Day one at Woosung, their initial taste of what their life would be like for more than three and a half years, finally ended. “Our misery started,”17 Goicoechea later wrote.
Any American who awakened in the middle of the night to visit the latrines received a hint of the treatment that lay ahead. Ten stalls, hardly more than wooden planks with holes cut into them and heavily populated with rats, stood at the end of the barracks. Large earthenware pots underneath collected the refuse, which Chinese farmers retrieved every few days to use as fertilizer for their fields. According to Lieutenant Kinney, the Japanese handed out only ten sheets of toilet paper for the entire year, so everyone had to improvise. Most men kept a rag and a small can of water with which to clean themselves afterward. Whoever went to the latrine then had to return to his platform and crawl between the other men, which meant that few Wake Islanders ever enjoyed a solid night’s sleep.
A shrill blast from a Japanese bugler began the first full day at Woosung. The men had only a few moments to clean the barracks, fold their blankets, mop the floors, and stand in front of their platform for the daily inspection. When the Japanese officer arrived, the men had to bow, then count off in Japanese with their horyo, a number given each man the first day. James Allen’s number, 4428, indicated he lived in Barracks 4, Section 4, and was man 28.
After the inspection, Lieutenant Kinney walked outside the barracks for a quick glimpse of his surroundings. Across from a dirt road that circled the camp stood a storage facility, the prison galley, and a few other buildings. Electrical fences separated the camp from the Japanese living quarters. Open fields later used for sports and gardening flanked the barracks to the east and south.
Kinney met other men who had been in Woosung before the Wake Island men arrived. British embassy personnel from Shanghai awaiting repatriation chatted with him, as did members of the crews of two captured or sunken gunboats, the British vessel Peterel, and ironically, the American gunboat Wake.
J. O. Young received the first beating administered at Woosung when he saw a group of Americans dragging their straw mattresses outside for more straw. He joined the men, not realizing that a guard nicknamed Rocky had specifically marked which mattresses were to be moved. Since Young’s was not among those marked, Rocky forced Young to stand at attention, then smacked him on both sides of his head as hard as he could. Trying not to mutter a sound, Young absorbed the blows with dry eyes.
His reaction exemplified the struggle that started with the first moment of incarceration and lasted until the day of liberation—the battle to endure, to absorb whatever the captors handed out, to show by doing so, that, while they may be prisoners of war, they had not been defeated. “Hidden behind the routine, under the surface of life in prison camp, was fought a war of wills for moral supremacy—an endless struggle, as bitter as it was unspoken, between the captors and the captives,” Major Devereux wrote after the war. “The stake seemed to me simply this: the main objective of the whole Japanese prison program was to break our spirit, and on our side was a stubborn determination to keep our self-respect whatever else they took from us. It seems to me that struggle was almost as much a part of the war as the battle we fought on Wake Island.”18
Nature provided one of the battlegrounds. Men endured the summer’s heat without much complaint, even though it meant dealing with the presence of what seemed millions of mosquitoes and flies, because that was far more tolerable than the frigid winter temperatures that frequently dropped below zero. Lieutenant Kessler wrote, “The days and nights became one long misery of wet and cold. The shivering became so prolonged that muscles ached and grew tired.”19
The men battled the cold in different ways. They heated bricks in makeshift fireplaces and stoves during the day, then wrapped the bricks in blankets and placed them on the platform beside them at night. So many men surreptitiously hooked up improvised hot plates to the camp’s electrical power lines that they caused a blackout. When engineers from a Shanghai power company investigated, they discovered the reason and put an end to the practice.
Other men paced back and forth all night in futile attempts to ward off the cold. “The winter at Woosung was rough,” said Goicoechea, whose feet hurt so bad from the cold that he shouted in pain as he walked. “I seen grown men with tears in their eyes because it was so cold. I still think about that. Remember, we only had light clothing.”20
Besides the weather, rats constantly plagued the men, sometimes running across their faces at night. The worst pests, however, proved to be smaller—bedbugs and lice. Bedbugs, about the size of a pencil eraser, so harassed Private First Class Gatewood and his friends that they dampened their top blankets because they heard bedbugs would not move around on a wet surface. It worked to a degree.
“The bedbugs just started climbing up to the ceiling and dropping down on us,” mentioned Gatewood. “They felt like rain falling down on us. They’d get on you someplace and suck blood out of you until they were full, then they’d roll off. Then we’d roll over on them in the night and squash them, and there’d be a big bloody spot. There were thousands in your blankets, in cracks in the walls. You could easily have a hundred of ’em on your body at any time when you were sleeping.”21
The men eventually learned to live with the critters. They could control the lice—the size of a pencil point and anywhere from one-quarter to one-half inch long—a bit easier by boiling their clothes, but nothing they tried solved the bedbug problem. If they squashed too many bedbugs, an atrocious smell inundated the barracks. Eventually, Gatewood and the others fell into a nightly routine—like robots, they periodically waved their arms about their bodies to swipe off the bothersome pests.
The lack of cleanliness vexed many of the men. Accustomed to showering and brushing their teeth every day, the men now had to readjust to grime and sweat. The prisoners grew dirtier by the week, although they had the dubious advantage of everyone being equally filthy. Cpl. Robert M. Brown later wrote that no one knew how bad anyone smelled because they all smelled the same.
A shipment of safety razors and hair clippers somewhat alleviated the conditions and made the men feel a bit more human. Each man received one razor blade, but he had to make it last for the rest of his confinement. For more than two years Kinney maintained his single blade by repeatedly sharpening it on the inside of a drinking glass.
“The Japanese Weren’t Ever Going to Take away Our Pride”
Most days, the enlisted men and civilians had to work in factories, mines, or on outdoor projects, while officers tended gardens or labored on other smaller endeavors. At first the enlisted men and the civilians polished shell casings to be used in large guns. Since the rules of the Geneva Convention governing conditions in prison camps prohibited men from working in anything war-related, the men objected, but the Japanese countered that they had not signed the articles of the Geneva Convention and ignored the complaint. The men turned to their second alternative and purposely did such a poor job on the shells that the Japanese eventually abandoned the idea and switched the men to other work.
No matter which task they received, the Wake Island men looked for ways to either sabotage the work or to insure the finished product did not perform properly. Men assigned to repair trucks, for instance, acted as if they corrected the problems, but instead altered the trucks to guarantee frequent breakdowns. A group of men storing oil barrels at the Shanghai Race Course loosened one end of the 55-gallon drums, then stacked them upside down so the liquid leaked out. These small victories boosted morale and gave the men a sense that they contributed to the war effort.
A project called Mount Fuji, however, provided a harsh challenge to their spirits. Early in 1943, guards marched the men to a spot outside of Shanghai and told them to begin building a hill. The Japanese commander explained it was to be used as a recreation area, but the Americans soon realized the project was a mound to stop bullets in a rifle range. Every day for almost a year one thousand men shoveled dirt into woven baskets attached to two poles, c
arried these on their shoulders to carts, pushed the carts along narrow-track railway lines to the hill, and dumped the contents onto the slowly expanding rise. Mount Fuji eventually grew to be five hundred feet long and more than thirty feet high.
A few lighthearted moments occurred during the building of Mount Fuji. One time a Japanese guard needed to ride down the hill in one of the carts. He ordered a civilian worker to take him down slowly, but as Joe Goicoechea watched, the man handling the brake jumped out, the car derailed, and the Japanese guard flew through the air.
Pfc. Jacob Sanders and other Marines loved to leap back in the cars after dumping the contents, then ride back down as quickly as possible, laughing like schoolchildren on a playground. Even if the carts tipped off the tracks and injured someone, the men thought it was worth it for a few laughs.
The Japanese guards’ reaction to the levity amazed Sanders more than anything else. “They assumed that since we had surrendered on Wake, we were totally shamed and without any self-respect,” wrote Sanders. “Instead, we never forgot that we were United States Marines and tried to show our captors that we had a lot of pride in who we were and what we had accomplished. The Japanese weren’t ever going to take away our pride in being Americans.”22
As the hill rose higher, the men had to work harder to push the carts to the top. They also had to be more careful because they worked under the scrutiny of the most feared Japanese official in camp, Isamu Ishihara. The Wake Islanders encountered all sorts of Japanese guards and camp officials, some decent men who offered help to the Americans and others who loved to torment the men. The worst was Ishihara.
The man, who served as an interpreter, fit the stereotypical image of Japanese that then existed in the United States—short, thin, and wearing horn-rimmed spectacles. He walked around the camp, clutching his ever-present riding crop, hoping to catch an American doing something wrong. When he did, he descended on the transgressor with such a vicious flurry of blows that the victim often stumbled away in a senseless daze. The Americans universally detested Ishihara, to whom they gave the appellation “Beast of the East.”
“The cruelest one we had in camp was the interpreter,” Lieutenant Hanna recalled later. “He would deliberately misinterpret what you said and then use that as an excuse to beat us.”23
Ishihara hated the Americans with equal venom. Apparently he had fallen prey to a group of bigoted Americans in Hawaii before the war, who beat Ishihara. Ever since, he sought vengeance on others. He shouted to the captives that when Japan won the war, he would shit on the American flag, and the level of animosity he displayed even disturbed some of his fellow Japanese. A group of officers once took away Ishihara’s sword when he started to use it to beat the prisoners. Nevertheless, Ishihara remained in power for the duration of the war.
Hans Whitney was one of the few who got the better of Ishihara. One day he and two other men hid behind a shed to avoid work. All of a sudden, Ishihara appeared and demanded to know why they were not helping with Mount Fuji. Whitney knew that Ishihara had a paralyzing fear of dying from disease, so Whitney quickly replied, “We have spring fever.”24 Ishihara hurriedly walked away as Whitney and his two friends burst out in muffled laughter, but the interpreter later whipped them with his riding crop when he learned what the phrase meant.
The Americans tagged the guards with a humorous array of nicknames. Woosung and Kiangwan had “Rocky,” “the Pig,” “Bucktooth,” “Whiskers,” and “Dog Face.” A guard named Morisako gained the appellation “Mortimer Snerd” because he reminded the men of the humorous-looking country bumpkin dummy used by famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. When Morisako asked who Snerd was, the prisoners told him he was a popular movie star in Hollywood. The guard loved the nickname until he learned the actual identity. The next man who called him Snerd received a horrible beating.
Some guards, like Ishihara, gained notoriety for their cruelty. Hans Whitney claimed “They were all bad, vicious, overbearing, cruel, sadistic, the only difference being some were worse than others.”25 Corporal Marvin, George Rosandick, and many others received beatings for minor offenses, such as dropping a cigarette on the ground. Joe Goicoechea was so severely beaten about the head that blood freely gushed from his ears, nose, and mouth. The guard named Whiskers, who loved to use his belt buckle to inflict pain, beat Whitney and forced him to stand at attention in the hot sun for four hours after the civilian accidentally broke a shovel handle in the garden. A guard named Clubfist, so christened because of the artificial left hand with which he smacked Americans, earned his harsh reputation from the repeated beatings he administered.
The smart prisoners learned to avoid these guards whenever possible. Private Laporte kept a low profile and rarely brought attention to himself. Corporal Gross avoided confrontations. “You had some guys who lived kinda reckless, but I never confronted a Jap unless I had to. If I could go around him rather than have to face him and salute, I did. Some guys didn’t think, and that’s why they beat the hell out of you. In one barracks we had a guard right outside the door. Every time you left the barracks you had to stop and bow to him. Sometimes guys wouldn’t do it right away and get beat. Hell, I’d go out the back door. I played it smart every way I could. Staying out of sight was the best thing.”26
At the same time, other guards developed a reputation for fairness and decency. Camp commandant Col. Satoshi Otera, nicknamed Handlebar Hank because of his mustache, allowed more Red Cross supplies into Kiangwan camp than was the case elsewhere. A guard called Popeye secretly passed out cigarettes and money to the men, and Dr. Yoshihiro Shindo, Kiangwan’s medical officer, tried to guarantee the men received the best medical attention available under the circumstances.
“Shindo would go out of his way to help you,” stated Goicoechea. “He couldn’t care less if you didn’t salute him. The rest of ’em would’ve come back and worked you over. He even got in trouble for helping us. Some Japs we knew we could get away with stuff, and others we knew we had to work because they took their jobs seriously.”27
“I Was Just Too Ornery to Die”
It is amazing that the military personnel and the civilian construction workers endured so many physical and mental hardships as well as they did. Everyone longed to be with their families, and the Marines, especially, constantly battled with the specter that they, as professional soldiers, could not take an active part in the huge conflagration unfolding all around the world.
To a man, the Marines pointed to Major Devereux as one of the main factors in their survival. Devereux constantly reminded the men they belonged to the First Marine Defense Battalion, and he insisted on maintaining the same discipline and system that every Marine camp followed, whether inside or outside the United States. Thus he demanded that every enlisted man promptly salute officers of any branch of service. He believed this put order into the men’s life, instilled pride in being Americans, and gave them a feeling of importance. Devereux also expected his officers to conduct themselves with the proper demeanor, a rule he so closely followed that even Japanese guards saluted Devereux when he walked by.
“His discipline helped pull us through,” claimed Corporal Johnson. “A corporal and a sergeant got into a fight one time, and Major Devereux had the corporal locked up in the Japanese brig for striking a superior noncom. He had us all between the barracks, and he, a very devout Catholic, said, ‘Goddammit! We’re trying to get you out of here alive, and you’re trying to kill yourselves! I won’t put up with it.’”28
In the early months of confinement, the hungry men so heatedly argued over food that some Marines suffered broken noses and busted teeth. Finally, Devereux lined up all the men and told them he would severely punish anyone if the arguing continued. “I will sacrifice a few to get the rest of you back,”29 he added.
The major later faced another predicament over food when camp cardsharps conned unwitting servicemen out of their daily ration allotments. Devereux turned to that old gambler himself, Gunner McKinstry, who c
ollected the neophyte gamblers to show them the tricks being employed by the more experienced card players.
In like manner, Teters established a routine for the civilians. He saw how efficient Devereux could be, and realizing the military knew more about survival than he, Teters copied their example.
The men employed all sorts of tricks to make life more bearable. Some took solace in the fact that, unlike other Allied forces, before surrendering they had put up such a stout defense. Whenever a Japanese guard shouted at Sergeant Bowsher, he muttered under his breath, “We’ve already whipped you. Now you can do your damnedest—you can’t hurt us…. We’ve had our victory. Now what are you going to do about it?”30
The men also relied on the buddy system. A person can tolerate much more if he has someone with whom to share thoughts and emotions and someone else to look out for. Goicoechea and Rosandick benefited in camp from their longtime friendship, which brought a feeling of normalcy into their otherwise abnormal existences, while Murray Kidd felt the pang of separation from his friends. Private Laporte claimed that even guys who rarely spent time together before the war now forged close bonds. “There was people there who wouldn’t talk to a guy before, but in camp they became best friends. You could support each other and get your morale up quite a bit.”31
A few others brought a built-in system of support because a member of their family was incarcerated with them. The civilians had a handful of father-son combinations, such as Leroy Meyers and his father. When his weakened father could not work, Leroy convinced the Japanese to let him do both jobs so his father could rest. Leroy scrounged around the camp for extra food, and he gave part of his own meals so his father could recover faster.
Many held on to the most important items in their lives—family, country, religion—as incentive for surviving. Sgt. Jesse L. Stewart lost more than sixty pounds and suffered such cruel beatings that he coughed up blood, but he persevered for compelling reasons—what awaited him back home. “It would have been very easy for me to have given up the ghost at this time, but I knew my wife would be waiting for me at the end of the war and I wanted to go back to her and to my son, whom I had never seen and at this time did not even know I had, only knowing that my wife was pregnant at the time I left for duty on Wake Island. Also while still on Wake Island, I had been told by a Japanese Interpreter [sic] that I would never live out the war and I was determined to do so and see that this man was brought before Justice for the acts which he committed against both United States Civilians and servicemen on Wake Island…. We took these beatings, we took this humiliation, we took the persecution and the degradation, we stood by in our faith in the United States and what it stood for, we dreamed of Old Glory flying over us once more, of cleanliness, of good food, and good clothes, and we trusted in our God and in our Nation to come to deliver us from this hell.”32
Pacific Alamo Page 30