by James Scott
The Tang men knew food—even Ofuna’s meager rations—offered Hunt his only chance of survival. He needed to eat and build up his strength to heal. Kitamura’s refusal to allow fellow prisoners to feed Hunt prompted O’Kane to go over him. The skipper appealed to Ofuna chief interrogator Yuzuru Sanematsu, a man prisoners dubbed the “Little Captain.” O’Kane’s request was denied. Hunt began to starve alone in his cell just as the February temperatures plummeted. Snow blew through the cracks in the walls and even healthy prisoners struggled to keep warm in unheated cells. Leibold refused to sit idle, even if it meant suffering the Butcher’s wrath. “Some of the other prisoners and I sneaked into Hunt’s cell several times when the guards were not looking to cover him and try to make him comfortable, as it was very cold and Hunt was unable to keep covers on himself,” Leibold recalled. “Hunt was given no medical attention and had to lay in his own excretion as he was too weak to go to the head.”
Guards refused to touch Hunt, whose cell stank of burned skin, infection, and feces. Few even dared to venture into his cell. The only time guards did so was to pound a bat on the floor at night and laugh at Hunt, now delirious with pain, reliving his crash over and over again. Kitamura finally relented and allowed Leibold twice to enter Hunt’s cell, but only to clean his filthy dressings. “When I tried to wash these bandages there were bits of flesh and matter clinging to them that I was unable to get off,” Leibold would later testify. “Consequently I had to take them out and bury them.” The prisoner in the cell next to the burned pilot heard his delirium finally fall silent. Hunt died at 9:40 p.m. on February 25. “Kitamura and Commander Sanematsu were directly responsible for his death,” Leibold testified. “I firmly believe that with a little care Hunt would have survived.”
Hunt’s death would not be the last at Ofuna.
The Allied assault on Japan had now reached the homeland and bombers crowded the skies over major cities. Interrogators pressured guards to break the will of prisoners who could provide intelligence that might help Japan counter the furious attacks. Guards ramped up the beatings and slashed the already meager diets. The Tang men were not immune. Guards liked to force O’Kane—who became Ofuna’s senior prisoner when Fitzgerald was transferred—to punch fellow captives. Other times guards thrashed him, including a Kitamura-ordered attack in April that cost the skipper some teeth. “After five full swings from the six-foot guard with closed fists to my jaw and ear, I was still standing mainly because of the wall behind me,” O’Kane would later testify. “Kitamura who was standing in back of the guard watching each blow then ordered him to hit me five more times in spite of blood coming from my mouth and chips of my teeth falling out.”
Prisoners began to unravel. One man repeatedly sang a line from the song “Freight Train Blues” while others obsessed over the camp’s policy of a cigarette in exchange for 100 dead flies. “One of the more pathetic sights I witnessed at Ofuna was seeing full grown men, all of varying degrees of sanity or insanity, salvaging dead rats and garbage out of the dump. These items would be placed in a choice spot in the sunlight to attract the flies, which were swatted,” one prisoner would later testify. “The dead flies would then be picked up by the fingers and placed in a can containing dead flies, filled with maggots.” Starving prisoners withered. Beriberi ravaged many by spring, leaving some unable to walk. Others stumbled. “Naval intelligence had obviously expected that the physical terror and the starvation diet would break men down, but that the food would be sufficient until the prisoners were transferred to registered camps,” O’Kane observed. “They had miscalculated and now took alarm.”
When a diet swap of bread for barley coupled with shots to fight dysentery failed to improve prisoner health, the Japanese decided to transfer nineteen captives to a camp in Tokyo, including Boyington and Tang’s six enlisted sailors. Tang officers O’Kane, Savadkin, and Flanagan would remain in Ofuna until late July. The Tang enlisted men bid farewell on April 5 and hiked up the dirt road that had delivered them to Ofuna 155 days earlier. Boyington led the crew. The fighter ace had first arrived at the camp in late March 1944, marveling at the beauty of the Japanese countryside as he approached Ofuna’s gate. A year of beatings, torture, and starvation had changed Boyington’s perspective. “I looked back over my shoulder at the closed gates of Ofuna with no nostalgia,” Boyington would later write. “When we walked back the same road I came in on originally, I wasn’t conscious of the quiet wooded scenery in the same way, for I saw no beauty in looking back anyplace.”
21
TANG
“Recurrently I am homesick, but even home and the loved ones there seem so distant—so indistinct and far off that even my homesickness is instinctive rather than voluntary.”
—Ernest Norquist, July 14, 1943, diary
Boyington, the six enlisted Tang survivors, and twelve other former Ofuna captives climbed aboard a streetcar that wound down out of the hills toward Tokyo, a trip the fighter ace estimated at about twenty-five miles. The men disembarked upon arrival and marched the rest of the way, crossing a narrow bridge that led to a small island that housed Omori prison. Guards lined up the new arrivals in front of the camp’s administration building for orientation. The men prayed the transfer to Omori would mark the end of their status as special prisoners. They hoped that the American government—and more importantly, the men’s families—would now learn the truth that they were still alive. The captives stood at attention all day before the camp’s gray-haired commander emerged at dusk amid the profuse bows from his subordinates. The colonel turned to address the new arrivals with the aid of an interpreter. “You are to remain in this camp as ‘special prisoners,’ ” he barked. “If any of you try to escape you will be killed.”
Omori served as the main prisoner of war camp for Tokyo and Yokohama. American investigators would discover at the war’s end that there were twenty-one branch camps, including Ofuna, which housed a combined 6,050 prisoners. Unlike Ofuna, where the Japanese imprisoned men in individual cells, Omori’s unheated barracks resembled human stables. Some 600 captives crowded each night into the shotgun-style quarters. A dirt path bisected each barracks with two raised sleeping platforms along either side, one stacked about five feet above the other. Newcomers slept up top while veterans stretched out below. Lice, fleas, and bedbugs feasted on them all. Many prisoners worked at rail yards, wharves, and warehouses, promising opportunities to steal everything from rice and canned goods to dried fish and grain alcohol, the contraband hidden in pant cuffs, false pockets, and even in socks suspended inside trouser legs. Stolen sugar served as Omori’s illicit currency. Prisoners swapped sugar for food with captives on different work details while others bartered with the guards for cigarettes. Some even forked over a half canteen of sugar as payment for a night with one of the camp’s homosexuals.
Work not only supplemented the men’s diets, but helped prisoners pass the days faster, though some jobs proved better than others. Men scooped feces from the pit latrines into wooden buckets, then hauled them dangling from bamboo poles to dump into a beachside pit just outside the prison. Others worked in the camp’s leather shop, stitching ammunition pouches for the military, or lugged sacks of coal across Omori’s causeway from the mainland. Most prisoners labored offsite, sorting steel in scrap yards and unloading lumber and coal from railcars and ships. Other captives hauled steel rails and plates to help build air raid shelters. Prisoners used these glimpses of the enemy’s homeland and the daily lives of Japan’s citizenry to chart the war’s progress. “Disappointed with what I see of Tokyo,” American Ernest Norquist, who survived the 1942 Bataan Death March, wrote in his diary. “It is decrepit. Trucks and cars run on charcoal and are all over age. Houses and shops are ramshackle and in need of repairs. Factories are like junk heaps.”
Most captives—except the special prisoners—enjoyed greater freedoms than in Ofuna. British prisoners captured in Hong Kong entertained the camp at night with jazz and orchestra concerts while a Red Cross phon
ograph belted out tunes such as “Queenie, the Strip-Tease” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” Captives even produced a New Year’s Eve play, a spin-off of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “The change to Omori was like surfacing after an all day dive,” O’Kane wrote, “for the 500 prisoners made it impossible for the guards to single out individuals.” But the effort needed to hold out hope for the war’s end wore down many prisoners. “The waiting seems more than a man can stand. I even hate to be with people at times. I crave both solitude and open spaces—and freedom,” Norquist wrote. “I’ve worn ruts into my memory thinking the same thoughts over and over. Even my plans for the future have grown stale with the long anticipation.”
The bombing that helped buoy prisoner morale intensified—bombing that came at the hands of one of America’s deadliest new weapons, the B-29 Superfortress. Boeing’s aeronautical monster more than lived up to its name, boasting the largest propellers ever fitted on a plane along with a sprawling 141-foot wingspan—twenty feet longer than the distance of the Wright brothers’ first successful flight. Constructed out of some 55,000 parts, twelve miles of wiring and tubing, plus 600,000 rivets, the four-engine bomber could haul ten tons of ordnance and fly some 4,000 miles across the ocean, a task that demanded a railroad tanker car’s worth of oil and fuel. Engineers spared nothing, from pressurized cabins that allowed fliers to operate free of oxygen masks at altitudes as high as seven miles to built-in ashtrays for the standard eleven-member crew. Hailed by the New York Times as a “magnificent instrument of destruction,” the Superfortress ushered in the air war “against the heart of the Japanese Empire.”
The horror that this new air war would bring to Japan became clear in the predawn hours of March 10, 1945. Some 300 bombers had lifted off from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian at sunset, aimed at Japan’s capital of Tokyo, the world’s third-largest city. B-29s dropped 1,667 tons of incendiary bombs on the city’s center, an area crowded with as many as 100,000 people per square mile. The fires proved so intense that bombers en route used them to navigate from 200 miles out while airmen as high as 20,000 feet over the city could read their watch dials. Soot even blackened the bombers’ bellies. Recon photographs taken hours later would reveal 15.8 square miles of homes, shops, and industry had burned as the fires reached the edge of the emperor’s palace. The attack killed 83,793 people, injured another 40,918, and left one million homeless. “I have never seen such a display of destruction,” wrote a Boston Globe journalist who flew in one of the B-29s. “I not only saw Tokyo burning furiously in many sections, but I smelled it.”
American Frank Fujita, imprisoned in Tokyo, described the horrific attack in his diary. “Almost instantly it seemed as if the entire city burst into flames,” wrote Fujita, who had been captured in 1942 in Java. “Fires created other fires and then their up-drafts would join and create monstrous ‘fire storms’ that sent flames thousands of feet into the air. It was awesome.” The true destruction greeted the Japanese and Allied prisoners at daybreak. “We saw such a sight as I have never seen in all my life,” Omori’s Norquist wrote in his diary. “Even we as prisoners, who have suffered so much, did not glory in what we saw—miles of destruction, block after block of charred ruins, as far as the eye could see, where just yesterday the flimsy dwellings and shops had stood. Twisted metal, smoldering wood, household goods and what not else, lay in black heaps. There was the stench of burnt flesh and the suffocating smell of smoke in the air. Women stood weeping, with children on their backs. Ragged, tired-looking men pushed carts or carried bundles that held all their rescued earthly possessions.”
Tokyo proved only the start. Bombers returned night after night, pounding the major cities of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. In just ten days B-29s flew 1,595 sorties, dropping 9,373 tons of bombs on Japan’s arsenals, factories, and shipyards. More than thirty-one square miles vanished. The size of these airborne armadas only grew as new $600,000 Superfortresses rolled off assembly lines each week at plants in Washington, Kansas, and Georgia. The same military that could muster only 111 bombers in November 1944 for the first Tokyo attack since Jimmy Doolittle’s raid now sent five times that many planes. On a mission in late May more than 550 bombers—with over 6,000 fliers crowded inside them—pummeled Tokyo in a nearly two-hour attack in which about forty tons of bombs dropped each minute. Reconnaisance photos revealed that the fifteen square miles leveled in March jumped to fifty-one square miles of charred ruins in less than three months, an area more than double the size of Manhattan island.
Prisoners at the Tokyo area camps sat ringside to this holocaust. The scream of air raid sirens—dubbed the “music” by the prisoners—would send guards scurrying into shelters. The exposed captives could do little more than watch and pray to survive as bombers darkened the skies. Australian Captain John Woodward, a surgeon with the Indian Medical Service captured after the British surrendered Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941, described an attack on Yokohama that left standing little more than scorched chimneys. “We went to a top window to see the raid. From 12 till 2 B-29s accompanied by fighters came over in unwavering formation and the sound of their bombs on the distant Yokohama was like the continuous roll of a drum. After we had counted 200 planes, both planes, city and sun were obscured by smoke and we saw no more,” Woodward wrote. “The following morning when the smoke had cleared Yokohama had vanished and in its place were blackened smouldering ruins.”
The merciless pounding at times brushed right up against the gates of Omori—one attack even destroyed the causeway—where prisoners waited and wondered how much more Japan could tolerate. “Shrapnel from incendiaries whizzed into our camp,” Norquist wrote in his diary in late May. “Scraps of burnt paper fluttered in all day from huge blazes. What a sight!” Boyington and the Tang sailors, though sequestered from the other prisoners in a special barracks, watched the attacks, too. To the starving prisoners, Boyington would later write, the silver B-29s looked beautiful. “The ground would shake. The windows would tremble and shake, and the sills on the doors would creak back and forth,” Boyington wrote. “Yet this was not so bothersome as at night, when the B-29s came over low, at around four to six thousand feet. We could hear them swoop down and dive, the engines roaring. We didn’t know where they were, didn’t know when to duck. We could just put our faces down into our cotton blankets—and hope.”
The Japanese ordered Omori’s special prisoners to sift through the debris of American bombings. “We would walk to these outskirts in areas where houses had been burned out. There would be bodies, dead bodies hither and yon,” recalled Tang’s Clay Decker. “They had flat bed trucks. We had to load the dead bodies on these flat bed trucks. Then we would clean up the rest of the debris.” Weakened by beriberi and chronic diarrhea, the Tang’s Jesse DaSilva made tea for the men, using a five-gallon water can he carried. The rest of the time he scavenged for garbage the men could eat, like discarded vegetables and fish heads. “When you’re starving, anything tastes good,” DaSilva said. “Another time when we were all on a tea break and sitting around talking, a stray old dog came around. We immediately discussed the possibility of eating this animal if only someone had the nerve to kill it. But of course, nobody would.”
The men labored in the rubble one day when a Japanese woman approached their guard, a gentle man with a limp the prisoners had nicknamed Gimpy. The filthy and emaciated prisoners horrified the woman. She left and returned. When she departed the second time, Gimpy summoned the prisoners. The woman had given them a ball of mochi, a pounded rice cake. As the senior-ranking prisoner and group leader, Boyington cut up the ball into nineteen pieces, a tiny sliver for each man. The woman returned the following day and brought the men candy carrots. Work not only promised the occasional bite of food, but also in Boyington’s case helped with his nicotine fix. The fighter ace scavenged the ruins for discarded cigarette butts, which he smuggled back into camp. He collected the tobacco and rolled his own cigarettes, using any paper he could find. When the light came through the cell
window at the right time of day, he would use a convex flashlight lens to light the first one. He would then chain-smoke them all, lighting a new one off the last.
The work coupled with the lack of food took its toll on the Tang survivors as spring turned to summer. Given lesser rations than official prisoners of war—and cut off from Omori’s illicit bartering system—submariners who had once enjoyed the Navy’s finest meals slowly starved to death. The six-foot-tall DaSilva, who weighed 168 pounds when he joined the submarine service, dropped to just 100 pounds. His feet swelled up, making it too painful to walk. He stopped laboring in the rubble with the others. Machinist’s mate Decker’s weight plummeted from almost 170 pounds to just 102 pounds. Leibold suffered hepatitis and a beating from a guard left his foot and leg infected. O’Kane turned bright yellow from jaundice. Recently transferred from Omori to another camp, Norquist captured in his diary the plight of many such prisoners on the eve of the war’s end. “I’m so weak I can hardly walk. How long can we keep on this schedule?” he wrote. “We work day and night now. Lord, deliver us soon!”
The wait for the war’s end would prove too much for some. Stronger prisoners began to contemplate how the conflict might end. Would troops storm the beaches, as they did at Guadalcanal, Saipan, and Iwo Jima? What would the Japanese do with the thousands of captives—many weak and infirm—crowded in flea-infested prisons like Omori? March them inland for a final stand? Kill them? Let them go? Other prisoners looked past the war’s end. What would life be like, the return home to parents, wives, sons and daughters? How had the beatings, torture, and starvation shaped them? Twenty-two-year-old Frank Fujita, forced to make propaganda radio messages, wrestled with these questions in his diary. “If we are to be free, we will emerge emaciated, weary fragments of humanity into a strange world; endowed with nothing but a few measly dollars, an unsurpassed knowledge of human nature and such a morbid philosophy on life that it will serve to ostracize us from society, should we put it to use,” Fujita wrote. “We will be easy to please and hard to fool.”