First Into Nagasaki

by George Weller

  The Japanese were suddenly in fearful haste. Lieutenant Toshino would scold Mr. Wada in Japanese, and the hunchback would say, “Get in the barge, quickly, quickly! You must hurry, hurry!” Some prisoners were literally pushed off the dock and fell in the barge’s bottom. “Speedo!” shouted the guards. “Speedo, speedo!” With rifle butts and the flats of their swords they pushed back the fallen in the barge. “Back, back! Speedo, speedo!”

  The sun was just coming up as the prisoners climbed on sunburned feet the iron side-ladder of their new vessel, whose propellers were already impatiently turning over. All this haste was for a good reason. Ordinarily, in wars hitherto, ships have considered themselves in danger from air or submarine attack only by day. If armed, they have felt themselves fairly safe against submarines except at the weak visibility hours of sunrise and sunset, when the low profile of a submarine gives it an advantage.

  The American submarines, however, became specialists in night attacks. Thus the Japanese shipping controls were always in a dilemma: whether to face the subs by night or the bombers by day. Where they were within range of both, as at Manila, there was simply no answer but to take advantage of any bad weather and hope for stormy cover, which makes either torpedo or bomb sighting difficult. At Lingayen, however, more than a hundred miles to the north, they were out of range of scourging air attacks by day—though a long-range raid was always possible. And if ships sailed by day and lay up by night, they had at least a fighting chance to beat the American submarines, whose deadliest strikes were made by darkness . . . . The Japanese wanted to get out at dawn and widen the aircraft range as much as possible the first day, thus halving their possible antagonists.

  Two freighters were leaving, a big one of about 8,000 tons marked No. 2 on its superstructure, and another of about 5,500 tons marked No. 1 on its funnel.* The first bargefuls of men were crowded aboard the No. 2 in the midships hold, which had two levels. But as the nervous captain watched the rapidly rising sun, he lost patience with the slow crawl of tired prisoners up his ladder. Once the thousand-man mark was reached, he lifted anchor and the last batch climbed up while the freighter moved down the harbor. The remainder, some 234 men and a few Japanese wounded and sick, were hustled aboard No. 1. On the morning of the 27th both vessels set forth along the coast of northern Luzon. That same evening a submarine fired two torpedoes at No. 2. Both missed, and exploded on the Luzon shore.

  The last cargo which No. 2 had carried was horses. “The hold where we were,” says a prisoner, “was like a floating barn, full of horse manure and the biggest, hungriest horse flies I ever saw. They immediately set to work biting our backs and legs. Then more flies came and covered our mouths, ears and eyes. We smelled already, and our smell drew them.”

  It was the Japanese practice to save the horses’ urine for some chemical use, bringing it back to Japan in the bilges of the ship. “An overpowering smell like ammonia came up from the bilges,” one man recalled. There was a ventilating system installed to keep the horses alive, but with Americans in the hold the Japanese shut it off.

  The prisoners placed their wounded on the upper of the two decks in the hold, where the odor was less. The two Army doctors, Lieutenant Colonels North and Schwartz, were in charge of this sick level. In delirium several men fell or rolled off into the lower level that night. Below, in the fetor of the hold, Commander Bridget, almost indistinguishably hoarse now, was in charge. Beecher handled negotiations with Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada.

  The pit on No. 2 was about 60 feet square, with bays 10 feet deep on two sides and bays about 4 feet deep on the other two sides. The horses had left scattered feed in the crevices of these stalls. The prisoners scraped up the remnants and ate them, mixed with the bran stolen on the dock.

  The Japanese crew of this vessel seemed willing to give the prisoners rice and water. But Mr. Wada and Lieutenant Toshino and the Formosan guards were afraid to let the prisoners on deck. Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth “Swede” Olson, a regular Army finance officer who had been camp commandant at Mindanao, climbed up boldly and faced the hunchback. “These men are hungry and thirsty, Mr. Wada,” he said. “They are dying. Sick men won’t be any good to you. Dead men won’t help you. Give us a chance. We’re not afraid to work for our lives. All we want is a chance.”

  Finally Toshino and Wada relented. They allowed the crew to send down food, and eventually allowed the prisoners to send six-man chow details on deck to the galley. The prisoners each had rice and a quarter canteen cupful of hot soup. But the Japanese would not allow them to keep the rice buckets long enough to pass around; they had to send them up again immediately. So they dumped out the rice on dirty raincoats and on the manure-scattered pit. “The lineup was something to see,” says one prisoner. “We were barefooted, bearded, dirty and full of diarrhea. We ate from our hats, from pieces of cloth, from our hands. You would see an officer who once commanded a battalion with a handful of rice clutched against his sweaty, naked chest so the flies could not get it, eating it like an animal with his befouled hands.”

  Again death was moving quietly among them. Of dehydration or diarrhea, or old wounds, a man died almost every hour. From the Japanese galley they procured rice sacks for shrouds. When a man died his body was stripped of useable clothing, bundled in a sack, and hoisted out. Tying up the bodies was the job of boatswains like Jesse Lee and corpsmen like Patrick C. Hilton of Pratt, West Virginia: “The trouble was that the second day we ran out of sacks. I would tie a running bowline around the feet of the corpse and a half hitch around his hand, then say, ‘All right, take him away’. He would rise up out of the hold, and his friends could see him for the last time against the sky, swinging back and forth against the side of the hatch as he went out of sight.”

  Most of the chaplains were by this time beyond doing any duties, but a Catholic Army lieutenant, Father William “Bill” Cummings of San Francisco and Ossining, New York, who in a sermon on Bataan had first uttered the phrase “There are no atheists in foxholes”, often managed to say a few words of blessing as the body rose through the hatch. A Navy chief carpenter named O’Brien, for example, stricken on the beach with nutritional diarrhea which not even food could check, passed his final moments and was eased by Cummings. An Air Force sergeant named Brown, however, who jumped overboard off northern Luzon at night, was followed only by the scattered shots of the Taiwani guards.

  Captain John Presnell, a graduate of the University of Maine, tried to climb the iron ladder to the deck, and was shot dead by the guards.

  AS the ships drew away from the Luzon coast it began to grow cold. The men who had broiled now shivered both night and day. As their losses increased the Japanese made a rule that bodies could no longer be hoisted out of the hold immediately after death. They had to lie out on the bottom of the hold in full sight of Lieutenant Toshino or Mr. Wada when they glanced into the pit. Once there were six or eight bodies, Wada would give permission for a general hoisting of corpses. The horse troughs around the hold were now latrines. “You could watch a single fly go from the latrines to the bodies, and then from the bodies to your rice,” says a prisoner. Captain Jack Clark, a Marine, kept the death roll for Beecher.

  The 234 men on No. 1 were in a way worse off than those on No. 2 because they were committed into the hands of their frightened Formosan guards. For the first two days they got nothing at all, except that the guards diverted themselves by dropping cigarettes through the hatch to watch the Americans scramble. Lieutenant Colonel “Johnny” Johnson, one of the few hardworking officers who came through, took firm hold and saw that every scrap of food on hand was rationed. Their first food was the leavings from the guards, and a Japanese guard does not leave very much. It amounted to a teaspoon of rice per man.

  Johnson took a teaspoonful to the commander of the guard. He said, “If we must go on like this, my men will all die.” The commander replied, “We want you to die. Your submarines are sinking our ships. We want you to die.”

  The Japanese cr
ewmen sold a cheap rock candy to the prisoners for rings and fountain pens.

  All sense of disorder and fight was now gone from the men. Johnson had set them off in groups of twenty, by areas. Bearded, dirty, shoeless and sunburned, they lay in their areas, awaiting death in the throbbing hold.

  No. 2, though the newer and larger ship, broke its steering gear two days from the Philippines and had to be towed most of the rest of the way. The convoy reached the harbor of Takau, in Formosa, on New Year’s Day, 1945. In celebration of safe arrival the prisoners aboard No. 1 received five pieces of hardtack each, their New Year’s feast. About a dozen men had died on No. 1 and somewhat more on No. 2. Older men like P. D. Rogers, once General Pershing’s secretary and later Governor of Jolo, passed away of general weakness, while young men like Captain Alfonso Melandez and Captain James Sadler, both of Santa Fe, died of dysentery and exhaustion. Major Reginald Ridgely, Jr., Beecher’s Marine mess officer, kept up a ceaseless chant of “Take it easy, boys, at ease, now” in his deep voice.

  After three or four days in Takau harbor, the Japanese decided to put the two parties together again aboard No. 2. The smaller party spent a day and night, in between, aboard a still smaller freighter with a bad list, apparently from bombing. After twenty-four hours without food or water they were moved on January 4th to No. 2 and jammed down into the midships hold already occupied by about 1,000 men. The next day the Japanese decided to open a forward hold, where about 450 men under Captain Arthur Wermuth of Chicago, the “one-man army”, were transferred.

  The prisoners knew that they were now within range of more bombers: the U.S. Air Force in China. Their alarm was increased when a light warship approached and tied itself to No. 2, making an inviting double target.

  The No. 2 had already taken aboard two hundred sacks of sugar, which were placed in the lower part of the crowded hold amidships. The prisoners sensed that the moment of departure for Japan was at hand. The 37 British prisoners, with them since Manila, were ordered ashore to join their compatriots in Formosa’s camps.

  About eight on the morning of January 6th there was a sudden crackle of anti-aircraft fire. Practice or real? Under the closed hatches the prisoners could not tell. Then bombs began to fall. The first hit the side close by the forward hold, and the ship rolled with the blow. The others—two or perhaps three—hit close inboard.

  The first American bomb not only tore at the side of the ship; it ripped holes in the partition between the two holds. “We looked through the holes,” says Theodore Lewin, a big broken-nosed soldier of fortune who had been a reporter in Los Angeles on the Huntington Park Record and proprietor of an offshore gambling ship. “We could see bodies in the forward hold, all stirred up and scrambled. Almost nobody was even moving. In our own hold the whole place was covered with bodies. Then from the forward hold Captain Wermuth yelled up, ‘I’m taking charge here. Get us some stuff for the wounded, quick!’”

  The wild cascade of hatch planks had felled Major Malevic of the Fourteenth Engineers, but he was still alive. Three Army lieutenant colonels were lying in a row, Peter Kemp, Jack Schwartz and Bill Manning. The outer two had been killed by head blows; Schwartz was untouched. The gallant Marine, Major Andrew Mathiesen, who had helped so many, was knocked from the upper level to the bottom by a hatch plank and later died of shock and internal injuries. Even after the mortal blow he pulled himself up, worked and gave orders normally, but finally collapsed.

  “We’re going to need the last clothing you have for bandages, boys,” announced Lieutenant Colonel James McG. Sullivan, a medico. “Tear off your pant legs and shirts. If you’re cold, get a sugar sack. We’ve got to save these men.”

  The appearance of the wounded in the middle hold was peculiarly unbearable. The fumes coming from the bilges had made a yellowish combination that the engineers said was ammonium picrate gas. In the pit, the men’s hair had turned an unearthly yellow blond color.

  “A Navy doctor only a foot away from me,” says Lieutenant Russell Hutchison of Albuquerque, who had built a tiny radio in Davao to time MacArthur’s coming, “lost his eye right out of his head. I was eating a mess kit of rice at the time. On my left a man had the back of his head blown clean off. There were dark flecks in my rice that had not been there before. I only hesitated a moment, then I ate the rice.”

  In this hold amidships, from which come the only coherent accounts of what happened, about 40 were killed and about 200 wounded. In the forward hold, which resembled a human butcher shop, over half the prisoners, more than 200, were dead, and many of the rest gravely wounded.

  The Japanese were now in a civilized harbor, with doctors, hospitals, barges, and all other medical services at their disposal. Did they move to help? They did not. The first day nothing whatever was done. The unwounded in the middle hold, where some doctors were still alive, were not even allowed to go above and then descend into the chaos of the forward hold to help. So the first night passed, with the bodies stiffening where they lay.

  The second day a small detachment of Japanese Red Cross corpsmen arrived at the ship. They did not even attempt to enter the forward hold. They handed out some medicines in the midships hold, and went away.

  By now the living men in both holds were pleading with Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada for permission to lift out their dead. The bodies were swollen and bloated; the stench was beyond breathing. But the Japanese would not allow them to move the bodies. Still another night they spent with their mangled dead and their unrelieved wounded. On the morning of the 8th, two full days later, Toshino and Wada for the first time agreed to have the bodies removed.

  Purely as physical labor, it was a task almost beyond the strength of the survivors. To move 300 living men, heavy and helpless, would have been a full job for a large hospital corps with stretchers, slings, and aidemen husky and strong. These men had lost as much as forty pounds each; they had not had a true meal in many months; they were battle-shocked; they had no apparatus; and the dead bodies they had to move were those of their comrades of nearly three years’ imprisonment.

  And yet they had not wholly lost the American’s last resource: his humor. As they stripped the bodies of clothing, as they tugged them and stacked them, they laughed at what had happened to a rice-and-latrine detail that was on deck when the bombs struck. Their guard, a Formosan named Ah Kong, hardly heard the whistle of bombs when he dropped his rifle and took to his heels. He ran into a passageway and huddled there. The Americans were scared of the bombs, but more scared that the other jittery guards, seeing them without Ah Kong, would shoot them down. So they picked up Ah Kong’s rifle and poured pell-mell after him into the passageway, where they returned their panting sentry his weapon, pointing it back as usual at themselves.

  “We’ll never forget,” said one member of this detail, “when Ah Kong allowed us to walk forward and peer down for a moment through the twisted hatchway of the forward hold. We could see Wermuth standing there, looking around trying to get his bearings. There seemed at least 300 dead around him and about 100 wounded. About 50 men who were whole were still walking around, dazed.”

  Beecher took charge in the hold amidships, Wermuth forward. Captain Jack Clark of the Marines, who had kept the list of the dead in the tennis court, was now dead himself, as was also Captain Lee Clark, another Marine. A sergeant of the Fourth Shanghai Marines named Staley had been killed between two petty officers of Ah Kong’s trusties.

  Even the Japanese saw that No. 2 was so hopelessly perforated that she could never make Japan. Light peeked through all her bulkheads. The prison ships had left a long trail of American bodies committed to the sea, but a mass burial could not be carried out in Takau harbor. A barge appeared alongside. The dead were going ashore in Formosa.

  Out of the middle hold the dead could be hauled individually, stripped and tied to ropes. For the forward hold it was necessary to rig a broad wire cargo net, on the end of a boom and tackle. Here Wermuth, with the help of corpsmen like Hilton, hauled the bodies li
ke fagots and had them swung away through the hatch by the dozens, hugged within the wire net as if they were bunches of asparagus.

  Before a load was lifted, if there was a body in it who had not yet been identified, the question would be asked: “Anybody alive from this man’s bay?” (Silence.) “Anybody know which bay this man comes from?” (Silence.) Some men were unrecognizable even to those who had lived with them.

  For the ugly job of loading the dead there was little rivalry. The survivors were weak and extremely thirsty. Though the horses in the same cargo hold had presumably drunk gallons of water, and though the boat was in harbor, the Japanese kept saying, “No water—we have no water.” The wounds were kept from healing and further sapped by abnormal loss of water as well as blood. Then came the command: “We need thirty men to go ashore for burial duty with these bodies. Who volunteers?” Almost every man who could totter to his feet volunteered. His offer was not without self-interest. He hoped that for once, if he went ashore, he could fill up his body with water and renew his thinning blood.

  “I wanted to go ashore and try for some water with all my heart,” says one officer. “But I could not move. So I just lay on my back and watched that wire cargo net—it was about twenty feet square when laid out, I guess—going down into the hold empty, being loaded, and then ascending, shutting out the light with naked bodies before it swung away out of my sight.”

  At length the barge, overloaded, moved toward shore. Among the ten officers who went were Lieutenant H. B. Wright of the Air Corps, Lieutenant Keene of the Cavite 6th Marines—a South Carolinian—and Major John Fowler, 26th Cavalry. They reached a breakwater, tied up, but found that they were too weak to carry the bodies ashore one by one. They attached ropes to the naked feet, dragged them to the point where the breakwater met the sand, and laid them out in rows. It was a coal dumping yard, and there were black mountains of bituminous coal, thousand of tons, nearby. They left the bodies on the beach that first night, beside the coal.