by James Scott
“Twenty-one,” the boatswain’s mate replied, surprised at the admiral’s command of English.
“You look thirty-five,” the admiral answered, noticing that Leibold’s teeth chattered. “Frightened?”
“No,” Leibold answered. “I’m cold.”
The admiral dropped his eyes to Leibold’s wet and muddy feet. “Of course, stupid,” he barked. “No shoes.”
The Japanese admiral turned and left. The men hoped his comments meant guards might provide them shoes and clothes, a hope that never materialized. The Japanese loaded the sailors on a train north, no handcuffs but each accompanied by a personal guard. O’Kane’s heart sank as he watched the enemy homeland rush past. Despite thirty-four months of war—and the efforts of American submarines, bombers, and fighters to starve the empire of its precious raw materials—Japan appeared far from defeat. “The countryside may have been beautiful, but the fast, loaded trains, the hydroelectric lines coming down out of the mountains, and the buzzing industry were depressing to us indeed. This was particularly so at Nagoya, where we disembarked for a time. It was dark, but the factories were booming like Kaiser’s shipyards, the bluish light of arc-welding spread out through the city,” he wrote. “Here I knew that Japan, with her routes to China quite defensible, could be defeated only by invasion.”
The survivors disembarked about 8 p.m. the night of November 3. Guards marched the men in the dark some 1,500 meters down a muddy road to the Ofuna Naval Interrogation Center, a nonregistered prison administered by the Yokosuka Naval Station. The Japanese built the secret camp just south of Tokyo on the site of a former school at the junction of two valleys, opening its doors on April 7, 1942. An eight-foot-high board fence enclosed the primitive prison, constructed of little more than unpainted planks and tarpaper roofs that American investigators later measured at just seventy-five yards long and sixty-eight yards wide. “The camp was built of flimsy wood and consisted mainly of three plain, crackerbox structures called One, Two, and Three—lchi, Ni, and San,” recalled former prisoner Louis Zamperini, an American Army bombardier forced to ditch in the Pacific because of engine trouble. “The layout looked like the letter E. Each barrack was set apart from the other by twenty yards; all were connected to a main building that housed the officers’ headquarters, the latrines, and the kitchen.”
Prisoners crowded into approximately ninety small cells, each six feet wide and nine feet long, the floors covered with two grass mats—tatamis in Japanese—on which the men bedded down at night. Wooden bars guarded the small windows. Lieutenant Commander John Fitzgerald, skipper of the sunken submarine Grenadier, who arrived in Ofuna in May 1943, would later tell war crimes investigators how prisoners locked in these austere cells battled the frigid winters with nothing more than worn blankets and tattered clothes. Many even suffered frostbite. “No heat of any description was furnished for these quarters. Their construction was very poor, so poor in fact that the weather aged the boards forming the walls and floors of the building so they would no longer overlap thus forming large cracks in both walls and floors,” Fitzgerald would recall in his 1946 affidavit. “When snow fell, accompanied by a wind, the cracks in the building were large enough to permit snow to be blown into some of the rooms.”
But the physical conditions at Ofuna, as the Tang men would learn, proved only part of the struggle. Nonregistered captives received less food than official prisoners of war. Typical rations consisted of a teacup of rice and barley—counted out almost grain by grain—and a thin soup made of hot water mixed with a teaspoon of soya bean paste and a few carrot tops and potato peels served three times a day, a diet of just a few hundred calories. Prisoners received a sliver of meat or fish on rare occasions—and even then the meat was often rotten. Bombadier Zamperini, who endured a year in Ofuna before the Japanese transferred him to another camp a month before the men from the Tang arrived, would later recount one such event to war crimes investigators. “One day I walked over and looked in a wagon in which fish were being brought into the camp for our food. The fish were covered with maggots which were swarming all over,” Zamperini recalled. “Later that same night, fish were served as the meal but I lost my appetite.”
“Eat!” one of the guards ordered the aviator.
“I can’t eat it.”
“You eat,” the guard demanded and pressed the tip of his bayonet into the muscle behind Zamperini’s ear, drawing blood. “You eat.”
Zamperini did as ordered.
Portion sizes fluctuated, but rarely did quantities increase, in part to help wear down prisoner resolve, but also because the camp’s thieving cook operated a black market for the local population. Prisoners suffered chronic diarrhea, body sores, and malnutrition; the latter coupled with neglected wounds would lead to at least eight deaths. Many others battled beriberi, a painful thiamine deficiency associated with malnutrition that causes the loss of muscle function in the legs. The diet proved so poor in nutritional value that some prisoners would go as long as six weeks without a bowel movement. Food became an obsession. Men lulled themselves to sleep at night remembering favorite childhood meals. Chief Petty Officer Carl Quarterman, a Grenadier quartermaster who spent nine months at Ofuna, recorded a list in his diary of “new experiences” he endured as a prisoner, much of it dedicated to the horrible things he ate to survive, including fish and animal guts, horse blood, and even weeds and tree leaves. “Eating soup with worms floating on top,” Quarterman penciled on his list. “Living from day to day.”
But prisoners suffered more than starvation.
With every able-bodied Japanese man fighting on the front lines, Zamperini observed, Ofuna’s guards proved little more than “moronic farm kids and misfits not fit for combat.” Trivial offenses like talking, spilling rice, or failing to show respect translated into beatings. Other times guards invented charges. Staff made a special sport of slipping into cells in the middle of the night to pummel sleeping prisoners. The midnight groans of the injured reverberated throughout the barracks. The sadism went beyond just clubbings. The prisoners nicknamed one guard the Lover because he enjoyed unzipping the flight suits of captives, reaching inside and then pulling them around by the penis. The same guard on another occasion held a gun on a prisoner and made him masturbate while he watched. Other guards masturbated with an injured duck. Prisoners recalled with horror how guards drilled one day using the body of a deceased B-24 pilot as a bayonet target. “We lived in eternal constant dread of beatings and punishment,” recalled one prisoner. “It affected many of these men mentally and all of us physically. Some of the American prisoners through this constant dread of beatings and inhumane treatment could not even eat and digest their rations.”
The worst of the guards—a man the Tang sailors would come to despise—was the camp’s ruthless medical orderly, Sueharu Kitamura. The thirty-one-year-old medic thrived on other people’s pain. Born in Tokyo’s Ushigome ward, Kitamura grew up the middle of five children. His father died when he was eight years old, leaving Kitamura’s impoverished mother to raise him, his two sisters, and two brothers. The married father of a newborn daughter, he had enlisted in the Navy when he was twenty-one, climbing the ranks to the American equivalent of petty officer 1st class. He landed at Ofuna in March 1944. Kitamura’s light skin, square face, and chiseled jaw and general handsome looks disguised a maniacal fury that he liked to vent on Allied prisoners. Compared to the other Japanese guards that prowled Ofuna, Kitamura was a giant, standing almost six feet tall and weighing about 180 pounds, much of it muscle. “He was very heavily built,” recalled one prisoner. “Very wide shoulders, hard as a rock.”
Kitamura had a feminine high-pitched laugh that could spark terror in the prisoners, who alternately dubbed him “the Quack” and “the Butcher.” He carried a small black book in one hand to log alleged prisoner infractions and a bat in the other that he used to thrash captives. Other times Kitamura simply punched prisoners in the face and then kicked them when they fell to the ground.
The medic at times forced prisoners to squat on the balls of their feet while holding their hands above their heads in a tortuous position the captives called the “Ofuna Crouch.” Kitamura other days made them stoop over and push wet rags down the floors while he and other guards whipped them. When the passageways iced over in winter, Kitamura forced the men to do it barefoot, punishment that tore the skin off the bottoms of the prisoners’ feet. No one was safe from his violence, not even his young bride, Kazue, whom American prosecutors would later learn he often beat at home.
The increase in Japanese battle losses in the summer and fall of 1944 coincided with a rise in beatings. One prisoner noted that a glance at Kitamura’s face served as “a barometer to us of the Allied progress in the war.” The violence at Ofuna reached a crescendo one afternoon just weeks before the Tang crew’s arrival. Fitzgerald recorded that brutal September 9 beating after the Butcher caught Marine Lieutenant Bill Harris and Navy Lieutenant George Bullard trying to translate headlines in a week-old Japanese newspaper. “Kitamura called Bullard out of the formation of POW’s and started striking him with a club approximately 11/2" in diameter and 4' long across the back of his legs and buttocks. Bullard was struck approximately 15 times,” Fitzgerald recalled. “Kitamura then turned on Harris. By this time, Kitamura had become a raving maniac, he was screaming and jabbering Japanese intermixed with a few words of English to such an extent that none of us could understand what he was talking about. He then started striking Lt. Harris with the same club he had used on Bullard but in a more vicious manner. After about 10 or 12 blows Harris fell to the ground.”
To the men’s horror, the beating continued. “Kitamura started kicking him about the body and face and made him stand up again. He then continued beating him with the club. Harris was again knocked down and was unable to rise. After being again brutally kicked about the back and body he forced two American prisoners to lift Harris up and hold him in an erect position while he, Kitamura, struck Harris repeatedly in the face with his fists. After many blows in the face Harris was again knocked down whereupon Kitamura started kicking him again in the face and body. He then drew a circle about three feet in diameter, after a few minutes Harris had revived to a certain extent, whereupon he was forced to stand on his feet in his dazed condition within the limits of this small circle,” Fitzgerald said. “A P-38 pilot and a B-17 pilot passed out as a result of the psychological effect upon them and had to be carried to their rooms. As a result of this severe beating Harris had a lapse of memory for about three days.”
For the nine survivors of Tang—cold, wet, and filthy—Ofuna was now home. The guards ordered the new arrivals to wash their feet, dirty from walking through mud. The Japanese then issued them fresh clothing that included a dry shirt, pants, and shoes several sizes too small. Narowanski still wore the Hawaiian shorts he had had on when he escaped from the Tang, while the barefooted DaSilva sported only dungarees. Personal toiletries doled out included a toothbrush, tooth powder, and a towel that was little larger than a handkerchief. Guards escorted the new arrivals to individual cells, each with a stack of tattered blankets in the corner, a stack whose size would diminish throughout the winter as new prisoners arrived. The exhausted men slurped down a small bowl of soup and warm rice before stretching out for the night on the tatami mat, eager for rest. Morning loomed just a few hours away, promising the men a first glimpse of what life was really like in Ofuna.
• • •
Vice Admiral Lockwood stewed in his Pearl Harbor office. Tang had departed for its fifth war patrol on September 24, arriving in Midway three days later to top off fuel before leaving that afternoon for the coast of Formosa. Tang’s orders called for O’Kane to depart his patrol area November 8 and return to Midway ten days later. That day came and went. Skippers of Silversides, Trigger, and Salmon—all on patrol in the same area—had heard nothing from O’Kane. Repeated attempts to raise the Tang by radio had so far been greeted with silence. Lockwood waited as long as he could before he forwarded his four-page report to Admiral Nimitz. “It is with the deepest regret that the Commander Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet, reports that the U.S.S. Tang is overdue from patrol and must be presumed to be lost,” Lockwood wrote. “The area assigned to the Tang was at the request of the Commanding Officer of that vessel, who fully realized the dangers involved. However, it was the nature of Commander O’Kane to ask for the most difficult assignments and then to carry them out to perfection.”
Western Union telegrams went out the same day to the families of the Tang’s officers and crew, a three-sentence message families hoped never to receive. “The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your husband William Rudolf Leibold, Chief Boatswains Mate USN, is missing following action while in the service of his country,” read one such message. “The Department appreciates your great anxiety but details not available now and delay in receipt thereof must necessarily be expected to prevent possible aid to our enemies and to safeguard the lives of other personnel. Please do not divulge the name of his ship or station or discuss publicly the fact that he is missing.” Most knew that the odds were against the Tang crew’s survival. Lockwood had captured that anxiety in a personal letter a year earlier to Mush Morton’s wife after Wahoo’s failure to return. “The words ‘missing in action’ are, in our service, misleading,” the three-star admiral wrote. “We all know when a Submarine is reported over due how slim is the chance that any of her gallant crew has survived.”
Lockwood had grown tired of such messages. American submarine losses had continued to climb; the Navy counted some forty boats as presumed lost. The same day Tang was lost, so were two other submarines, Darter and Shark, the latter following its destruction of the Arisan Maru hellship. The famous Tang’s loss shocked the submarine community and the nation. The New York Times reflected on the Tang and the inherent risks faced by submariners in an editorial titled simply “Overdue.” “The undersea craft and the men who take them down are in a class by themselves. They fight far from the warming spotlights of public attention. In the far reaches alone, unaccounted by fellow fighting ships, they go in for the attack, often on the very threshold of the enemy domain,” the paper wrote. “The Tang and her men have gone to join the gallant and honored company—and company it is, for submarine losses are relatively higher than in any other category of fighting ship.”
• • •
The gravity of the Tang crew’s predicament crystallized the morning after arrival when an American prisoner under the supervision of a Japanese guard informed the men that Ofuna functioned as a secret interrogation camp unknown to the Allies and international relief agencies. “We were all warned that we were special captives of the Japanese, and that we were not prisoners of war, and that we would not be entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war. We were to be held strictly off the books,” recalled Marine pilot Major Gregory Boyington. “In other words, the Japanese did not notify our government through the Swiss that we were alive. To our people back home or anyone else we remained missing in action or dead.” Bombardier Zamperini outlined what that meant in blunt terms. “There would be no Red Cross supervision, no improved treatment. No humanity,” he wrote. “Men left the camp to be either executed or relocated. If you died there, no one would know but your brothers in arms.”
“We pulled you out of the water,” camp officials threatened new arrivals, “and can drop you back in.”
The Tang men witnessed Ofuna’s horror at 8:30 a.m. on the morning of November 6, just three days after arrival. Guards marched the survivors—kept in isolation on the camp’s west side—across the compound, where the rest of the prisoners stood at morning formation. Kitamura opened his dreaded black book and called out eight captives for punishment, all over trivial offenses. One man had failed to jump fast enough when a guard demanded he move a bench. The staff had caught two other captives talking. Another prisoner had complained that the men scrubbing the barracks had needed a break. Lastly, the Butcher singled out Grenadier
’s Fitzgerald, who had only five days earlier celebrated a grim anniversary: eighteen months in Ofuna. Guards demanded that the thirty-six-year-old Missouri native—as the camp’s senior prisoner—be punished alongside the others as an example. O’Kane watched his fellow submarine skipper step forward, a man who looked so shriveled he resembled a walking skeleton, and who as a captain and captive had endured the unimaginable.
Guards lined Fitzgerald and the other seven men up five paces in front of the rest of the prisoners, ordering the men to raise their hands above their heads. Armed with two-foot clubs Kitamura and other guards beat the captives as O’Kane and the Tang crew watched. “Every blow was as vicious as possible resembling an attempt to hit a ‘home run.’ They fell anywhere between the shoulder blades and knees of the prisoners, knocking them down, and in three cases unconscious,” O’Kane would later testify. “I counted the blows administered to Lieutenant Commander Fitzgerald. They were twenty seven in number. He must have been ‘out on his feet’ about half way through this torture when Kitamura knocked him clear of them and then to the ground. This beating was so severe that I fully expected several of the prisoners would be killed.”
Kitamura had before the morning formation smiled and promised O’Kane and his men an important lesson that day in Japanese. The Butcher’s brutal instruction horrified the Tang crew. Caverly, a former professional boxer, vomited. Leibold watched the blows fall on Fitzgerald with such force he feared the Grenadier skipper’s back would shatter. To the shock of the crew, guards hoisted the unconscious men back up and held them so the beatings could continue. None of the Japanese officials present—including the camp’s commander—intervened to stop the assault. Only when the winded and exhausted guards finally tired did the blows stop. Fitzgerald would later tell war crimes investigators that it was the eighteenth blow—a direct hit to his spine—that finally toppled him. “As a result of this beating each of us remained stiff and sore for about a week,” he would testify. “The discolored condition of our flesh where the blows fell remained black and blue for fully two weeks.”