First Into Nagasaki

by George Weller

  James Bashleben—quoted in Weller’s first POW dispatch—wrote me the following account, sixty years and six weeks later.

  I was a POW in Camp 17 and recall the day your father entered the camp—it was after the war ended. We were not aware of this, even though we were no longer working in the coal mine. Also, Red Cross boxes had been distributed, and we had been given new clothing. We suspected something was happening.

  Another POW and I were near the front gate to the camp when a person in light khakis entered unescorted and went directly into the camp commander’s office. We were stunned! The person was George Weller.

  Shortly afterward we were told to assemble in an open area within the camp. There a large platform had been erected. [Four or five feet above the ground, remembers Major John Perkowski; it was around noon.] We lined up on one side facing the platform and the Japanese guards lined up on the other side. We noticed at once that they carried no rifles.

  The camp commander [Isao Fukuhara], an interpreter and George Weller took the stand, and the commander began his speech. The only sentence I can recall is when he said, “Japan has laid down its arms in favor of a great nation.” I do not remember any great emotional display at that moment. After years of our determination to beat the hell out of these guys, we just stood there speechless.

  It was then that George Weller took over, and spoke to us. Sixty years is a long time ago, but as near as I can recall he told us about the A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also, that the war was over and troops were already occupying Kyushu.

  “The 21st Cavalry is already flying in troops and supplies from Okinawa,” he said. “I have no authority to tell you what to do, but why should those planes go back empty?” Immediately, a couple of POWs took off for Kanoya field.

  The following day a small plane flew over the camp and dropped a message it was OK to come down. I, along with a couple other POWs, tossed some Red Cross food in our shirts and took off. We reached the 21st Cavalry, boarded an “empty plane” and flew to Okinawa. Thanks to a subtle hint from George Weller we were on our way home!

  Another POW, Wesley C. Browning Jr.—one of the original “old 500” prisoners at the camp—wrote me:

  I remember very well one of the things that your father told us. It was: “I am a civilian and cannot tell you what to do, but if I were you, this is what I would do. About a hundred or so miles south of here is Atsuga Air Field, where our planes are coming in around the clock with men and supplies and are leaving empty. If you were there they would be glad to take you south to Manila.”

  After your father finished his talk Lieutenant Little, a Naval officer, proceeded to tell us, “If any of you leave this camp without my permission I will court-martial you.”

  As it turned out, Little was the one that was court-martialed. The next day three friends and I departed Camp #17, walked to the train station and found our way to Atsuga Air Field and were flown to Manila after a stopover at Formosa.

  This incident is referred to in Weller’s twelfth POW dispatch.

  Among his Nagasaki papers I found a large sheet of lined paper handwritten in pencil, as if by a schoolchild, in English, and signed The Camp Commander at Fukuoka, which was Omuta’s military district. It is impossible to say if this is the translated statement by the commandant of Camp #17, the much-feared Fukuhara, as scrawled out by the interpreter and read aloud just before Weller spoke. But its tone is probably not unique:

  I am pleased to inform you that we received military orders for stoppage of welfare [!] on Aug. 18th.

  Since you were interned in this camp you have doubtless had to go through much trouble and agony due to the extension of your stay here as prisoners of war. But you have overcome them and the news that the day for which you longed day and night, the day on which you could return to your dear homeland where your beloved wifes [sic] and children, parents, brothers, and sisters, are eagerly awaiting you, has become a fact is probably your supreme joy.

  I would like to extend to you my most sincere congraulations [sic] but at the same time I sympathize most deeply with those who have been inable [sic] due to illness or some other unfortunate reason, to greet this joyous day.

  By order, we the camp staff, have done all in our power towards your management and protection, but conditions here, we regret that we were unable to do half of what we wanted to do for you. But I trust in your great understanding on this point.

  Several days ago at one camp the prisoners presented the camp staff and factory foremen with part of their valuable relief food stuff and personal belongings. This I know is an expression of your understandings open hearted gentlemenliness [sic] and we the camp staff are all deeply moved.

  Until you are transferred over to Allied hands at a port to be designated later you will have to wait at this camp. Therefore I sincerely wish that you will wait quietly for the day when you can return to your homeland, behaving according to camp regulations, holding fast your pride and honour as people of a great nation and taking care of your health.

  The Camp Commander at Fukuoka

  One of Weller’s photographs shows the judgment of Fukuhara’s earliest POWs, the original “old 500” in Camp #17. On a wall has been written, in careful, large capital letters: “THIS WAS THE H.Q. OF FUKAHARA, [sic] ONE OF THE MOST VICIOUS AND INHUMANE PRISON COMMANDERS.” Fukuhara was found guilty of war crimes and hanged in early 1946.

  Others, also guilty, even more vicious and inhumane, were luckier. Like the masterminds of Unit 731 of the Japanese army, near a Mitsubishi factory in Manchuria, who spent years performing imaginative experiments on white and Asian POWs, to learn how much suffering humans of all varieties could take before they died—atrocities to rival or surpass anything the Nazis thought up. MacArthur felt the U.S. military had use for such invaluable research in the coming fields of biological and chemical warfare, not to mention torture, and he provided dozens in Unit 731 with immunity in return for information. Many went on to become successful politicians and scientists, even millionaires, in Japan and in the United States.

  IX

  “The Death Cruise” would not exist had Weller never interviewed scores of prisoners. At some point early in those weeks he realized he had stumbled on another significant piece of history that was unwritten. Despite its descriptions of murder, cannibalism, and POW deaths by friendly fire, the story got through. This may be because the text was not delivered in cablese to a censor’s office in Tokyo, but was sent from Guam, where Weller got accredited to Admiral Nimitz and the Navy. He finished the typescript on board the ship that carried him, encased in plaster, away from Nagasaki, and mailed it back to the Chicago Daily News. Neither his original nor his carbon bear a Passed By Censors stamp, nor is there any mention of censors in the correspondence. Yet alone of the 1945 material in this book (except for a few of the POW dispatches), it actually got published—albeit incomplete, with many of the more repellent passages omitted. It is also virtually the only wartime material here that exists as finished prose rather than as compressed cablese. “The Death Cruise” has never appeared complete, with all its hardships unsanitized, until now.

  It is not so surprising that the two-hundred-plus Japanese hellship voyages have entered neither the general cultural memory, nor the cinema mythology, of World War II. They were unwaveringly horrific, and the deeper one goes into the details of each, the worse it all becomes. Though there have been books on the subject over the decades, those survivors still living quite reasonably feel their suffering has been neglected by the public and even by historians. The 102-volume official Japanese military records of World War II, for example, do not mention the ships at all. Nor do the U.S. records treat them as a separate area of study, deserving their own archival harbor. Yet more than a third of all Allied combatants taken prisoner rode at least one hellship.

  Besides the documented voyages there were dozens of other hellships, for the most part undocumented, that are rarely mentioned because so little is factually known about
them—like the ones that carried the 139,000 “comfort women,” sexual slaves, all over the Japanese empire, or those that slogged Asiatic male prisoners as movable, expendable slave labor. These people suffered and died in their own hellships, too; no one speaks for them.

  The ships were mostly merchant vessels (Mitsubishi owned and ran at least seventeen) used to transport Allied POWs from Malaya, Burma, the Netherlands East Indies, Borneo, the Philippines, and so on, either to elsewhere in the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or to Japan, to be crammed in prison camps and put to work. A single journey often involved several ships. As James Erickson points out, “Some of the Oryoku Maru survivors had been on six hellships; one to Davao, two back to Manila, and then the three to Japan.” At war’s end the Japanese were careful to eradicate a great deal of relevant documents.

  As a result, statistics about the hellships are notoriously unreliable, and no two sources agree. It seems likely that between January 1942 and July 1945 over fifty thousand prisoners traveled by at least one hellship. About twenty-one thousand died, a rate of over 40 percent. The Death Cruise was among the most brutal in terms of suffering, and among the deadliest, both proportionally and in total losses. Only one man in six survived.

  The hellships were, by themselves, the most deadly aspect of the war in the Pacific. A mathematical argument can be made that it was even more dangerous to be a passenger with the Japanese than to be in combat against them. Yet this is somewhat misleading, for as horrific as the hellships were—and there is no scarcity of quotes from men who experienced all the nightmares the war had to offer and still pronounced their weeks in a hellship’s hold as the worst—the majority of deaths on board were a result of so-called friendly fire. Over 90 percent of Allied prisoner deaths at sea were the result of attacks on hellships by their own (usually American) planes and submarines, as with the Oryoku Maru. Death by friendly fire is one of the knottiest tragedies of war; once a conflict is over, it is discussed as vaguely and infrequently as possible. The sad fact is that fully one out of every three of all the Allied POWs killed in the entire war with the Japanese were killed by friendly fire at sea.

  In terms of the Oryoku Maru, by autumn 1944 the movements of POWs out of the Philippines were accurately known to MacArthur’s broad intelligence network. And yet American forces continued to sink Japanese transport ships that were carrying POWs. Of course, they were also carrying Japanese troops and military supplies, civilian passengers, and cargo. Weller does not provide a final tally, but out of the roughly 1,300 men who died as a result of the Death Cruise, at least five hundred died through U.S. attacks.

  Weller’s was the earliest serious extensive reportage on any hellship, and also the first to reach the American public. (There’d been earlier minimal reports in the United States on the Shinyo Maru and Arisan Maru, and about rescues of POWs in the water from a couple of other torpedoed vessels.) It remains the most in-depth contemporaneous eyewitness coverage of a hellship. Every other narrative of the Death Cruise has drawn substantially from it, almost invariably without giving credit.

  Nearly all the men on board were Americans, and, unusually, two-thirds were officers. Though British, Australian, and Dutch prisoners suffered equivalent hells on their own hellships many times, it would appear that only American prisoners at sea ever committed acts of murder, vampirism, and even cannibalism to survive. Why, stretched to such extremes, did Americans behave differently?

  It has been argued that each nationality was protected by its character against such a breakdown; that the Australians were better at mucking in together, or that the rigid class system enabled British officers to keep order and resist an every-man-for-himself mentality that American prisoners, for whatever reason, were unable to fend off. Cited along with these theories is the fact that in the POW camps only Americans seemed to re-create a harsh capitalistic system that resulted in food trading. Another possible answer is that the claim may not be accurate—that, instead, only Americans have had the self-possession to own up to such behavior.

  The careful reader will have noticed that certain names recur a few times in these pages. Some men within the space of eight months survived the Death Cruise, the harsh conditions in the mines and the camps, and then watched both atomic bombs explode.

  Throughout the war Weller often wrote longer articles that ran as series in the Chicago Daily News and its syndicate newspapers. “The Death Cruise” was the longest. Although most of Weller’s research was done in the prison camps, it was supplemented with interviews en route from Nagasaki to Guam via Okinawa and Saipan. Evidently he wrote most of the twenty-five-thousand-word piece aboard ship, and mailed it to the Chicago Daily News on October 20. A letter from Guam on November 1 to his editor, Hal O’Flaherty—who had recently taken over from Carroll Binder—states:

  Ten days ago I sent you a set of rough drawings to go with this death cruise story, asking for an acknowledgment when you received them. No cable has come yet, but I am hoping you will have had them by the time this manuscript arrives . . . .

  I have felt enough faith in the subject to have worked on it every moment I could since I first heard of it at Omuta on September 10th. None of the survivors kept notes—they were not allowed to—and the army was way behind me on this topic at the time. So I have made over 70 pages of notes alone, plus many lists and cross-lists of names.

  I realize that it is confronting you with a new struggle for space to give you this just before Christmas. But I should have felt remiss in the correspondent’s duty toward history if I failed to record this before liberation had sicklied over the sharp memories these prisoners possessed . . . .

  The orthopods are going to tell me this weekend whether they will let me go to China. Will you please acknowledge this MS and the October 20th sketches as they come in? A cable would relieve my mind very much.

  As it turned out, the Chicago Daily News moved with speed once the story arrived. It ran in eleven parts, starting November 9. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran it in fifteen parts beginning on November 11, and the San Francisco Chronicle ran it in nineteen parts beginning on November 18. In all cases the story was cut, often very heavily, and differently from city to city. Perhaps editors felt that, after the war, the time for detailing such gruesome suffering had passed; references to murder among the POWs, much less to blood drinking, were minimized or eliminated.

  The typescript also contains several partial lists of the dead at different stages of the journey. Weller included them with misgivings, aware that their numerous inaccuracies would not be resolved for months. Though the lists appear in some newspaper serializations, it seemed irresponsible to repeat them here. (I have corrected a few spelling errors in names in the text itself.)

  Two years later, in 1947, following trials brought as a result of their conduct on the Death Cruise, Shusuke Wada received a sentence of life imprisonment and Lieutenant Junsabura Toshino the death sentence. Toshino was hanged; but Wada, who many of the men thought even more deserving of a noose, was let out of prison after serving only eight years.

  X

  From Guam Weller proceeded to Shanghai, then Chungking, China’s wartime capital, and spent part of the winter in Beijing. He covered the hasty Soviet withdrawal from Changchun that deftly handed Manchuria over to the Communist Chinese, who imprisoned him for three weeks. Throughout those months Weller wouldn’t let Nagasaki go, determined to pull some substance out of an experience still fresh in his memory. From Tsingtao, China, on May 19, 1946, no doubt as a result of a chance encounter, he filed this story.

  Some Japanese died at Nagasaki long after the blast from “atomic skin,” the co-builder of Nagasaki’s new “atomic airstrip” said today.

  Lieutenant Commander Paul O’Donnell of Peekskill, New York, said Navy doctors have concluded that small particles of radium-impregnated dust entered below the surface of bodies of some Japanese who died weeks later. The bomb’s terrific blast lodged deadly particles under their skin, Navy doctors
now believe, reversing the theory held earlier that irradiation entered directly in the form of the ray and had a permanent effect.

  All doctors are agreed that the bomb’s main effect is killing platelets in the bloodstream: small elements which give the blood its capacity to clot.

  From Chungking there was also that magazine article published in October 1946 as “Atom-Bomb Myth Exploded,” and quoted from earlier:

  The atomic bomb which laid waste Nagasaki never struck that city. An atomic bomb does not strike its target; it murders the earth, but it bursts in the air far above it . . . The great rainbow shimmering cloud of gases builds into a tall, ghost-like figure of a genii, with the ghastly head of a foetus. It seems to throw man in its shadow . . . .

  What the small, drab people of Nagasaki saw around them a half hour after the cloud built its mighty, spectre-like column in their midst, was this: a great, flattened area of industrial slum. It was a sea of rubble, timbers at all angles, cries coming out from under them. The heavy or concrete buildings still stood, though an air-push of death had moved through their windows.

  Then smoke began to arise over the tossed sea of smashed buildings. The city had not caught fire immediately; it was crushed first . . . But these smokes multiplied. Some began to turn red, then yellow. Smokes began to appear in other places.