by James Scott
• • •
Leibold and Caverly watched a Japanese escort approach, picking up survivors from the ships Tang had torpedoed the night before. Leibold didn’t believe the lookouts had spotted them and urged the men to swim toward the Chinese coast rather than let the Japanese take them prisoner, but the exhausted Caverly feared he couldn’t make it. The escort lowered a whaleboat and sailors rowed toward the survivors, tossing them a rescue line. The time to escape had passed. After almost eight hours in the frigid water, Caverly was so weak the rope slipped from his swollen hands. The sailors hauled him and Leibold on board and started back before spotting another survivor. The men recognized O’Kane, clinging to what resembled a wooden door. Leibold reached down to help his skipper. “Good morning, Captain,” he said. “Do you want a ride?”
Leibold instantly regretted his comment. The Japanese didn’t understand much English—the sailors repeatedly asked if Leibold and Caverly were “Deutsche”—but instantly recognized the word “captain.” The skipper of an enemy ship would be a prized intelligence asset. The Japanese singled out O’Kane, forcing him to sit near the stern as the whaleboat returned to the escort, its hull marked P-34. Caverly spotted a watch on one sailor’s arm when the men disembarked. The radarman turned the man’s wrist and read the 10:30 a.m. time—eight hours after Tang had sunk—only to have the sailor punch Caverly in the face. The Japanese tied up the prisoners, hauled them to the port side of the main deck, and sat them down in the hot sun. Larry Savadkin soon joined them.
The six Tang sailors who clung to the rescue buoy watched a Japanese escort circle them with its guns manned. The survivors could not mount a defense. Decker and the others who had escaped from the Tang with pistols, ammunition, and shark knives stuffed in their pockets had long since abandoned the cumbersome weapons along with their waterlogged shirts, shoes, and pants. Most now floated in little more than their underwear. The struggle to survive against the horrific conditions below coupled with the grueling escape had left them all exhausted and sick. The patrol circled a second and third time, then stopped. The gunners turned the weapons on the survivors in the water. “Well this is it,” DaSilva thought to himself. “They’re going to shoot us.”
The Japanese instead lowered a whaleboat with five sailors, who rowed out to retrieve the last of the Tang’s men, ushering them with rifles to the boat’s stern. One of the Japanese sailors tried to retrieve the buoy, failing to realize that it was anchored to a submarine on the bottom. No one volunteered to explain. Pharmacist’s mate Larson stopped breathing as the whaleboat pulled alongside the escort, the likely result of a pulmonary embolism. He lay in the bottom of the boat, his face blue. The Japanese forced the other survivors to climb aboard while the men slapped and kicked Larson to revive him before lifting him on deck. The Tang crew pleaded to help Larson, who at one point appeared to stir and rise up, but the Japanese refused. When Leibold later asked about Larson’s fate, a guard motioned that he had been tossed overboard.
The five survivors from the life buoy joined the other four Tang sailors as prisoners on board the escort P-34. Nine men were all that remained of a crew of eighty-seven. By the time the Japanese off-loaded the last survivors from the whaleboat, it is probable that every man still on board the Tang had died.
The Japanese of P-34 took no chances with the Tang survivors—not that the exhausted men posed any threat. The captors tied each man’s biceps to his chest, then lashed his wrists. Leibold tried but couldn’t move either his arms or hands. The Japanese then sat all nine together on the port side of the main deck in the hot sun. “We were trussed up like a chicken,” recalled Savadkin. “Then they asked us our name, our rank and the name of the vessel from which we had come. Failure to answer the questions brought severe socks on the jaw, to be perfectly blunt about it, they just hauled off and whacked us, and we decided it wouldn’t hurt too much to tell them our name and what ship we were from. They also wanted to know what job we had aboard. We balked at this and they didn’t press the point too much.”
The men were thirsty after a long night at sea. The Japanese offered them hot seawater to drink, served in a can of Campbell’s vegetable soup Trukke brought up from the Tang. The harassment escalated. Guards made DaSilva sing and dance while men clubbed him. The executive officer struck Caverly on the head with his samurai sword, knocking him unconscious while the crew kicked Flanagan in the ribs and kidneys and stomped on his bare feet. O’Kane’s refusal to reveal the name of his submarine or answer whether others lurked in the area prompted guards to punch him in the face and thrash his back with clubs that resembled baseball bats. “O’Kane received the worst beating of us all,” Caverly would later tell war crimes investigators. “They beat and kicked him from head to rump, with fist, feet and bamboo clubs.”
Burned Japanese sailors covered in bandages and coated in a white salve gathered around, slapping and kicking the manacled Americans. Others shoved lit cigarettes up their nostrils, in their ears, and used the prisoners’ necks to grind out butts, the pain excruciating. The skipper again drew most of the torment, his skin peppered with burns. The Tang survivors understood the hostility. The bandaged tormentors were survivors of the ships Tang had destroyed. The Tang men had come face-to-face with their victims. “When we realized our clubbings and kickings were being administered by the burned, mutilated survivors of our own handiwork,” O’Kane would later write, “we found we could take it with less prejudice.”
19
DRUM
“We did not care one way or another whether the ship sank or not as we had suffered greatly and felt that if the ship did go down, our suffering would be at an end.”
—Philip Brodsky, war crimes testimony September 5, 1946
Sergeant Calvin Graef couldn’t slake his thirst on the Japanese prison ship Arisan Maru, which steamed through the dark toward Formosa on the night of October 23, 1944. The twenty-nine-year-old New Mexico native—one of some 1,800 prisoners on board—had endured twelve days in the ship’s crammed cargo hold. Graef had watched in that time as dehydration and disease had claimed the lives of some prisoners and driven others mad. The journey threatened to break even the most hardened men, including Graef, who had survived the infamous Bataan Death March and more than 900 days in Japanese captivity. The father of a two-year-old he had never met had passed those lonely days in prison speculating about his son’s birth date. Graef had settled in his mind on April 9; a day he would never forget, the fall of Bataan. Not until he received his wife’s first letter shortly before Arisan Maru had departed—accompanied by two photographs of his son—did Graef learn he had guessed three days too early.
Graef’s experience on Arisan Maru had only confirmed why prisoners called such freighters “hellships.” The Japanese had crammed some 1,200 prisoners into bunks hammered together out of planks and stacked several high that reminded Graef more of shelves than beds. Prisoners lacked room to stretch out or even roll over. “To try and describe an allotment of space that was given per person is about like putting marbles into a bottle,” he would later recall. “When there are so many marbles in the bottle, you just can’t put any more in.” Guards forced the remaining 600 captives down ropes into the freighter’s coal hold. Prisoners rode atop piles of coal that tumbled about in the rough seas, burying the captives and forcing them to dig out. “The oil and coal dust got smeared on our bodies and caused infection. There was no way of stopping it, in the wallow of filth and dirt,” recalled prisoner Donald Meyer. “The coal dust worked deeper and deeper into the lesions of these sick men until they cried and prayed to die.”
Rations aboard the Arisan Maru consisted of less than a fistful of rice twice a day coupled with a few ounces of rust-flavored water, far less than the men needed to battle the tropical heat. Guards taunted the emaciated captives and nibbled chocolate pilfered from the Red Cross packages intended for the prisoners. “Food was lowered to us in buckets, and no attempt was made by the Japs to ration or apportion the food,�
�� recalled prisoner Philip Brodsky. “If you wanted any, you had to get there fast.” A handful of five-gallon cans served as latrines—emptied only once a day at night—but in the overcrowded quarters few ventured to find them, a wending journey through the throngs of prisoners that could take up to two hours. Many of the sick, suffering from malaria, dysentery, and pneumonia, defecated on themselves, the feces and blood dripped between bunks. “We waded in fecal matter,” Graef would write. “Most of the men went naked. The place was alive with lice, bedbugs, and roaches.”
Conditions had deteriorated soon after the 448-foot-long freighter had departed Manila’s Pier 7 on the afternoon of October 11 amid air strikes in advance of MacArthur’s return. The ship steamed south and anchored in a sheltered bay, a move prisoners presumed was devised to wait out the attacks. The days at sea had provided a breeze that vanished once the ship anchored. Temperatures soared during the day as the sun beat down on the steel decks. The sun-side bulkhead grew too hot even to touch. Heat blistered the prisoners, turning skin the texture of raw hamburger. Tempers flared and fights broke out. Others suffered breakdowns or sank into lethargy. “If you fell down,” Graef recalled, “you just suffocated.” Many did, their bodies tossed overboard. “While men were dying of thirst, Jap guards—heaping insults upon us—would empty five gallon tins of fresh water into the hold,” Graef later wrote. “Men caught the water in pieces of clothing and sucked the cloth dry. Men licked their wet skin.”
The horror Graef endured on Arisan Maru proved all too common. Japan’s conquests had netted thousands of prisoners, many of whom now cleared jungles, toiled in factories, and shoveled coal. Crammed and filthy hellships throughout the war would shuttle by some estimates more than 126,000 prisoners around the empire. Absent the wooden hulls and canvas sails, these modern slave ships were little different from their centuries-old ancestors. In the bowels of one such ship that had just unloaded horses, prisoners crowded atop hay soaked with urine and sticky with manure. Emaciated captives picked through the soiled hay beneath a swarm of blowflies to scavenge seeds left over from the millet the Japanese fed the horses. When temperatures topped 120 degrees below deck on another ship, men drank urine while others slashed fellow prisoners for a taste of blood. Some went mad, as described by one former prisoner: “As a guy goes crazy he starts to scream—not like a woman, more like the howl of a dog.”
The 6,886-ton Arisan Maru, much to the relief of the prisoners, had returned to Manila once the air strikes ended. In the days since Graeff had first boarded the hellship, the harbor had been transformed. Sunken ships littered the waters. Graef hoped what he saw proved the Japanese equivalent of Pearl Harbor. But he would have to wait and wonder. Arisan Maru remained in port only long enough for crews to load bananas, sugar, rice, and water before the freighter departed again just before midnight on October 20 as part of a large convoy of ships that the Japanese hoped to move beyond the reach of American fighters and bombers. Twelve ships steamed north toward Formosa’s port city of Takao, hauling everything from raw rubber and manganese to aviation fuel. Five escorts guarded convoy MATA-30, including three destroyers, a fleet supply ship, and a submarine chaser. With a top speed of just seven knots Arisan Maru set the convoy’s slow pace through waters infested with American submarines.
Graef and other captives understood the danger the Arisan Maru faced at sea because the Japanese refused to mark such freighters as prisoner of war ships, forgoing the illuminated crosses typically used to denote hospital ships. Through a bombardier’s eyepiece or a skipper’s periscope, Arisan Maru looked no different from any other cargo ship that might otherwise haul coal, bauxite, or iron ore. Attacks on prisoner ships had occurred throughout the war. But the concentration of American carrier forces and submarines in waters close to Japan—coupled with the enemy’s harried effort to evacuate prisoners ahead of Allied advances—saw those numbers reach a crescendo in September, killing by some estimates up to 9,000 POWs, almost half of the war’s total of 21,000. Sealion had torpedoed the 9,418-ton Rakuyo Maru September 12 off the coast of Luzon. Of the 1,318 Allied prisoners—most former laborers on the infamous Burma Railway—only 159 men survived. North of Subic Bay just nine days later, Allied bombers obliterated the Hofuku Maru, killing more than a thousand Dutch and British prisoners.
But the worst such attack had occurred just twenty-three days before Arisan Maru set sail. That afternoon the 5,065-ton Junyo Maru steamed from Java to Sumatra with 2,200 Allied and Indonesian prisoners along with another 4,320 Javanese slave laborers. The British submarine Tradewind picked up a plume of smoke on the horizon, chased down Junyo Maru, and fired four torpedoes. Explosions rocked the ship. The bow rose up out of the sea so that the crippled ship appeared to stand upright, like a skyscraper. Prisoners in the water spied two twenty-five-foot holes in the ship’s steel side. Others saw men, trapped on the bow, plummet toward the bridge. Against the backdrop of a fiery sunset, Junyo Maru dove beneath the waves, taking with it 5,640 Allied prisoners and Javanese conscripts.
As the misery below deck on Arisan Maru increased en route toward Formosa, Graef noted, many of the prisoners crowded around him now prayed aloud to meet a similar fate.
“If the Navy would sink us we’d—”
“Come on, Navy!” begged others.
• • •
Maurice Rindskopf scanned the dark horizon for convoy MATA-30 on the night of October 23. Drum’s radarman had detected the seven-knot convoy at sunset at a distance of almost fifteen miles. The skipper had ordered his men to start the hunt. Rindskopf needed a good target. He had been at sea for forty-five days and had yet to fire a single torpedo. He may have been the youngest skipper in the Pacific, but he knew the Navy demanded that he perform just as well as his older colleagues. Rindskopf had fared well on his first patrol as skipper off Palau despite hunting in waters void of worthwhile targets. He had demonstrated his aggressiveness in blasting Refinery Point followed by his destruction of the sampan and capture of two prisoners. He felt he had made the most of the empty seas. Vice Admiral Lockwood agreed, deeming the patrol successful so as to earn the coveted combat insignia. The convoy MATA-30 that steamed through the dark ahead offered Rindskopf the promise of a much better patrol.
The war Rindskopf now fought as skipper proved far different from the one he entered as a young lieutenant junior grade in the frightful days after Pearl Harbor. America had hacked away at Japan’s empire with 1944 on track to be a decisive year for the enemy. American troops had invaded Saipan in June followed by Guam and Tinian in July. Emperor Hirohito needed only to look to Germany for a glimpse of his nation’s future. Allied bombers that October would drop more than two tons of explosives every minute. The importance of the Marianas was reflected not only in the 50,000 troops Japan sacrificed to defend the islands, but also in the ouster of Premier Hideki Tojo and his cabinet following the loss. More telling were the four words uttered by Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano, Hirohito’s supreme naval adviser: “Hell is on us.”
For the Japanese, the news only worsened.
Three days earlier American troops had hit the beaches of the Philippines accompanied by an armada of some 700 ships, the most powerful naval force yet assembled. The invasion held special importance for Douglas MacArthur, who had escaped with his wife and young son from the Philippines in a patrol torpedo boat the night of March 11, 1942. After his arrival in Australia he vowed that he would return to liberate the Pearl of the Pacific. The fall of the Philippines had haunted MacArthur, who only spoke of it in public to mark the anniversary, as he fought his way back across the Pacific. “Bataan is like a child in a family who dies,” he confided in fellow officers. “It lives in our hearts.” Two years, seven months, and nine days after his escape, MacArthur sloshed ashore through the knee-deep surf in an event designed for maximum press exposure. “People of the Philippines,” he declared in a radio broadcast. “I have returned.”
Allied victories had robbed the empire of its conquests as submarines stran
gled the island nation. Captured airfields coupled with increased carrier power helped tighten America’s blockade, forcing Japan to abandon major sea lanes as well as some coastal routes through home island waters. Skippers like O’Kane, Coye, and Rindskopf helped slash Japan’s former first-class merchant fleet by some 75 percent, from 6.6 million tons to just 1.5 million. The few vessels that remained afloat proved small and inefficient, if not inoperable. The destruction of Japan’s merchant fleet halted the flow of the raw materials that fed and fueled Japan. As stockpiles of iron ore, rubber, and bauxite vanished, Japan turned to desperate measures. Workers collected scrap copper and lead, recycled cotton, and slashed the amount of nickel used in armor plating and gun barrels. With scrap aluminum totaling 80 percent of the aircraft industry’s supply, engineers even experimented with wooden planes.
More than any other import, the loss of oil proved catastrophic. Japan could produce only 10 percent of the oil needed to power its fighters, tanks, and aircraft carriers, importing the rest from territories conquered in the south. America’s blockade had cut Japan’s imported oil from fifteen million barrels in 1943 to just five million in 1944. In the final year of the war only a handful of tankers would brave the blockade to deliver just a few thousand barrels. The Japanese would grow so desperate in 1945 that engineers would extract oil from peanuts, soy beans, and coconuts to use for industrial purposes and would convert fat and vegetable oils into lubricants. Workers built almost 40,000 small distilleries, including some on the golf courses of tony Tokyo clubs, to harvest oil from pine roots. Engineers battled gasoline shortages with substitutes of ethanol, methanol, and acetone while others converted confiscated rice, sweet potatoes, and sugar to alcohol. Even precious bottles of sake vanished from store shelves.
Few of these measures helped. While military trucks puttered around base powered by charcoal, battleships and even aircraft carriers lay at anchor, relegated to port and antiaircraft duty. Japan struggled to keep its fighters in the air, slashing gasoline quality from 92 octane to 87 as technicians modified engines to burn alcohol. Pilots who had once received 100 hours of basic training now got as little as thirty and no navigation. Fliers would follow one another into combat as mission losses soared as high as 70 percent. Fuel scarcity would force leaders to devise the kamikaze attacks. “There was no prospect of victory in the air by the employment of orthodox methods. Suicide attacks were more effective because the power of impact of the plane was added to that of the bomb,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel Naomichi Jin, an air army operations staff officer. “Suicide attack was the only sure and reliable attack by airmen whose training hand been limited because of the shortage of fuel.”