The game was an unspeakable reversal of ordinary baseball, with the errors greatly outnumbering the chances accepted. In the ninth inning the physician-coach was confronted with a question of sporting ethics. He had a run on third—a potbellied skeleton with acute edema and a xylophone breast development—and he needed a clean hit to bring the near-cadaver home. His other players were lying on the sooty clay of the mine-yard, hollow-eyed, panting, and collapsed. He needed a pinch-hitter able to run at least as far as second, and the hospital rolls were exhausted.
But the Grunt had a card still unplayed. There was a prisoner who worked in the mine, who had once played semi-pro baseball around Denver, but whom the Grunt had never been able to make into a hospital patient because he refused to apply for treatment. He preferred slaving in the tunnels to participating in such a macabre parody of a game he loved. The card Murao held was that once, months before, this man had served as assistant in an emergency operation in the hospital.
He ordered the ex-player, who was off-shift and asleep, summoned. The game was stopped. At length the ringer arrived, yawning with sleep and dazed. Murao explained to him what was expected. When the visitors saw his practiced and relatively virile swing, they protested. The Grunt sweetly produced testimony that the pinch-hitter had actually been a hospital assistant.
The ringer hit a clean single, the skeleton galloped home with a gaunt giraffe-like step, and the game was won. The ringer went back to his cot and sleep immediately, and when he was roused by starlight for his shift in the mine, he remarked, “Funny what you dream in a camp. I dreamed Murao had me playing ball for him.”
As the sharp Japanese autumn verged into winter, the prisoners nursed a hope that the doctor’s passion would wear off. The patients were playing in thin cotton clothing, bare-legged and with straw sandals. The wind coming down from the mountains cut their lungs and set them coughing. The field was hard and icy, and sometimes snow fell.
Instead of halting, the coach intensified his training. “Pray harder, you keep warmer,” he said. The patients played from the cold winter sunrise until the sorrowful sunset. A man tagged with a ball simply fell over as though clubbed. Murao, feeling that hardening exercises were called for, introduced a new training program. Under this system, patients were called from their wooden pallets at 5:30 in the morning, when it was dark and frosty, and given a half hour of calisthenics to toughen them for the winter baseball season.
At the same time, however, conditions were deteriorating in the mine. Cave-ins were frequent. Miners began to turn themselves into baseball players. The hospital doubled its patients, then doubled them again. Captain Yuri had gone and the new commander was Captain Fukuhara, an unpliant personality. He was heard to complain to Lieutenant Murao that extending the influence of baseball was cutting down coal production by encouraging men to aim at avoiding the mine. “Hold more men above ground!” retorted the Grunt in Japanese rather wildly. “Hold five hundred! Hold a thousand! We’ll have a baseball league—maybe two leagues!”
Murao eventually did overreach himself. He proposed that several new hospital buildings be built, and drew up plans. If carried out, his camp plans would have changed the entire coal mine into a gigantic hospital, completely girdled with ball fields. He also demanded more gloves, mitts, balls and bats. At this point the Army officers saw that they had an empire-builder on their hands, though of a peculiar order. They decided to get rid of him.
The Grunt was hustled out of camp without even a chance for a farewell speech to his squad. The same afternoon the new commandant went through the hospital swinging a large narugi, followed by several guards with kibokos. They cut the squad. Later Murao’s diamond was dug up into air raid shelters, and just in time too, for the first B-29 raids were beginning.
An American officer of one of the prisoner-recovery teams, coming up from Nagasaki after the surrender, reminded the men in this camp that the World Series would begin soon back home. “They reacted a lot different in this camp from our boys on Honshu,” he remarked, puzzled. “Instead of wanting to know all about who was playing and so forth, they looked at each other and gave a kind of shudder. I guess they must’ve had some experiences so terrible they just couldn’t talk about them.”
Izuka, Japan—Monday, September 17, 1945 1800 hours
Allied Prison Camp #7, Izuka, Kyushu
All names herewith exclusively obtained by myself, being the first correspondent to reach this camp.
Two Mitsui coal mines, Shinko and Honko—the scene of bitter toil by 186 American, 360 Dutch, and 2 British prisoners for the past year—limped along on Japanese labor today while eager prisoners, hungry for home, waited for a typhoon which has grounded transport planes to blow itself out.
Men were paid ten sen daily, non-coms fifteen; that’s about seven-tenths of one American penny, and a cent and a quarter, for twelve hours’ work. Beatings were frequent but, unlike the Mitsui mine at Omuta where five Americans were “executed” thus, none of the beatings were prolonged. However, one American weakened by malnutrition was beaten enough to bring about his death.
Fifty-four Dutch died, having passed away with pneumonia before camp physician Captain Sidney Vernon of Willimantic, Connecticut, arrived with the first sulfadiozene.
The Japanese here introduced two types of speed-up days or odashis. On big odashi days prisoners got worked one hour beyond the normal twelve, and received one potato as a bonus. On little odashi days they worked one hour extra and got nothing.
The camp is commanded by a Dutchman, Captain Willem Andrau, who before the war was the Dutch East Indies representative of the Universal Oil Products Company, a Chicago builder of international refineries.
Joseph Matheny of Zanesville, Illinois, a member of the 192nd Tanks, said that Maywood Company “was hit harder than any other and I cannot believe many are alive. I’ve been trying to find them among Kyushu’s prison camps, without success. My best buddy, a Chicagoan, died in O’Donnell. [Correspondent’s note: Names are known here but cannot be released until confirmed by the War Department.] Our company was one-quarter Chicago boys, and I cannot remember a single one who’s still alive.”
Pharmacist Kenneth Moffat of San Diego was more hopeful, saying: “I saw Chicagoan Steve Gados and the whole crew of his suicide tank alive at Cabanatuan between April and July of last year. I also saw the Japs force another Chicagoan, from a tank battalion, to hold his hands aloft while they beat him severely with bamboo sticks. They then had him lower his hands, and they beat his head until it was covered with swollen knobs.”
Moffat gave a moving account of how five Americans (Emery of the Quartermaster Corps, Smith of the 200th Coast Artillery, Gustafson of the 31st Infantry, Adams of the Air Corps, and one other believed to be from the 192nd Tanks) were executed by a firing squad in August 1942 when the Japanese detached a bridge-building party to Calumpet in Bulagan, thirty miles from Manila. The Japanese at first refused to allow Moffat to give medical care to the party, but when all but ten of 120 were down, they permitted him to open an infirmary but denied him medicine. Four cases died from appendicitis within three months because the Japanese doctor who came every ten days from Manila refused Moffat’s pleas to remove them in his empty truck. In the face of a death penalty for any absence from camp, Moffat used to swim nightly across Pampanga’s river to receive gifts of medicine from Filipinos who “pledged us twenty percent of their wages for medicine but actually gave us nearer sixty percent.”
The showdown came when “Adobe Citizen”—an American, Gottlieb Neigum of the 31st Infantry, who was living Philippine-style—escaped despite a warning from the Japanese lieutenant, Watanabe, that ten Americans would be killed if one departed. Watanabe lined up the Americans and informed them that because he was generous he had decided to shoot five instead ten. Neigum had been holder of camp number #120. Watanabe announced that under the presumption of having influenced or known about Neigum’s escape, two numbers below and three above Neigum’s—the holders of #1
18, #119, #121, #122, and #123—would be executed. Having been accidentally next to Neigum in the lineup, but otherwise not even acquainted with him, these five Americans were completely innocent of any complicity. Nevertheless, without any religious rites, the Americans were immediately led by an improvised firing squad of camp guards to a schoolhouse across Pampanga’s river.
“Only one accepted a blindfold,” said Moffat. “They’re buried in unmarked graves which I visited. Three had been sick with malaria and diarrhea. The four whose names I know represented the 200th Coast Artillery, the 31st Infantry, the Air Corps, the Quartermaster Corps, and I think the fifth was from the 192nd Tanks. Just the day before, everybody had taken up a collection of sixty dollars for one of those executed who was low with malaria but without the money for black market quinine.”
En route to Japan, Moffat had suffered a beating from a guard which deprived him of his hearing for several weeks. After about seventy-five blows on the head, the Japanese compelled him to kneel motionless on a hatch cover for two hours.
The above reprisal shooting is additional to the one which occurred at Lumban, Laguna, southwest of Manila, in June 1943, when the Japanese exacted a full toll of ten American lives, a massacre celebrated by the prison camp bard Raymond Russel of Pittsburg, Texas, in a long homespun ballad famous among prisoners.
Sergeant William Snyder (Cairo, West Virginia): “I was with the Philippine guerrilla bands under Lieutenant Arnold in northern Luzon for about a year as one among about thirty Americans who’d formerly run an air raid system. We had to break up into separate bands because of a lack of food. One day we destroyed nine Japanese truckloads of equipment and three field guns, killing around two hundred Japs. After that it became too hot and I had to give in.”
Administrative officer of the camp, here by way of Bataan, Captain Roscoe Price (Lasalle, Colorado): “The Japanese never recognize officer status. I was forced to work in the garden, to clean the latrine. Once all the officers were lined up and slapped because we allowed the men to get up five minutes later than the fixed rising time.”
Medical Officer Vernon said that the camp developed two new diseases: colon malnutrition, evidenced by a burning sensation in the feet which failed to respond to thiamin chloride but only to more food and which affected at its peak one-tenth of the camp; and what he calls “pseudo-adolescent mastitis” which involved thirty percent of the camp and “resembles transient breast enlargment at puberty.”
Addressing this writer in the camp’s infirmary, Corregidor Marine Corporal Harry Douthit of Dalles, Oregon, said: “That oily smiling Jap doctor right across from you sent me back to work with my calf swollen enormously from this infected ulcer.” The Marine showed me fifty old scars.
Prisoners from Tyler, Texas, Sergeant Robert Coley and Lloyd Durbin, are both Corregidor veterans. Said Coley: “The Japs wouldn’t recognize that losing sweat deprives the body of salt and causes weakness. I got caught taking salt from cattle on the farm, and our former Japanese commander stood me up and beat me uninterruptedly for forty-five minutes.” Said Durbin: “I was beaten, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. They seemed to be reacting to outside events rather than anything we did, and it was noticeably worse just before the surrender.”
Corregidor Corporal Fred Patrick (Sherman, Texas): “We lived on thin soup, rice, occasionally a little fish, wheat, soybeans. It seemed the Japs were trying to starve us to death.”
Marine First Sergeant John Coe of Saltyville, Virginia, also out of Corregidor: “I weighed 210 prewar and fell to 103 working in the mine. But pneumonia and the onset of dysentery gave me three months in the infirmary, which saved my life.”
Nick Page (Los Angeles): “I’d been in bed for nine weeks with pneumonia. I wasn’t supposed to get up. The Jap doctor refused to see me unless I came to the infirmary, so two corpsmen supported me to get there. On returning I collapsed on their shoulders from sheer weakness, and this Jap administrator we called Napoleon overtook me in the corridor and gave me a thorough kicking from behind.”
Tall Marine drum major captured at Corregidor, Jackson Rauh of Mission Beach, California: “I’m closing out the war very short of teeth, because I lost my uppers en route to Japan in a packed ship’s hold where the Japs jammed us, and my gold-filled lowers disappeared during a Japanese shakedown of prisoners’ bunks.”
Fireman Leo Hughes of Dayton, Washington, captured at Fort Hughes: “I’ll never forget July 17th, 1944, when the Japanese put 1568 men in a hold forty by fifty feet, four levels of bunks deep, for the trip from Manila to Japan in the Nissyo Maru. When men passed out they simply carried them on deck, then put them below again.”
Radioman William Laplante (Grafton, North Dakota): “The boat ride here knocked my weight from 140 to 100 due to weakness, and I’ve never recovered.”
The average weight of an American laboring for the Mitsuis in the coal mine, computed according to age/height charts, should be just under 153 pounds, but for the entire camp period it is 1231⁄2.
Corregidor Marine Corporal James DeNixon (New Orleans): “I started out yapping back at the Jap straw bosses regardless of how much they beat me. It was tough going, but finally I convinced them I was crazy.”
Marine Corporal from Corregidor, Edward Howe (Beverly Hills): “Many Americans burned themselves with battery acid or anything else handy in order to escape underground work. On the surface the Japs were halfway human, but underneath they became beasts.”
Machinist Albert Roberts (Brookfield, Illinois): “I’ve done all sorts of work. They had Americans doing airport building, farmwork, a coal mine. I’ve been beaten in the mine with a pick handle, an axe handle, a saw, a timber. I’ve been kicked in the shins, spat on in the face, and had coal thrown at me.”
Sergeant Glenn Wayman of Paola, Kansas, captured on Bataan: “In nine months underground I never got anything more serious than cuffs and slaps. Then I was beaten above ground for protesting about the day guard making noise while the American night shift slept.”
Donald Versam (Bloomington, Nebraska): “I got only two cuffs, for not extinguishing my cigarette when the Japs rang their bell. I was wise enough to take my blows without flinching, as the Japanese demand. But Chester Williams of Fresno, who erred by turning his head, was made to kneel on cement while they burned him with bamboo.”
Corregidor Marine Corporal Franklin Boyer (Philadelphia): “I got slapped around so much in the mine that I began keeping my ulcers open in order to keep above ground. But the Japanese caught on.”
Monford Charlton (Denbo, Pennsylvania): “I went from 145 to 102. So I dropped a rock on my hand, mashed it, and got eighty-nine days of sick rest. When that was gone, I spilled acid on this scarred foot and got forty-nine days more. Guys would plead for someone to do a fracture job for them. Chicagoan Albert Roberts obliged four fellows that way, but the best deal he could get was three rations of rice for a breakage fee when he wanted the same done to himself.”
Raised in Fort Dodge, Iowa, a resident of Long Beach, California, the longest-term prisoner is Chief Pharmacist Fred Roepke: forty-four months in Japanese hands since Guam fell on the third day of the war. “We had sixty self-inflicted wounds in one year among 190 Americans. They took turns fracturing bones and pouring acid. I’ve seen a Jap walk through a hospital and slap every man. My worst job was when the whole Guam medical team was summoned by Japs from the Zentsuji model prison camp in Shikoku Island to care for an arriving Allied ship. It proved to be the Shonan Maru from Singapore, with 250 Englishmen of whom, despite all our efforts, 127 died in six weeks from dysentery and malnutrition.”
Corregidor Marine Sergeant Potter Sillman (Burr, Nebraska): “My normal weight of 185 hit 85 on Bataan from malaria, and 90 in Japan from malnutrition.”
Seaman Edward Walaszek (Holyoke, Massachusetts), captured at Fort Hughes: “I got my only beating when I tried to prevent a guard from making off with my shirt. I finally was forced to donate it anyway, then got beaten by another Japanese who accused
me of black market trading.”
The Mitsui coal mine had its own gallery of thugs whom the American prisoner miners named the Beast, the Pig, Tom Mix, and the Dripper, so-called because he was personally so filthy. Sergeant Hubert Barber of Williamsfield, Illinois: “For eight months in the mine I was the pet peeve of a straw boss we called the Cobra. He would throw coal at me too close for me to duck, sometimes within three feet of my face. Once he wrestled and threw me down because I was so weak.” Medico Vernon described Barber as having “a severe case of malnutrition, beriberi, and edema.”
Pharmacist Thomas Locklear (Powderlee, Alabama): “We called our bossman the Gorilla because of the way he would jump around, clawing at us, trying to get us to fight him.”
William White (Kingsbury, Indiana): “What was toughest for me was being sent back to the mine by the Jap doctor after a cave-in injured my shoulder. My inability to work put a heavier burden on my buddies.”
Sergeant Forest Swartz (Sacramento): “When my weight reached 103, the Japs allowed me to work in the kitchen instead of the mine.”
A Marine from Corregidor, Sergeant Charles Eckstein (San Francisco): “There was an old camp commander we called Emma or Dreamy Eyes. When three prisoner rooms were in disarray, he lined up seventeen room-heads and punched each personally in the jaw. I believe the Japs are the lowest people on earth, and I would rather have spent my three years on Alcatraz.”
Corregidor Marine Herbert Klingbeil (Minneapolis): “I was lucky enough to make the same camp as my brother Arthur, who’s already en route home. When Arthur tried to ease his heavy burden of mine timbers in a rising tunnel and was beaten with a saw handle across his arms and face, the overseer found me resting in my bunk with my sandals on and beat me twenty-three times across my face until it swelled up.”
First Into Nagasaki Page 12