Two weeks later, a paper angel came via Switzerland. He could not believe what he held: a letter from his mother. She had put her tender hands on that very paper. He could see a few dents in the strokes on the paper, the pen almost making its way through the page. He knew she had written the letter at the kitchen table without putting a book under the paper. The letter was short and to the point:
You are desperately missed. You are loved.
He smelled the paper, held it close to his face.
He was permitted to write a response. He told his mother he was fine, but his handwriting gave him away. He told her he loved her, and not to worry because he was swell, and to keep the old chin up until they met again.
It was the finest letter he ever penned.
By the summer of 1943, the war had begun to go badly for the Japanese Imperial Army. The death toll was staggering. The Japanese military machine required more able bodies to work in their nation’s foundries, shipyards, and mines. They needed steel and coal, bullets and fuel. They needed to arm their soldiers with something—anything—as the Americans inched closer to the island.
And so began the Japanese “draft.” The men who were able to walk from one side of a two-lane road to the other won the draft. From one red chalk line to another was about twenty-three steps. The prize was a one-way ticket to Japan.
Letter from Ralph MacLean to his mother from North Point POW camp, November 29, 1941
Ralph was a winner. He felt a certain relief. He imagined it would be a welcome change. It was their homeland; surely there’d be more food, more provisions, cleaner conditions. How could it get any worse?
At dawn on August 15, 1943, the 276 men who had been able to walk the twenty-three steps the previous evening were marched to the dock beyond the south gate of Shamshuipo. As the gate opened, Ralph made out the ship’s name: The SS Morningstar. It was an ocean liner. His heart jumped. Maybe, just maybe, things were looking up.
He had never been more wrong in his life.
Even the past two years could not have prepared Ralph for the test he was about to face. He was stepping onto a hell ship, aptly named by the men who would survive the journey.
Ralph was in the middle of the parade march along the dock and up the ship’s ramp, so he could see the men in front of him. He knew his way around a ship. As soon as he set foot on the deck, he knew exactly where the line was heading. He braced himself the only way he knew how. He took a deep breath and kept putting one foot in front of the other. Down the stairs the line went, into the guts of the ship. The man in front of him whispered something about beds in the interior cabins. Nope, Ralph thought. They made their way past the mess hall, past the engine room, down another flight of metal steps. The tall men ducked and held the rail. Several slipped on the polished metal track, their bare feet no longer accustomed to walking on metal. Ralph could hear the shouts of a Japanese guard.
“In!” A guttural growl.
He saw the barrel of a mounted machine gun well before he saw the doorway. He knew why it was needed. As it became clear to the man in front of him what was happening, his shoulders slumped and he began to convulse. Ralph realized he must be claustrophobic, and he knew that the man was hyperventilating and about to go into shock. He put a hand on his shoulder.
“Stay steady.”
They were only fifteen paces away from the machine gun. As soon as each man stepped through the doorway, he disappeared. They were walking into the void. The ship’s cargo hull. Hell.
Ralph’s eyes were on the Japanese soldier manning the machine gun. The soldier was perched on a chair, his finger on the trigger. He was in firing position. Ralph was careful not to make eye contact. He knew the man wanted to pull the trigger. The soldier stared at each of them as they passed, daring them, begging them to give him a reason to shoot.
Ralph feared that the man in front of him would provide just that reason. He knew how bullets would spray out of the barrel now a mere ten paces away. They would kill half a dozen men on either side of the target, himself included.
He squeezed the man’s shoulder. “Steady. You’re going to be okay. Don’t panic,” he reassured him. “Stay with me.”
The man was sobbing silently as they passed the soldier with the gun. Ralph closed his eyes, unsure if he’d ever open them again.
There was no burst from the barrel.
Ralph had no time to feel relief. He opened his eyes to a darkness that went well beyond the absence of light. He could feel the man in front of him move into full hyperventilation, gasping for breath. Ralph lost him in the shuffle as each man searched in vain for a spot to claim. The cargo hull had barely enough room for thirty men to lie down. There were more than one hundred to accommodate.
They were encased in metal. There were no blankets, chairs, or beds. They were cargo. The only concessions they received were a bucket of rice—some cooked, some not—and an empty pail, both lowered down on a rope. With that, the hatch was sealed and the ship’s engines roared.
Within hours, the small pail was overflowing with human waste. Ralph’s excrement piled up in his pants until they too overflowed. He moved only when the hatch cracked open and more rice was lowered down. They were worse off than cattle. Worse than rats. Each hour, the air grew thickener with the stink of waste and human decay. Ralph would not see a ray of light for seven days.
The men tried their best to alternate between standing and lying. They tried to ensure that those who became too ill to move were granted space. They tried to allow one another to sleep. They were struggling for their sanity first and their lives second. Bouts of panic would rip through the hull, as contagious as diphtheria. It needed to be quashed or it could overtake them all.
For three days Ralph sat with his head resting on his knees. He went inside himself, as deep as he could go. These were the darkest hours of his life.
The war was not going well for the Japanese, in large part because the Americans owned the sea. The Japanese navy had been sunk months ago during the Battle of Midway. The Japanese Merchant Fleet had also been largely relegated to the bottom of the sea. American submarines prowled the Pacific. They had no way of knowing that the SS Morningstar carried 276 Canadians.
The ship had to dock in Formosa to hide from U.S. subs. The men were permitted to leave the cargo hull for a few hours. While on deck, Ralph spotted a pail of water. He plunged his hands into the pail and splashed his face and drank three gulps from his cupped hands. He could hear boots approaching but he didn’t care. He had not had any water in over three days. If he didn’t drink, he was going to die. It was worth the beating he knew he was about to take. He felt the soldier pull him up by the back of his baggy shirt, which strained against his neck. The guard spun him around and pushed him against the ship’s metal wall. He felt a rail gouge into his lower back. The soldier yelled and hit him twice in the face. Ralph felt the wetness still inside his mouth and tried to hide his smile.
The forced stop rattled many of the men. As they descended back into the cargo hull, they were descending into their own minds. If a submarine torpedo struck, the explosion would rip into the hull. There would be no survivors. By the third day—or at least what seemed to be the third day—Ralph could hear one man praying for just that. “Send a torpedo. Send a torpedo. Send a torpedo.” Over and over, for hours on end. Barely audible, but it rang in everyone’s ears in the dark of that stifling hull. Finally, mercifully, someone shut the man up.
The second leg of the journey ravaged Ralph’s body. For seven days, he sat unable to move, eating only a few handfuls of rice, drinking little more than those three stolen gulps of water. Again he saw no light.
When the shipped docked in Osaka, he was unable to move. His body had withered in the dark and the cold. Feces clung to his back, his buttocks, and his legs. His hair was coarse with salt and urine. Every man was seared by the experience on the hell ship, and Ralph was no exception. Some men were completely broken. Some wept openly as they deboarded.
/> One thing was for sure: they had left Hong Kong as POWs and arrived in Japan as slave labourers. A contingent of soldiers waited for them at the end of the dock. The first one hundred men were loaded onto cattle cars and immediately shipped to a camp north of Kyoto. The remaining 165 men went by train to Niigata.
The train ride was hours of motion in the dark. The windows were covered with black cloth. One man managed to tear a hole in the cloth and catch a glimpse of the Japanese countryside. He was impressed with what he saw. Ralph didn’t see any of it. Too weak to sit up, he lay on the dirty floor for the duration of the trip. When they arrived at the camp, he was put on a stretcher and laid in the courtyard beside several other men.
The camp commandant addressed them, brandishing a Katana sword. The gist of his welcoming remarks was, You will all live the rest of your days here. You are swine and I’ll cut your head off with this sword if you do not obey me or work for me.
The guards split the men into three groups. The first group went to the foundry. These men would toil next to molten steel and furnaces, spending their days sweating out all the salt they desperately tried to consume while away from the foundry.
The second group went to the dockyard. While these men had to face the cold, damp northern air, they had ample opportunity to scavenge rice and beans from the broken bags they unloaded from the supply ships. They would tie their pant legs at the ankles and pour the rice straight down their pants. The trick was not to get too greedy and come off the dock looking like a stuffed toy.
The final group were the truly unlucky. They were assigned to the coal yard, where they would spend fourteen-hour days outside pushing around loaded coal cars with their bare hands and feet. There were no safety rails on the tracks, so if they slipped they’d fall to certain death in the water below.
Ralph had not been assigned to any work group. He was too weak to walk. Afraid that he’d be bayoneted on the spot, he tried to stand, but his legs buckled under him. He had lost half of his body mass. His bones jutted out of his skin like bamboo shoots. His face was gaunt. He was, again, very near death. He was taken away from the courtyard to the infirmary on a stretcher and left there.
A guard approached Ralph and began to take his shoes off. Ralph protested, kicking his feet about and telling him to stop. This angered the soldier. He pulled Ralph by the collar of his shirt and punched him square in the nose. Ralph’s blood gushed onto both their chests. This made the soldier more furious.
“No work—no boots!”
Another punch was levelled.
Ralph spent his first night in Japan bloodied, shoeless, and immobilized.
Those who could not work were given less food. He was not in an infirmary. He was on death row.
Ralph would have died in that room but for another angel. This one did not come with a red cross. This was a living, breathing angel. This angel was from Welland, Ontario. His name was Henry Marsolais. For the next three months, every single night Henry would come back from his work detail, stand in line for his slop, and bring Ralph anything he could get his hands on. It was mostly rice gruel with a piece of leaf affectionately known as green horror. If he was lucky, he might get a thumbnail-size piece of fish. It would have had to be poison for Ralph not to eat it.
By November Ralph was able to walk again, albeit slowly. The Canadian commanding officers knew he would still not last a day on a work detail. One of them remembered Ralph had been in charge of the liquor chest in Gander, Newfoundland. They knew that the Japanese camp commandant was a heavy drinker. He and his senior officers needed someone to help with menial tasks around their quarters. Ralph could be trusted to keep his head down and not do anything stupid.
His first act of labour in Japan was to take a plate full of steamed fish and shaved daikon to Commandant Tetsutaro Kato. Commandant Kato, or “four eyes,” as the Canadians would refer to him, was infamous for his callous cruelty. He had ordered and committed some terrible acts. A few days after Ralph started his duties, two men, an American and a Canadian, were caught committing some misdemeanor. As punishment, both were stripped down to their undershirts and trousers and tied to a stake hammered into the frozen ground. In order to stay alive, they were forced to jog around the stake for the entire night. The other men lay helplessly in their hut listening to their comrades grunt and groan. At dawn, they awoke to the terrible sound of rifle butts beating the men. The American’s body was left at the stake. His head was split open and pieces of his brain had frozen to the ground.
Miraculously, Mortimer survived both the night and the dawn beating. But his frostbitten body became ravaged by gangrene. His flesh rotted and for weeks he suffered in unspeakable agony as the decomposition continued its relentless march. He literally died from the toes up.
This episode solidified Commandant Kato’s standing in the eyes of every man on the camp. He was a monster.
But Ralph came to know that he was also a learned man. Born into an influential Tokyo family, Kato had gone to university and socialized with scholars, business leaders, and politicians. He had a bright future ahead of him. Then he was commissioned into the army and sent to Manchuria. There, he started to drink heavily. He arrived in Niigata an angry drunkard.
The war had robbed Kato of many things, but not his curiosity. He called Ralph by his last name, which sounded like “Mac-u-rane.” One night, Ralph had finished opening the second bottle of whisky for him and was about to return to the mess hall when Kato spoke softly, showing no sign of being intoxicated.
“Mac-u-rane. Wife?”
Ralph looked closely at Kato’s face. He didn’t want to speak, but an answer was expected.
“No,” he said. He did not bow. He had forgotten. The slight went unnoticed or ignored.
“Mac-u-rane, drive car?”
This was by far the longest Ralph had ever spoken to a Japanese person. Kato also happened to be the highest-ranking Japanese person he’d ever come into contact with. He wanted to keep this short, tight, non-offensive.
“Yes, a truck. Back home.”
“Ah, back a home.” Kato looked past Ralph. He didn’t say anything else, just nodded and seemed to be lost in thought. Maybe he was thinking about his home, maybe he was imagining Ralph’s. Either way, Ralph saw an exit and took it. As he slid the door shut behind him, he saw Kato in the dim light of his hut, smoke from his pipe filling the room. He was still nodding and repeating the word home.
Both of them were so very far away from it.
On the night of December 31, 1944, a heavy snowfall was not able dampen the men’s New Year’s Eve celebration. Those in Ralph’s hut scraped together the few cigarettes they had and passed them around. Ralph rolled away from them, hoping that 1945 would bring an end to all of this. It turned out to be a classic case of being careful what you wish for.
Each sleeping hut housed one hundred and eighty men. The huts were built of wood and had a dirt floor. They had been hastily set up. The Japanese had not anticipated capturing prisoners, let alone bringing them to Japan. Nor had they anticipated the record snowfalls that year. The hut roofs were lined with heavy tiles. Two levels of sleeping planks, seven feet long, were attached to opposite walls. The top bunks were five feet above the lower ones. Each man had a rice-straw mat for bedding. Ralph’s hut had a pesky hole in the roof where one of the heavy tiles had blown off a few nights earlier, allowing the wind to howl through. Everyone felt sorry for the poor chap who slept below the hole, but nobody offered to switch places.
The hut’s night watchman was finishing his rounds. He was just entering Ralph’s hut to return to his bunk when he heard a loud crack. It sounded like a baseball bat knocking a hardball out of the park. The wood was moving, bending. As the watchman stared from the threshold, the doorway shifted sideways as the entire building collapsed under the weight of the snow.
Ralph awoke to someone or something hitting him on the shoulder. He thought it was a guard pounding him with one of those despised clubs. One of the two-foot ceil
ing beams had slammed into his shoulder, missing his skull by an inch and knocking him off his platform to the dirt floor. Amazingly unharmed, he stood up. He rubbed the dust out of his eyes and looked up; he saw a sky full of stars and felt heavy snow falling on his face. He looked down and saw the roof of the hut spread out around him. He was standing in the gap left by the missing tile. Men inches to the left and right of him had been crushed. He heard the cries of injured and dying men around him and registered the gravity of the situation. One hundred and seventy-eight men were trapped. The night watchman was already running to alert everyone. Ralph stood exactly where he was.
Collapsed hut at Shamshuipo POW camp, January 1, 1944
Other POWs ran to the scene and desperately tried to dig through the rubble with their bare hands. They were pulling men out when the guards’ whistles stopped all efforts. Worried about men escaping, they wanted to count the prisoners. All rescue ceased as the men lined up in the parade square, helplessly staring at the pile of wood and snow. They knew that as they stood there being counted off, their buried friends were dying. Tears ran down their cheeks.
Ralph would think later that it was ironic. Of all the things that had taken him to the edge—bullets, mortars, bayonets, diphtheria, the hellship journey—of all these things, it was snow that had come closest to sending this Canadian boy to his grave.
Eight men died that night under the rubble, three-and-a-half hours into the new year, their third in captivity.
If only that had been the final degradation. The bodies had frozen, and in order to fit them into the Japanese caskets, the living were forced to break the bodies. Legs, ribs, and pelvises were snapped, folded, and jammed into the wooden boxes. The men left alive lost a part of themselves that morning as they lowered the eight broken bodies into the frozen ground.
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