My Hitch in Hell

by Lester I. Tenney

  Ready at last with our new clothes, we could move on to the next leg of our journey. We stood another hour waiting for instructions. Everyone wanted to know what we were going to be doing, where we were going, and how we would survive this new experience.

  A young naval officer stepped onto a platform at the far end of the building. When we saw him, we all stood at attention and stopped talking. The Japanese officer spoke perfect English. In fact, when I turned my head away, I could have sworn I was listening to one of my own officers speaking. As he started to speak, he announced, “I was born in Long Beach, California, went to school at Stanford University, but I am Japanese and will always remember my heritage. We will win the war against the American threat of boycotting our country and depriving us of our very existence to live.

  “You are prisoners, and don’t forget it. You are here to work, and to work hard for the emperor,” he shouted. Then he explained that we would be taken by train to our new “home,” where we would be indoctrinated into the work habits of the Japanese.

  We were then marched to a nearby railroad station, where waiting for us was a very old steam engine with seven very antiquated passenger cars in tow. The engine bellowed dark smoke from its smokestack, and the hissing sounds and the belching of steam from the release valves made us wonder if this engine would ever be able to get started while pulling a load behind it.

  The guards ordered us to start boarding the train, but instead of allowing us to board on our own, they pushed and shoved us so that we would hurry up our boarding procedure. I did not move as fast as the guards wanted, so the one closest to me hit me on the head with the butt of his rifle and hollered, “Hayaku, hayaku” (faster, faster). I turned to look at this guard who had just struck me, and as I did so, another guard who had been watching the whole episode stepped in front of me. With his rifle turned so that the butt was directly in front of my nose, he swung his gun in a wide arc, hit me squarely in the face, and hollered, “Domi, domi” (no good, no good).

  Blood gushed from my nose, and from the pain, I believed he had broken my nose once again. The bleeding also seemed to come from my forehead, so I put my hand up to my head to put pressure on the spot where I thought the bleeding was coming from. I did all of this while boarding the train. I had no intention of stopping to look back; I knew the second guard attacked me after he caught me looking back with disgust at the first guard.

  At last we were all aboard the train, still without having the faintest idea of where we were or where we were going. We no longer fantasized that we were going to be traded for Japanese prisoners, for we felt certain that our time as prisoners of war was going to continue until the war ended. This unhappy bunch of Americans felt that we had lost whatever chance we had of being released now that we were in Japan. The thought of U.S. forces coming into the Philippines to release us had at least kept us dreaming. We had had hopes, plans, and dreams—all of which were now shattered.

  I wondered how we could make it now that we were so far from friendly forces. I kept thinking of all the Filipino people who had waved at us, showed the V sign, and had been our friends. What was it going to be like here in enemy territory? How long would this go on? If only I had some idea I could count the days and have something to look forward to, but this uncertainty could drive me crazy.

  I could not figure out the answers to my questions. I did arrive at some important conclusions, however, while on that train ride through Japan: I would make it, I would go home, and I would get even with those bastards, the ones who beat and tortured me, the ones who deprived me of my dignity, the ones who killed my friends.

  This little speech that I made to myself helped me figure out how I was going to deal with each day’s activities and problems. First, I decided that I would have to keep busy. Even if I was tired, I would have to do something each day to stimulate my mind and to make me want to face tomorrow. Second, I would not just sit back and let the Japanese do whatever they wanted to me. Instead, I vowed to have a voice, even if only a small voice, in any decision that affected me personally. Third, I would use my knowledge of the language to communicate on a regular basis with the Japanese I encountered. And last, I would never forget my main objective: to survive and return home. Therefore, everything I did from that day on was weighed against “the probability of my going home, if I do such and such.” Like the days on the Bataan march when I looked down the road to fix my eyes on a goal, a place to aim for, I would search for anything that would help me reach my objective.

  After six hours, the train blew its whistle and the bell rang, announcing its arrival. The train continued slowly for another ten minutes and finally came to an abrupt stop. At the command of the officer in charge, we began disembarking. When I stepped off the train, I saw for the first time what a Japanese city looked like, and I was not impressed. As I looked around, I could have sworn that I had seen this town before in a magazine or newspaper. It was so typical of what I expected that I was not shocked, as some of my friends were. The homes were made out of bamboo, with thatched roofs. I saw only one building constructed of brick, and that looked like a government facility. Few automobiles were on the street, and they seemed quite old, just barely chugging along.

  Some of the townspeople had gathered at the train station to see what we Americans looked like. They just stood there, in their typical Japanese attire, waiting for something to happen. As we marched off the train, we took a look around, just to get our bearings, and saw civilians gawking and pointing at us as if we were animals in a cage. With muffled laughs and derogatory gestures, they made us feel as if we were cowards. Without a single word, they stripped us of our dignity. We felt they were thinking that we had been afraid to fight, that we had just given up. We even looked like beaten men. We had been taken like animals in a trap, beaten and tortured, and made to feel worthless. Now once again, we were being humiliated.

  Once we were all off the train, the guards counted us to ensure that all of us who had survived the voyage were present. We then began another march, but not as bad as before. We walked for about four miles before we saw in the distance a large compound with a wooden fence six feet tall that was topped with two feet of barbed wire. As we approached the area, one-story wooden barracks came into view. Then as we got closer, we could tell that this was going to be our camp.

  Once inside we saw row after row of barracks, all on the right side of the camp. Apparently the Japanese were expecting at least another thousand men. Our original contingent of 500 prisoners was augmented early in 1944 by another 800 American, 200 Australian, and about 150 Javanese soldiers captured in the battle for Sumatra. Then in February 1945, the last group of Americans arrived: ninety-five men who had survived the bombing and torpedoing of the Japanese freighter that was ferrying them from the Philippines to Japan. This brought the total number of POWs in our camp to seventeen hundred men.

  Each of the thirty-five barracks was identical: about sixty-five feet long, fifteen feet wide, and divided into seven rooms. The front room was reserved for the barracks leader and his assistant, and the other six rooms each housed eight men. Running the length of the barracks was one three-foot-wide interior corridor on the side of the building. From this aisle, we entered our sleeping room by stepping up onto a small, foot-high platform, which also served as our sitting area, in front of the room and then sliding the wood-framed door covered with rice paper either to the left or the right. The wooden floor was covered with typical straw mats. Each room had a large window that could be opened, but in winter, the cold breeze seeped through the many cracks caused by poor construction. Each prisoner had one thin mattress, stuffed with straw, and one heavy, coarse blanket. When it was cold, all eight of us in the room would move as close together as possible to allow our body heat to generate more warmth. Extending the full width at the very front of the barracks was our latrine. It consisted of four cubicles with nothing more than holes in the floor where our body waste was collected. Little did I know then tha
t I would be spending the next three years in this environment.

  Up to this point we still did not know what we were supposed to do. What was our work going to be? That was the question of the day. We were counted off in groups of fifty and assigned to one of the barracks. I was assigned to barracks number 4. In the middle of the compound we found the POWs’ showers and our mess hall, and on the left side of the camp were the Japanese headquarters, their barracks, and their eating area.

  That evening we were each given our own bento box. About seven inches long, four inches wide, and two inches deep, it had a cover with a one-inch lip that just fit over the bottom section. It was made of wood, and the outside was lacquered a shiny deep brown.

  The following morning, the Japanese told us that we would be working in the coal mines. They also told us that we were expected to salute or to bow to any Japanese guard or officer we saw or thought we saw. Whenever we left our barracks and came out into the open street, we had to stop, face the location where the guard would normally be stationed, and bow. We had to do this, we were told, even if we could not see the guard. Any failure to bow would result in severe punishment.

  The Japanese then instructed us that once we went into the mine we would be divided into three groups for exploration, construction, and extraction. Those doing exploration would look for new veins of coal and would work in hard rock. The construction team would shore up the ceilings of the laterals, whereas the extraction team would blast and dig out the coal. The first few days, according to the guards, we would all go down into the mine and do a little of each job, just to get a feel for what had to be done.

  Next, the Japanese guards marched us to the mine, a distance of about three miles, and then turned us over to civilians for the actual work in the mines. The shaft mine was underground. We had to either walk or ride down. Most of the time Japanese workers filled the rail cars, so we had to walk, carrying jackhammers with five-foot-long bits, shovels, axes, saws, hammers, our bento boxes, our cloth caps with their light in the front, and battery packs on belts strapped to our waists. We would start down fully clothed, but as we progressed into the coal area, we would start taking our clothes off until we had on nothing but our loincloths. Inside the tunnels it got hot and stuffy. Very little air got into the lateral areas, which were far away from the main tunnel.

  The shaft went down at a 15 percent grade. That meant that for every one hundred feet we walked, we went down fifteen feet. (The steepest grade allowed on most roads in the United States is 6 percent.) The deepest part of the mine was about half a mile down. Although we walked down most of the time, walking back up really got to us, especially after working for twelve hours shoveling coal, moving coal troughs, and bracing the ceilings so that we would not be injured in a cave-in.

  I will never forget that first day down in the mine. We were allowed to ride down the shaft in one of the cars, and it took about five minutes to reach our tunnel. Our first job was building ceiling supports. When I asked why this was needed, one of the civilian workers told me that the mine had been shut down years before because all the coal that was safe to extract had already been removed. Now we were really going after the proverbial needle in the haystack; that was how difficult it was to find more coal that could be safely extracted.

  I then found out that in mining coal a supporting lateral sixteen feet wide was saved for every sixteen feet of coal extracted. What we were doing was extracting that lateral support. This meant that we had to enter the area from which the coal had already been taken, put up supports to help prevent the ceiling from coming down, and then extract the coal from the side that had been used as the original ceiling support. In other words, we were stripping the mine of all the remaining coal.

  We paid the price for doing this. We experienced serious accidents that cost many of our men their lives, an arm or leg, and in a few cases, broken backs. Many injuries, often fatal, were caused when the ceiling collapsed in what was known as sidewall cave-ins. It made no difference how many accidents we had, however; the work had to go on.

  On that first day in the mine, we were divided into groups of eight. Each group had two Japanese civilian miners working with it. The group to which I was assigned was being trained to build rock walls in the tunnel that had already had all of its coal removed. We started to build a wall sixteen feet wide and sixteen feet long up to the ceiling. The tunnel we were working in that day was sixteen feet wide by about eighty feet long. Thus, we had to construct three retaining walls, each separated by sixteen feet of space. Therefore, for every sixteen feet of space we had a sixteen-foot wall.

  The Japanese supervisor of our group told us that we had to start the base of the wall with the largest boulders we could find. Then we would build on top and to the side of these first boulders with smaller rocks to form a well-structured wall. As the wall grew to three feet in height, the supervisor instructed us to shovel whatever debris was on the ground nearby to the other side of the wall. Then we threw smaller rocks into the wall for packing. We continued building the wall until it got to be about five feet high. Then we followed the same procedure as before, filling the inside of the wall with whatever we could find. We repeated this process until the wall hit the ceiling, about seven feet. To top off the wall, we made wooden wedges and then crammed the top boulders firmly against the ceiling.

  Here I was, a Chicago boy who had never seen the outside of a mine let alone been inside one, working below ground in the most unsafe and archaic conditions imaginable. By then, I was about sixty pounds under my prewar weight and was still fighting the malaria bug and amoebic dysentery. And I was no exception. Most of the men working in the mine had the same problems.

  As we were building the wall, we found out how weak we had become. Trying to lift some of the large, heavy boulders into place, it would take two or sometimes three of us just to get the boulder from the ground up onto the wall. At about this time, the Japanese working with us would start laughing and say, in sign language, in pidgin English, and in Japanese, “Americans are big but weak; Japanese small, but strong.” When we tried to get one of the big boulders to the wall, we would roll it, end over end or any way we could, just to get it there. Once again the Japanese would laugh at us and then say, “Two Americans to move that boulder, but it would take only one Japanese.” They were really riling us, but how could we respond to this constant harassment? I spoke enough Japanese to be understood, and the men in my group wanted me to say something that would get them off our backs. After thinking for a few minutes, I realized that if one Japanese could do the work of two Americans, we could finish our work faster and have time to rest.

  I waited for the next time that the Japanese were going to say something nasty about our not being able to do something. Sure enough, as soon as we tried to lift another heavy boulder onto the wall, one of the Japanese laughed and said, “Two Americans for what one Japanese can do.” This was my chance. I motioned to the one in charge and said, “Why don’t you show us how you would do it?” Within seconds he got up, spit on his hands, grabbed the boulder around the center, and lifted it into place on the wall. I started to applaud, then the rest of the men caught on and also applauded.

  Not to be outdone, the other Japanese man went over to a boulder much larger than the first man’s, and with a loud grunt, he lifted it up onto the wall and shifted it around until it fit into place alongside the others. Once again we all applauded. The two Japanese men took a bow and started to help us build the wall. They were so proud to have Americans applauding them that they wanted more, and we gave it to them. We thanked them, bowed to them, shook their hands, patted their backs, and applauded some more. They loved it all. We knew what we were doing—just using some very simple psychology on them—and it worked.

  When we finished this ten-hour work shift, we were allowed to ride the cars topside. Then we were herded into a huge “bath” room, literally, a room with three tubs of hot water that were heated by a large gas water heater. Each tu
b was about twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and three feet at its deepest part. A seat went around the entire inside of the tub. We also had soap, small wooden dunking buckets, and an assortment of small rags. I discovered in short order that I should not use the soap in the water. Instead, I got in the tub and soaked, letting my body relax. Then I got out of the tub, soaped down, and poured buckets of hot water from the tub all over me. When I finished that routine, then I returned to the tub to soak for a little while longer.

  As we found out later, the shift that finished work first enjoyed clean hot water, the second shift got dirty hot water, and by the time the third shift finished work, these men got murky, very dirty, hot water. Most of the men who worked the third shift never bothered to bathe at the mine, preferring to walk back to the camp and take a shower there before turning in for the night.

  Our wall-building project continued for another week. We were working to make the area safe before the first coal-extracting team of prisoners came in to begin their work. Working under these conditions was a constant strain on our minds as well as our body. That first week toughened us up, though. At least we knew what was expected of us, and if we performed the way we were supposed to, the Japanese did not beat us. If we goofed off, however, then we could expect the consequences. Of course, this basic premise did not follow any type of pattern. We were beaten for any reason the Japanese civilians wanted. If their food was in short supply, if the Americans bombed a Japanese city, or if the supervisors that day wanted more coal than was produced, they beat us. We quickly found out that there was no need for an excuse; we were punished any time the Japanese wanted to vent their anger and frustration.

  We slowly learned to accept our fate that, while in Japan, we were going to work in the coal mine. As day followed dreary day, we carefully watched everything that went on down in the mine. We noticed that the large motor that ran the main conveyor belt from the bottom to the top of the mine was connected to all of the tunnels and laterals and transported the coal out of the mine and onto ships for destinations unknown. We quickly realized if that one main motor could be stopped, all of the work in the mine would grind to a halt. So while in camp that week, our work group of ten men made plans to sabotage the motor the next time we had to walk down the mine’s main tunnel to our work station.