The War Below

by James Scott

  Prison gave other captives a chance to reflect on life’s priorities and hopes for the future. Many looked forward to leaving the service, marrying and starting families, thoughts reflected in Minnesota native Norquist’s diary. “I dream of home again and again and again. I dream, too, of the home that is to be—God grant that it may! The home that the one I love shall plan and build and live in. Shall I someday know a little one who will call me ‘Daddy’ and climb on my knee? A little bit of my own self in miniature,” Norquist wrote. “I want to enjoy life as never before and find in each day an adventure. I want to be known as hospitable always by every friend and acquaintance. And yet, I want to be alone at times too—to fish in streams and lakes, and wander through the old familiar countryside with perhaps just a faithful hound to accompany me. I want to get away from the Army—to be a civilian again—to wear the clothes I want to wear when I want to wear them and be my own master again.”

  • • •

  Colonel Paul Tibbets, Jr., throttled up his B-29 bomber in the muggy predawn darkness of August 6. The veteran pilot of more than two dozen combat missions over Europe and North Africa couldn’t help but feel nervous as he stared down the chipped coral runway on the tiny Pacific island of Tinian. America’s relentless pounding of Japan had so far failed to force the enemy to surrender even though bombers had burned up almost 160 square miles of Japan’s urban centers. Secured in the bomb bay just a few feet away from Tibbets sat what American leaders hoped would be a persuasive new weapon. Experts estimated that the 9,000-pound atomic bomb—nicknamed “Little Boy”—packed the punch of more than 20,000 tons of TNT, a horrific force equivalent to what 2,000 B-29s would carry. Tibbets released the brakes at 2:45 a.m. The newly christened Enola Gay—named in honor of his red-haired mother back home in Miami—roared down the runway at 155 miles per hour and lifted off into the dark.

  Tibbets puffed his Kaywoodie Briar pipe as the Enola Gay with its twelve-member crew droned across the empty ocean, reaching Iwo Jima at 5:55 a.m. He looked down a few hours later on Hiroshima 30,700 feet below—pleased at the lack of fighters and antiaircraft fire—and noted its streets, buildings, and waterfront piers. A 7 a.m. air raid alarm had sent many of the city’s 250,000 residents into shelters, only to emerge an hour later after the all clear signal. Families sat down to breakfast. Businessmen and shopkeepers rushed to work this Monday morning. Overhead, the Enola Gay’s pneumatic bomb bay doors yawned open. At 8:15 a.m. the bomb dropped. Tibbets turned the plane 155 degrees, the engines roaring. Forty-three seconds later, Little Boy detonated. A blue-white light lit up the plane’s cabin. The plume rose 45,000 feet in the air as the copilot Robert Lewis jotted down on the back of War Department forms he used as a makeshift log: “My God, what have we done?”

  American investigators after the war estimated that the attack killed approximately 80,000 men, women, and children, some charred black. As many as 100,000 others suffered injuries. The blast leveled more than four square miles and destroyed 65,000 of Hiroshima’s 90,000 homes, schools, and factories. Clothes erupted in flames and clay roof tiles bubbled when temperatures surpassed 3,200 degrees. Radiation not only exposed X-rays housed in the concrete basement of a hospital but made the fillings in Tibbets’s teeth tingle miles overhead. In a statement issued sixteen hours after the attack, President Harry Truman warned that Hiroshima was only the start. Failure to surrender would invite a “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.

  “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East,” Truman declared. “Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s ability to make war.”

  Bombers carried the president’s threat directly to the Japanese people, dropping millions of leaflets that begged residents to evacuate urban areas and pressure the government to surrender. “We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man,” stated the translation of one such leaflet. “We have just begun to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one atomic bomb fell on that city.” The pressure intensified as Russia declared war, steamrolling across Japanese-held Manchuria. On the Thursday morning of August 9, a second B-29 shot down Tinian’s darkened runway. Hours later the atomic bomb dubbed “Fat Man” plummeted toward the congested city of Nagasaki. The explosion that muggy summer morning flattened 1.8 square miles. Postwar investigators estimated that the attack killed approximately 45,000 people and injured as many as 60,000.

  Japan could take it no longer. A radio announcer informed the Japanese public at 7:21 a.m. on August 15 that Emperor Hirohito would deliver an address over the airwaves at noon. Officials planned to provide power to blacked-out districts and ordered receivers set up at government buildings, train stations, and post offices. Only hours earlier the emperor had read his entire speech into a microphone, 625 words when later translated into English, allowing audio engineers to capture it on a gramophone record. It took two tries before engineers felt the emperor—with tears in his eyes—successfully recorded the words designed to end the war that for America had started at Pearl Harbor three years, eight months, and eight days earlier.

  At noon throughout Japan millions of men, women, and children crowded around radios to hear for the first time the voice of the Sacred Crane. Even Hirohito, secure in an underground shelter after a failed military coup, tuned in with a portable RCA radio. Captives watched at one of the prison camps as guards dressed in formal uniforms—complete with swords—bowed to the radio. O’Kane and other prisoners from Omori, forced to dig bomb shelters, paused to listen as guards piped the broadcast over the worksite loudspeaker. The announcer asked listeners to please stand. Japan’s national anthem played. In Studio 8 of the NHK building, engineers cued the recording; the emperor’s voice now crackled over the airwaves. “To our good and loyal subjects,” Hirohito began. “After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure.”

  That extraordinary measure was, of course, Japan’s surrender, though Hirohito’s four-minute-and-forty-two-second recording was ambiguous. Rather than admit defeat, the emperor told his subjects that the “war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” The war had never been about territorial gains, he argued, but Japan’s self-preservation, something the atomic bomb now threatened. “The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives,” the emperor said. “Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects; or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.”

  The news of Japan’s surrender reverberated around the war-weary world. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz broadcast a message to all naval forces in the Pacific to cease operations, but continue searches, patrols, and remain vigilant. Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood fired off a message of his own to the submarine force. “The long awaited day has come and ceasefire has been sounded. As force Comdr I desire to congratulate each and every officer and man of the submarine force upon a job superbly well done. My admiration for your daring skill, initiative, determination, and loyalty cannot be adequately expressed. Whether you fought in enemy waters or whether you sweated at bases or in tenders you have all contributed to the end which has this day been achieved. You have deserved the lasting peace which we all hope has been won for future generations,” Lockwood wrote, ending with a reminder of those destined never to come home. “May God rest the gallant souls of those missing presum
ed lost.”

  Following Hirohito’s broadcast, guards ordered O’Kane and the other prisoners to stop work, gather up the tools, and march back to camp. Other work parties streamed through Omori’s gates that afternoon, including a group of British captives who sang. Some of the Japanese at Omori slaughtered a horse, then left with the meat, though Omori’s crafty cooks salvaged the horse’s intestines, chopped them up, and mixed them with gyp corn that would serve as part of a makeshift celebratory feast for the prisoners. Boyington stretched out on his back on his straw mat, suffering from jaundice and unable to work. One of the guards, an elderly man the fighter ace respected, summoned the major. He informed Boyington of Japan’s surrender. The major had learned enough Japanese to understand the guard, but after twenty months in captivity the gravity of his words failed to register. Boyington’s blank stare prompted the guard to repeat the news. “The war is over,” he declared. “It was over fifteen minutes ago.”

  The special prisoners gathered that night for the evening formation, led as always by Boyington. “Hey, fellows,” the major called out. “We don’t know whether this is over, but I would like to suggest something.”

  “What is it?” came the chorus.

  “Let’s stay in formation and all repeat the Lord’s Prayer.”

  And so they did.

  The guards burned many of the compound’s records that night, a move the Tang’s Savadkin felt signified that the war had truly ended. The shock of the emperor’s surrender message drove many of Omori’s guards to drink. Boyington, O’Kane, and the Tang crew woke up to a banging on the barracks door. The on-duty guard warned the men that some of his inebriated colleagues had debated killing the Americans. The guard handed Boyington a hammer and nails to seal the door. The prisoners peered through the cracks as a drunken noncommissioned officer stumbled and shouted, slicing the air with his sword. Despite the on-duty guard’s efforts to restrain him, the drunken guard pounded on the door. The prisoners feared he would break it down. Boyington gripped the hammer and perched next to the door, planning to crush the drunk’s skull should it open. “Let me at the captives,” the drunk barked. “I am going to kill all of them. I’ll prove to them that Japan is greater than the United States. Let me at them.”

  The drunks had sobered up—or passed out—by the morning. The prison commander accompanied by an interpreter visited the Tang crew’s barracks and asked about the quality of the living conditions, a visit that surprised the men since the commander had never before shown any interest in Omori’s special prisoners. The commander’s visit preceded an issuance of new clothes along with multivitamins, iron tablets, and cod-liver oil pills. Medics began sick call for the special prisoners and increased the meager food rations, improved treatment many greeted with cynicism. “It seems as if the Japanese were trying in a few days of kindness to make up for the years of deprivation and cruelty,” Norquist wrote in his diary. “I have no desire or plans for revenge. I want to go home and forget about Japan and everything here. I’ll be so very happy to be truly free that I won’t be able to be mad at anybody at all. Just let me be free, and everything else will take care of itself. May God grant it soon.”

  American planes soon appeared in the skies above Omori. British prisoner Harry Berry, captured in 1942 in Singapore, described the euphoria that seized prisoners during one such flyover. “We all stood out in the open, rain or no rain, stripped to the waist standing on roofs or anything else available and cheered and waved like mad,” Berry wrote in his diary. “One pilot must have seen one of our Yanks who was standing on the roof signaling him to dive. He dived straight towards him and just skimmed the fence.” Frank Fujita climbed atop one of the latrines as a pilot buzzed the camp, tossing down his half empty pack of cigarettes with a note that read: “Hang on! It won’t be long now!” “When he came over we all waved and I was going to shout or let out a big yell for joy but no sound would come out,” Fujita later wrote. “There was a lump in my throat about the size of a grapefruit and the harder I tried to yell the worse it hurt. I was so emotional and elated that I almost burst out in tears.”

  The B-29s that had for months rained fire down on Japanese cities returned, but now hauling 10,000-pound loads of medicine, canned food, and clothes. The massive bombers, with “P.W. Supplies” painted beneath the wings in three-foot-high block letters, slowed to just 165 miles per hour and buzzed as low as 500 feet over the camps, parachuting fifty-five-gallon drums. America planned the loads for three-, seven-, and ten-day drops, the first and most important containing medical supplies, soups, and juices; foods that starving prisoners could easily digest. The seven-day drops delivered more substantive foods and extra medicines, while the ten-day drops consisted largely of canned foods. During the twenty-four days beginning on August 27, bombers would fly some 900 sorties, dropping 4,470 tons of food, clothes, and medicine to captives at some 158 camps scattered across Japan, China, Korea, and Formosa. These supplies would help the prisoners survive until America could evacuate them.

  Prisoners climbed atop Omori’s barracks and used Japanese tooth powder mixed with water to paint messages on the rooftops, including a three-word communiqué that would appear as a photo in the New York Times: “Pappy Boyington Here!” Supplies soon rained down, from toothbrushes and razors to soap, cigarettes, and chewing gum. Prisoners devoured ham sandwiches and popped handfuls of sugarcoated vitamins, sucking the sweet layer off them like candy. “This is better,” Harry Berry wrote in his diary, “than any Christmas I have had.” Some of the drums dropped into the bay while others tore free of the parachutes and crashed to the ground, including one that busted through an office window. “Everyone ran for cover just in time,” Fujita wrote of one such scare. “When the steel drums hit the ground, the tack-welds broke loose and here came all the little cans of food, shooting out like shrapnel.”

  Boyington watched the B-29 drops from the safety of a bomb shelter. “Why don’t you stay out here and get some of this stuff,” one prisoner asked the major.

  “After living through all I have,” the fighter ace fired back, “I’m damned if I’m going to be killed by being hit on the head by a crate of peaches.”

  22

  TANG

  “I have been dead 21/2 years while the world has passed me by—just existing from day to day a slave for the Japs.”

  —Carl Quarterman, September 15, 1945, letter

  Commodore Joel Boone climbed on board a Navy landing craft shortly before 3 p.m. on August 29 in Tokyo Bay. The mission this muggy afternoon of Boone’s fifty-sixth birthday: liberate the prisoners of war at Omori. A former physician to presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, the mustached Boone’s job was to help identify and evacuate the most critical prisoners first. No one was better suited for the job. The Pennsylvania native in July 1918 had repeatedly braved enemy fire and gas on a French battlefield to treat wounded Marines, heroism that earned him the Medal of Honor. American forces had spent the nine days since Hirohito’s broadcast of Japan’s surrender planning the rescue of thousands of Allied prisoners. The Navy had trained special medical units, assembled portable communication sets, and prepared landing forces. Boone and others had pored over intelligence reports and studied maps and aerial photographs of the prisons in preparation for their mission.

  Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General Douglas MacArthur had ordered the Navy to wait for the Army before liberating prisoners. A picket boat patrolling near shore south of Tokyo the night of August 27 had rescued two escaped British prisoners who recounted gruesome stories of captivity, stories Boone had confirmed the next day in a briefing with a Swiss doctor with the International Red Cross. Admiral Halsey felt he couldn’t wait. Liberation must begin immediately. He fired off a plea to MacArthur, alerting him that local emissaries reported some 6,125 prisoners in Tokyo area camps with 417 of them bedridden. Halsey informed MacArthur that he had three hospital ships along with thirty doctors, ninety corpsmen, and enough food and cloth
es for 3,000 men with enough medical personnel and supplies on the way to accommodate up to 4,000 more. “I propose for most expeditious action,” he urged. “All of the facilities under my command are available to you.”

  Most of Halsey’s Third Fleet at the time lay at anchor twenty-five miles south of Tokyo in scenic Sagami Bay near the emperor’s summer palace and with a view of iconic Mount Fuji on the distant horizon. The colorful admiral known as Bull, who made headlines after he boasted of his plan to ride through the capital on Hirohito’s white horse, weighed anchor and steamed into Tokyo Bay the morning of August 29, followed a few hours later by the cruiser San Juan and the hospital ship Benevolence. Halsey’s 9:40 a.m. meeting with Boone and other senior officers on board the battleship Missouri only reconfirmed his belief that the Navy needed to begin evacuations immediately—with or without MacArthur’s blessing. Halsey outlined the dire scenario to Fleet Admiral Nimitz, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean areas, moments after the five-star admiral touched down on board a seaplane from Guam at 2:20 p.m. and climbed aboard the battleship South Dakota, Nimitz’s flagship.