Pacific Alamo

by John Wukovits

  Men risked their lives to create handmade American flags, even though they had to keep them hidden until war’s end. Gathering cloth from old uniforms or tattered sheets, men fashioned rude Stars and Stripes in an effort to keep morale high. Two men in one camp laboriously stitched together a flag by taking red cloth from a Japanese quilt, white cloth from sheets, and blue material from a pair of dungaree pants donated by an Australian officer. While the flags could not yet take their proper places atop a flagpole, the prisoners drew inspiration from knowing that the Stars and Stripes (a symbol that some individuals in less threatening times take for granted) existed amidst their misery.

  Above all, maintaining a positive attitude helped pull men through the years of confinement. Some knew they would survive or adopted the approach that if only one man returned, it would be him. “I was just too ornery to die,” claimed Lieutenant Hanna, an outlook made stronger by the men’s faith that the United States would prevail and they would be freed. Corporal Holewinski divided his time in camp into phases. “You handled it by saying in the springtime, ‘It [the end of the war] will happen this fall.’ When fall came, you said, ‘It will happen this spring.’”33

  Murray Kidd never doubted he would survive, because he was determined to see Boise again. “I always thought if there was one guy who was gonna get home, I’m gonna be it,” he explained years later. Corporal Marvin felt the same. “I always figured the will to live is a lot stronger than the will to die. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to make it.”34

  Some men used laughter to endure each day. Joe Goicoechea joked with George Rosandick, with other Americans, and even with the Japanese. Pfc. Max Dana constantly teased Sgt. Stephen Fortuna, who had been his recruiting officer in the States, “Hey, how about those good things you told me about the Marine Corps? Is this part of it?”35 When forced to salute the Japanese, many men saluted with their left hands instead of the right and made sure the middle finger was raised more than the other digits. If the Americans had to urinate while working outside, they purposely turned toward a monument erected in honor of Japanese soldiers. This lasted until the Japanese caught on and ordered it stopped, at which time the men turned toward the east—the direction of Japan—and pretended they aimed at the emperor.

  Ishihara expressed to more than one man his surprise that they did not act like prisoners, that they lacked any sense of shame over surrendering. Goicoechea answered that they had never been prisoners before and did not know how to act.

  Others turned to hatred to keep them alive. Private Laporte hated his Japanese captors. Corporal Johnson hated an American isolationist politician, Sen. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, because he always voted against the military. He vowed to survive prison camp, return to the United States, and kill the senator. “I thought, ‘We are here with the Japanese all around us, and you’re back there [in the United States] with the guns we wanted to buy.’ He’s the man who kept us from having the necessary equipment. I wanted to come back and kill him. That kept me alive in camp.”36

  Religion also contributed to some of the men pulling through. Pfc. LeRoy N. Schneider credited the weekly sessions conducted by Major Devereux where men said the rosary together with helping him, while Corporal Holewinski turned to prayer and confession as an aid.

  Inevitably, though, others gave up. The first man to die at Woosung was a civilian who simply refused to eat the food dished out, lay in his bunk, and died. “Some guys didn’t make it because they didn’t want to take it anymore. You could tell when a guy got to that stage and that he didn’t have long,” said Joe Goicoechea. “You could try to stop it, but you could only tell him so much.”37

  “An Exercise in Survival”

  J. O. Young claimed that in many ways, “Camp life was an exercise in survival”38 that separated the boys from the men. In a classic example of Charles Darwin’s theory, the fittest survived at the cost of the weak.

  Some civilians believed that the military created an informal three-tiered hierarchy in camp—officers occupied the top, followed by the enlisted personnel, and finally the civilians. While the officers enjoyed a few amenities not shared by the others, most men in camp coexisted well. Sometimes a person from one group might create harsh feelings and do something to irritate individuals in another, such as behaving improperly or cooperating with the Japanese, but on the whole relations among the three groups went smoothly.

  Enterprising prisoners opened up “businesses” catering to certain needs. One man cut hair; another repaired shoes or washed clothes. Behind these legitimate concerns stood the black market trades, where men bartered for more food, bootleg alcohol, medicines, and other items. They had to exercise extreme caution, however, to avoid detection. After catching one man involved in black market activities centering around food, the Japanese tied all his fingers together, then twisted the string until every digit broke.

  The product that created the largest demand, and thus the most traffic, was cigarettes. Men who did not smoke used cigarettes as a medium of exchange to acquire food and other necessities. Since camp officials restricted the number of letters going to the United States, for instance, Private William B. Buckie, Jr., purchased the rights to another prisoner’s letter home with a handful of cigarettes. Other men, suffering from nicotine withdrawal, were willing to part with almost anything for extra tobacco. Ten cigarettes, with the most value placed on Camels and Lucky Strikes, for instance, might buy a man someone else’s bowl of rice, while chocolate bars from Canadian food parcels also brought a good yield. Many prisoners recalled those individuals who willingly gave up their sorely needed food to obtain a few cigarettes.

  Bootleg alcohol also enjoyed a ready market. Some men operated illegal stills in which they brewed their own versions of beer or liquor. Medics with access to alcohol sometimes appropriated it for their own use, and prisoners who worked at the Kiangwan Racetrack smuggled in fuel consisting of ethanol.

  One type of prisoner gained almost universal condemnation from his fellow captives—the individual who collaborated with the enemy. Every camp possessed a few men who, out of a desire for more food or because they could no longer bear the strain, turned in the names of prisoners who violated the rules. These men, labeled traitors by their cohorts, generally lived lonely lives from then on, except for the periodic nighttime visits by angry Americans who administered severe beatings.

  Wake Islanders state that when compared with the camps they later encountered inside Japan, the Chinese prison camps offered a better existence. One reason was the opportunity they had to participate in sports or other activities. Following supper and on Sundays, the men had time to read, play softball, or become involved in a number of different hobbies.

  Since Woosung and Kiangwan stood close to Shanghai, where a large and friendly international community offered help to the captives, the Americans enjoyed a three-thousand-volume library containing the works of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Sinclair Lewis, Erle Stanley Gardner, and back issues of magazines. Each evening J. O. Young read Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield at Woosung, while other men leafed through magazines or newspapers the Japanese allowed into camp. Young recalled that the Gideons, a religious group, sent a box of Bibles, but few were read because “most were used as toilet paper as diarrhea swept through camp.”39

  Major Devereux established classes in subjects such as mathematics and foreign languages, but had to cancel them for low attendance. After tiring days working in a garden or on Mount Fuji, the last thing the men wanted to do was pay attention in a classroom. Instead, some of the men taught themselves. Lieutenant Kinney, who never gave up on the idea of escaping, learned the Chinese language on his own.

  As was true on Wake, cardsharps prowled both Woosung and Kiangwan. The Japanese banned card playing, but the men ignored it. Each night the men posted a lookout, then opened their poker matches. If a guard approached the barracks, the lookout yelled the signal, “Air the blankets!” which meant the men should remove all
traces of gambling and move to their sleeping platforms. Eventually the Japanese figured out the scam, which forced the Americans to be more circumspect in their card playing.

  The fiercest competition came with the Sunday sports contests. Barracks formed teams of their best athletes in softball and football, then challenged squads from other barracks. Over the course of time, heated rivalries built, and impassioned fans cheered on their favorites. Little quarter was given or asked.

  “I went through the line one time in a football game,” said Joe Goicoechea, “and this Marine got rough! He’d knock me on the ass. We played touch football, but it could get rough. We also played softball, and it was bitterly contested because we had some good ballplayers.”40

  Kiangwan Prison Camp

  “Remember Those Hamburgers?”

  Books, sports, work, sleep—none of those compared to the one topic that dominated every man’s mind. One thousand men, confined together and forced to go without it for so long, naturally thought about it, talked about it, and dreamed about it. Not girls—food.

  “By far the most talked about, the most insistent, ever-present basically important element in our incarceration was food,” wrote Hans Whitney. “We were hungry before and after meals. We were hungry all the time.”41

  Though the daily ration varied throughout the war, all men could basically expect to receive a cup of cooked rice, two cups of watery soup that the men labeled “Tojo water,” and three cups of weak but hot tea. Men carried the food into each barracks in huge buckets; then a trusted prisoner selected for his fairness poured the food into each man’s cup. After everyone had received their portion, the server handed out leftovers until no food remained. The men meticulously remembered where in line the server stopped with the leftovers, because that is where he had to start the next time.

  The watery soup provided little nutrition. A few vegetables usually floated in the tepid concoction, and a man felt lucky if gristle or a tiny piece of meat happened to appear. The men had to be wary of biting too hard on the rice, which obviously consisted of floor sweepings, because it frequently contained pebbles and other hard substances.

  For men in such terrible conditions, the diet hardly sufficed to keep meat on their bones. Private First Class Gatewood dropped from 200 pounds to 137, Forrest Read lost thirty pounds in one month, and Hans Whitney, despite eating a cat and sparrows, lost one hundred pounds. Tattoos on the bodies of men distorted into unrecognizable shapes because the bearer had lost so much weight. Joe Goicoechea did not have to visit the latrine for twelve days because he consumed such a small amount of food.

  Not surprisingly, fights erupted over food. Men yelled at the server that he resumed leftovers in the wrong spot or that he failed to stir the soup often enough so the vegetables rose from the bottom. J. O. Young never thought he would be placed in such an awkward situation when enjoying all those hamburgers with Pearl Ann, but he was chosen in his barracks to dish out the food. Called the “King of the Ladle,” Young stirred the soup for every man, and made sure that he packed and leveled off each bowl of rice. He encountered more problems if the rice burned and hardened on the bottom of the bucket, for everyone wanted some of the crunchy and chewy substance that was considered something of a delicacy.

  The Wake Islanders quickly learned to eat anything, no matter how atrocious it looked. In the early days, a few men refused to eat, but they either changed their minds or they died.

  Lieutenant Kessler joked with his friends about the stages through which a prisoner passed. “A short timer would turn away from the disgusting sight of dead weavils [sic] sprinkled like bits of cocoanut [sic] over the cereal; a man with more time as a P.O.W. would pick out the weavils and eat the cereal; but the longtime P.O.W. would eat it all and then reach for the weavils discarded by others—weavils were protein.”42

  Men supplemented their diets in different ways. Since tobacco alleviated hunger pangs, many took up smoking. Those who worked outside camp smuggled in vegetables or fruit by hiding it in their crotches as they passed by the guards. Joe Goicoechea ate caterpillars, which he thought tasted like bacon, as well as tangerine or orange peels lying on the ground for their vitamin C. Men traded with Chinese laborers for eggs whenever the guards were not looking.

  Some stole extra food. Ellis Gordon endured beatings that distorted his face to the size of a basketball, yet he continued to commit the offense for which he was punished—stealing food. He stated that men readily accepted physical pain to relieve the pangs of hunger. “Hunger is a peculiar feeling,” he wrote in a letter after the war, “and I’ve seen where food even came before ‘God.’ We would steal or try and deal with the Japs, in order to get something to eat. And when we were caught, this is the kind of treatment we received.”43

  Sgt. Jesse L. Stewart eased his hunger pangs by stealing, but suffered remorse afterwards. He admitted to stealing whatever he could from the Japanese, which was never very much, but he anguished about “going against all the teachings we had been given by our parents and by the schools that we had attended in the States…”44

  Hunger made men appreciate what most people living in normal situations take for granted. Commander Cunningham relished what he called one of the best meals he ever tasted when he received a small bit of margarine to spread over his rice. Private First Class Gatewood dreamed one night that he feasted on a huge stack of hotcakes, then awoke to find himself licking the pillow as if it were covered in syrup. Men swapped recipes for actual dishes like young boys trade baseball cards, even though they knew they could not feast on any of the delectables until after the war. Maj. George H. Potter compiled a sixty-six-page book of recipes during his confinement. One page contained elaborate recipes for “Potato, onion, carrot burger,” “Sweet sauce,” “Spiced pickle vinegar,” “Hasenpfeffer,” “Mexican Guacamole,” and “Yorkshire Pudding.”45

  One day, Corporal Johnson reminisced with a friend about a San Diego hamburger drive-in. They and many other young men frequented the place because of a beautiful carhop, who kept her blouse unbuttoned partway down for the benefit of her male customers. An ample bosom now took second place. “I said, ‘Pappy, remember that drive-in down by the civic center?’ He said, ‘Yea, boy! Remember those hamburgers? They were a full inch thick!’ Our mind was on food.”46

  Pfc. James King had dated an attractive young woman in Hawaii whose father owned an ice cream parlor. Instead of thinking of the girl, King had more immediate needs about which to fantasize. “I used to dream about that ice cream shop,” he explained years later. “Malted milks, especially. I dreamed more about that than about her. Sex was on a low priority after the first few months. When you’re hungry all the time, you think about steaks and lobsters.”47

  The men so constantly thought about food that Lieutenant Kahn worried about its medical effects. He spoke to the officers and begged them to do something to halt the conversations about food. “Talk to the men about sports, sex, anything to get their minds off food,” Lieutenant Kahn implored. “They’re thinking about food all day and that’s causing them to salivate, and that’s bad because saliva is strong in acid and that is going into their stomachs and eating their stomachs.”48

  With the assistance of a dentist, Private First Class King momentarily suspended his attention on food. He also learned that while thoughts of sex had receded, they still did not linger far from the surface. A Japanese officer discovered King carrying contraband around the camp, and as punishment smacked him in the jaw with a rifle butt. When the camp dentist worked without medication on two cracked teeth in King’s mouth, a curvaceous Japanese dental assistant kept stroking one of his arms in an effort to distract him from the pain. The nearness of the female and the gentle touch of her hand made King realize that once back home, he would have little trouble readjusting to a more normal “social” regime, and for a few moments, that Hawaiian ice cream parlor took a back seat to lust. “That one incident taught me that I was still male. She sure distracted me from what tha
t dentist was doing! She was young and very attractive, and could not have been over twenty or twenty-one. It was almost as good as Novocain.”49

  The International Red Cross helped out whenever possible, but the prisoners never knew when the Japanese would allow a shipment of food into camp and how much of the shipment would actually be handed out. In every camp, Japanese officers and guards stole large portions before giving the remainder to the Americans. Lieutenant Hanna estimated that of the two or three Red Cross shipments his camps received, the Japanese confiscated at least half the material.

  A typical Red Cross package contained small portions of fifteen different items, ranging from eight ounces of cheese and twelve ounces of corned beef to four ounces of instant coffee and ten cigarettes. The material packed in tin containers stayed relatively fresh, but hundreds of small worms infested the rest, including the coveted chocolate bars. Even though the men fumed that the Japanese kept part of what was rightfully theirs, Red Cross parcels, sporadic though they were, dramatically boosted morale.