The noise of the crazed men could not be stopped and the hatches were closed. That was at about 10 o’clock. Then some of the men crept up the ladder and parted the planks slightly, so that a little air could get through. Mr. Wada came again to the edge of the pit. “Unless you are quiet I shall give the guards the order to fire down into the hold.”
A kind of relative quiet had settled on the hold—the quiet of exhaustion and death. The floor was covered with excrement and urine. Almost all the officers had stripped their bodies, so that the pores would have a chance to breathe what the lungs could not.
Occasionally an American would awaken from a stupor out of his mind. One began calling, around midnight, “Lieutenant Toshino, Lieutenant Toshino!” The others, fearful of Japanese repercussions, shouted, “Knife him, knife that son-of-a-bitch!” Someone said, “Denny, you get him!” There was movement, a struggle, and a scream in the darkness. Then somebody else called: “Get Denny, he did it, get him!” and there was another struggle.
Then came foreboding quiet, with all who had heard wondering what had happened. Men who owned jackknives unclasped the big blade, prepared to fight if they were attacked.
Around midnight the convoy ran into difficulties. American planes were sparing Manila Bay by day, but their submarines were still patrolling by night. The night attack, a specialty of the American underseas fleet, was at its high point of the war. Prisoners who crept up the ladder to open the planks for air reported that an enormous floating fire had broken out on the horizon at the point where the Japanese cruiser had been.
The Oryoku Maru crept through the mouth of Manila Bay and turned northward in the darkness, hugging closely the Luzon shore so that the remaining vessels in the convoy could protect her. Meantime death strode through the fetid, slippery bays, taking impartially soldiers old and new. Major James Bradley of Shanghai’s famous 4th Marines passed away. Lieutenant Colonel John Bennett of the 31st Infantry was suffocated. So was Lieutenant Colonel Jasper Brady of the same outfit. The Army Lieutenant Colonel Norman Simmonds, who had the curious record of once having been middleweight boxing champion at Annapolis, went down and did not arise. Major Houston B. Houser, an outstandingly capable figure who had organized M.P.s of a sort to keep order in the darkness, who busied himself running up the ladder to plead with the Japanese and cleaning up excreta in the darkness, was felled with exhaustion and later took the short way home. He had been [General Jonathan] Wainwright’s adjutant during part of the battle for Bataan. Major Maynard Snell, a veterinarian who had been a professor at Louisiana State University, also did not last till morning.
But in the darkness few knew that these men had died. It is even possible that some of them did not actually pass away till the next evening. “Once you passed out, you were gone,” as an officer says, “but only those near you could tell that you were dead. The temperature down there must have been 130 degrees at least, and it took a long time for a body to grow cold.”
Major Howard Cavender, Dollar Line representative in Manila and manager of the Manila Hotel, was among those who succumbed but were not recognized till light came.
“The worst thing,” according to a major of the 26th Cavalry, “was the men who had gone mad but would not sit still. One kept pestering me, pushing a mess kit against my sweaty chest and saying, ‘Have some of this chow? It’s good.’ I smelled of it and smelled what it was. It was not chow. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you don’t want it I’m going to eat it.’ And a little while later I heard him eating it, right beside me.”
There was a tendency on the part of men near the border of madness to get up and wander around, as though to get assurance where they were. “You would meet one of these men. He would seem to talk perfectly normally. But all the time he would keep putting out his hands, placing them on your shoulders in the darkness, running them up and down your arms as though trying to make sure that you and he were alive, and that you both were real. If you stepped away, he would follow you, pawing and trying to put his face close to yours, to make sure you were there.”
After the hatches were closed the Japanese refused to allow any more benjos, or slop buckets, to be handed up the ladder. Overfull as they were, the buckets still circulated. A man would be heard saying, “Someone take this thing, for God’s sake. I can’t hold it and I have no place to put it.” He would be ignored, because nobody would be willing to give up space in order to take the benjo. If angered or irrational, the badgered and weary man might simply overturn the mobile toilet on his neighbors.
As the first faint light crept down through the parted planks of the hatches, the men in three holds looked about them. Some men were in a stupor, a few were dead, a few were mad. The first step was to get the insane under control. In the pit of the aft hold, which was the worst affected, there were two decks and a bottom hatch, leading into the bilge. The most violent of those who were mad were lowered into this sub-hold.
It was hot. The labored working of hundreds of lungs had expelled moisture which clung to the sides of the bulkheads in great drops. Men tried to scrape off this moisture and drink it. Naked, sitting like galley slaves between each other’s legs, they looked at their hands. Their fingers seemed long and thin and the ends were wrinkled as though they had been soaked a long time in hot water. But their throats were sandpaper-dry. They were in the first stages of weakening through dehydration, aggravated by the loss of body salts, the sparks of energy.
DAWN came slowly and at first almost no light filtered back into the rear bays, where most of the dead lay. Chief Warrant Officer Walter C. Smith of San Diego had found himself a tiny shelf beyond the last tiers of the suffocated. “I was jammed all the way up against the rudder. I could hardly see daylight at first.”
Again the gray-haired, indefatigable Commander Bridget took charge. Under medium size, about one hundred fifty pounds, he had a fighting build, with a thin face and marked bow legs. To the few who were not naked—some had kept on their clothes even in the dripping heat, as protection against being pawed by the wandering insane men—he said: “Take off all the clothes you can. Don’t move around. You use up extra oxygen that way and you sweat more. Use your shorts to fan each other.”
He showed them how the little air that came down the hatch could be fanned with easy motions back into the rear bays. Some of the officers in the rear bays, lying in a stupor between suffocation and life, came slowly alive. Others did not stir. The Japanese lowered a little rice, and it was distributed by Warrant Officer Clifford Sweet of the U.S.S. Tanager. Water there was none.
Smith surveyed his tiny post on the vibrating counter of the ship. In a 10-foot circle around him were five officers. They sat, naked and doubled up, like white-skinned fakirs praying. But they were cold and dead. He wondered particularly what had happened to one big man who kept walking around all night, stepping indifferently on bodies and followed by a train of curses. For a time he had stopped by the rudder and insisted on sitting across Smith’s stomach. This vagabond kept getting into fights wherever he roamed in the fetid dark. In the faint light Smith could see the big man, crumpled on the filthy deck, now dead.
He recognized another young man whom he knew, went to him, felt his heart and got no answer.
Bridget was a fountain of hope. He climbed to the top of the ladder into the very muzzle of the Formosan guard. He talked to the Japanese and persuaded them to allow three or four of the unconscious elder officers to be carried up the ladder and laid out on the deck. None of the dead were allowed to be removed. As soon as the unconscious men revived they had to go down the ladder again to make way for others.
Lieutenant Toshino, in charge of the prisoners, and Mr. Wada, the hunchbacked interpreter, learned what was happening in the pits of the holds.
In the growing light, with the unbalanced men out of the way and the dead no longer taking their share of air, and with everyone sitting down and none wandering around, it was possible for the officers to take cognizance of where they were.
“The whole space in the aft hold,” according to Major John Fowler of Boston and Los Angeles, a 26th Cavalryman taken at Bataan, “looked about a hundred feet long by about forty feet wide. There were thirteen bays or little compartments on each side, and two across. Each bay was double, above and below, and the average was about eight feet by eleven and a half feet.”
The Oryoku Maru coasted slowly and uncertainly along the edge of Luzon. In the morning, summoned perhaps by the submarines which had attacked the convoy during the night, American planes appeared overhead. Soon they began their attacks.
Bridget, completely cool, sat at the top of the ladder. Like an announcer in a press box, he called the plays. “I can see two planes going for a freighter off our starboard side,” he would say. “Now two more are detached from the formation. I think they may be coming for us. They are! They’re diving! Duck, everybody!”
The Japanese gun crews opened fire, and a wild cacophony of gun dialogue went back and forth. Thump, went the shock as the bombs hit the water. The bulkheads shook. The naked men lay flat on the filth-smeared planks, trembling.
Lieutenant Colonel Elvin Barr, executive of the 60th Coast Artillery on Corregidor, who had fought his guns magnificently until silenced by the crossfire of Japanese artillery and dive bombing, stumbled up to Fowler. Fowler was on the cargo deck; Barr had been in the well-deck.
“There’s a hole knocked in the bulkheads down there,” Barr said. He had a wound in his side that ran from armpit to hip. “Between thirty and forty majors and lieutenant colonels have already died down where I came from,” he added. Though neither of them then knew it, Barr himself was to die from this wound, and from disease and neglect, before reaching Japan.
Out of bombs but not out of gas or bullets, the planes returned and began to strafe the ships. “It sounded like a riveting machine, running the whole length,” recalled a survivor. These attacks could not sink the ship, but they raised havoc with its gun crews. First one crew was spattered to death, then another. There was nothing wanting in Japanese courage. An artillery officer says: “They were magnificent. As soon as a crew would be wiped out, another would take its place.”
The half darkness that still reigned below decks gave a strange phenomenon. Bridget would announce a dive bomber, “Here comes one now!” and the prisoners would hear the scream of wings. Then, lying flat but with faces turned sideways, they would hear the crunch of the striking bomb. And suddenly the whole side of the bulkheads was alive with sparks. The bomb’s concussion, causing the plates to scrape together, would throw off such will-o’-the-wisp flickers, by which blue glow they could see each others’ faces and the dead around them.
Though the American flyers brought terror to the prisoners, they also brought two gifts: light and air. In the shock and disorder, the hatch planks had become disarrayed. Each party of United States Medical Corps men, when allowed to take up an officer who had fainted, made use of the confusion to open the planks more. At length Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada gave permission for some of the suffocated who were dead to be brought up on deck.
Bridget’s cool example, plus air and light, brought an improvement in morale and partial recovery of discipline. The situation was not altogether hopeless. If it grew better, they would live. If it grew worse, and the attacks continued, the Japanese could not send them to Japan, and they would be rescued by MacArthur after all.
Bridget and Commander Warner Portz, who as senior officer was nominally in charge of the whole party, took advantage of the slight lift in hope to order a roll call. Some sobering discoveries were made. The madness induced mainly by lack of air, and partly by lack of water, had caused men to pair off by twos in the night and go marauding. If they could not have water, they would have blood to drink; if not blood, then urine. There were slashed wrists. And “Cal” Coolidge, a large, fat former Navy petty officer who had been proprietor of the Luzon Bar in Manila, was found choked to death. There had been murder, then; the prisoners accepted that, too, with what distaste they could muster, but it seemed a natural part of the whole.
A food detail that was allowed to go up the ladder and forward to the galley reported that a big ship was burning in the convoy, and that the course was turning back toward Subic Bay. The Japanese captain sent word that if they were badly stricken in another attack, he would give Bridget and Portz the word when to bring up the prisoners, which side of the ship they should go over, and how far it was to nearest land. Through Lieutenant Colonel E. Carl Engelhart, the American interpreter, the Japanese sent down this warning: “If anyone other than an officer in charge so much as touches the hatch ladder, he will be instantly shot.”
Among the 2,000 Japanese civilians there was terror and confusion. From the forward hold, where Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Beecher was in charge, the Army physicians Lieutenant Colonel William North and Lieutenant Colonel Jack W. Schwartz, along with several doctors and corpsmen, were summoned on deck to take care of the Japanese wounded.
Especially in the aft hold, blood seeped down through the hatch planks and gave the naked, panting men a spotted appearance.
In the middle hold, where approximately 250 men were under Commander Maurice Joses of Santa Monica, there was plenty of room and enough air to maintain discipline. This group even had resourcefulness enough to keep back the wooden buckets that the Japanese sent down with food. By retaining one each time, they were able to accumulate enough toilet buckets for themselves. By now, in other holds, men were using their mess kits and their hats for benjos, being denied buckets by the Japanese.
Men in Hold No. 2 who got a peep over their hatch reported seeing “a tall lighthouse” on the shore. “That’s Subic,” said the Navy men with relief.
Between three and four in the afternoon the Oryoku Maru edged close to shore. The captain sent down word that he was going to disembark all passengers. The American prisoners would be disembarked too, as soon as guards were arranged on shore to keep them from escaping.
Suddenly there was a sandy, grating sound. The liner had run aground. Immediately the ban against going on deck was strictly enforced. For the next three or four hours, until well beyond sunset and the fall of gloom into the holds, there was a scraping of chains and spitting of winches as the captain strove to free the Oryoku Maru. It was foul, filthy and airless in the forward and aft holds; again discipline began to crack.
About 8 p.m. the Oryoku Maru floated free once more, moved in toward the American naval base at Olongapo, and at about ten began to discharge her Japanese passengers. Now the Japanese, knowing the conditions in the prisoners’ holds by the number of dead already stacked on the decks, were fearful that a break for shore would take place. Below decks the sane prisoners were almost equally fearful that the unbalanced would unite against them and rush the ladder; they posted guards.
There were approximately sixteen chaplains in the three holds, and most of them carried Bibles or breviaries. A few other men had prayer books or religious works. Some read them aloud. A Navy Lieutenant O’Rourke, who had been on the Chinese river patrol, took out his prayer book and read a few words to those around him in the cargo hold in the stern. Suddenly he stopped and began tearing pages out of the book and scattering them. Then without warning he made a dash for the vertical iron ladder beside the wooden stairs, and began to climb up. A big chief boatswain, Jesse Earl Lee of San Diego, pulled him back before the guard above could draw a bead on him. They tied him to the ladder until he quieted down.
During the first night his fellow pharmacist mates had taken care of Chips Bowlin, who had become unmanageable. They saved him from being forced into the bilges with the miserable wretches whom no one could handle, but this second night he managed to creep away from them, made a furtive dash for the ladder and climbed up it before he was missed. They heard a sentry scream something, then three shots and finally Bowlin’s voice: “The only thing I ask of the Japs is that they give me a decent burial.” They never saw him again.
Bridget never le
ft his post on the wooden ladder. His voice was hoarse, now, from continual shouting. He was relieved occasionally by an officer of the 4th Marines, Major Andrew J. Mathiesen of Los Angeles. Mathiesen had a cool smile that never came off; even in the darkness, hearing his unruffled voice, the prisoners imagined that they could see that smile. “Not going to Japan, boys,” he would say. “Still right off old Subic. Not going to Japan.”
“For God’s sake, boys,” Bridget would rasp, “keep fanning. Don’t leave your place. Every move you make generates heat. There are men in the back bays who are going to die unless you sit still and keep fanning.”
Some obeyed Bridget and Mathiesen, but not all. Some could hear, or imagined they heard, men plotting against them in the darkness. They unclasped their knives. Chief Pharmacist’s Mate D. A. Hensen worked his way across through the foul and steaming aisles to a little cluster of chief warrant officers. “Look,” he said, “I’ve lost my nerve. The fellows over in my bay are plotting against me. They are going to kill me.” His friends allowed him to stay until he felt better, told him he was talking nonsense and that he must follow the general order and go back to his bay. In an hour he was back again, full of the same fear of murder. Again they told him it was a hallucination, and sent him back. In the morning he was found dead, his belly slit open.
There was Lieutenant Bill Williams, an Army engineer, who took the same line in talking aloud as Bridget and Mathiesen: if not sunk, they would get away; if sunk, they would land on Luzon and the Japanese would never again be able to get together enough ships to take them to Manila.
But there were also nuisances like the doctor who kept imagining he had to see someone in the next bay. He spent the whole night crawling back and forth, and could not be dissuaded from his empty errand.
First Into Nagasaki Page 19