Pacific Alamo

by John Wukovits

  News of the Allied march across the Pacific heartened the Americans, but it also led to growing impatience. Month after month, the men waited for news indicating that the war’s end drew near. They realized a difficult road lay ahead for their nation and tried to keep things in perspective, but under the extraordinary conditions in which they lived, patience often lost out. The men in James Allen’s barracks started chanting in the spring of 1943 and each spring after, “Spring is sprung. The grass is riz. I wonder where the Allies is?”11

  Radio provided one of the most emotional moments for the prisoners when on New Year’s Eve 1944, the men picked up a familiar station. When an announcer said, “This is San Francisco,” men at first cheered, then fell deathly silent as they absorbed names and songs from what seemed a distant past. For a moment, they had a viable connection with the United States, an unbreakable lifeline that burst through their isolation to remind them that something waited for them and someone was coming to their rescue.

  News trickled in through other ways. As he walked to work on a canal project near Woosung in 1942, Joe Goicoechea spotted a ship clearly marked with an enormous red cross. Streams of wounded Japanese soldiers, some hobbling, others in a state of shock, poured down the gangway. Goicoechea and those with him welcomed the sight, for they figured the United States or another Allied nation had inflicted punishment on the enemy.

  Japanese guards handed out tidbits of information, but only if the news favored their side. The guards never tired of showing the Americans photographs of Pearl Harbor, which always demoralized the men, and one guard informed Cunningham of Roosevelt’s death in 1945, boasting incorrectly that the president committed suicide because the burdens of conducting a losing war effort were too much for him to handle. Pro-Japanese English-language newspapers and magazines, such as the Nippon Times, continued to be provided by the captors until the war news turned sour.

  Finally, newly arrived American prisoners provided another, more accurate source of news. They confirmed the bad—such as Pearl Harbor—but also brought good news with tales of victories at Midway and Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and the Marshall Islands. The Wake Islanders kept pace with Pacific developments, all the time trying to curb their growing impatience over when the conflict might end and allow them to go home.

  The addition of recently captured Americans, however, also showed the men how ignorant people back home were about their condition. A crew member of one American bomber shot down reacted incredulously when he met Corporal Johnson and other men from Wake Island. He stared at Johnson as if he were a ghost and then exclaimed, “You people are supposed to be dead!”12

  “He Saved My Life”

  Most Americans captured after the defense of Wake wound up in either China or Japan. A smaller group of about four hundred, however, remained on the atoll until battle wounds healed or to work for their Japanese captors.

  One civilian volunteered to stay on Wake rather than board the Nitta Maru. Since some of the wounded were military, the Japanese at first ordered the Navy surgeon, Lieutenant Kahn, to stay behind on the island. Dr. Shank admired the younger physician, but Kahn’s inexperience bothered the more practiced doctor. He felt the wounded and ill had a better chance of survival if he remained to nurse the men back to health. He doubted the Japanese doctors would provide anything but a cursory glance at the men, so his presence would ensure that the Americans most in need of medical attention received it.

  Dr. Shank recognized another factor that others overlooked. He learned in discussions with Japanese officers that they intended to eventually evacuate all American military personnel on Wake. If Kahn and a pair of pharmacists’ mates stayed instead of him, they would leave as soon as all the military members were healthy enough to ship out. The civilians working on Wake, more than three hundred men, would then lack medical care other than what the Japanese provided. Dr. Shank arranged a switch with Lieutenant Kahn, an admirable choice that had tragic repercussions for the honorable man.

  Every Wake Marine or civilian who encountered Dr. Shank describes him in reverent terms, similar to the manner in which people speak of an esteemed country doctor in whose hands residents had placed their lives for years. With limited resources and medicine, he labored tirelessly to bring care to the men, even if it meant defying the Japanese.

  Marine Sgt. Jesse L. Stewart owed his life to Dr. Shank, whom he called “one of the finest men it has ever been my priviledge [sic] to know.”13 Wounded on December 9 when shrapnel from a Japanese bomb shattered his left leg, Stewart lay in the makeshift hospital while infection threatened his life. Dr. Shank implored the Japanese to allow him to operate with Japanese medical equipment and medicines, but each time an officer ignored his request. When Dr. Shank argued with a Japanese doctor, who wanted to amputate Stewart’s leg, an officer named Seishi Katsumi slapped him for being arrogant.

  Dr. Shank’s obstinacy held off the Japanese long enough for him to take his own lifesaving measures. With time running out—Stewart’s leg had even turned black from the infection—Dr. Shank scavenged through the ashes of the demolished American hospital until he located a pair of scissors and a pair of tweezers. He cleaned the instruments as much as possible under the circumstances, then without anesthesia to adminster, he removed the shell fragments from Stewart’s leg while two nurses held the Marine down.

  The rest of the Americans remained on Wake because of their construction skills. The civilians completed projects already started before December 8, such as the airfield and gun emplacements, plus worked on new projects assigned by the Japanese. The captors pushed the men so hard that by December 1942, forty-five men had perished because of exhaustion and insufficient diet.

  Murray Kidd, who saw the irony of coming to Wake to construct American defenses, only to complete them for the Japanese, also worked in a warehouse holding the food supplies. The Japanese mess sergeant in charge, a man named Tada, assigned Kidd the task of making sure no Japanese soldier took more food than allotted, a chore he performed so well that the mess sergeant allowed Kidd to quietly sneak extra food for himself. That additional nutrition helped Kidd survive a period that felled other construction workers.

  The Americans enjoyed the help of another benefactor on Wake, a Korean named Lee Bong Moon. Brought in to cook for the Japanese officers, Moon took pity on the overworked, beaten, and underfed Americans. He secretly passed out food to men who worked near the kitchen, and when eight civilians attempted to steal a boat and escape from the atoll on October 13, 1943, Moon hid four drums of gasoline near the beach for the men to use. While the Japanese watched a movie, the Americans paddled out to sea, disappeared from Moon’s sight, and headed toward Midway. The men vanished, likely either drowned or recaptured by other Japanese forces and executed.

  Two other civilians defied the Japanese, at least for a time. Fred J. Stevens and Logan Kay avoided capture for seventy-seven days after December 23. They hid in Wake’s dense brush, hoping that an appearance by the United States Navy would save them. Finally, running out of food and water, the weary men surrendered and joined their comrades.

  They were fortunate to avoid the fate suffered by another Wake civilian, a man named by Stewart as “Babe” Hoffmiester. Caught in May 1942 stealing food and cigarettes from a warehouse by the Japanese, and already singled out for being twice warned against violating rules, Hoffmiester stood trial and was sentenced to death. On May 10, Mothers’ Day, in front of twenty Americans forced to witness the event, the Japanese tied Hoffmiester’s hands behind his back, blindfolded him, and made him kneel beside a seven-foot-long pit along the lagoon with his head extending over the hole. After teasing him in an unsuccessful effort to unnerve the civilian, a guard beheaded the American. Katsumi ordered the witnesses to tell the other prisoners what they had seen and that this punishment awaited anyone who disobeyed orders.

  Two groups of Americans departed Wake in late 1942. Twenty Marines, now healthy enough to travel, boarded the Asamu Maru in the fall and headed to p
rison camps in Japan. When two hundred civilians left Wake on September 20 on the Tachibana Maru, an all-civilian work force of ninety-eight remained—ninety-seven to complete work projects and Dr. Shank, who refused to abandon his fellow civilians.

  Murray Kidd, originally scheduled to leave, almost became one of the ninety-eight when he agreed to change places with a man selected to stay. The other captive wanted to remain with his buddy, who was bound for Japan, so Kidd, who had no desire to be taken even farther from the United States, offered to trade places.

  When Kidd informed Sergeant Tada, however, Tada told Kidd, “If you’re supposed to go, you go.” Kidd sensed that the sergeant knew something of which the American was totally unaware and canceled the deal with the young civilian.

  Before Kidd boarded the Tachibana Maru, Sergeant Tada inspected the vessel, then offered more words of advice. “He told me to take a jug of water with me because he knew there wasn’t much water on the ship. He was a decent man. He went with me to the ship and handed me a package of stuff, cigarettes and other things. He got me on that ship, and then I never saw him again.”

  With his kind gestures, Sergeant Tada saved Murray Kidd’s life, something the American never forgot. “He saved my life. The kid ended up getting killed. I know Tada knew what was going to happen.”14

  As the war wound through 1943, the United States Navy targeted Wake for repeated bombing raids. Sometimes, American task forces bombarded the location on their way to other destinations, and carrier aircraft used Wake as bombing practice. Corporal Holewinski, recuperating from his December 23 wounds, recalled a February 1942 raid by American aircraft that rattled both the Japanese and the Americans. As Holewinski waited out the intense bombing in a dugout, a friendly Japanese interpreter inched over toward him, put his arm around Holewinski, and said, “Remember how nice I was?”15 The enemy soldier feared that the raid preceded an American invasion that would end with his capture by hostile Marines.

  The assault of October 1943, a particularly intense bombardment, so angered the Japanese commander, Rear Adm. Shigemitsu Sakaibara, that he exacted vengeance on the civilians. On October 6, ninety-eight Americans, including Dr. Shank and the young worker whose place Murray Kidd almost took, marched under guard to the beach.

  From nearby, Lee Bong Moon watched the proceedings. The Japanese led the Americans to a three-foot-deep ditch meandering along the beach, blindfolded them, lined them up in three rows in front of the ditch, and machined-gunned the defenseless men. “All the prisoners, both dead and wounded, were bayoneted,” explained Moon. “One of the prisoners only known to me as Mr. John, was one of my best friends. In the first burst of fire he was wounded in the left shoulder. There was an American water tank to the right, and because it was almost dark and the faces were barely to be seen, I recognized him because he had a red jacket on. He also recognized me and when he was wounded he ran for the protection of the water tank. I met him there, picked him up, and carried him into the jungle [brush].”

  Moon bandaged the American’s wound and promised to return with food. Two days later, however, a Japanese soldier searching for birds discovered the American. Four captors, one carrying a sword, led the wounded man to a depression near a road and forced him to kneel. When Moon spotted the proceedings, he hurried up to see what was happening. His gaze caught that of Mr. John. “He was kneeling with his hands tied behind his back. We again recognized each other, and again tears came to his eyes.”16 Shortly after, a sword thrust ended the civilian’s life. Sakaibara later had the ninety-eight bodies exhumed and dispersed about the atoll in an effort to make it appear they had been randomly killed in different American bombing attacks.

  “Wake Is a Dangerous Island”

  No example better illustrates the ironies that surround Wake than the condition of the so-called “victors” on Wake after the December battle. While the Americans headed into dreary prison camps, Japanese soldiers manned the vacated defenses at Wake, prepared to repel any American counterattack. As the Japanese waited for an assault that never occurred, they became each day more like their imprisoned foes.

  The diary of L.Cpl. Watanabe Mitsumasa, of the Mixed Independence Regiment No. 113, First Battalion, Anti-tank Gun Company, provides an illuminating glimpse into life for the Japanese on Wake. In the 268 days covered in the diary, from April 21, 1944, until March 11, 1945, Mitsumasa mentioned the presence of American aircraft on 243 days. The succession of blows affected both morale and performance. On May 5, 1944, for instance, Mitsumasa wrote that “Enemy planes come nearly every day as if on schedule. We are all very nervous.”

  In many ways, the tables had turned on the Japanese, who now found themselves in situations similar to those of the Americans in China and Japan. He repeatedly referred to the lack of rations and how often the men discussed food, just like the men languishing in Woosung and other camps. “All one hears about on Wake is food, we have to rely on substitution to fill our stomachs,” he entered on May 11, 1944. He wrote of eating roasted rat, leaves, vines, and referred to frequent punishments of men who stole food from the warehouse. Superiors jailed a soldier named Private Ikeda for eating sixteen cans of meat, then gave him so little nourishment that he perished. “Exchanging a life for 16 cans of meat. Oh, God save our soul. He was one of the healthy fellows in our squad. Wake is a dangerous island.”

  An occasional submarine shuttled in food and other supplies, and fish from the lagoon helped—when U.S. bombs lambasted the lagoon on May 17 and produced hundreds of dead fish floating on the surface for their enjoyment, Mitsumasa called them “a gift from F. D. Roosevelt”—but as the successful American drive pushed westward and severed the supply line from Japan, the men on Wake became more isolated than ever. Without hope of returning to their homeland until after the war, they had to survive on their own efforts, forgotten, underequipped, and underfed.

  Conditions so deteriorated that Mitsumasa finally lost hope. “If only I could get out of here,”17 he added on February 1, 1945. Nothing changed, however, and the soldier penned his final entry on March 11. Mitsumasa died of malnutrition sometime between August 7 and September 4, 1945, never having returned to the homeland he loved.

  “The Rats Were Just as Hungry as We Were”

  Mitsumasa’s passion for Japan would have escaped the American captives, for they experienced a different side. Most of the Wake prisoners lived in a Japanese camp at some time during the war, and those who endured Woosung and Kiangwan contended that the time they subsequently spent in Japan was far worse. In May 1945, J. O. Young and Forrest Read entered their new camp in northern Japan to shocking news—almost half the prisoners succumbed there the previous winter, which brought snow accumulations up to eighteen feet deep. Neither man, so weakened that they doubted they could survive such a fierce winter, expected to see the next spring.

  George Rosandick took one look at the inhabitants of the Osaka steel mill and camp and realized he had made a terrible decision. Before leaving China, he and Joe Goicoechea argued whether the new camps in Japan would be worse than Kiangwan. Rosandick could have remained in China, for the Japanese had not chosen him to depart in the same group as Goicoechea, but he let his friend talk him into going to Japan with him. Now he doubted the wisdom of his selection, a conclusion reinforced by meeting the men who had languished in the camp for two or three years, including men captured in the Philippines. “We looked like Charles Atlas compared to some of them,” claimed Goicoechea, “but you know, it did not take long for us to look like them, especially our older men.”18

  Harsher work assignments proved to be the main difference between Japanese and Chinese camps. Japan, sorely strapped for laborers because so many young men had been sent away to fight, used American prisoners of war as slave labor to produce war matériel. Some men disappeared into coal mines, where they braved cave-ins, explosions, and coal dust. J. O. Young toiled such long hours in the shipyards of Osaka, a large port town west of Tokyo, that he lost twenty-three pounds in twenty-
four days. Bombarded by deafening factory noises, the men had to carry large beams of steel weighing over three hundred pounds.

  Young witnessed men purposely break their bones to avoid the exhausting work, a trick a demoralized Young tried once by pulling a 250-pound casting down on his leg. He only skinned his leg, but the episode showed to what extent the men’s morale had plunged after three years in confinement, away from loved ones, decent food, and fun.

  The Japanese guards in the Home Islands made the soldiers in China seem friendly. One guard called the prisoners those “dirty sons of bitches Americans,”19 then beat anyone who incurred his wrath. A group of soldiers smacked Joe Goicoechea so badly about the face and neck that he incurred headaches that bother him to this day. The only solace the men took from the increased punishment was the pattern that developed—whenever something bad for Japan happened in the war, more prisoners received beatings. Obviously, the war had soured for the enemy.

  Murray Kidd purposely formed few friendships at Camp 18 near Hiroshima, one of the harshest camps, since he did not want to go through the anguish of watching a buddy die. So many men succumbed to the extreme cold and lack of food that the Japanese placed a coffin next to the man they thought would die next. Once he expired, they shoved the body into the wooden box and carted him off.

  “There was no heat and no hospital, not a thing,” Kidd mentioned years later. “We had many men from Wake die, at least, in camp, mainly from disease. You’d get a cold, then pneumonia. Guys younger than me got sick and died. The work schedule was rough, ten to twelve hours a day building a dam, and we didn’t ever see a softball or anything all the time we were there. We just worked! There was no fun, no relaxation, no religious services, just work. Everything froze in the winter, so we didn’t have water for baths and we couldn’t keep our teeth clean. A lot of guys don’t have any teeth anymore.”20