No Ordinary Joes

by Larry Colton

  It didn’t take long to find out. Bombs started to fall, big bombs, and far more than ever before. From the sound of it, they were hitting the steel mill.

  39

  Bob Palmer

  Ashio

  In early August 1945, Bob Palmer checked himself into the little wooden shack the prisoners at Ashio called the Death Hut, the place where the sickest of the sick went to die. His weight, which had been 160 pounds at the start of the war, was now down to 80. Despite several vitamin B1 shots, as well as experimental treatments with acupuncture and burning herbs, his beriberi had worsened. He could not continue with the backbreaking work or endure the noxious fumes at the smelter. His legs were too swollen for him to walk; he could only crawl.

  The relentless bombing that the B-29s had inflicted on Japan had spared the small mountain town of Ashio from any direct hits, but it had knocked out its main railroad supply line, effectively cutting off the flow of rice into town for the townspeople as well as the prisoners. The guards routinely stole the Red Cross parcels meant for the POWs. On one occasion, in a desperate attempt to add some substance to their soup, a horse bone that a POW found walking back from the smelter was added, but it only resulted in several prisoners choking and gagging on splintered bone. On another occasion, small bits of baby shark were mixed into the soup, but the smell of ammonia was so strong that Bob couldn’t eat it.

  One of Bob’s last jobs before entering the Death Hut was helping to scrounge around the camp for edible plants and bulbs to add to the prisoners’ small ration of soup. It was an exercise in futility: decades of poor mining practices had poisoned the area’s soil and robbed it of any agricultural value. Bob managed to bring back only a handful of weeds. He got diarrhea from the soup made with his gleanings; the camp doctor treated it by having him eat charcoal.

  Of all the prisoners at Ashio, it was the Javanese Dutch who suffered the most. The Javanese had been imprisoned the longest, and in the spring and summer of 1945, they were, as Kevin Hardy, one of the Grenadier’s officers at Ashio, put it, “dying like flies.” Perhaps none of the deaths had impacted the camp as much as the passing of a Javanese man who had been an opera singer before the war. According to the other prisoners, he died in the Death Hut just after singing a beautiful aria, his voice soaring above the camp, lifting everyone’s spirits. They had no idea what language he was singing in, or what the words meant, only that the music seemed to come from heaven. Bob had no memory of it.

  Bob knew his mental condition was almost as bad as his physical health. During the first two years of his imprisonment, he had kept his mind active with a variety of mental escapes: taking fishing trips in the Cascades; eating delicious desserts from recipes concocted by a fellow prisoner; rebuilding a ’36 Ford from the ground up; building a house in which to live with Barbara. Now, as death closed in, he couldn’t focus, mired in depression and hopelessness. Even thoughts about Barbara could no longer lift his spirits. All he could do was stare out the window of the Death Hut and mindlessly watch the prisoners and guards walk past.

  40

  Chuck Vervalin

  Fukuoka #3

  On the cloudless morning of August 8, 1945, Chuck Vervalin trudged from the train to his job in the pipe shop. This morning shaped up to be like all the others, a struggle to get through the day.

  Soon after the prisoners arrived at the shop, the morning calm was shattered by the warning blast of an air-raid siren. Nobody paid it much attention, including the pushers and guards. Despite the constant sounds of planes passing overhead and the rumbling of bombs exploding in the distance, there hadn’t been a daylight bombing raid over Yawata in more than a year.

  Reaching his workstation, Chuck was startled by a second siren, the one the POWs called “Burping Betsy.” This was unusual.

  Almost immediately, he heard a racket on the roof, like it was being hit by a million BBs. He looked through the large entrance to the building and saw hundreds of smoking white sticks falling from the sky and peppering a nearby building where many of his friends worked.

  To the west he saw the most incredible sight: row after row of glistening four-engine B-29s coming in low and silently over the rim of the mountains and gliding down into the valley. They were so close that he could see their bomb-bay doors open and large black canisters the size of train cars fall from their bellies. The canisters quickly burst apart, scattering thousands of small firebombs in every direction, each stick leaving a trail of white smoke behind it.

  All around him frightened men—POWs, guards, civilians, pushers—ran for cover from death pouring from the sky. For all the POWs’ talk and worry about being killed by American bombs one day, that day was now here.

  Incendiary bombs fell in every corner of the factory and all over the city of Yawata to the south.

  Antiaircraft fire erupted from a mountaintop to the north of the mill, but before the ack-ack could find its target, three P-51s swooped down like hawks and wiped out the emplacement. Chuck sprinted toward a shelter, but it was quickly filling to capacity. He returned to the pipe shop and took cover under a large stack of pipes piled against a wall.

  Trying to catch his breath, he felt something move next to his legs. Looking down, he did a double take. Crouching next to him was a guard, a man he’d seen around the steel mill many times but whose name he didn’t know. The guard was shaking hard. It occurred to Chuck that there was really no difference between them at this moment; they were just two human beings petrified that they were about to die.

  It seemed like everywhere and everything was on fire—the factory, machines, supplies, nearby houses—flames leaping across roads and railroad tracks. The sound was overpowering, like a strong wind, crackling and snapping everything in its path, great billows of black smoke rolling through the valley, choking the air, turning the sky from a beautiful blue to a dark haze.

  Chuck wondered about Gordy back in camp. He knew that those wooden barracks would go up in flames like bone-dry kindling if the incendiaries hit there.

  Nothing near the steel mill escaped the devastation—trees, buildings, and animals all on fire. At the water’s edge, small boats, docks, and a fishing village erupted in an inferno, impossible to extinguish. Ashes fell like snowflakes. The sun disappeared.

  The ground shook as a second wave of planes unleashed more destruction, in the form of huge 500-pound bombs. Relentlessly they came, whistling to the ground like freight trains, tearing gaping craters.

  After twenty-eight months in captivity, Chuck was overjoyed that these evil bastards were finally getting what they deserved—a fiery, excruciating pounding. But fear had a bigger hold on him. Cowering under the stack of pipes, pressed up against his enemy, he had never been so scared.

  It was late in the afternoon when the all clear finally sounded. The prisoners were rounded up and told to head for the train to take them back to the camp. Chuck didn’t know what to expect. The guard who’d been next to him had disappeared. Maybe there would be another raid. Or maybe the soldiers, or even the civilians, would turn into an angry mob and attack them.

  In the semidarkness there was an eerie stillness. Other than a couple of guards herding them to the train, the whole area was deserted. None of the Japanese pushers, workers, or civilians were in sight; they had likely fled to their homes to see if anything was left. In every direction that Chuck looked, the earth was scorched. Huge pieces of metal lay scattered on the ground. Where earlier in the day buildings had stood, now there were only piles of glowing embers. Entire sides of factories had disappeared, the equipment inside smashed to bits. Black, billowing smoke still swirled around the smoldering ruins.

  Accounts of the devastation quickly spread. The death toll in Yawata was over 60,000. Entire neighborhoods had been wiped out, the tightly packed houses made of straw, bamboo, rice paper, or cheap wood shooting up in flames. Miraculously, only one POW was killed; he had taken a direct hit on the back of his head from a firebomb. Another prisoner lost an arm. But nobody from
the Grenadier was seriously injured.

  Back at camp, which had escaped damage from the attack, Chuck and the other men spent the night huddled together in the shelter. Nobody slept. For Chuck, it was a better option than sleeping in the barracks, where a new infestation of bedbugs now covered everything.

  The morning of August 9 dawned bright and sunny, but soon a northeasterly wind started blowing the thick layer of smoke that had drifted out to sea overnight back toward land, spreading a blanket of haze from Yawata to Kokura. At the same time, a B-29 named Bock’s Car was winging across the Pacific toward Japan, its designated target Kokura, less than three miles from the camp. In its belly it carried an atomic bomb.

  The remaining 670 prisoners at Fukuoka #3 did not know that three days earlier the Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, fifty miles to the north. An estimated 45,000 people out of a population of 250,000 perished in the initial blast, and another 20,000 died within four months. Kokura, because of its stockpile of military arms and equipment, had been designated as the target for the second bomb.

  Before taking off from Tinian in the Mariana Islands, the crew of Bock’s Car discovered a malfunctioning fuel pump on an auxiliary fuel tank. The pilot, Major Charles Sweeney, decided the extra fuel would not be essential and disconnected the auxiliary fuel tank. The plane took off, and upon reaching Yakushima, an island off the south coast of Kyushu, it was supposed to rendezvous with an instrument plane, as well as a photographic plane. But the photo plane was late, so after circling for almost an hour and using up considerable fuel, Major Sweeney proceeded toward Kokura without the photo plane. An advance weather report forecast clear skies over the target area.

  Bock’s Car was under specific orders to drop the bomb, named Fat Boy, only if the arsenal storage facility could be visually spotted, but upon reaching Kokura, Sweeney found that the target was hidden under the thick layer of smoke from the previous day’s bombing raid. The plane circled, looking for an opening, then circled again, taking a third pass over the target; still the view was obscured. With the fuel running low because they had disconnected the auxiliary fuel tank, Sweeney decided to abort the Kokura mission and change course for the secondary target of Nagasaki.

  Tom Courtney continued to write in his journal:

  8/8/45 Uncle came today! Blew hell out of factory. Incendiary bombs all over, thousands of them. The hand of God was over us. He will see us through.

  8/9/45 Stayed in camp today. Sirens went five times this morning. Uncle hasn’t come back though. He better be here tonight or we go back tomorrow. God be with us in that factory. Everyone optimistic now. Think it will end soon. Please God, end it soon!

  8/12/45 Shelter again. Still no work. Heard factory hit again. Also heard Russia at war and well in Manchuria. Also Red + coming now. This war about over. It is so hard to imagine what it will be like to be free again, to America that is HOT DOGS, HAMBURGERS and BALL GAMES—FREEDOM AND HOME the sweetest words in the world.

  8/13/45 Uncle again. Dive bombers. Shelter almost all day. Some jobs went back to factory. God I hope I never see it again. They want to kill us for sure. Keep praying.

  8/15/45 23-years-old today. No work today. Also no more work in factory. The scuttle really strong and spirits up. Maybe war is about over. All parties come in from factory at noon. Everything points to the end. (God in Heaven make it so. You have been with us through it all Father and have answered my prayers.)

  On the morning of August 16 a Japanese soldier entered the barracks and ordered everyone to assemble outside in the quadrangle near the guards’ barracks, the largest open space in the camp. There was something ominous in his tone. Chuck noticed several men close to him offer a quick prayer.

  Chuck wasn’t relying on prayer or God in Heaven for his strength. Since the bombing of the factory, and with the end of the war and of their captivity possibly near, he was doing his best to keep his mind focused on the same thing he had for the past two years and four months: that honor would come in his survival and in seeing the Japanese defeated. That, and making sure he got enough to eat.

  More than at any time since the crew’s capture, the rumors were flying: the American invasion was set to begin; a big bomb had wiped out an entire city; there would be mackerel for dinner tonight; there were only enough rations to last one more week. The rumor Chuck worried about the most, of course, was the one that had been circulating the longest: that an Allied invasion was imminent, and as soon as it started, the POWs would all be lined up and gunned down. Certainly the Japanese had done their part in spreading this fear, including every day since the factory was bombed.

  He took a spot at the rear of the quadrangle. Every prisoner in camp who could walk was there, the crowd spilling out of the quadrangle and down the main street. None of the men had slept more than a few hours in over a week. A stepladder was placed at the front of the crowd. Behind it stood the guards, all of them armed with rifles and bayonets.

  Maybe this is where they finally kill us, thought Chuck.

  A Japanese colonel climbed the stepladder, which was steadied by a sergeant major. The colonel looked out over the prisoners, his glare slowly shifting from one side of the silent crowd to the other. Finally, in almost perfect English, he spoke.

  “The war is over,” he said. “Japan has lost the war.”

  He paused, waiting for a reaction from the POWs. There was no shouting, no rejoicing, no slaps on the back.

  Chuck wasn’t sure how to react or what to think. For too long he’d gotten his hopes up that this nightmare would end, and the one thing he’d come to know for sure was not to believe anything until it happened.

  Was this just another cruel hoax? Given the destruction and devastation the Japanese had suffered recently, it certainly seemed logical that they would surrender. But Chuck remembered the countless times he’d heard his captors talking about the code of Bushido, and how true warriors never give up, only cowards surrender, and that a Japanese soldier would never put down his arms.

  The colonel continued: “His Imperial Majesty, in an effort to put an end to the death and bloodshed, has agreed to an unconditional surrender and cessation of war. All hostilities have been terminated. His Majesty and your General MacArthur will sign the terms of surrender on September 2, 1945. I have been ordered to inform you that as of this moment you are no longer prisoners of war. You are free. I have also been instructed to ask that you all remain here until your authorities come for you after the surrender has been signed.

  “Please do not think harshly of those who were in charge of you, your guards. Have compassion for them. Many have lost their entire family and homes. Food is scarce. I would suggest that Red Cross food parcels in the warehouse be given to them, that they might have food to eat, while they too readjust. They were only doing their duty, as you would yours.”

  He stepped down off the stepladder and returned to the office, followed shortly by the guards, leaving the prisoners still staring in stunned silence. It was hard for Chuck to fathom. Was he really free? If he wasn’t, then the colonel had done an amazing job of acting. And what was he to think about the colonel’s request for the POWs to be forgiving of the guards? Could that Jap possibly be serious to think that all these prisoners who’d been surviving on a cup of rice a day for more than two years were going to give what little rations were left to the same men who had treated them worse than dogs? Was there no end to these people’s audacity?

  That night the 670 former POWs dragged their blankets out of the barracks and set them on the hard dirt of the street. They would all sleep out under the stars, leaving the barracks to the bedbugs. As midnight came and went, most stayed awake talking, their first night of freedom spent in dazed and elated conversation.

  The next morning, Chuck awoke to one of the men running down the main street of the camp yelling at the top of his voice. “The Japs are gone … the Japs are gone!”

  Sure enough, in the dark of night, the camp commandant and all the guards
had snuck away unnoticed, leaving the prisoners on their own. Many of the POWs went scrounging for food, but found little.

  Later that morning, the top-ranked officer in the camp, Army major W. O. Dorris, addressed the prisoners, cautioning them to sit tight until American forces arrived. “I’m not sure how long it’ll take them to get here, a week, maybe two,” he said. “But I can assure you that anyone caught leaving camp early will be court-martialed.”

  He nodded toward the perimeter of the quadrangle, where six American Marines, armed with sabers the guards had left behind, stood guard.

  Chuck glanced at Tim McCoy, who was sitting next to him, perplexed. Many times they had talked about what they would do when and if they were ever free again. Nowhere on either man’s list, however, was anything about hanging around the prison camp after the war was over.

  “I don’t know who’s coming to get us,” said Chuck, “but they better get here soon, or I’m leaving anyway. They wouldn’t dare court-martial us.”

  41

  Bob Palmer

  Ashio

  It was August 15, 1945, six days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Lying on his straw mat in the Death Hut and floating in and out of sleep, Bob was awakened by his friend and crewmate Len Clark.

  Using Clark as a crutch, Bob shuffled across the wooden floor to the door, his swollen legs throbbing. In the middle of the dusty compound, all the guards stood at attention in a circle around the camp commander. They all carried rifles and they were all wearing white gloves. On the ground next to them, a voice blared from a radio: Emperor Hirohito was addressing the nation.

  Every few sentences, the guards bowed toward Tokyo, their expressions as solemn as those seen in a funeral procession as Hirohito’s words sunk in:

  … Indeed, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to insure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark on territorial aggrandizement.