No Ordinary Joes

by Larry Colton

  Pursuant to the provisions of Public Law 490, as amended, the Secretary of the Navy has given careful consideration to the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of your husband. In view of the fact that the list of prisoners made available by the Japanese through the medium of the International Red Cross have included the names of some of the personnel of the GRENADIER and because the possibility that your husband may be an unreported prisoner of war, the Secretary of the Navy has directed that he be continued in a missing status until information is received or other circumstances occur which would indicate that he should no longer be continued in this status.

  By operation of law your husband’s pay will be credited to his account and any allotment registered in behalf of his dependents or for the payment of insurance premiums will be continued so long as he is carried in a missing status.

  The Navy Department is aware of the anxiety experienced by the relatives of those men whose fate remains undetermined. You are assured that you will be promptly informed upon receipt of further information concerning your husband.

  Sincerely yours,

  A.S. Jacobs

  Commander, USNR

  Head of Casualties and Allotments

  Barbara reread the letter. On the one hand, she was thrilled to learn that Bob had not been declared dead. But what if he was alive? She was now in love with another man, a man she was convinced could provide a better future, a man to whom she’d made love and written love letters.

  Bob had beriberi. By his estimate, half of the 275 prisoners at Ashio had it, the ones who had it the worst paralyzed from the waist down. Those men were housed in the sickroom, or as the other prisoners called it, the Death Hut. Bob wasn’t ready to check himself into the Death Hut, not yet anyway, but he knew his condition was deteriorating. On this morning, instead of going to work at the smelter, he headed for the Death Hut in search of some sort of treatment.

  It wasn’t his first visit. Like all the prison camps in Japan, the medical facilities and treatment at Ashio were severely lacking. Red Cross medical parcels had been received, but the supplies were limited. On a couple of occasions, Bob had received a vitamin B1 shot, and although the shots had not eliminated the beriberi, they had at least provided him with enough relief that he could go back to work. He appreciated that, because no work meant less food.

  The word “beriberi” derives from a Sinhalese phrase meaning “I cannot, I cannot,” which seemed fitting to him. Because of his impaired sensory perception, weakness and pain in his limbs, irregular heartbeat, and swelling in his legs, the long walk to the smelter felt like climbing Mount Fuji. Some days he just couldn’t do it. Another symptom was a weakening of his emotional state. For most of his life, even back in high school when his stepmother Cora was treating him badly or Barbara’s father had forbidden her to date him any longer, he’d somehow kept his spirits up. But lately, especially since being transferred from Ofuna, he felt a gathering sense of hopelessness and doom.

  Approaching the sickroom, he hoped Dr. Dullin would be there. He wasn’t sure how Dr. Dullin had been captured, but he knew the doctor had little to work with in terms of supplies. If Dullin wasn’t there he would have to see Katoku, one of the guards, or Kato as the prisoners called him. To them, he was a bit of a comical figure, often strutting officiously around camp carrying a riding crop that he liked to beat against his shiny black riding britches. He also served as a medical practitioner and liked to experiment on prisoners with what some of the men referred to as his “voodoo medicine.” He’d treated Bob several times by shredding some sort of herbal root and rolling it into a ball, and then placing it on Bob’s leg, arm, or stomach and lighting it with a firecracker-like punk. It would smoke and stink and burn and, as far as Bob could tell, accomplish nothing except to leave a blister on his skin. Kato’s treatments seemed more humorous than anything else, especially the time Bob watched him treat a prisoner for hemorrhoids by placing one of the balls on the man’s head. After it was lit, the prisoner looked like he had smoke pouring out of his ears; he got no relief from the hemorrhoids.

  Bob’s heart sank as he entered the sickroom. Kato was right there to greet him, telling him that he wasn’t going to use the burning herb treatment; today he was going to try acupuncture. Bob had never heard of it. When Kato pulled out a very long needle, Bob winced, guessing it was two feet long. Already leery of Japanese medical treatment, he knew that Japanese doctors were using Americans for medical experiments, and he didn’t want to be part of it, but he also knew he had no choice. He recalled the time he’d held down Pappy Boyington while The Quack operated on him without any anesthesia. Certainly this couldn’t be that bad.

  Kato stuck the pin in his swollen abdomen, then removed it and made two more punctures in the form of a triangle. The pin went in easily; there was no fat in the way. It wasn’t painful. Kato repeated the process in Bob’s knees and elbows; that didn’t hurt either. In fact, to Bob the procedure didn’t seem to be doing anything except annoy him.

  Kato had Bob sit on the edge of a table while he stuck the needle into the back of his neck and began angling it down his spine, deeper and deeper until it was almost all the way to his tailbone. Then slowly he removed it.

  Kato then felt Bob’s face. “Very swollen,” he said. “This help.”

  He pressed the needle into Bob’s temple, breaking the skin and then wiggling it back and forth, pushing it deeper. Bob held his breath.

  Dozens of Chinese prisoners were working in the mines at Ashio, and Bob suspected that they had taught acupuncture to Kato. However he had learned it, Bob’s condition hadn’t improved. At least the procedure had no ill effects, other than rattling his nerves.

  Even though he sometimes had difficulty telling the Chinese from the Japanese, he was sympathetic to the Chinese prisoners’ fate. In some ways it seemed as if they had it even worse than the Americans. Indeed, the Japanese had adopted a practice known as “laborer hunting,” abducting Chinese from their North China farm fields at bayonet point and bringing them to Japan as slave labor. A high percentage of these laborers died in transit to the Ashio work site. Many arrived physically weak, and even though they were starving, they still had to work.

  Japanese prison camp officials gave detailed instructions covering all aspects of camp life for Chinese prisoners throughout Japan. The specific directives given to control the Chinese prisoners at Ashio included the following: “(1) Be overpowering as method of control. (2) When you capture runaways, do not let them return to the camp and work again (if they are allowed to return, other workers will be relieved to see that runaways are not killed, causing others to flee). (3) Make their living quarters as shabby as possible. (4) Make the food as poor as possible and consider it to be fodder.… They should be given mostly bran, corn, or leeks, not rice or wheat.… Feed them according to the diligence of their work.”

  It was November 1944, and the snow was already falling in Ashio. Given his steadily declining physical condition and the woefully inadequate clothing for the cold, Bob worried that he wouldn’t be able to survive the winter. At night, the temperature in his barracks fell below freezing. Still, he continued to work. To determine if a POW was still fit to work, they were required to stand naked in front of a guard and do a knee-bend. Those that could, worked.

  Bob’s jobs at the smelter varied. Some days he loaded the furnace; on others, he helped push the ore cars up to the blast furnace. And on the days the furnace wasn’t working properly, he helped repair it. Because of the fumes, he had to wear a respirator.

  One evening Bob sat down next to Ed Keller, one of the twenty surviving men from the crew of the Sculpin. That sub’s captain, John Cromwell, had ordered it scuttled after it had been hit and had gone down with his ship. Keller knew why Bob was there: to drool over his latest creation. Since arriving in camp, Keller had kept a diary filled with recipes for pies, cakes, and other desserts. He called it “The POW Cookbook.” The recipes were detailed masterpieces listing every ingr
edient and step of the procedures. Like other prisoners, Bob liked to read the recipes; he imagined sitting down at a table with Barbara and slowly savoring every delicious, mouthwatering bite. Every week he anxiously awaited Keller’s newest pie recipe, each one providing another escape for him: almond; chocolate custard; peach; pumpkin; raisin nut; rhubarb meringue; peanut butter; eggnog; strawberry chiffon; strawberry mousse.

  “What’ya got today?” asked Bob.

  It was a cheese pie, explained Keller, handing Bob the recipe.

  Fill pie shell with mixture of ½ lb cottage cheese, ½ lb Phila cream cheese, 1 cup sugar, 2 Tbsp melted butter, 8 egg yolks, 6 egg whites, ½ cup cream, ½ tsp vanilla, ½ tsp baking powder, and ½ cup of pineapple. Beat mixture until fluffy with rotary beater. Chill unprepared pie in icebox, then bake in 400 degree oven to glaze pastry, then reduce heat to 275 for about 20 minutes.

  Bob finished reading the recipe. “I’ll take two,” he said.

  Bob sat on the edge of his bunk, trying to finish the scripted postcard to Barbara. Since arriving at Ashio, he and the other crew members had been registered as prisoners of war. On a couple of occasions, they’d been allowed to share a Red Cross parcel; they were also allowed to send a card home once a month. Bob had written faithfully, but he had no idea if the cards had been sent. A few of the men had received letters from home, but he’d received nothing from Barbara.

  Today he was having trouble focusing. Maybe it was the cold. The previous day the guards had made him and the other prisoners stand out in the snow, naked, for seven hours, making him wonder if the guards weren’t sexually perverted. Or maybe he was depressed, finally going over to the dark side. For the past couple of months, he’d felt his mind slipping almost as much as his body. Every morning he woke up and wanted to just play dead, no thoughts, no anything. The idea of working another day in the smelter was almost too much to bear. His beriberi had gotten worse, and his legs were so swollen that every step felt like all the capillaries in his body would explode. Life had become an endless crawl through a fog. He’d thought about going to the Death Hut and just letting himself die with as much dignity as possible. But then he thought about Barbara, and he willed himself to survive the day, and the next one, and the one after that.

  But on this day, he was too weak to finish his letter or even think about another slice of cheese pie.

  Tim McCoy, just before he got kicked off the Trout. (

  Photo Credit i1 )

  Bob Palmer—those eyes, sky blue and friendly, reminded Barbara of why she’d first let him sweet-talk her into the backseat of her father’s car. (Photo Credit i2)

  “Growing up, I went to bed hungry lots of nights,” Chuck Vervalin said. “Joining the Navy gave me three square meals and a regular paycheck.” (Photo Credit i3)

  When Gordy Cox’s mom realized he wasn’t going to graduate from Yakima High, she gave him permission to join the Navy. He was seventeen. (Photo Credit i4)

  Barbara Palmer on her wedding day in 1941. (Photo Credit i5)

  “Our wedding night is a trauma I don’t think I ever got over,” Gwen Vervalin said. (Photo Credit i6)

  Gordy and Weasel. (Photo Credit i7)

  Gordy watched the Grenadier (pictured here on its inaugural cruise), his home, the place where he ate and slept, vanish beneath the ocean surface in stunning silence. (Photo Credit i8)

  “The Convent on Light Street was such a beautiful place,” Chuck Vervalin said. “It’s hard to fathom that so much evil took place there.” (Photo Credit i9)

  The POWs who were too sick to trudge off to labor at the steel mill stayed behind in their barracks at Fukuoka prison camp. (Photo Credit i10)

  Tim knew that when he got out of that bunker, he would find the sonuvabitch who snitched on him and beat the hell out of him. (Photo Credit i11)

  I.D. photo taken of Gordy when entering the POW camp in Japan, October 1943. (Photo Credit i12)

  “In the fifties I bought a little boat to take my son sailing,” Bob Palmer recalled. “He was my life.” (Photo Credit i13)

  “My men called me the Big V,” Chuck Vervalin said. “But not to my face.” (Photo Credit i14)

  When Bob saw Barbara again after almost thirty years, the first thing he said was, “Oh my God, you’re as beautiful as ever.” (Photo Credit i15)

  Bob had trouble buying his son Marty’s claim of PTSD. “That’s a convenient scapegoat. Strange, there were none from World War II and Korea … only Vietnam.” (Photo Credit i16)

  “You never really get over losing a child,” Chuck Vervalin said. (Photo Credit i17)

  A sign greets visitors to Gordy’s house in Central Oregon: “Two people live here—one nice person and one old grouch.” (Photo Credit i18)

  “For a long time, I felt like I lived in his shadow,” Tim McCoy, Jr., said about his father. “Now I feel like I stand in his light. He’s been one hell of a mentor.” (Photo Credit i19)

  Part Seven

  SAVED BY THE BOMBS

  37

  Tim “Skeeter” McCoy

  Fukuoka #3

  Jarred out of sleep in the middle of the night by the air-raid siren, Tim McCoy rolled out of his bunk to join the other hundred men lining up by the front opening of the barracks. It was mid-March 1945. These middle-of-the-night air-raid alerts had become an almost nightly feature of life at Fukuoka #3, and they were increasingly irritating for Tim and everyone else. It was the same drill every night—spend two or three hours huddled and shivering in the shelter, return to the barracks, and then get up in a couple of hours and trudge off to work in the steel mill, exhausted and sleep deprived.

  Part of what made the air raids wearisome was that nothing ever happened. Rumor had it that a lot of other parts of Japan were getting bombed, but so far not Fukuoka or Yawata. Surprisingly, at least to the POWs, the Americans hadn’t bombed the nearby power plant, which seemed to be such an inviting target with its six huge smokestacks. Not that the men were complaining. They all knew that a bombing raid on the power plant most certainly would spell doom for them.

  With the American invasion and capture of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian in the Marianas, America’s bombing strategy had changed. The first attack launched from the Marianas targeted the Nakajima Aircraft Company’s Musashi engine plant just outside Tokyo on November 24, 1944. A total of 111 B-29s took off, but engine problems, cloud cover, and a jet stream with winds as high as 200 mph at precisely the high altitudes the planes were flying made accurate bombing impossible. Only 24 of the planes dropped their bombs anywhere close to the intended target; damage was minimal. In December and January, the bombing raids across Japan continued, but in addition to the other problems faced by the American planes, Japanese defenses were becoming more effective; the Americans suffered considerable losses and many of the captured downed airmen were beheaded. In late January 1945, General Curtis LeMay was transferred to run the B-29 campaign from the Marianas and improve the success ratio.

  LeMay temporarily suspended the raids on Japan, diverting the B-29s to capture Iwo Jima, considered vital to the air campaign because it could be used to base fighters capable of escorting the B-29s to Japan, as well as provide an emergency field midway between the Marianas and the Japanese targets. On February 19, 1945, LeMay decided to destroy industrial feeder businesses and disrupt the production of weapons vital to Japan. Instead of using the high-explosive bombs that had been previously employed, he would switch to incendiary bombs, which he hoped would cause general conflagrations in the large cities. The high-altitude, daylight attacks would be replaced by low-altitude, high-intensity incendiary raids at night. To increase bomb loads, the B-29s were reconfigured, reducing their structural weight. The new strategy was to drop the bombs from altitudes of only 5,000 to 6,000 feet. By flying lower, the planes would no longer have to struggle against the jet stream and could fly below most cloud covers. This would save wear and tear on the engines and preserve fuel. LeMay was confident that the Japanese night fighter forces were weak, although
he admitted that flak losses could be substantial.

  Another new strategy had been added to American bombing. At the beginning of the war, FDR directed that only military targets be bombed. This differed from the British approach, which targeted cities following the German bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940. But with the American bombing of Berlin in March 1944, the rules had changed. Cities and civilians were now targets, including those in Japan.

  * * *

  In the dark, the guards hustled the men out of the barracks, assembling them next to a fence behind the kitchen building, not far from the power plant. On the other side of the fence was a small hill. A guard opened a gate in the fence, and the men passed to the other side, ducking and crawling into a deep, dark hole—the bomb shelter. The only illumination was the guard’s flashlight.

  The roof and sides of the shelter were corrugated metal propped up with tree trunks and branches. To Tim, it seemed like even the slightest shock wave would bring tons of earth crashing down, burying the POWs inside.

  Once everyone had crammed together on their haunches, the guards backed away, closing and locking the door behind them, leaving the men no escape.

  In silence, the men waited. They had been through this many times before, and each time there was no attack, only the discomfort and dirt of being penned together inside the shelter. Tim felt the sand fleas crawling up his ankles.

  Adding to their tension was the knowledge that the Japanese had lined the edge of the shelter with dozens of sticks of dynamite, with a fuse running back inside the camp. Should the guards choose, they could light the fuse and bury the POWs, leaving little trace that they were ever there.