Baa Baa Black Sheep

by Gregory Boyington

  Should ever I return to Japan any of these days or years, one of my biggest novelties would be in knowing just how I was going to get there, or exactly where I was day by day while traveling. For on that first trip, while being flown from island to island, we were not told anything. All we could do was try to guess where we were and try to remember our geography.

  Our first stop was overnight at what we presumed to be the island of Saipan, and I still think it was. After landing we were taken away from the airstrip about four or five miles and put into a chicken coop. Here we were kept overnight with several guards with bayonets guarding us in the chicken coop. During my brief stay at Saipan life began to take on a new look. I was served my first civilized meal in over two months. The fact that the last of the booze had been sweated out of me at Truk might have had a great deal to do with this good feeling.

  The farmhouse adjoining our chicken coop was occupied by a Japanese warrant officer and his family. He was a kind, gentle person who insisted that we were fed properly. I know this because we were introduced to him by Suyako, who interpreted this man’s words of friendliness. He said: “I would like to have you meet the man who is responsible for all this. He says he would like to explain a few things to you.”

  “Okay with us, anything after a meal like this.”

  “I’m not able to translate the exact words, but I will give you the message as best I can. He says he would like to have you know the majority of the Japanese are ashamed of the way you are being treated, but to have faith, because the horrible war shall be over before too long. Then we shall all be friends again.”

  For some reason I believed this man, I was satisfied that he was sincere and honest. As I watched the stars in the universe above me that night, as long as I could remain awake, I felt calm and comparatively happy. It was truly a heavenly sleep I had, among the leavings of the barnyard fowl, and I didn’t begrudge the henhouse folk a single thing. Prior to this point in my life I never dreamed it possible to feel that a Japanese could be a true friend, a friend of mankind. So I was not saying good-by with my tongue in my cheek. For my money the warrant officer and his wife and children, who waved good-by to us as we left the farm, were a swell family in anybody’s world. Even Suyako was so touched he forgot the blindfolds until we were driving on the airstrip. When he suddenly noticed this, he said: “For gosh sakes, put on your blindfolds or I’ll be the one that’s in hot water.” We complied with grins.

  His attitude had changed gradually since leaving Rabaul and by that time we regarded him much the same as a drill sergeant, because he yapped only when he thought somebody was looking our way. I had the feeling he must have thought we were his permanent wards after saving our lives and keeping the Japs from beating us up. Under these circumstances he had done his best to see that we were watered and fed.

  The night after Saipan we spent at—well, I was not to learn the name of the island until after the war. Then, while being flown home, I happened to recognize a picture of the island while thumbing through a magazine. The island was Iwo Jima. In the picture I recognized Mount Suribachi. We had been kept in an open board-covered lean- to overnight at its foot, and anybody who ever has seen the volcanic cone that is Mount Suribachi will never forget it.

  The place felt so quiet, so forlorn, so desolate, while I was there. Why anybody was on it in the first place was beyond my comprehension. So you can imagine how I must have felt when later I read and saw the picture of the Marines who had taken this desolate rock. And the Marines must have thought it worth over nine hundred per cent in casualties.

  We were free as the cold breeze during this evening in the little board lean-to. The guards shared their food with us, and side by side—guard and prisoner alike—we ate from some cans of plums they had opened. I remember how cold it was, and we huddled together next to a large rock that was helping to hold the lean- to off the ground. These guards also shared their cigarettes and matches with us prisoners. We smoked plenty. We didn’t stop to realize how scarce cigarettes were for them.

  On the next leg of the trip Suyako didn’t insist that we wear the blindfolds, which didn’t make me unhappy in the least. As we were waiting to take off in our DC-3, there were any number of Japanese peering through the glass windows into the plane. They were ragged, not dressed exactly like the soldiers or sailors, at least no insignia of any nature. In peering in through the windows they plastered their noses flat against the panes and just stared and stared, much the same as a little waif at home would look into a department-store window filled with toys. I asked Suyako: “What are they looking at? And who are they?”

  Suyako, for lack of better words—and I’m certain he meant no insult—said: “They are workers. Same as your Seabees. We call them Hee.”

  “What does Hee mean?” I asked curiously after I had seen him go to the windows and shoo these lookers away, several times, but more always came back in their places.

  “Hee means flies in Japanese.”

  I felt that this expression was quite appropriate for these people, but somehow I had the feeling that the already-industrious Seabees would double their efforts if they could have heard Suyako make the comparison to them.

  That afternoon we were flown into an airport near Yokohama. I never will know just which one it was. Then we were walked to a junction on the outskirts of the city. From there we were taken some distance by truck and part of the way by streetcar.

  Now that we were on the mainland of Japan, I rather imagine they felt that it was safe to remove our blindfolds for good. I never did learn of a white man escaping, once he was on the mainland. The people in the streets and on the streetcar just gawked and gawked at us. They couldn’t seem to tear their eyes away. Come to think of it, we were such a mess that people back in the United States would have gawked at us too.

  During our streetcar ride we put a multitude of questions to our host, Suyako, some of which I doubted he could have answered if he had wanted to. I asked: “Where in the hell are you taking us?”

  “A navy camp, Ofuna, it’s a suburb of Yokohama, the same as your Hollywood in Los Angeles, where they make motion pictures in Japan.” And my hopes began to rise.

  After we left the streetcar we sort of marched loosely back into the hills on a dirt road. The scenery was beautiful, like being out in the wooded countryside back home. We passed one of their ancient shrines, and Suyako explained about this as best he could. And nearby we were able to listen to the tinkle of prayer sticks, a sound that went on endlessly in the clear air, coming from somewhere outside of our prison stockade at all hours. Finally we approached a wooden stockade, which, except for its fragileness, reminded me of those used by early Americans to keep out the Indians. Suyako said: “Well, boys, this is it, at last. This is going to be your new home.”

  We all had looked forward to this, for we had been told how nicely we would be treated once we were on the mainland. I guess we rather imagined we would be back to living the way we were accustomed, like please-pass-the-salt-and-pepper, and all that sort of thing. We could see other prisoners about the courtyard. I tried to see if I could recognize any, and I was able to see just one fellow I knew when I was on the Yorktown prior to the war. So I yelled at him: “Hey, Junior,” but he didn’t return my greeting.

  Suyako said: “You’re not allowed to speak until you have been in camp for a while, and then the haitisons [guards] will give you permission.”

  “Oh no, not more of that no-speako routine?”

  “Just be patient, don’t get upset, they will let you talk in due time.”

  I never did see Suyako again, and didn’t know his real name, but after I had been home a few months I received a letter from the War Crimes Commission personnel in Tokyo, and they told me that an interpreter had claimed I had given him a watch; they described it, asking me if I had given it to him. It was a pleasure to be able to write back and say:

  “Yes, I gave him the watch. It was broken, so I had no more use for it, and told
him he could fix it up and keep it.” And I had added, “He is a good gent, treat him right, and please wish him the Season’s Greetings, most sincerely, for me.”

  I found that Ofuna was a special camp, out here away from everything in these country foothills. This was a naval camp, the only one, and it was even unknown to their civilian population. The Japanese Navy kept about seventy to ninety prisoners there all the time. The idea was to try to make you miserable enough so that they could pry military information out of you. This went on for a year to eighteen months for each prisoner. Not every prisoner went through Ofuna, but people they thought had some special value to them were sent here. There were submarine survivors, pilots, and technicians of various kinds, besides anyone with any rank they were able to get hold of. Fortunately for us, or I should say for the rank, they never were able to obtain many of them to my knowledge.

  The manner in which the health and morale in the prisoners stood up, except for odd cases, was directly proportionate to their ages. The younger seemed to take it easier without too much consequence, while the older took it much harder with a great many aftereffects. Most of the older ones died off shortly after the war was over.

  I wasn’t exactly a spring chicken, but there were several reasons, in spite of my wounds, why my health took an upsurge under these circumstances. One of the main reasons, and I knew it then, was that I was finally placed on the water wagon whether I liked it or not. My health has always been remarkable when I leave the booze alone.

  Another reason, I know now, despite my age then, was that I possessed the emotional growth of a child. So, barring no one, I was about as young-acting as anyone Camp Ofuna ever held.

  * * *

  27

  * * *

  Merely the change of scene was relief enough for me, for all my life I counted upon some new geographical location as a solution. But in a very short time, I recall, Ofuna turned out to be the same as any other locale I had ever been in. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that I came to the conclusion that every place had to be the same.

  My previous opinions of the Japanese people, gathered from propaganda, stories, and my own imagination, were changing gradually. One item: I had thought that the Japs were a filthy lot, but they turned out to be the cleanest race of people I have ever run into. They saw that our living quarters were clean and sanitary. Of course we prisoners did the physical effort in this idea of theirs. They even made the prisoners keep their persons clean when they saw no good reason for doing so. Truly amazing, it was, to see uneducated Nip guards have to shame some of our American boys into cleanliness. Soap was about as precious as gold, and just about as scarce, and when a guard on his own handed you a piece of soap, which they did on many an occasion, you knew he was either a generous person or he wanted to help you to remain clean.

  Thank God, the chill of the winter was about over when we arrived, for it was a process of months before one inherited sufficient clothing to keep halfway warm. Our wooden cell block was unheated but served to protect us from the wind and rain and snow. We rolled up in the cotton blankets the Japanese issued us and slept on straw mats. As a matter of record, it became quite a healthy way of life for me and others; I never had a cold during the entire twenty months without heated quarters, or shoes most of the time.

  Our particular little detachment of six arrived in the latter part of March 1944 and was not transferred out of Ofuna until the following year, April 1945. Very few prisoners died in this camp. The few that did had internal injuries of some nature when they were captured, and of course the Japanese would do nothing about such cases. A man with an internal injury was just sunk, that’s all there was to it.

  I tried to explain briefly earlier because I realized I would be using later a couple of words freely. The words “prisoner” and “captive” have different meanings, especially in Japan at this time, but it was not until we reached Ofuna that we became fully conscious of our status—or the difference in status. We were all warned that we were special captives of the Japanese, and that we were not prisoners of war, and that we would not be entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war. We were to be held strictly off the books, the sort of thing the Bureau of Internal Revenue dislikes so much. In other words, the Japanese did not notify our government through the Swiss that we were alive. To our people back home or anyone else we remained missing in action or dead. This is the reason nobody knew about my existence until fourteen days after the war was over.

  One of the most aggravating things about this special category was the rule governing our food rationing: we were allowed a three-quarter portion of that assigned to a prisoner of war. As time went on, the other so-called benefits that a prisoner of war received became minor to us in comparison to this differential in food.

  I realize that books about the war may be considered old stuff now, and I further realize that war books may once again come into their own after the customary lapse of time following any war. But my point in all this is not to put out just another war book, for, God knows, I realize as well as anyone else how people on all sides hate war, and it is an ugly word. But in regard to this secret camp of Ofuna, suburb of Yokohama and formerly a film colony similar to our Hollywood, I would not be doing my duty to the all-around records of war if I didn’t tell about it. Nor is it my fault, nor the fault of any of the other Americans who were held in secret there, that we did not through some miracle get out in time to let our story be known to the country when such stories were considered “hot.” It was not our fault that we did not get out of Japan, or were rescued, or some such thing, before the war was over. Even now I hear it said again and again to me (and I am getting a little weary of the same old disc): “But, Boyington, the whole trouble with you is you’re so late.” It is almost as if I, or some of the other American captives there, were now being accused of not having had our Japanese guards furnish us with carrier pigeons or radio-sending sets. But, be that as it may, I haven’t seen anything a ghost writer has written that has taken care of my memories, or I damn sure wouldn’t bother you.

  My main point is beyond all this: it is to show, in describing Ofuna, how people, any people, Japanese or Americans, behave under certain circumstances, and how any people, Americans or anybody else, may be expected to behave again in the wars coming up.

  In this camp we called Ofuna none of the Japanese personnel of the camp was supposed to be able to speak English. They didn’t want any Japanese around there who spoke English because they were afraid they might tell us how the war was going and therefore get less information out of us captives. The only Japanese who spoke English were the visiting intelligence officers who came out two or three times a week to call the boys into the interrogating room to ask them questions. I went through this routine thirteen months.

  I thought that the prime requisite of being a guard there was to pass a minus-one-hundred in an I.Q. test, because these guards surely were some of the dumbest scoundrels on the face of this earth. We never were able to get any written rules from them. All the rules were in oral Japanese, and if the guards felt like beating us up or anything, all they had to do was talk fast, so fast that we couldn’t understand what was being said, and then, because we couldn’t we were accused of one thing or another and then punished by being struck in the face while standing at attention, usually until the guard got tired. If the guard thought the offense was bad enough, he would haul us out in the courtyard and have all the other captives line up and then he would get what was the equivalent of a baseball bat. You would be ordered to stand there with your feet apart, your hands raised in the air as in a stick-up, and then he would swing at your backside with this baseball bat, and, believe me, one would gather the impression that he didn’t give a damn whether he struck out or not.

  I believe I got the worst beating I ever had just about one week after I was able to stand up on my feet without the aid of a crutch. Because of my infected wounds I spent my first six months as a captive lying in a h
eap of my own stinking bandages in the corner of my cell. But after I was out of this, and still using one crutch, I was taken out in a circle and beaten with a baseball bat. Baseball bat is a descriptive term, but the only difference actually was that these bats did not have “Spaulding” on them.

  The guard who had accused me of the rule infraction had selected a club that was too long and too heavy for him to swing, so he tired quickly. He had also consumed a considerable amount of energy in his explosive fit of rage, much the same as a boxer who loses his temper in the ring. Because of the combination of errors I had counted on Lady Luck letting me off easy, but another guard noticed his mistakes, and after selecting a bat he could swing more readily he spelled his friend off. And the fresh recruit with the smaller bat and the even temper really and truly made old Daddy-oh feel like pulling leather. Of course, it is true that I didn’t feel physical pain like some of the other prisoners. Mental worry had always been the painful thing in my odd make-up.

  During the latter portion of the beating the only thing I could think of doing was to keep giving a sort of prayer to God for the power to keep standing on my feet. I had seen many boys fall down unconscious and I did not want to let this particular Nip guard think he could make me fall. When they were through pounding me, my accuser drew a small circle in the dirt, about two feet in diameter, and told me in Japanese to stand at attention in this circle until nightfall. Then for the additional benefit of the other guards, and prisoners who were forced to witness this, “Swivel Neck,” the guard, went on screaming at the top of his lungs in Japanese:

  “Now, now, do you understand that you have to obey the Nippon Rules? You fool. You idiot. Don’t you understand Nippon is all-powerful? Do you understand? Do you understand? Do you understand?”