The War Below

by James Scott

  “Go ahead,” Nimitz replied. “General MacArthur will understand.”

  The landing craft pulled away from San Juan just forty minutes later, cutting through the water toward Omori. Boone moments earlier had dashed off a note to Benevolence’s senior medical officer to prepare to screen and care for the prisoners, but hospitalize only the sick. Able-bodied prisoners would be sent on to other ships. The surgeon also had forwarded color-coded tags he’d created to help classify the returning prisoners. On board the landing craft with Boone sat Commodore Rodger Simpson, commander of the rescue operation, and his chief of staff, Commander Harold Stassen, who had resigned as governor of Minnesota in 1943 to go on active duty in the Navy. The Missouri’s chaplain accompanied the men as an interpreter. Two other landing craft with Red Cross officials and additional medical officers and hospital corpsmen followed. Navy planes buzzed overhead, guiding the three boats some four miles across the bay toward Omori on this muggy summer afternoon.

  • • •

  Prisoners on the beach at Omori had watched America’s massive warships steam into Tokyo Bay with great excitement. The promised liberation appeared at hand. For the nine survivors of Tang, the war’s end had arrived just in time. The reduced rations given to the special prisoners had pushed O’Kane and his crew to the brink of starvation. None weighed over 100 pounds and beriberi had crippled most of them. Motor machinist’s mate Jesse DaSilva could hardly walk, while Clay Decker could press on his ravaged muscles and make them dimple. The hepatitis that had racked Leibold had now hit O’Kane, the suspected culprit a dirty needle the Japanese had used to inoculate the prisoners. Jaundice had turned him ocher, a color that reminded Leibold of a Philip Morris cigarette pack. O’Kane was so weak he needed help just to get off his tatami mat. He struggled even to eat. The Navy’s arrival in the bay had buoyed morale. Many of the prisoners collected around the beach, including Tang’s Clay Decker and Pete Narowanski, waiting to see what would happen.

  “What’s that?” a prisoner shouted around 4 p.m.

  The prisoners stared out as the landing crafts roared toward them, a scene British captive Harry Berry captured in his diary. “Nobody doubted that they were anything else but a landing party and everybody was right. As they drew near we could see three launches, the last one flying the Stars and Stripes. Everybody went mad. From out of nowhere came the home-made Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes and the Dutch flag. Everyone dashed along the beach shouting and guiding the barges in. Some men swam out to meet them,” he wrote. “The camp was in an uproar.” Everyone that is except Boyington, who after twenty months in captivity felt empty. “All these months I had been wondering what my reaction would be on being rescued. I could imagine myself crying, maybe laughing and jumping around, doing practically anything. As I looked around, all these prisoners were now doing these things,” the major wrote. “But for my own part I was numb. I just couldn’t feel. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t laugh.”

  Frank Fujita jumped in the water and began to swim out to the boats, still dressed in his clothes and shoes. Fujita swam some forty yards before he found his strength depleted. He sucked in a mouthful of water as his head slipped beneath the waves. Fujita struggled back to the surface, took a deep breath, and tried to arch his back to remain afloat. He saw one of the landing craft headed toward him and feared the propeller would chop him to pieces. The exhausted Fujita again slipped underwater. Why had he been so foolish in his weakened state, he thought, to attempt to swim out to the boats? “I had ended my own life just at the moment of liberation,” he wrote, making one last kick toward the surface. “The next thing I knew, two large hands had me by the head and were pulling me out of the water, and then another sailor helped lay me on the deck of the landing craft,” he wrote. “As the other landing craft plucked up the rest of the swimmers, I lay on the deck too exhausted to move.”

  Boone’s landing craft pulled up to a sewer pipe supported by pilings that extended out into the channel. Excited prisoners lined the edge of the camp’s bulkhead, shouting with joy at the liberators. A Navy photographer snapped pictures, including one that showed the Tang’s Decker, shirtless and dressed only in a pair of tattered shorts, at the forefront, his arms raised in excitement. A few feet to Decker’s left stood submariner Denny Landrum of Grenadier, waving an American flag he had made from a bedsheet and hung on a fireman’s pole. Boone, Simpson, Stassen, and the others climbed up on the sewer pipe and onto the beach, with Boone the first ashore, a distinction he wrote in his report that he could not be mindful of given the starving and suffering captives who now mobbed the rescuers. “The excitement of the prisoners was a never-forgettable sight,” Boone wrote in his report. “Many of them were unclad, some clad merely with a G-string, others with trunks, while some others were dressed in non-descriptive apparel.”

  Senior prisoner Commander Arthur Maher, who had served as gunnery officer on the cruiser Houston when the Japanese sank it off Java in 1942, approached Boone along with an Army major. The prisoners informed the surgeon that the Japanese guards—armed with fixed bayonets—demanded that the rescuers enter through Omori’s main gate. Guides then led Boone, Simpson, Stassen, and the others around the prison’s waterfront to where the men found the Swedish Red Cross representative. The Japanese had barred him from entering Omori, so he had waited for the rescuers for several hours at the camp’s entrance. The Japanese escorted the Americans to the office of the Omori’s commanding officer. Simpson told the Japanese colonel that his party had arrived to rescue the prisoners. The colonel protested through an interpreter that he did not have orders from his war department to release them. Simpson and Boone countered that Admiral Halsey had ordered the immediate liberation of the prisoners.

  “I have no authority to release them,” the colonel stammered.

  “You have no authority, period!” Stassen fired back.

  Rescuers pushed the colonel aside and entered Omori. The officers announced to the prisoners who crowded around them that the camp was now liberated. No longer would captives have to bow to Japanese officers. Rescuers entered Omori’s dispensary to find emaciated prisoners, deprived even of simple comforts like sheets, blankets, and pillows, stretched out atop bare wooden platforms. Other than a small dressing room with a few drugs and bandages, Boone found nothing that indicated the building served as a dispensary. He ordered one of the medical officers to assemble all of Omori’s sick in the dispensary and prepare them for immediate evacuation, a total of eighteen stretcher-bound patients and 125 ambulatory. Rescuers gave senior prisoner Maher a portable communications set and instructed him to help organize the rest of the prisoners for evacuation. All afternoon and evening rescue boats would run, ferrying 707 prisoners to Benevolence moored five miles offshore.

  • • •

  To the nine survivors of Tang, the Benevolence resembled a luxury liner. The 15,400-ton ship stretched over 500 feet and spread out over seven decks. Staffed with a typical complement of about seventeen medical officers, thirty nurses, and 238 corpsmen, Benevolence boasted a surgical suite with several operating rooms plus dental, dermatology, and eye, ear, nose, and throat clinics. Patients even could enjoy whirlpools and massages in the physical therapy clinic. The floating hospital was designed to care for 802 officers and crewmen, but if pressed could accommodate up to a 1,000. There were bunks equipped with reading lamps and a five-channel radio system that offered a choice of educational shows, religious services, or the ship’s entertainment program. Staff pushed around library carts and showed movies topside while the band belted out the ship’s theme song, “Sentimental Journey.” “It was just magnificent,” recalled Alice Bruning, a nurse. “It was a brand new hospital.”

  Crews on Benevolence immediately began processing the throngs of former captives who climbed on board. Clerks interviewed and tagged each prisoner. The men stripped, showered, and slipped on clean pajamas, bathrobes, and slippers; crews destroyed all the lice- and flea-infested clothes. Doctors gave each man a physical
exam to determine who required hospitalization. The Navy then issued new white uniforms including underwear, socks, shoes, and a hat. Eighty-five percent of the prisoners, in Boone’s estimation, suffered serious malnutrition. Many battled tuberculosis, beriberi, and pellagra while others suffered infected wounds and even fractures. “All were to a fair degree emotionally disturbed and had a marked expression of fright,” Boone observed. “All showed evidence of intense suffering.”

  The medical staff sympathized with the hundreds of traumatized prisoners who cycled through Benevolence. “These men were right from the camps and it was a psychological shock to suddenly be safe on this beautiful, immaculate hospital ship. They just couldn’t believe what had happened to them,” recalled Madge Gibson, a nurse on Benevolence. “Here were these poor, emaciated, filthy dirty, horribly smelling men crawling with lice in a state of disbelief and ecstatic euphoria. They had had no showers, no delousing, and were starving. Some were carrying small tattered cloths, perhaps containing a picture of a wife and a few precious things they had been able to hold onto all those years. Many were wearing stiff, unwashed dungarees that had recently been dropped by our planes. I will always remember those unwashed dungarees on those poor dirty bodies. They had to put their little possessions into an autoclave on the fantail because everything was so contaminated.”

  The first order of business for the Tang survivors: food. After ten months of starvation in Ofuna and Omori with little more to eat than rice, barley, and broth, the men hungered for calories, fat, and flavor. Much to the frustration of the ship’s medical staff, the skipper of Benevolence ordered that the prisoners be allowed to eat as much as they wanted, even though their shrunken stomachs would no doubt struggle. The cooks answered the call. Prisoners gorged on plates of fried eggs, bacon, and ham. Others dove into bowls of fruits and grains, chasing the fine meal with endless cups of juice and coffee. Prisoners marveled over the ship’s “mechanical cow” that could convert powdered milk into forty gallons of frothy liquid every hour, while others lined up at the automatic ice cream machine. “Boy, what a meal,” Harry Berry wrote in his diary. “Real ham and eggs. Fruit, cereals, coffee, milk. Everything. I shall never forget it.”

  Tang engineer Larry Savadkin couldn’t stop himself once he sat down. He pounded down one egg after the other, trying to make up for 309 days of missed meals in a single sitting. “I personally accounted for 15 fried eggs, about a quarter of a pound of ham and I don’t know how much milk and ice cream. I got sick a few hours afterwards. I think all of us did the same thing,” recalled Savadkin. “It is my opinion that the doctors felt that they could handle an upset stomach, and the effect on our morale would far offset the effect of our upset stomachs after we were all finished with it.” Pappy Boyington rivaled Savadkin, devouring five plates of ham and eggs to the shock of a bomber pilot across the table. “My God,” the pilot declared. “I wish I could put all the stuff away that you do.” A corpsman rolled Bill Leibold to the mess hall in a wheelchair, where the Tang’s boatswain’s mate had the opposite reaction of Savadkin and Boyington. “I got some food,” he recalled. “All I could do was sit there and look at it.”

  Life aboard Benevolence and other Navy ships came with its shocks for the Tang men and other prisoners, something the nurses recognized. “The men would go through stages you could identify. At first everything was wonderful—like a miracle. And then after a while, nothing was right,” nurse Gibson recalled. “At first, they couldn’t believe having sheets on the bunks and things like that. Then they would hoard food because they weren’t sure they would get any more. When you made up their bunks you’d find bread stuffed under the pillows as though they figured there might not be any food tomorrow.” Other former captives simply wanted to talk. “We were the first women they had seen in years,” Gibson remembered. “They wanted to tell you what they had been through. I guess it was a catharsis for them. And they wanted to talk to us because they thought we, as women, would be more sympathetic. We represented their wives, their girlfriends, their mothers, or whatever.”

  Some captives proved in worse shape than others, including Tang motor machinist’s mate Jesse DaSilva. Beriberi had largely robbed him of his ability to walk. “I was in no condition to be flown home,” DaSilva wrote. “I was put to bed and given blood and other medication.” Worse than DaSilva was Tang skipper Dick O’Kane. Emaciated and jaundiced, he suffered a high fever. Doctors placed the skipper in isolation and sedated him, but he would survive. Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, grateful to see seventeen submarine officers and 141 enlisted men freed from Japanese prisons, was shocked when he first saw his prized skipper. “He was just skin and bones. His arms and legs looked no bigger than an ordinary man’s wrists,” the three-star admiral recalled. “His eyes were yellow with jaundice, but that’s the only yellow in O’Kane’s make up. Nothing ever had, nor will anything ever, daunt him.”

  The Navy had learned from intercepted communications that O’Kane and eight others had survived the loss of the Tang, a fact kept secret even from the families. The public’s first news of the men’s survival and the details of what happened that tragic October night off Formosa now appeared in newspapers nationwide. “The saga of the submarine Tang and her nine survivors cannot be retold too often,” the New York Times wrote. “It ranks among the epics of American naval history.” Ernestine O’Kane sent a copy of that article to the families of the Tang crew. “Words are inadequate to tell you what a great part your loved one took in helping to bring the war to its end. I pray each of you may find peace of mind with His help,” she wrote. “There will be months of recuperation of body and soul for my husband and I am asking you not to write him for the present, since his pain for the gallant men who went out with him and for their loved ones, is one of the scars I shall try to help him heal.”

  New prisoners poured in each day from other liberated camps in the region, prompting the Navy to cycle the healthier ones off of Benevolence as fast as possible to free up beds. This included Leibold, who landed on board the Ozark after his strength returned following his battle with hepatitis. One of the corpsman told him that O’Kane was on board. Leibold visited his sedated skipper and found him the lone occupant of a two-person room. He promptly moved in with him. The Tang survivors one by one departed for home, excited to see family and friends. Savadkin in a trip typical of most of the crew flew first to Guam, Pearl Harbor, and then back to California, met at each stop by representatives from the submarine force, who offered to assist in any way. Jesse DaSilva took a different and slower route. The Navy transferred him to the hospital ship Rescue, where he would steam for weeks across the Pacific. A corpsman appeared in the door one day and announced that Leibold’s turn to depart had finally arrived.

  “What about the old man here?” he asked.

  “He’s not ready to leave yet,” the corpsman replied.

  Leibold was reluctant to leave his skipper. He had commissioned the Tang with O’Kane almost two years earlier. The skipper had in just five patrols spread out over nine months managed to sink more ships than most submarines did in the entire war. Leibold had been on the bridge right next to O’Kane—a pair of binoculars pressed to his face, searching for enemy escorts—for almost every one of those attacks. The men had endured the loss of the Tang, the cold night at sea, and ten subsequent months in Japanese prisons that had almost forced them to suffer the same fate that befell their seventy-eight shipmates at the hands of a malfunctioning torpedo. But the pair had survived. The corpsman told Leibold he had no choice now. The Navy had arranged his air evacuation. The boatswain’s mate knew that O’Kane—unconscious and sedated—would heal and follow him soon. Leibold’s wife now waited for him in California along with the promise of a new start. It was time to go home.

  The war was over.

  Finally over.

  EPILOGUE

  “Please take care of yourself, honey, & just stand by. I’ll be back some day.”

  —Ira Dye, January 15, 1943,
letter

  Dick O’Kane stood on the south lawn of the White House alongside President Harry Truman at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 27, 1946. The former skipper of the ill-fated Tang, who in February had celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday, dressed for the occasion in his formal blue uniform. The requisite winter Navy blue cap hat hid his buzzed head. His wife, Ernestine, and the couple’s six-year-old son, James, and nine-year-old daughter, Marsha, looked on along with O’Kane’s sister and parents. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz attended along with the architect of the submarine war, Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood. O’Kane had earned over the course of the war three Navy Crosses, three Silver Stars, the Navy Commendation Medal, the Legion of Merit, and the Purple Heart. To that collection this afternoon would be added the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for heroism.

  The seven months since Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender had proven a period of adjustment for O’Kane and the other eight survivors of Tang. Bill Leibold had come home to recover in the arms of his wife, while Clay Decker had returned to find his wife had given him up for dead and remarried. Fearful that his gaunt frame would frighten his family, O’Kane had delayed his homecoming, hoping to pack on a few extra pounds. His mentor, Mush Morton, had died alongside his men. O’Kane had suffered the loss of seventy-eight of his, a grief so strong that he would spend his final days before Alzheimer’s and pneumonia claimed him in 1994 desperate to swim out to rescue them.

  O’Kane was not yet done with the horrors of the war. He would return to Japan along with Leibold to testify in the war crimes trials against their captors, including Sueharu Kitamura, the notorious Butcher of Ofuna. The tribunal would ultimately convict Kitamura for causing the death of Norman Imel—a naval aviator O’Kane and the Tang crew buried—and contributing to the deaths of three others. The tribunal determined that he had beat no fewer than a hundred other prisoners. “It was the opinion of the prosecutor,” one memo stated, “that he was one of the most vicious beaters ever tried in the Tokyo area.” The tribunal sentenced the Butcher to hang on February 26, 1948, prompting his mother, brothers, and sisters to break down in tears, his entire family with the notable exception of his wife.