First Into Nagasaki

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First Into Nagasaki Page 13

by George Weller


  Bataan prisoner Freddie Ray (Erico, Oklahoma): “My worst experience was on the Bataan death march, when I had to go seven days without food and water. With my own eyes I saw at least fifty men shot, and forty to fifty bayoneted. I saw men drink water from ditches where dead Americans and Filipinos lay. When the Japs caught you asking for water, they’d throw a bucketful in your face.”

  Corregidor Gunner George Beuris (Hazard, Kentucky): “My worst time was from May 7th until May 22nd, when the Japs kept us in the broiling sun on Corregidor all day.” Beuris has a mangled finger which was operated on without anesthesia by a Japanese doctor.

  Captain James Corrigan (Wichita): “Just for pausing a moment in order to watch a Japanese beating up a Dutchman, I got a punch in the jaw.”

  Corregidor Marine Corporal Clarence Thompson (Commerce, Texas): “I got several slappings—though no beatings—for no apparent reason other than the disagreeable Japanese temperament.”

  Woodrow Wilson (Poplar Bluffs, Mississippi): “Lots of my friends have been seriously beaten, but I’ve had only casual blows.”

  Sergeant Hubert Seal (Rupert, Idaho): “In eight months I’ve been beaten quite a lot, but starvation was what really hardened my heart toward the Japanese people. Before the war my weight was 175. At the surrender I weighed 112.”

  Sergeant Joseph Fragale (Buffalo): “The Japs would beat us for putting our hands in our pockets anytime, and they were harder on Americans than on the Dutch. I got the worst beating of my career as a prisoner for taking some squash seeds out of the garden because I was very hungry and didn’t realize it was forbidden. They beat me until I could no longer hear, and until I had a big boil on my back. I’ll never forget the day of that beating. It was August 15th—the day the war ended.”

  Izuka, Japan—Tuesday, September 18, 1945 0900 hours

  Allied Prison Camp #7, Izuka, Kyushu

  Unflaggingly bold as a prisoner of war, just as when he was a jungle sniper on Bataan, Chicago’s Captain Arthur Wermuth, the one-time “one-man army,” remains in the history of the Pacific War another man to whom the same aphorism is applied as to MacArthur: “Some like him, some don’t like him, but even those who don’t like him respect him.”

  His rough and tough tactics of personal leadership gained him the respect of the Japanese, for the Nipponese admire daring and cunning above all other characteristics. Friends of his with whom the writer has talked say that American estimates giving the stocky Chicagoan over a hundred Japanese scalps were exaggerated, but that the number certainly was at least sixty. They add however that much credit should be given to the Filipino scouts who went everywhere with the Chicagoan and who “got the Jap who would have got Wermuth, while the one-man army was getting his.”

  How Wermuth gained the admiration of enlisted men even during his prison days was explained by Navy Pharmacist T. E. Locklear of Powderlee, Alabama, who recounted a clash at Camp Cabanatuan between the one-man army and a vicious Japanese sentry called Laughing Boy.

  The Japanese forced ailing amoebic dysentery patients in groups of four to carry loads of 600 pounds of manure. When Laughing Boy refused to lighten the loads, Wermuth cursed him openly, took a spade, and fell to, saying, “I’ll lighten their loads myself.”

  For this defiance, Laughing Boy began his punishment by kicking Wermuth’s shins and making him kneel. Then Laughing Boy, with two other Japanese, beat Wermuth’s face and buttocks, leaving him with blackened eyes and a visage covered with bruises—but more popular than ever with G.I.s for having attempted to defend the prisoners’ cause.

  Gene Riding of Whitehall, Illinois remembers “seeing Captain Wermuth after having been kicked and beaten in the face at Cabanatuan. Three of his ribs were supposed to be fractured. Ordinarily he did everything himself, but this time he asked me to carry a bucket of water which he was unable to lift.”

  Wermuth later saved many lives by his coolness aboard a bombed Japanese freighter carrying American prisoners. The bomb fell in the forward hold, full of ailing Americans, while the Japan-bound freighter was in Takau* harbor, Formosa, on January 6th of this year. Approximately 371 Americans were killed, including many officers who had served both at Corregidor and Bataan.

  After the bodies had lain untouched by the Japanese, who refused to allow them to be moved from the hold, Wermuth seized the situation below decks. Despite light shrapnel wounds in both legs, he was able to organize a burial detail for the bodies piled under a hatch. Wermuth also smuggled a note asking for medicine up through hatches guarded by the Japanese and, with the aid of former Los Angeles newspaperman Theodore Lewin, was able to get medicine from the crew in return for keepsakes of the men killed.

  His insistence on reestablishing cleanliness in the body-strewn forward hold of the freighter saved many lives after the Japanese allowed the bodies to be taken ashore and cremated.

  Izuka, Japan—Wednesday, September 19, 1945

  Allied Prison Camp #23, Izuka, Kyushu

  The miracle of a Japanese prison camp where nobody was beaten to death, and cuffs and slaps took the place of the usual torture, was revealed here when Camp #23, with all American prisoners, was liberated today. It is another worn-out coal mine in the Mitsui chain that was abandoned till U.S. prisoners arrived. By American standards, Camp #23 was one where the treatment of prisoners would call for stern investigation with blue-ribbon juries and special committees. But by the standards which Americans learned from the Japanese on Bataan’s death march, it was almost comfortable. Stick beatings were relatively rare. While one Japanese doctor withheld medicine provided by the Red Cross from medical officer Major Kenneth Hagen of Fresno, another physician named Shigata secretly opened the forbidden boxes and sneaked him drugs. Hagen himself was beaten up “two or three times” by a Japanese who called him contemptuously “Bamboo Doctor.”

  Hagen told the Japanese camp physician, “Unless these men get help they’ll die,” and the latter replied, “Sick men die, okay okay.” Patients were often slapped for being too weak to be able to descend in the mine, but never were deliberately starved to death in confinement as they were by the notorious Captain Fukuhara at Omuta. Sometimes the mine authorities gave extra portions of rice to supplement the thin gruel of ordinary fare. Yet Americans from Bataan and Corregidor whom this writer interviewed, like pharmacist Dudley DeGroat of South Bend and Thomas Boyle of Mason City, Iowa, showed marks of malnutrition, Boyle having fallen from 216 pounds to 109 pounds at his worst. Beatings were common enough for the Japanese clubs to gain the name “‘vitamin sticks’, because when you’re weak they pep you up.”

  The fact that only 5 out of 200 Americans at Izuka have died is proof enough of the Japanese government’s direct responsibility for the much higher death rolls elsewhere. This Mitsui mine is extremely dangerous like all the others in Kyushu, which had been dropped as economically unprofitable until the Americans came with their one-cent-daily labor. It is a “wet mine”, with roofs mushy and constantly falling. The American prisoners were actually chipping at the coal pillars which alone supported the ceiling in this stripped mine. And yet here the death roll was lower, due to the absence of constant beatings, than in other mines even though the same dangerous conditions prevailed and the food was almost the same. Here the Americans were provided with overcoats, which lessened the toll from pneumonia even though most worked in winter in straw sandals or rubber split-toe sneakers. Elsewhere many were forced to work barefoot. Here only about two percent of the prisoners’ injuries were caused by the Americans voluntarily breaking their own limbs or pouring acid on themselves to escape going underground, whereas in Camp #7, about five miles away, conditions were so cruel that one-third of the Americans broke their feet or arms, put their hands in conveyor machines, or poured acid on themselves to get relief from the mine tunnels.

  The Japanese camp commander at today’s parting from Captain Marvin Lucas of Albuquerque voluntarily presented him with a four-hundred-year-old samurai sword. Of the ex-commander, Captain Fran
k Turner of Gallup, New Mexico, said, “Nakamura was all right, and although the guards were often rough, all our Japanese commanders have been generally just.”

  Through the bitter winter in the Japanese coal mountains, the only heat provided was in the dispensary. It was freezing from December to May but the Americans were unable to use the coal which they provided by the tons for the Mitsui chain. Lieutenant Joe Allen of Santa Fe said, “That green soup made from grass gathered around the camp, with a bowlful of rice, was hardly enough to satisfy a man after twelve hours’ labor in the mine.” Officers were not allowed to go below in the mine and share or even witness the conditions prevailing there.

  Sergeant Gilbert Soifer (Philadelphia): “The worst thing was expecting us to do heavy physical labor on two bowls of rice in the morning, a small box of rice with a pickle at noon, and rice with a bowl of thin green soup at night. But if you were hospitalized you got one-third less food.”

  Taking their cue from the tough camp physician, the medicos were Camp #23’s hardiest Americans. After being beaten, Erwin Kilburn of Lake Placid, New York, was forced to stand up at attention all day. He became paralyzed and now has “drop foot” making it impossible for him to move without crutches.

  Chicagoan Robert Oliver: “Physical treatment by the Japanese has been reasonably good by their standards, but the food has been very skimpy, and the mine was very dangerous. Several men have been permanently injured by cave-ins.”

  Earl Burchard (Janesville, Wisconsin): “I twice got real beatings for simply not understanding.”

  Robert Bartz (Beloit, Wisconsin): “Living conditions were good, but working was rough, with abusive treatment and long hours.”

  Sergeant William Wright (Niantic, Illinois): “Outside of the food, I’ve got no particular complaint—the Nip who was my boss acted pretty decent.”

  Edward Urbaschak (Roxbury, Massachusetts): “We sometimes averaged fifteen hours a day underground.”

  Corporal Peter Jumonville (Baton Rouge): “I was beaten twice for sore feet. Once the guards lined us up for fun and ordered us to slap each other. When we refused, they went to work on us with clubs.”

  Antonio Tafolla (San Angelo, Texas): “Due to the bullets in my shoulder I worked in the mess hall. The Japanese beat me for not being able to lift more.”

  Ruel Lott (Alma, Georgia): “I’ve seen lots of men beaten, and not more than one-tenth deserved it.”

  Buren Jonston (Clovis, New Mexico): “I got along without beatings or slaps for nearly a year.”

  Garley Silverio (Belen, New Mexico): “I’ve been treated pretty fair.”

  Corporal Oscar Look (Addison, Maine): “My normal weight is 180 and the Japanese beat me for weakness when I weighed only a little over 100.”

  Franklin Ivins (Red Bank, New Jersey): “We used to call going underground ‘getting the axe.’ But I got dry beriberi even above ground.”

  Sergeant Ray Tow (Silver City, New Mexico): “Even well-fed American workmen have cradles to hold a jackhammer above their heads for ceiling work. Despite my weakness, I had to hold my jackhammer up with my arms. In the United States we use water in order to keep digging a hole dry; here they use dust blowers, which saturated our lungs.”

  Logan Kay (Clearlake Park, California): “Coal dust blown back in our faces while we were forced to work invited silicosis.”

  Machinist Laverne Dunning (Centralia, Washington): “The Japanese were unable to repair their own mine machinery.”

  Edward Gorda (Fresno): “My main complaint is the way the Japanese hoarded our medical supplies while men sank.”

  Handsome Bataan soldier William Johnston of Mountain Grove, Missouri, with his left leg amputated, described how the continual failure of lights in defective mine equipment cost him his leg. “I was working ‘in the loose’—that’s where a cave-in is possible at any minute—when the lights failed and my leg was pinned between two cars.”

  Robert Harrison (Wheatland, California): “I lost half my sight. My left eye was buried during a cave-in, when I was picking coal down in these dangerous tunnels. The Japanese made me keep working in the mine anyhow.”

  Corporal Sanford Doucette (Graniteville, Massachusetts): “I pulled Harrison out from his cave-in, but got hurt myself and began to dwindle away. The Japanese still had me working with that fifty-pound jackhammer in August when I weighed only 90 myself. The war’s end saved my life.”

  Izuka, Japan—Thursday, September 20, 1945 0130 hours

  Allied Prison Camp #23, Izuka, Kyushu

  How the Dutch police head in the East Indies died under Japanese torture, rather than reveal how guerrillas were communicating by radio with the refugee Dutch government, was recounted here by an RAF officer now commanding a Japanese prison camp.

  After Java fell in March 1942, Dutch secret police who stayed behind managed to keep a radio set going, but their chief died and the second-in-command, named De Kuyper, succeeded him. Natives who cooperated with the enemy betrayed him. De Kuyper for over two weeks was subjected to the most refined tortures known to the Japanese, who did not realize they were now dealing with the top man because they were ignorant that De Kuyper’s superior was dead. They demanded both the latter’s location and the radio.

  The Japanese denied him water, fed him salted meat, and drank ice water in front of him. They denied him sleep. They gave him beatings of many different kinds. When these failed they pierced his eardrums with pencils. Next they brought in his fifty-three year-old sister and caused her to be raped by a half-witted Javanese before De Kuyper’s eyes. At this point De Kuyper’s reason gave way. Finally they gave him the “water cure” of forced feeding, then jumping on his belly until his entrails cracked.

  When De Kuyper’s periods of consciousness became so brief and his insanity so evident that further questioning was useless, he was thrown into prison where the RAF officer, who was a surgeon, treated him. De Kuyper had fleeting moments of sanity before death, when he explained what had been done to him.

  “Perhaps we might have saved his life, but knowing the Japs would only resume working on him we considered it more merciful to let him go,” the RAF officer told this correspondent. “In order to keep the Japs appeased, we put ‘pneumonia’ on the death certificate.”

  IV

  Return to Nagasaki

  (September 20–25, 1945)

  Weller returned to Nagasaki from the POW camps for a week (September 20–25) and found that the U.S. military, including much-needed medical staff—the Navy, not the Army—had finally arrived en masse, five weeks after the Japanese surrender and six weeks after the dropping of the atomic bomb. No longer impersonating a colonel, he wrote more material about the effects of radiation, hoping to be able to get the Navy to transmit all his dispatches and bypass MacArthur’s censors. He was blocked in this hope as well, though they did let through three brief hometown POW stories. Then, trying to catch a medicine ball aboard a hospital ship in the harbor, he injured himself and was put in plaster. Utterly thwarted, Weller decided to leave Nagasaki.

  Nagasaki, Japan—Thursday, September 20, 1945

  The gulf separating American and Japanese ideas of humanity is both deep and wide, according to Navy Chief Quartermaster Clarence Sosviale of Auburn, Massachusetts. Since his capture while serving aboard one of the “bait boats” for Bulkeley’s PT boats of Bataan, Sosviale spent most of the time working underground in Baron Mitsui’s worn-out coal mine at Omuta in central Kyushu. Sosviale is now forty years old and once took fifty-two blows with a stick from a Japanese guard before losing his senses on Kyushu.

  “On my shift there was a Solomon Schwartz of New York City, whose hand was mangled in their defective machinery. For one hour I was refused permission to take him above ground while he bled. When permission came, Schwartz lay on the Mitsui Company’s operating table for another hour waiting for the Japanese physician to arrive. Finally the physician operated but without anesthesia although he possessed plenty, and put the man’s mangled hand back tog
ether amateurishly, with little regard to the bones or tendons.”

  Japanese reluctance to allow any Americans to leave the mine with less than twelve hours’ daily labor—for which they were paid less than one cent daily—also contributed to the permanent mutilation of John E. Garner of Nacogdoches, Texas. Garner stepped backward into a post and was blocked when trying to escape one of the defective mine’s recurrent cave-ins. Dug out by friends, Garner was found to have a compound fracture of his leg. Yet it was impossible for one whole hour to move him to the surface due to the Japanese obstructing his rescue. In the mine dispensary the Japanese doctor refused to give Garner anesthesia and simply put his leg in a cast without setting the bones, with the result that Garner spent the next six months in hospital in traction trying to straighten his limb.

  In contrast is the operation performed by Major Thomas Hewlett of New Albany, Indiana, who was confronted with the problem of saving a man with a ruptured appendix on a prison ship where the Japanese refused all aid. Hewlett made himself a bent needle with pliers and, using an old razor blade for a scalpel and a ship’s hatch cover as an operating table, saved the American prisoner’s life. Hewlett is today a recuperative patient aboard the Navy hospital ship Haven in Nagasaki harbor.

  Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 22, 1945 1200 hours

  New cases of atomic bomb poisoning with an approximate fifty percent death rate are still appearing at Nagasaki’s hospital six weeks after the blow fell, but United States Navy physicians who have examined them report that the death rate is falling off.

 

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