped wherever they conquered. Ninety-nine per cent of Japan's masses are still enmired in this propaganda and will not know better until proof is offered. Yokohama is an example in that the chief of the civil police force “suggested” that all women and girls should leave Japan's first seaport by August 26, two days before the American landing, in order to protect their virtue. One result was that the streetcar system instantly broke down because all motoresses and conductorettes fled. Now they are returning. But in Tokyo many daughters have been sent to the country by families for the same reason. American officers treat this situation with a kindly tolerance slightly mixed with derision. “Our boys won't look at the girls unless the girls look at them,” one general told the writer.