by Larry Colton
Chuck felt the engines reverse, then stop. The men were ordered out of the hold and up on deck, then led down a gangplank and loaded onto trucks; the flaps were quickly closed to block their view. They did not know it, but they had landed in Singapore. It was August 10, 1943, and all of the men were still together. Nobody knew the whereabouts or condition of Fitzgerald or two other officers who were missing.
Singapore had been heralded as an “impregnable fortress” and considered the strongest of all British bastions. But in February 1942 it had fallen to the Japanese after only seven days of battle, the largest surrender in British history; over 50,000 British and Australian troops were captured, as well as most of the European citizens living there.
After a twenty-minute ride, the trucks stopped and the crew climbed down and surveyed their new surroundings, a large fenced internment area encircled by barbed wire. Inside the fence stood thatched huts built on stilts; a short ladder allowed entry. The men were marched into the yard, then separated, seven or eight assigned to each hut.
For the next forty-six days, the camp would be their home. Each day they were loaded onto trucks and driven to an abandoned horse-racing track. Chuck imagined it in better times, filled with elegantly dressed patrons, magnificent thoroughbreds, and jockeys in beautiful silk colors.
The men picked weeds on their hands and knees for ten hours under the brutally hot sun, with no water or food. Chuck’s back ached relentlessly and his knuckles were scraped raw. Some days the guards ordered the crew to go back to where they’d started picking and do a better job. Each day on the other side of the track he could see Japanese troops training, the sergeants screaming and slapping the trainees with the same ferocity that the guards at the Convent at Light Street had treated the American prisoners. It was more proof, not that he needed any, that these people were savages. He took consolation in the fact that compared with the treatment the crew had received in Penang, this camp was more humane. The rice portions at night were a little bigger, the harassment and beatings from the guards not as frequent, and they weren’t constantly awakened in the middle of the night. They received cigarettes, and were allowed to shave and bathe. For the first time in months Chuck felt clean. He could survive this, he believed.
He even joined a discussion about an escape plan. The details of the plan were vague, but the idea was to tunnel under the fence, then hollow out logs and use them as canoes to paddle to one of the many small islands bordering Singapore. The whole crew would have to be included; as they had in Penang, the guards made it clear that if anyone tried to escape, anyone left behind would be severely punished or killed.
To Chuck, it seemed impossible that such a plan could succeed. Still, if men he considered smarter and wiser than he thought it was worth risking, who was he not to go along? Besides, an escape plan gave him hope, and if there was one thing he and his crewmates needed, it was hope. In time, however, the plan was abandoned when it was concluded that even if they got away safely, they would have no place to go. “What are we gonna do … paddle to America?” said Chuck.
At night in their huts, the men shared stories of the different types of interrogation and torture they’d suffered in Penang. Everyone had a story. Bob Palmer told how a bamboo sliver had been jammed under his fingernail and set on fire, and his other fingernails had been pulled off with a pair of pliers. Chuck described how a guard had held his head while another burned off his eyebrows and lashes with the flame of a candle.
The rumor spread that the crew was to be transferred to another prison camp; maybe to China, or to Japan. On September 24, 1943, they were loaded back on trucks, taken to the dock, and marched at gunpoint onto the Asama Maru; it was much larger than the ship that had brought them to Singapore. Chuck had a bad feeling about what lay ahead.
26
Bob Palmer
POW
In 1943, Americans back home knew nothing about Japanese Hell Ships. These unmarked vessels, usually freighters, were used to transport American POWs to Japan, China, Manchuria, or Korea to be used as slave labor. Because the ships were unmarked, the U.S. Navy had no way of knowing POWs were crammed into their holds; thousands of captured American soldiers and sailors, men who had already endured months of torture, malnutrition, and disease in prison camps, had already been killed by American torpedoes and bombs. Built in 1925 as a passenger ship, the Asama Maru, part of a convoy of Japanese ships in the South China Sea sailing north from Singapore, was such a ship.
It was hard for Bob Palmer to look at his crewmates, now so emaciated and dressed in rags. Along with other prisoners, Bob showed signs of beriberi. A disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1, it was rarely seen in America, but it was common in countries where white rice was a staple food. It could be easily cured by a change in diet or by vitamin supplements, neither of which would be forthcoming from their captors. Bob also had a tingling, burning pain in his legs, then a feeling of stiffness and heaviness, symptoms due to lack of exercise, as well as all the bending and squatting he’d been forced to do while pulling weeds on the track in Singapore.
The ship had been on the seas for eight days when a loud explosion jarred Bob from his sleep in the middle of the night. He recognized the sound of an exploding torpedo; it sounded as if it had hit one of the nearby ships in the convoy.
In response there was a series of smaller explosions—depth charges being dropped on an American sub below. Bob knew the terror those submariners were feeling; he wondered if he’d ever been out drinking beers back in Perth with any of the guys on that sub.
The attack lasted for about an hour, and when the guards returned they were noticeably surlier. Bob figured that one of the ships in the convoy must have been sunk, and the Grenadier crew was now going to pay the price.
A sense of doom swept through the crew. Maybe they weren’t going to get off the ship alive. Maybe they’d be beaten to death, or torpedoed, or taken up on the deck and pushed overboard. Who would ever know? Bob closed his eyes and thought about Barbara. He imagined the two of them holding hands and sitting on a big boulder next to the rushing waters of the Rogue River, a picnic lunch, including an apple pie, spread out next to them.
After a couple of more days at sea, Bob felt the ship’s engines reverse and its forward motion stop; the engines shut down. They had arrived at a port, but where?
Bob heard a commotion and looked up to see a dozen screaming Japanese charging down the stairs, carrying rifles with bayonets fixed. They were drunk. Bob saw that they were Imperial Marines, much larger and more solidly built than the crew of the Asama Maru. The biggest marine, a broad-shouldered guy over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, walked over to the foot of the stairs and yanked out one of the oak handrails. It was eight feet long and five inches around.
The crew was herded out of the compartment onto the landing hatch. A guard signaled Bob to step out of the line and stand on the hatch cover, hands over his head. He did as instructed. Holding the handrail like a baseball bat, the biggest marine stepped behind him and took a vicious swing, connecting to the lower part of Bob’s back. The force of the blow lifted him off his feet and drove him across the hatch cover. He slammed headfirst into the bulkhead five feet away, slithering to the deck, all feeling in his lower limbs gone.
Another marine kicked Bob in the side, then dragged him off to the side and deposited him in a heap.
The next man was directed to the hatch cover, and the big marine took another swing, this one even more vicious. Then the next man was ordered forward, and the next, until every man had been clubbed.
With each swing, the big marine tried to outdo himself. Some men lost consciousness. Others urinated in their pants. When the men collapsed against the bulkhead, temporarily paralyzed, they were kicked and poked, then dragged off to the side. If the first blow didn’t drive them into the bulkhead or knock them off their feet, the marine struck again.
Bob watched as Tim stepped onto the hatch cover and looked defiantly at the big marine. Putting
his hands over his head, Tim took the blow across his butt, but he didn’t flinch.
The marine swung again, even harder, this blow landing on his lower back. Tim stood firm.
Infuriated, the big marine wound up again; the blow struck Tim in the small of the back. And again he didn’t go down. Finally, the marine’s fourth blow sent Tim staggering forward, his head banging against the bulkhead, his legs crumbling under him. He curled up into a ball. Standing over him, the marine kicked him in the back.
After the last man was hit, the crew staggered to their compartment, many having to crawl. The men who had lost control of their bladders were not able to clean themselves.
Bob didn’t know how long he’d been drifting in and out of consciousness when he heard the guards screaming and yelling. He was jerked to his feet and pushed toward the hatch, and then up the stairway toward the deck. The ship had landed in Japan.
27
Tim “Skeeter” McCoy
POW
Tim was one of the last to climb out of the hold onto the ship’s deck, greeted by the early morning sunlight and fifty Japanese Imperial Marines yelling and prodding him with bayonets and clubs.
Wobbling down the gangplank to the pier, he staggered through the gauntlet of marines. One connected with a rifle butt, another with a fist. He struggled to stay upright. If he fell, he’d be pummeled. His legs, bruised and stiff from ankle to hip, ached. Ahead of him, Gordy stumbled and was immediately jumped by three marines. Tim could only watch as Gordy tried to crawl forward, unable to get back up. Of all his crewmates, Gordy was the one he wanted to help the most. He seemed so vulnerable.
It was October 9, 1943. The Asama Maru had landed at Shimonoseki, population 105,000, a port city on the Sea of Japan. Located on the southwestern corner of Honshu, Japan’s largest island, and narrowly separated from the smaller inland of Kyushu, Shimonoseki was an important railroad and industrial center, with shipyards and chemical plants, as well as a primary training location for the Imperial Marines.
Tim and the other captured submariners shuffled away from the pier, heading into town. As they slowly moved through the streets, civilians poured out of their homes and shops to view the emaciated and foot-sore prisoners. For most, it was their first glimpse of an American. Some shouted and shook their fists; others hurled rocks. A small woman stepped toward Tim and spit, hitting him in the neck.
Of all the degradation he’d suffered so far, this was the most humiliating, because he was now on the enemy’s soil. It took all of his self-control not to attack the woman.
The crew was imprisoned in a single-story barracks at an old marine training base. Straw mats carpeted the concrete floor and the windows were nailed shut. Each prisoner was issued a rough woolen blanket and a crude bar of soap.
The camp commander entered, informing the crew that each morning and night they must bow toward the emperor.
Tim wanted to laugh. Back in Penang he’d been slapped and punched for not bowing correctly. Since then, he’d bowed every morning and evening as instructed, but he told himself that he was really bowing to FDR. He used the same inner strategy when bowing to or saluting a guard: in his head, he was saluting Captain Fitzgerald.
Tim was having trouble shaking the image of Fitzgerald being dragged out of the courtyard unconscious, his whole body one continuous bruise. Back in Singapore, the men had discussed Fitzgerald’s decision to pursue the ships in search of a kill. Had he been too aggressive and too concerned with building his own reputation? Would they have escaped if he’d given the order to dive more quickly instead of questioning the lookout’s word that he’d spotted the dive-bomber? And every submariner knew that a captain was not supposed to keep his sub on the surface in daylight, especially not so close to land and when the enemy knew you were in the vicinity. But not once did anyone blame the captain; the crew’s respect and admiration for his toughness, courage, and strategy were unassailable.
On the morning of October 12, three days after their arrival, the crew was mustered together just outside the door of their barracks and ordered to stand at attention.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty. For Tim, his body weakened and his legs in pain and swollen from beatings, standing at attention was one of the hardest forms of torture. To distract himself, he thought about Valma back in Perth and how positively beautiful she’d looked when he proposed to her.
He wondered if his divorced parents knew that he’d been captured and was a POW. If they knew, were they talking to each other or dealing with it separately? Was his Uncle Ben, the successful insurance man, supporting Tim’s mom? Tim had been sending part of his pay home each month. Certainly his mom would have noticed by now that the checks had stopped. Or maybe the Navy was still sending her money?
He assumed his mom had turned to the church for support. She’d often said that it was her faith in God and the Baptist Church that helped her get through those long periods in the institution. Tim thought back to the days in Lubbock when he and his mom and dad had listened to Reverend Truitt preach the gospel and expound about the wages against sin and the certainty of a God and his promise of eternity. He’d carried a Bible with him onto the Grenadier, and it bothered him that he’d abandoned the ship without it. Since falling into the hands of the Japanese, he’d often tried to let the Scriptures flow through him as one way to survive this crucible. In Matthew, Jesus taught that he should “turn the other cheek,” but the truth was that the injunction from Exodus about seeking justice in “an eye for an eye” was more to Tim’s liking.
According to Tim’s interpretation of the Bible and Jesus’ teachings, he believed that there was no true authority except God, and that it was a believer’s responsibility to work and pray to change a wrong. He had no doubt that Japan was a godless and backward nation, and the guards who carried out its rules were godless too. So Tim would, as the Bible instructed him, give unto Caesar only that which was owed him: he could obey his captors with his words and actions in order to survive, but never with his heart, which would remain loyal only to his country and to God.
Standing in front of the barracks, the men remained at attention. Finally the camp commander stepped forward and started calling out names of crew members to step forward. Tim waited for his name to be called. It wasn’t. Neither was Chuck’s or Gordy’s.
But Bob Palmer’s was. Tim watched as Palmer and twenty-eight other submariners stepped forward and then were marched away, around the corner and out of sight.
A few days later, Tim and the remaining members of the crew were marched to a nearby train yard and shoved aboard a small coach car. After a slow, uncomfortable two-day trip, the train finally stopped in front of a large steel mill. The men could see Japanese workers coming and going in the morning mist.
Assembled next to the train, the men were marched away from the mill, through a residential district and past shacks of corrugated metal. People hurried out of their houses and lined the street as they straggled by, and once again the men were yelled at, spit upon, and pelted with rocks.
Finally the prisoners reached the bottom of a steep hill. At the top, shrouded in the mist, sat a large concrete four-story building with metal-framed windows, ominous and cold.
They trudged up the hill and into the building—quickly dubbed “the Castle” by the crew—and were escorted down a long corridor, passing several rooms with large metal doors. At the end of the corridor, they were divided into two groups of twenty-two, half of the men going into one room, the other half into another; Tim, Chuck, and Gordy were in the same group. Each room had two rows of bunks with thin straw mats. Before the men had a chance to relax, they were ordered back out into the hall. There they were informed that they had joined the hundreds of other prisoners assigned to Prisoner of War Camp #3, in the Fukuoka district.
The new interpreter explained that they would all be working in a steel mill three miles away and be paid 10 sen (the equivalent of less than 2 cents) a day. They could use the money to buy cigarette
s or candy from a camp store. For meals, they would receive morning rice, a bento (box lunch) to take to work, and rice in the evening. Everyone would be required to work except those with a serious illness, as determined by the Japanese camp doctor. Each man would be issued a thin, light green burlap jacket and pants, and a wool overcoat (taken during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 when the Russians surrendered to the Japanese). They would also receive one pair of split-toe socks, a pair of flat-soled shoes with a V-shaped thong, and a G-string—a thin piece of cloth attached to string tied around the waist—that would serve as underwear. This was fine with Tim; he was glad to be out of the Navy-issued T-shirt and dungarees that he’d been wearing since the Grenadier had been torpedoed.
The POWs would also receive a razor with one blade, a toothbrush, and a bar of soap. They would be permitted to bathe after work each night, but because there was only one tub for hundreds of prisoners, those getting to bathe first would be rotated by room. The camp doctor had set aside one room for those seriously ill. Colds or the flu would not be considered an illness.
And finally, if the camp commander eventually deemed they were worthy, they would be allowed to write their families and to receive mail and Red Cross packages, and they would not be beaten. Tim, now prisoner #526, didn’t believe it. Not for a second.
28
Gordy Cox
Fukuoka #3
Gordy Cox, prisoner #528 at Fukuoka Camp #3, closed his eyes, trying not to think about how hungry he was.
“Hey, 528, get back to work,” ordered Dave Megeson. The engineer had been taken prisoner when the Japanese invaded Wake Island.
Gordy opened his eyes and ignored Megeson. They were standing in the pipe shop at the Yawata steel mill, where Gordy and a dozen others from the Grenadier, including Tim McCoy and Chuck Vervalin, had been assigned to work. Gordy despised Megeson.