First Into Nagasaki

by George Weller

  Railroad tracks at the city’s heart (p. 30). In the distance (center) is the Medical Institute Hospital, 700 meters south of where the bomb exploded. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

  One of two torii (gates) still standing after their shrine was destroyed, 700 meters south of the atomic blast. The Medical Institute Hospital is in the backgound. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

  The exact “hypocenter” beneath where the bomb burst; the district is Matsuyama-cho. The Catholic cathedral is in the background (p. 37). Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

  The Medical Institute Hospital, (p. 31), 700 meters south of the bomb hypocenter. In the distance (center) is a prison; on the hill (right) a medical school. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

  Passersby covering their noses from the lingering stench of the dead near the demolished Nagasaki Steel Company, approximately 700 meters from the blast. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

  Presumably a Mitsubishi factory. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

  A Mitsubishi weapons complex about 500 meters from the blast, destroyed except for two concrete walls. In the background is a middle school. This man may be Weller’s interpreter. Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

  In the concrete Mitsubishi headquarters, surviving employees set up an altar of little boxes containing the ashes of unknown colleagues. (p. 280) Nagasaki, September 7, 1945.

  Just-liberated Allied prisoners, probably U.S. servicemen. Camp #17, Omuta, September 11 or 12, 1945.

  POW Sgt. Wallace Timmons of Chicago, presumably nicknamed “Tim” (see p. 50). Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

  Sleeping just-liberated prisoners. Camp #17, September 11 or 12,1945.

  George Weller (above right), probably with members of a prisoner recovery team. Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

  A just-liberated prisoner. Camp #17. September 11 or 12, 1945.

  George Weller (left) at Camp #17 with ex-prisoner U.S. Marine Sgt. Major James J. Jordan, who also survived the Death Cruise. (see pp. 93 & 230), September 11 or 12, 1945.

  Graffiti done by U.S. POWs upon liberation. The “old 500” were the first five hundred prisoners at the camp. (pp. 295-296) Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

  A just-liberated prisoner. Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

  Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

  One final funeral, led by members of a recovery team, as ex-prisoners say farewell to a comrade. Camp #17, September 11 or 12, 1945.

  The Chicago Daily News Foreign Service presents herewith the first attempt to recount historically one of the great American tragedies of the Pacific War: how more than 1,600 American officers and enlisted men, prisoners of the Japanese and survivors of the defenses of Bataan, Corregidor, and Mindanao, were reduced to about 300 survivors alive today. These Americans, having lived through nearly three years of Japanese prison camps, died in the course of a broken journey seven weeks long from Bilibid Prison in Manila to a chain of prison camps in Kyushu, southern Japan. They died of Japanese bullets and American bombs, of suffocation, dehydration, disease, starvation and murder. Some went insane.

  This series is based on interviews obtained by George Weller of the Chicago Daily News during a period of eight weeks’ investigation in the prison camps of Kyushu, in American rest camps, aboard hospital ships in bomb-torn Nagasaki, at Okinawa and Saipan and Guam.

  Because an official record of the death cruise cannot be prepared for many weeks, this account must be regarded as a preliminary one in a historical sense. Survivors’ stories conflict in minor details; absolutely reliable lists are not obtainable in the Pacific; in spelling some names phonetic methods had to be used because of the uncertainty of the survivors.

  This tragic odyssey was the fourth and last part of the general tragedy of the Philippines, which began with the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, entered its crescendo with the death march of prisoners to Camp O’Donnell, passed its midpoint with their three years of imprisonment, and closed with the death cruise to Japan.

  Omuta—Nagasaki—Okinawa—Saipan—Guam

  November 1, 1945

  THIN from nearly three years’ confinement, guarded by bayoneted Japanese, a column of American prisoners numbering somewhere above 1,600 men shuffled in ranks of four through Manila’s dusty streets on the morning of December 13, 1944, on their way from Bilibid Prison to what in pre-war days had been known as “The Million Dollar Pier.”

  They shuffled rather than marched because the sun was hot and many of them were ill. The ragged streetboys of Manila made them furtive V-for-Victory signs. In the lace-curtained parlors of the poor Philippine homes the cheap radios were turned on full blast as they approached, then tuned down after they left: an indirect salute of the underground.

  Nearly all the prisoners were veterans of the defense of Bataan, Corregidor and Mindanao. About half were officers. They represented about 90 per cent of the field, staff and medical officers who had sustained the defense of the Philippines for six months totally without help from the United States. The officers ranked from Navy commanders and lieutenant colonels of the Army and Marines down through lieutenants and ensigns. Some were civilians who had been commissioned hastily after Japan struck south. Others were civilians who had helped in the defense of Bataan and Corregidor without ever having formally entered the armed forces. There were also 37 British prisoners.

  The 1,600 prisoners (the exact number is given by various survivors as 1,615, 1,619, and 1,635) marched slowly through Manila not only because of heat and illness, but because rumor had already spread that they were being sent to Japan. If true, this report meant that their long-sustained hope of being rescued and freed by MacArthur’s forces was ended.

  The prisoners thought their journey by sea to Japan might take as much as a week or ten days. Had they realized what lay ahead of them—that some would die of suffocation even before the next dawn—many undoubtedly would have chosen immediate death on the bayonets of the Japanese guards who flanked them.

  Many of the prisoners were survivors of the death march from Bataan to Camp O’Donnell, where the willful denial of water and food by the Japanese cost the lives of hundreds of Americans—a trip which for deliberate butchery and needless sacrifice would take its place with the Alamo and the Boston Massacre. These men, including everything from highly trained West Point and Annapolis graduates to hastily registered missionary chaplains, had no inkling that they were setting forth on a journey no less cruel and far more extended.

  Instead of lasting ten days, as the prisoners expected, their journey to Japan would last seven weeks. Instead of going the whole distance on the ship waiting for them at the Million Dollar Pier, the prisoners would use four ships, besides motor trucks, railroad freightcars and their own naked feet. And instead of arriving in Japan with 1,600 survivors, they would reach there with slightly over 400 still alive, most of whom would be so far sunken that more than 100 would die soon after being turned over to prison authorities ashore.

  About 1,880 prisoners were crammed into Bilibid military prison in downtown Manila when the Japanese decided to move them to Japan. Many, like Commander Warner Portz, the sharp-nosed, kindly former senior officer of the Davao prison camp, and Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Olson who had been commandant there, had been moved northward to Manila on June 6th, leaving in Mindanao a residue of 175 officers of junior grade and about 600 enlisted men in the camps at Davao and nearby Lasang. Even today the fate of these men is only partly known, and the reported finding of large caches of American skeletons in Mindanao leaves it still unclarified.

  The prisoners were thin and weak. Their sustaining dish in Bilibid was lugau—watered rice made into a thin, gluey substance. So unnourishing is lugau that many prisoners descending from the second floor of the Bilibid Prison for their morning dishful on the ground floor found themselves still too weak to climb the stairs to their pallets again. They would remain in the prison yard to await the evening bowlful in order to husband their strength for that ascent of the single flight of stairs.<
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  Against this liability of their own weakness the column of prisoners had an asset: a dedicated group of doctors, both Army and Navy, poor in medicine but rich in spirit. In one of the camps—Cabanatuan—there had existed a group of irresponsible men who lived in part by manufacturing spurious sulfathiozole tablets, stamped with a mold made from a cartridge, and selling them to the Japanese guards. But the Bilibid doctors were superior to that ilk. From May 30, 1942, three weeks after the fall of Corregidor, to October, 1943, the naval medical unit at Bilibid had been under Commander L. B. Sartin of Mississippi, who was then succeeded by Commander Thomas H. Hayes of Norfolk, Virginia. Hayes was marching through the Manila streets now with the column, marching toward the death that was waiting for him in Formosa.

  The Japanese had made plans for evacuating the Americans sooner, but Manila was under almost constant air bombardment. They had not dared to bring in ships of large enough tonnage to carry so many men. From the upper levels of Bilibid the Americans had watched the American carrier planes dive bombing the harbor. Their hopes rose that the American dive bombers would be able to keep the harbor clear of shipping long enough so that the Japanese would not attempt to evacuate them.

  For some reason, however, the American air attacks stopped suddenly on November 28th, giving the Japanese their chance to sneak their freighters into Manila. As with dragging feet the prisoners marched their last miles on American soil, they feared that for them MacArthur would come too late.

  The Japanese had divided them into three groups. Group One, which numbered about 500 superior officers, included ranks from Navy commander and Army or Marine lieutenant colonel down through major and Navy senior lieutenant. Group Two had a few majors, all the rest of the junior officers, and some Navy medical corpsmen attached to their respective doctors, and numbered about 600. Group Three included all non-commissioned officers and enlisted men, a few medical officers, about 50 American civilians, plus the 37 British. This last group, comprising some 520 men, was in the charge of Chief Boatswain Clarence Taylor of Cloverdale, Virginia, and Long Beach, California, who had been executive of the naval receiving station at Cavite. In marching toward the pier the prisoners were further broken down into sections of 200 men, and provided with a small ration of soap and some toilet paper.

  Sympathetic Filipinos were frequently rapped back with rifle butts for getting too close to the prisoners. The column reached the Million Dollar Pier at about 2 p.m. The pier was crowded with Japanese civilians by the hundreds, all well dressed, with wives, babies, luggage and often large casks of sugar to take with them. At the pier was the Oryoku Maru, a passenger and freight ship of 9,000–10,000 tons, built in Nagasaki in 1939.*

  On hand to supervise the prisoners were several Japanese whom the prisoners knew. There was General Koa, who was in charge of all prisoners in the Philippines, and also Lieutenant N. Nogi, director of the Bilibid hospital—a former Seattle physician who customarily had been kind to Americans. The prisoners mounted by single file the gangplank to the ship. The Japanese sentries all had narugis, clubs. The Americans were already showing signs of straggling from weakness and frequently had to be touched up with a blow of the narugi.

  The Japanese elected to fill the aft hold first, and to put aboard the highest ranking officers before the others. It was this circumstance which was to make the death toll heaviest the first night among the top officers, men who had commanded regiments and battalions in the hopeless struggle for Bataan and Corregidor. The aft hold’s hatch was cut off from free circulation of air by bulkheads fore and aft of it. A long slanting wooden staircase descended some 35 feet through the hatch, down which the prisoners weakly crept.

  When the first officers reached the bottom of the ladder they were met by a Sergeant Dau, well known at Davao, who wore a sword and had several privates under him armed with brooms. Dau used the sword to direct the privates, and the privates used their brooms to beat the American officers back as far as possible into the dim bays of the hold.

  “We had to scamper back in there,” one officer describes it, “or get a crack from the brooms or Dau’s sword. There was a platform about five feet high built over the hatch above, and so the little light that came down in mid-afternoon was deflected. Long before the hold was filled the air was foul and breathing was difficult. But the Japanese kept driving more men down the ladder from the deck, and Dau and his men kept pushing the first-comers farther back into the airless dark.”

  This hold’s dimensions none of the prisoners could then estimate, because it was already too dark, at three in the afternoon, to see its limits. The loading in this hold alone took 1½ hours. The first officers who had descended were sitting down in bays, a double tier system of wooden stalls something like a Pullman car. The lower bays were three feet high. A man could neither stand up nor extend his legs sitting down in them.

  Each bay was about nine feet from passageway to rear wall. The Japanese insisted that the Americans could sit in rows four deep, each man’s back against his neighbor’s knees, in this nine-foot depth. The elder officers who were forced back in the rear almost immediately began to faint. Instead of making more space in the center under the fading light of the hatch, the Japanese insisted that the men in the center should not even sit down, but should be left standing, packed together vertically.

  When the Japanese on deck looked down through the hatch they saw a pit of living men staring upward, their chests and shoulders heaving as they struggled for air and wriggled for better space. “The first fights,” says one officer, “started when men began to pass out. We knew then that only the front men in each bay would be able to get enough air.”

  While the early struggles were beginning in the aft hold, the Japanese were herding the endless line of embarking prisoners forward to the bow hold. Here they managed to force down the ladder about 600 others against the 800 already under decks. The air here, too, was foul. Finally the last party to board, approximately 250 enlisted men and civilians, got the only fully ventilated hold of the Oryoku Maru, the second hold forward.

  About 5 o’clock the Oryoku Maru cast off, and headed down the bay. Now the prisoners discovered into whose hands their lives had been committed. Their guards were mixed, some Japanese but mostly Formosans, or as they were taught to call them, “Taiwanis.” The whole party was in the charge of Lieutenant Toshino, a Japanese officer of somewhat Western and Prussian aspect, with short clipped hair, spectacles and a severe manner.

  Though Toshino was nominally in command, the real control fell, as it often did in Philippine prisons, in the hands of the interpreter. In the prisons of Luzon and Mindanao, as everywhere from Japan to Java, the treatment depended on the interpreter more than on the commanding officer. Toshino left as much as possible to the interpreter, and his interpreter was a Japanese no survivor will ever forget.

  Mr. Wada was a hunchback. He hated the straight-backed world, and all his hatred had turned itself on the Americans. He had been an interpreter at Mindanao, and already laid up for himself an unusual record as spy and stool pigeon. The blood of the Americans who were to die needlessly between Manila and Moji is on the hands of all Japanese into whose care they were committed. But if you believe what the survivors say, the man whose hands are most ineradicably smeared is Mr. Wada. (There was something about him that made him always be called “Mr.” Wada.)

  The Oryoku Maru, as it moved down the harbor, became part of a convoy of five merchant ships, protected by a cruiser and several destroyers and lighter craft. They moved without lights, their holds vomiting forth the hoarse shouts of the Americans. Discipline had begun to slip in the struggling pits of the No. 3 and No. 1 holds. As air grew scarcer, the pleas for air grew louder and more raucous. Before long the Japanese threatened to board down the hatches and cut off all air.

  As the cries of struggling men persisted, the Japanese lowered down into the complete darkness of the pit a series of wooden buckets filled with fried rice, cabbage and fried seaweed. In the stiflin
g darkness, filled with moans and wild shouts, the buckets were handed around. The officers who had mess kits scooped in the buckets; the others simply grabbed blindly in the darkness, palming what they could. Some ate, but those in the rear ranks—if conscious—got as little as if they had fainted.

  Fear was already working its way on the bowels and kidneys of the men. Asked for slop buckets, the Japanese sent them down. These buckets circulated in the utter darkness far less readily than the similar food buckets. A man could not tell what was being passed to him, food or excrement. In their increasingly crazed condition, men would tell their neighbors that the one bucket was the other, and consider it uproarious if a hand was dipped in the toilet bucket, or the food bucket was befouled by a man who had no way of knowing what he was doing.

  Mr. Wada was very dissatisfied with the clamor issuing from the struggling pits of Americans. “You are disturbing the Japanese women and children,” he called down from the top of the hatch to Commander Frank Bridget, who was shouting himself hoarse trying to keep order among the suffocating men. “Stop your noise, or the hatches will be closed.”