The navy doctors were able to refresh their knowledge, refine their skills, and share notes, diagnoses, and observations. They had a language in common, and an experience tempered by blood, fire, and penury. In the heat of the moment, in plenty’s absence, their resourcefulness was nothing short of inspiring. They studied the diseases that confronted them, even drafted papers for publication. For the first time since Bilibid, they were able to work together as a medical team. They were happy to assume old roles in a new place because doing good fostered hope.
In reality the Kōbe POW Hospital was a pet project of Colonel Murata Sōtarō, commander of the Osaka Prisoner of War Camp Area. It was a propaganda ploy to help convince world opinion, through the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross, that Japan was treating its prisoners of war well. The timing was hardly coincidental. On June 6, 1944, American, British, and Canadian troops stormed the beaches of Normandy in Operation Overlord. That same month, Admiral Toyoda Soemu, commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, vowed to vanquish the U.S. fleet if the Americans invaded Saipan. His bid led to the biggest carrier engagement of the entire war. The Battle of the Philippine Sea dealt a devastating blow to Japanese naval and air power. Two Japanese aircraft carriers, the Taiho and the Shokaku, were sunk in the first day alone, while radar-directed American fighters destroyed nearly 300 enemy aircraft in what was later referred to as “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” The Allies were winning stunning, nearly simultaneous victories in the European and Pacific theaters. The capture of Saipan followed on July 9 and forced Tōjō’s resignation. One day later the hospital at Kōbe welcomed Allied POWs. As a Japanese propaganda pamphlet entitled “Victory on the March” explained next to a photograph of POWs being examined by a Japanese man purporting to be a doctor: “The sick are given full medical care and attention in the prisoners [sic] camps in Japan. Everything is done to assure their health.”
The stevedores at Kōbe House had access to the English-language Japan Times and the Mainichi Shimbun. John Quinn, having married a Chinese woman in Hong Kong, was pressed into service as a translator because he could read kanji, the Chinese-derived characters that the Japanese used in their writing. The seriousness of Japan’s situation was brought home when the men saw air raid shelters being dug along city streets while they were on their way to work in factories, and the antiaircraft positions being erected and sandbagged around Kōbe’s harbor. Before long there were almost daily air raid drills. The hospital prepared two bomb shelters for the Japanese and one for the POWs. Two small reservoirs were filled with water in case of fire.
On August 18 the Swiss ICRC delegate, Heinrich C. “Harry” Angst, visited the Kōbe POW Hospital, and Colonel Murata made sure he was there to greet him. Murata praised the facility’s “most suitable” location, the “mild climate, protection from harsh winds and an abundance of sunshine,” as well as the thoroughly up-to-date equipment that rivaled “any first-class hospital in Japan.” A cablegram Angst sent to Washington, D.C., via Geneva on September 18, 1944, quoted Fred Berley as expressing “SATISFACTION GRATITUDE FOR FINE HOSPITAL WHICH GREAT HELP FOR BOTH PATIENTS DOCTORS TREATMENT SATISFACTORY BEST HOSPITAL HE SAW SINCE POW STOP.” But in his formal report, Angst naïvely gave the last word to Murata, who spoke as if one calculated good deed could absolve him of the crimes committed throughout the Ōsaka-area camps under his control: “Col. Murata affirms that in treating POW patients at the hospital he and the Japanese hospital staff are governed by principles of humanity and international justice.” His subordinate Dr. Nosu put it another way. He informed the POW medical staff that, quite simply, no one was to die. “I command!”
Three days before Harry Angst’s visit to Kōbe, an article in the Ōsaka Mainichi took a rather different view:Difficulty grows: Americans are epicurean wild beasts. No nation on earth lives as much on meat as the Americans. This has deprived them of what should be the adequate quota of human decency. They have degenerated to such a depth that the resentment one would usually feel against a human being would be a luxury when applied to Americans. Since indignation towards the Americans would be sheer waste of sentiment, mankind owes it to itself to exterminate them with the same positive zeal as a civilized community would manifest in eradicating obnoxious insects.
The “principles of humanity and international justice” of which Colonel Murata grandiloquently spoke were hardly in evidence at Kōbe House. Or at the Kawasaki Branch Camp, where POWs toiled for Kawasaki Heavy Industries. Or at Osaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp, where they unloaded cargo for Sumitomo, the Osaka Ko Warehouse Company, and army contractors Kitamura and Heiki, or sweated it out in the steel mills of Ōsaka Tekko and Ōsaka Seio, which manufactured tank parts and built destroyers and cruisers.
Private Everett D. Reamer of the Coast Artillery Corps used to watch the Japanese staff enter the locked storehouse at the rear of his barracks in Osaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp and brazenly steal Red Cross food parcels. Reamer and five other POWs in rokuban, or Room No. 6, decided to stake their claim. He had been captured on Corregidor, imprisoned in Cabanatuan, and by August 1944 had lost almost forty pounds. The Red Cross parcels were intended for the POWs, so why should they be kept from the table? Besides, some of the fellows from Wake and Guam were already taking their fair share.
The men drew straws to determine who would lead the heist. Reamer came up short, followed by Private Louis C. Bradsher, also of the CAC. Because the headquarters camp was in a designated military zone, camp regulations required that at the end of each day a POW had to stand guard at night to make sure that only one man went to the benjo at a time. Bradsher would act both as guard and as Reamer’s lookout.
On the night of August 10, Bradsher slipped by the benjo, switched off the light in the security area, unlocked the storeroom door with a key that had been forged in the foundry, and returned to his post. Reamer then grabbed three Red Cross parcels and hid them in the benjo, which was concealed by a thin wooden stall. Almost instantly Reamer heard the sound of hobnailed boots. The light must have been the tip-off. He crawled over into the next stall, knowing full well that if he was discovered, he’d be shot on the spot. The guards, meanwhile, were in a huddle by the storeroom, which gave Reamer the opportunity he was waiting for. He sneaked around them, continued on his way back to his barracks room, and squirreled up to the top level of the bay he shared with Mike Christle of the 4th Marines, where he lay perfectly still. The guards were hot on his heels. They beat up Bradsher, interrogated the other POWs in the barracks, and searched the bays but found nothing incriminating.
The next morning the Japanese cut off rations. There would be no food until the guilty party was found. That night Reamer confessed to Chief Boatswain’s Mate Philip Earl Sanders, who was the American commander of the camp. Sanders listened sympathetically and said he would appeal to the Japanese for clemency. But Sanders himself was benefiting from the Red Cross parcels that the Japanese broke into, because they shared some of their booty with him. Sanders decided to turn Reamer and Bradsher in.
On August 14, 1944, while they were lined up for work, Reamer and Bradsher were taken to Colonel Murata’s office. They were beaten, interrogated, tied to a bench so water could be pumped into their lungs, and questioned again. When that tactic failed to elicit a confession, they were forced to hold an office chair over their heads by the hind legs until they faltered and were slapped with a bamboo stick across the arms and back. Then they were made to stand at attention at the main gate twenty-four hours a day without food or water. They urinated down their legs, they defecated into their trousers, and they quickly dehydrated. Reamer’s ankles swelled beyond recognition, and soon his mind and body went numb. On the evening of August 20, just as tenko was being conducted, nineteen-year-old Private Reamer collapsed.
Two British POWs rushed to his aid and took Reamer as well as Bradsher into their barracks for the night. “We’re not going to let you kill them,” the Britishers told the Japanese. They gave them food an
d water, but the next morning the guards came back for the two men. The Japanese placed them at the main gate for all to see, and at night confined them to a brig opposite the guardhouse that was so small, you could sleep on the floor only in a sitting position. Reamer and Bradsher were held there for nearly a month, subsisting on a small bowl of rice and a cupful of water twice daily.
A typhoon hit Ōsaka on the night of September 17, and by the next morning the camp was flooded. The guards tied the prisoners’ hands behind their backs, strung their own shoes around their necks, and escorted the Americans to army headquarters in Ōsaka.
At 1300 Reamer and Bradsher were taken into a courtroom, where they stood before three Japanese Army officers, who served as judges, on the bench. They were asked through an interpreter to explain what had happened. One judge asked Reamer who he thought was going to win the war.
You bastards won’t, he wanted to say, but reason won out over rashness. “It’s only natural that as an American I think we’re going to win the war,” he explained.
Reamer and Bradsher were sentenced to one year solitary confinement.
“What do you think about that?” Reamer was asked.
“I don’t think it’s fair,” he said, “because we only attempted to take what was ours to begin with.”
After being handcuffed and hooded, they were escorted to a train. Reamer imagined his own execution, wondering if he was going to be shot or beheaded. Finally they arrived at Ōsaka Sakai Prison, where they exchanged their clothes for lightweight prison fatigues and were locked into their respective cells.
The room measured five by seven feet. A small barred window about three feet wide and eighteen inches high was situated in the cell door just above eye level, so the Japanese could see you without being seen. No books were allowed—not even a Bible. No exercise was permitted. You couldn’t even stand up during the day. There was no running water, no heat, not a chair to sit on nor a bed for rest. A wooden pail was used as a toilet. A bare lightbulb burned continuously overhead. Food was pushed through a trapdoor, and at night you slept on the floor. Reamer recited the Twenty-third Psalm daily for strength. When the cell door closed behind him that first time, the teenager from Elizabethtown, Ohio, known to the Japanese as Prisoner No. 1589, wondered: “What now? Will this be the end for me?”
Dr. Ōhashi was intrigued by the American doctors. They seemed so knowledgeable, and their skills were so far beyond what he had encountered in Japan. But while their comparative experience and levels of expertise differed greatly, there was a common basis to their knowledge—up to a point.
In 1870, two years after the ascension of the emperor Meiji, the German system of medical education was adopted in Japan by cabinet decree. Pathological anatomy had been a weakness in Japanese medicine until students began to learn at the hands of European physicians. The emperor Meiji had lost six of his seven children in infancy to meningitis and appointed Hashimoto Tsutatsune, who had studied with a Dutch physician in Nagasaki, chief medical officer of his palace. Hashimoto went on to become medical officer of the Army Ministry and later surgeon general of the Japanese Army. By the late nineteenth century the faculty of Tōkyō’s Imperial University Medical School was predominantly German. Japanese medical students continued to flock to Germany for instruction up until World War I.
At the same time, the German model of medical education was also the inspiration for sweeping reforms in American universities, whose medical graduates, lamented Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard, were so ill prepared it was “horrible to contemplate.” Germany was preeminent in the laboratory sciences and in research, which were virtually nonexistent in pre-Civil War America when medicine was taught largely by apprenticeship. The medical school of Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1893, provided the new template. As in Japan, instruction was largely didactic. Lectures and rote memorization were emphasized at the expense of clinical and laboratory work. While the method of teaching changed in the United States in 1910, it remained the same in Japan throughout the prewar years.
Hopkins made a four-year college degree mandatory for admission. The medical curriculum comprised two years of laboratory science, followed by a two-year hospital internship and then a residency for specialization. In Japan the Doctor of Science degree was conferred upon almost every medical school graduate who simply completed two years of basic science, two years of clinical medicine, and an elective course of postgraduate study and research. There was no written examination comparable to the state medical boards in the U.S. in order to qualify for a medical license.
Before World War II the majority of Japanese doctors were graduates of senmon gakkō—second-class medical schools that often lacked a hospital affiliation for clinical experience. They were allowed to concoct their own prescriptions, sell medicine to their patients, and set up their own ten-bed hospitals. Pharmacists could prescribe and dispense drugs over the counter. Second-class doctors tended to work in rural areas; first-class doctors, such as Ohashi, practiced in cities.
Despite a less rigorous approach to medical education, Japan claimed major scientific contributions to medical science. Kitasato Shibasaburō, a physician and bacteriologist, discovered the plague bacillus and helped Emil von Behring develop the tetanus antitoxin in 1892. In 1897 Shiga Kiyoshi discovered the dysentery bacillus, which was designated shigella in his honor. In the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese Army medical service, noted Hans Zinnsser, was the first to demonstrate that typhoid fever in troops was preventable. In 1940 Shiga was still active at the acclaimed Kitasato Institute in Tōkyō, where Rockefeller Foundation funds helped build the new School of Hygiene that was run by Japanese professors trained at Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
But the same government that promulgated regulations for the study of medicine along secular European lines continued to allow doctors to engage in traditional Chinese medicine. Kanpō, as it was called, derived from the teachings of Buddhist priests and had been practiced in Japan since the sixth century A.D. What was mysterious or primitive by Western standards was a time-honored tradition in Chinese medicine. With little understanding of Asian culture, prisoners of the Japanese were apt to view oky(moxibustion), hari (acupuncture), or performing surgery without anesthesia when novocaine hydrochloride was standard issue in American and British medical kits as ineffective at best and sadistic at worst. Just as some POWs were indignant about being given roots to eat when they were handed daikon, the white radish that is a staple of the Japanese diet.
Shintōism, the state religion that glorified the emperor at the expense of the individual (as it was interpreted in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan), complicated the ways in which Japanese medicine was practiced during the war and was frequently at odds with the principles of the Hippocratic oath. If it was better to die by committing seppuku than to surrender, then when the wounded, disabled, or diseased stood in the way of a military objective, the Japanese argued, it was better for them to succumb to the hand of a doctor. As one Division 17 operation order (marked “Military Most Secret,” dated 12 January-18 February 1944) put it: “Arrangements to send the wounded and sick to the rear are being made, but if this causes too obvious an obstruction to the efficient execution of the withdrawal, unavoidable instances when wounded and sick must be disposed of are to be expected.”
Japanese doctors were allowed to carry swords and pistols. Corpsmen brandished rifles with bayonets. They rarely wore Red Cross brassards and in some instances were called in as reinforcements for frontline troops. Forward-area hospitals were usually camouflaged, while troop transport ships were sometimes disguised as hospital ships carrying arms, ammunition, and combat personnel who were bandaged like patients.
Not only did Japanese doctors dispose of their own wounded and assist in suicides when soldiers were deemed useless to the emperor, they killed POWs who posed no threat to military objectives or internal security. At Khandok a live vivisection was performed on an unwounded African POW as if he were a surgical p
atient in some medical school’s theater of the damned. As one witness described it, “The man was tied to a tree outside the Hikari Kikan Office. A Japanese doctor and four medical students stood around him. They first removed the fingernails; then, cutting open his chest, removed his heart on which the doctor gave a practical demonstration.”
But government-sponsored medical experimentation on prisoners of war was another matter entirely. In Mukden, Manchuria, Japan’s Unit 731 harvested POWs from the nearby Hoten camp and injected them with deadly pathogens as part of a bacteriological research program to develop biological weapons. The Japanese had used typhoid and cholera as biological weapons against China in 1940, and in March 1942 preparations were under way to release 1,000 kilograms of plague-infested fleas on Bataan, a plan that was abandoned when Bataan fell on April 9, 1942. Here, as in Nazi Germany, medical science was perverted in the interests of the state. What those interests were and how they were interpreted varied wildly from practitioner to practitioner as bushidō—the way of the warrior—came into contact with and often violated Western medical ethics.
As a doctor, Ōhashi was an exception. He was a devout Buddhist who prayed before performing his operations. He subscribed to the prevailing military ethos in believing that it was better to die by one’s sword than face the ignominy of surrender. But he also knew that the Allied POWs felt no shame in being captives. They were proud as Americans, Englishmen, Australians, and Dutchmen. He prized their medical learning and felt no compunction about helping them treat their patients. He even assisted Fred Berley in a hernia operation. The esteemed surgeon from Ōsaka viewed the POW doctors not as his peers—he looked up to them as his superiors and acted, as Fred said, like a gentleman.
Conduct Under Fire Page 44