First Into Nagasaki

by George Weller

  Under the authority of Rear Admiral F. G. Fahrion, commanding the rescue task force now anchored in Nagasaki’s bottle-shaped harbor, doctors from both the flagship cruiser Wichita and the hospital ship Haven have conducted an informal study of deaths from radium burns in this sixty-percent-flattened but uncratered city where, according to Japanese figures, about 21,000 persons died. These investigations support unqualifiedly the statement that the ground has no signs of saturation with dangerous radium rays—as first revealed in the Chicago Daily News’ original series from here a fortnight ago.

  The investigation has been under Commander Joseph Timmes, the flagship’s physician, a Georgetown and Fordham graduate. Earth gathered from the bombed area was scattered on the spotless floor of the Haven’s X-ray laboratory for a test of its radioactivity. Commander Norman Birkbeck, a graduate of the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan and the Haven’s chief roentgenologist, found that the scorched earth was radioactively lifeless. Moreover, sensitive film found accidentally in the Mitsubishi torpedo plant where hundreds of Allied prisoners worked was revealed to be unaffected.

  Whereas formerly twenty patients a day with dwindling hair and their bone marrow affected were coming to Japanese hospitals, the rate is now fallen to about ten. Deaths, which at the time of the writer’s first series of dispatches were eight daily, are now about five or less.

  Nagasaki’s medical center, with virtually all its staff, was wiped out by the same blast which laid a heavy hand on the Mitsubishi torpedo plants, diesel motor plants, and shipbuilding yards. This circumstance plus the lack of medicines has slowed any comparison between Nagasaki’s shock deaths, ordinary burn deaths, radium deaths, and disease deaths of which astonishingly few have appeared. What happens in so-called atomic bomb poisoning is now definitely known to be that the bone marrow is paralyzed. Human blood has three solid substances: red cells, white cells, and platelets. Red cells, normally numbered at five million in density, drop to two million or even one. White cells, which are disease fighters, fall from about eight thousand to fifteen hundred and in one case to four hundred. But the effect on the platelets, which are organisms giving blood the power to clot, is not merely to diminish them but to paralyze and apparently kill them.

  Ordinarily platelets enable the blood to clot by itself in three to four minutes. The blood of persons exposed to the atomic bomb’s rays, which are mainly of the gamma variety, requires thirty minutes to two hours to clot and sometimes as long as three to four hours. Autopsies have shown the bone marrow’s effort to recover, and its failure.

  In the first on-the-spot interviews with Japanese doctors, this writer reported that certain organs, especially the intestine, were affected by hemorrhages. Timmes said today: “Which organ is affected has no particular significance. Hemorrhages may occur anywhere—lungs, kidneys, duodenum. What really happens is that the nature of the entire bloodstream alters and aplastic anemia develops without particular regard for location. These late cases mostly have no external burns, but do have headache, fever, diarrhea, bleeding gums, loose teeth, falling hair, and often throat sores or lip sores.”

  Without attempting any large-scale therapy—impossible because Admiral Fahrion’s main task is rescuing Allied prisoners in Kyushu’s prison camps—the Navy is trying to ease somewhat the Japanese doctors’ task by providing modest amounts of those medicines whose expiration date would soon make them unusable anyway. Penicillin has been provided, and given some help in strengthening those cases where infection is present and the patient can be saved simply by strengthening the scavenger white cells. Penicillin is restricted to cases where pneumonia, abscesses, and mouth or throat infections are present.

  To meet ravages on the bone marrow by deadly gamma short-waves, the Navy is providing a marrow-building drug, pentnucleotide, in experimental quantities. Its effects are still inconclusive. Pentnucleotide has been used in the United States to revive flagging bone marrow. Pentnucleotide is okay for agranulous cytosis—white cell diminishment—but nearly no help for aplastic anemia.

  Loosely summarized, it may be said that Nagasakians suffer from what used be known as “X-ray poisoning.” 21,000 died, however, not because the atomic bomb’s ray is deadly, but because with American planes in full view overhead, the population failed go into air raid shelters and ignored earlier warnings. Mitsubishi plant workers—including Allied prisoners whose camp was in the plant’s heart—were killed when their empty shelters would have saved them, simply because the Mitsubishis chose to keep the war work going with enemy planes overhead. And Japanese doctors are in agreement that losses from an atomic bomb can be more sharply cut by concrete shelters than by any drug.

  Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 22, 1945

  How the two largest American prisoner of war camps in the Philippines were able to pierce Japan’s blackout on overseas news with tiny secret listening sets operating within the camps was related here today aboard hospital ship Haven by a liberated inventor. The sets were developed independently in barbed wire enclosures at Davao in southern Mindanao and at Cabanatuan outside Manila, in defiance of the death penalty.

  Not only was each camp ignorant that the other possessed a set, but only a close inner circle comprising the American commandant and inventor in each camp knew that any set existed. The secret was kept from Americans by Americans themselves.

  Each inventor thought he alone had outwitted the Japanese. Yet when Davao’s inventor—Bataan death march veteran Captain Russell J. Hutchison of Albuquerque—was transferred by a Japanese troopship hundreds of miles northward to Cabanatuan, he smuggled along parts of his set in corned beef cans and cakes of soap. After working his way into Cabanatuan’s prisoner engineering aristocracy, he discovered that a set built inside a water canteen was already functioning there. What made the hair stand up on his scalp was the unbelievable coincidence that the Cabanatuan inventor was also named Hutchison—Lieutenant Howard Hutchison, formerly a civil engineer in Manila.

  The odds against such a coincidence of names, spelled exactly the same but without any known family relationship, defy mathematical calculation. But Davao Hutchison was already heavily under suspicion as an operator of the Davao set, and feared that some leak would occur, imperiling the life of Manila Hutchison as well as his own. The inventor therefore caused the Davao radio set, brought under peril of death from Mindanao to Manila and already secretly operating in Cabanatuan’s Catholic chapel, to be dismantled. It was eventually buried in a latrine at Cabanatuan by the former Davao commandant, Lieutenant Colonel “Oley” Olson. Cabanatuan’s canteen set has disappeared somewhere in the maelstrom of war.

  The two radio sets were similar, each being a single-tube affair, but otherwise different because Davao Hutchison depended on a plug-in electric light socket while Cabanatuan Hutchison used batteries. Both sets were used principally at night with an elaborate split-second system of American guards and plausible diversions to keep the Japanese lulled. Davao Hutchison had rehearsed his raid warning system until it was down to fifty-five seconds for a complete dismantling.

  Hutchison’s listening post was a watch repair shop run by Air Corps Warrant Officer Jack Day. The guards were two New Mexican Coast artillery captains captured on Bataan: Charles Brown of Deming and Clyde Ely of Silver City. (Ely was afterward one among the passengers on the death cruise from Bilibid to Japan, whose arrival has not been reported.) When Ely whispered, “The Japs are coming,” Hutchison would detach the headphones and pitch them through the window to Brown who would walk to the nearby latrine before the Japanese guard hove into view. He would thus be able to simulate emerging from the latrine when the Japanese arrived.

  Once, when Hutchison had stolen a new tube and was entering the camp gate with it concealed in his armpit, the Japanese commandant Major Mayeda brought him to a trembling halt. It developed that all Mayeda wanted was to ask the inventor to make him a souvenir cigarette case.

  “Our first big news—that Mussolini had chucked in the towel—ne
arly wrecked us,” Hutchison said today. “Everybody was told the news under a strict pledge of secrecy to his best friend and soon the Japs smelled trouble. I’d been given four months’ jail after Major Dyess [author of the revelations of the Bataan death march] escaped. The Japs were now certain I was listening abroad. I bluffed them, however, by playing injured innocent and threatening to refuse to repair their own sets if accused again. Actually, their sets were furnishing parts for mine.”

  It was necessary to suppress most news received from abroad because any gossip invited Japanese investigation. The set had been built not to pick up news but in order get some advance warning of when MacArthur was approaching. “We felt the Japs would be sure to massacre all the Americans in Davao and in nearby Lasang camp as soon as landing parties came ashore. We hoped to break out from the camp beforehand and evade a massacre by hiding in the hills. The news from Mindanao that a hundred and fifty skulls had been found there confirms our fears and we dread the possibility that many may be our friends. I used to smuggle out intelligence reports to our contact man in Lasang, Lieutenant Johnny Morrett.”

  The demounted set was smuggled from Davao to Manila and Cabanatuan in three sealed-up cans of corned beef, and the tube in a can of cocoa. The potentiometer, too big to be hidden in cans, was buried in medicine by the camp physician Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Deter. When an unknown hand opened the food cans and found the parts, Hutchison obtained four bars of laundry soap and buried them in those.

  At Cabanatuan, finding a plug-in current in a safe place was a stickler for some time until it occurred to Davao Hutchison that the altar of the Catholic chapel was rarely observed by Japanese guards. He fixed the set so that it could be plugged in from the chapel’s chandelier and hidden among lacy altar cloths. This Hutchison’s “devotions” gained him a brief reputation for piety until the inventor found that Cabanatuan Hutchison had a canteen set already working, and dismantled his.

  Nagasaki, Japan—Monday, September 24, 1945

  Allied Prison Camp #18, Sasebo, Kyushu

  Marines and other forces under Kreuger’s Sixth Army, landing this weekend at Sasebo, the famous Japanese naval base, saw a big (75 feet tall) concrete irrigation dam nearby, but few knew that it was built with American blood. Japan owes the USA more than fifty lives for building this dam, the lives of American civilians captured at Wake Island who were literally starved and worked to death at notorious Camp #18. An imposing array of Japanese admirals and vice admirals who greeted the vanguard of American landing forces said nothing regarding the death camp, of which all traces have now been removed. But in an obscure plot of land on a hill overlooking the dam lie row on row of graves of the Americans who died from starvation, disease and pneumonia that Japan might be strong. Such is Sasebo’s horio haka, or prisoner graveyard, of Camp #18.

  265 Americans captured on Wake Island while working for the Pacific Naval Airbase Company, many of whom had gallantly served on guns in helping Marines to defend the island to the last, were brought to Sasebo on October 13, 1942. They were the less prepared for what the Japanese Navy was to do to them because their treatment by Japanese jailers on Wake itself during the first ten months of their captivity had been reasonable. The only execution was of Julius Hofmeister of San Francisco, who was publicly beheaded before all the other prisoners on May 10, 1942, as an incorrigible troublemaker. Other treatment, however, was relatively mild, and leftover American stores maintained the prisoners’ health for the first months.

  American workmen at Sasebo, mostly past military age, came under a Japanese Navy sadist named Egawa Haso who specialized in what Americans bitterly called “floor shows.” The “floor show” meant arousing men from a dead sleep—which followed twelve hours’ daily work on the dam—and lining them up, kneeling with their buttocks exposed. The men were then collectively beaten until their flanks purpled with clotted blood, they vomited and finally fainted. This punishment was applied to all prisoners when any single one was caught “garbaging”, that is attempting to buy the offal rice left uneaten by Korean coolies. “They’d simply race up and down, clubbing us until we fell over,” said Harry Forsberg of Clayton, Washington. When his weight fell to 100, Forsberg was still compelled to carry 110-pound cement sacks.

  When G. W. Huntley of Billings, Montana, was reeling with pneumonia, the Japanese forced him at gunpoint to continue shoveling sand for the dam’s concrete. On the following day Huntley died. Lester Meyer of San Francisco became unbalanced under continuous Japanese mistreatment and lost his eyeglasses, on which his vision was dependent. One day Meyer walked past a guard the prisoners had nicknamed Frisco Sailor, failing to salute the Japanese because he never saw him. Meyer was beaten for three days straight: knocked down with fists, clubbed with rifles in the head, finally kicked into unconsciousness and eventually death.

  Both Huntley and Meyer were thirty-one years old and survived relatively long. Forty-six-year-old “Captain” Gehman of Boise, Idaho—in bed with pneumonia aggravated by starvation from January 19–21, 1944—was finally kicked from his bunk by the Japanese. “We had to help him to his feet so he could walk,” said Logan Kay of Clearlake Park, California. “The next day he was unable even to walk, and at eleven o’clock he died.”

  Gehman was particularly persona non grata with Japanese naval wardens because when the higher Navy officers inspected the camp, all the sick prisoners had been taken up the hill near the present graveyard and there confined in order that their condition not become known. In some way Gehman, crazed with fever, managed to escape and descend the hill, tottered into the bunkhouse and fell to the floor before the inspector. In two hours he was dead.

  All punishment was collective at Sasebo Dam. Earl Wilson of Olympia, Oregon, said: “We had no soap for the first year and then finally one-quarter of a bar each. I felt so filthy I stole a piece of Japanese soap. We had almost no medical treatment but the Japs announced that it would be totally abolished unless the thief gave himself up. I stepped forward and they had me hold buckets full of water at arm’s length, and beat me whenever my arms lowered. Finally they beat me with their heavy fencing sticks for two and a half hours.”

  The men were housed in an old cement shed whose floor, usually flooded with water, accounted for their lung diseases complicated by malnutrition. They slept on boards covered with rice sacks, and in the winter got straw underneath. None were allowed to lie down and rest during the day if sick, unless absolutely unable to hold themselves erect.

  The camp’s good samaritan was Robert Neylan of Oakland, California, who connived with guards at the risk of his life to get medicine and save elderly men stricken with stomach diseases or beatings.

  Twenty-six-year-old Robert Harrison of Wheatland, California, said: “We had old men who could not learn Japanese, and they received terrible beatings simply for not understanding. The Japs also had one or two stooges whom they’d offer extra cigarettes for giving them the numbers of the men who loafed whenever the guards’ backs were turned. At parade drill their numbers would be called out and the men were beaten without a hearing.”

  Three night guards required that a prisoner report before going to the latrine, and be fully dressed.

  Walter “Red” Thompson of Boise, Idaho, a former world’s champion cowboy, was totally unable to learn Japanese. For misunderstanding an order Thompson was beaten with a split-toed tabi—a Japanese work sneaker—till he was “a mass of bloodshot beef.” Unable to endure the pain any longer, Thompson tried to attack the guard but was restrained by his comrades.

  Fifty-one-year-old Claude “Curly” Howes of Portland, Oregon, devised an electric cigarette lighter. The Japanese discovered it in a shakedown raid and claimed it would have interfered with the camp’s lighting system if used, then summoned all the prisoners and gave them a general beating.

  Frank Burns of Spokane, Washington, was among those prisoners most frequently beaten for stealing food to supplement the three bowls daily of rice, “fluffed in, not packed down”, wh
ich were the prisoners’ fare.

  When the camp was one year less three days old—October 10th, 1943—the Japanese Army took it over from the Navy, providing their own sadist, Lieutenant Ikagami. The prisoners had passed their first bitter winter with the meagerest of clothing. Weakening with cold, E. H. Knox of Cuba City, Wisconsin, made himself a shirt from a camp blanket. Ikagami had him thrown into a freezing jail with nothing on but the shirt, then regularly drenched him with water. Prisoner squad leaders plucked up courage and went in as a body to see Ikagami and said that Knox was dying. Ikagami said, “Let him freeze to death and die.” When Ikagami visited the suffering prisoner in the guardhouse he said to Knox, “You are going to stay here until your mind freezes numb.” Forty-two-year-old Knox died on January 15th.

  C. A. Scott of Sacramento, California, was jailed with Knox in his last hours for having picked up an orange peel, which constituted “garbaging”. Scott had been beaten until his eyes were swollen almost closed. The Japanese, seeing that Knox was going die from pneumonia, gave him one blanket. Knox told Scott, “When I go, you take my blanket.” A little while later he was dead.

  The Japanese insisted that American workmen stand at attention while being beaten. Tom Gillen of Portland, Oregon, “broke a finger trying to ward off the blows.”

  Fifty-six-year-old Walter Gell of Wadena, Iowa—both his pipe-stem legs swathed in bandages from foot to thigh—said: “If one man fouled up, everybody got it, with anything from a broomstick to an axe handle.” Another prisoner told about carrying Gell unconscious from the line after the collective chastisement of all for some single infraction.

  George Dillon of Metaline Falls, Washington, was beaten by a snooping elderly Japanese whom the prisoners called “Grammo” for grandma. Dillon returned to work but sagged, and drew another beating. This time he struck back. All 250 men were called off work and given a mass beating. Dillon was removed and tried; he is believed to have died.