Three months later, on March 17, 1945, the War Ministry produced “Army Secret No. 2257,” in which the vice minister of war informed field commanders: “As the war situation has become very critical, I have been ordered to notify you not to make any blunders in the treatment of prisoners of war based upon the attached Outline for the Disposal of Prisoners of War According to the Change of Situation when the havocs of war make themselves felt in our imperial homeland and Manchuria.”
When Murata told Hochman that no prisoners were to be repatriated, Hochman couldn’t believe that the colonel would execute his orders. He’d always gotten along with him. But he kept Murata’s words to himself—they would only upset the other POWs.
Japanese plans for the disposition of civilians were no less chilling. In June 1945 the Ōsaka police chief issued a directive: “Due to the nationwide food shortage and the imminent invasion of the home islands, it will be necessary to kill all the infirm old people, and the very young, and the sick. We can’t allow Japan to perish because of them.”
On June 5, the XXI Bomber Command resumed its campaign to level Japan’s major cities with Mission No. 188, a “maximum effort attack” involving the 58th, 73rd, 313th, and 314th Bombardment Wings. The target was the Kōbe urban area. The weather over the Pacific was cloudy with intermittent showers, but it cleared up once the Superforts reached the coast of Japan. Okino Island, in Ōsaka Bay, was the IP (Initial Point). Flying at a ground speed averaging 325 mph and at altitudes ranging from 13,650 to 18,000 feet, the various groups were spaced within four minutes of one another to saturate Kōbe’s antiaircraft and firefighting defenses. It was a perfect day for bombing.
The air raid alarms were such a common occurrence at the Kōbe POW Hospital that at 0700 the staff was having breakfast as usual in spite of the fact that sirens had sounded as the sun began to rise. Then at 0730 waves of planes, led by Major Ray Brashear’s Betty Bee of the 878th Squadron, 499th Bomb Group, began to fly in over the port city on a northeasterly heading. By 0815 they were directly overhead.
“This is it!” Fred said, running through the halls. “This is the big one!”
Doctors and corpsmen hurried their patients down to the main floor and into Ward No. 2. They isolated the tuberculars in a hole in the ground that was covered with a sheet of corrugated tin. They handed out blankets that had been doused in the camp’s reservoirs. Red Cross food, clothing, medicine, and equipment were moved into a dugout, and sacks of millet, barley, soy butter, and dried fish were piled nearby. Then they grabbed their medical kits. Murray brought his few worldly possessions outside, hoping they’d survive the raid.
An Australian POW named Mariencek called down to the TB patients in the shelter, “What’s wrong with you blokes? You all scared or something?”
A voice came back, “Hell no, I ain’t scared.”
“Will that bloke who ain’t scared please come out and let someone in who is scared?” he replied.
For Sergeant Paul S. Haemmelgar, one of the nonambulatory patients, the situation was anything but funny. Page and Fred had performed an emergency appendectomy on him the night before. Corpsmen carried him to the cooks’ quarters. Fred would never forget the look on the marine’s face: sheer terror.
Waves of B-29s darkened the sky. The planes first blanketed the harborfront, then swept up toward the Rokkō Mountains. Ernie Irvin thought they might be Russian. He was used to the old USAAF insignia—a white star in a blue circle—and didn’t recognize the white bars outlined in blue that had been added to it in mid-1943.
“They’re dropping leaflets!” Louis Indorf exclaimed.
“Leaflets, hell,” Fred replied. “Those are bombs!”
To the POWs, it was a beautiful sight, hundreds of B-29s flying in perfect V-shaped formations with a terrible kind of majesty. Prisoners emerged from buildings and peered up at the sky as if they were castaways at sea who had spotted a ship on the horizon. The Superforts looked almost dark blue, and were so close together that they seemed to overlap. “It made us feel proud,” Murray said, “as if we were not some poor, starved bastards the Japanese could spit on.” And it made the Japanese cringe.
“B-nijōku! B-nijōku!” they exclaimed. B-29s! B-29s!
The same guard with whom Murray had fenced after the mid-March raid grabbed his hand, as if he could somehow stop the bombs from falling and protect them both. The doctors moved over in front of Ward No. 2. Stan Smith went inside the OR.
“When they hit, they exploded with a great big ‘whoosh’ and tremendous flame, spattering jellied gasoline,” Fred recalled. “It was nothing like a bomb blast.” Metal, tin, and spent bullets sputtered down from the sky, shrapnel from antiaircraft guns.
Ten 500-pound cluster bombs blasted the grounds, hitting the hospital, the shelter, and the cooks’ quarters. Incendiaries fluttered onto the upper floor of Ward No. 2, igniting it instantaneously. Fire breathed out of the hole where the TB patients were huddled and from the dugout where provisions were stored. Stan Smith saw “a blinding flash” and blacked out just as the OR caved in. When he came to, he struggled to free himself from timbers and debris before the entire building was consumed by flames.
A line of fires now ran from the hospital down to the sea. The Japanese stood by as doctors and corpsmen raced through the wards trying to free trapped patients. Murray searched for John Akeroyd in Ward No. 2, only to discover that he had already been evacuated. An Englishman, Sydney Chapman, came staggering out, his clothes ablaze. Ernie Irvin tackled him to smother the flames, burning himself in the process. E. S. Williams was in the passageway to Ward No. 3 when an entire wall buckled, and hearing cries, he dashed in to rescue James Lupton, who was badly burned on the face and hands. Thomas Lyall was buried by a staircase in Ward No. 1, dug himself out, and managed to extricate Bluey Ashworth with the help of Stan Smith and John Page, who had been struck on the back by a fallen beam. A fallen beam was all that saved Dixie Dean when the ceiling collapsed and timbers tumbled down around him in the shape of a wooden tepee. Murray ran back inside Ward No. 2 to make sure they hadn’t forgotten any patients. He found one last POW with a leg in a cast cheerfully waiting to be rescued as flames threatened one side of the ward. Murray hoisted him onto his back and carried him, like a father removing a wounded child, from the hospital compound.
Down at Kōbe House the guards took cover so quickly they forgot to unlock the side gate of a building where the POWs were confined, and the building was on fire. As John Lane put it: “When we had been caught in a mortar barrage on Singapore Island, I had been petrified. Waiting for a torpedo to slice through the thin hull of the Wales Maru had left me terrified. Now, with a little more maturity, I was merely shit-scared.” Fortunately a bomb blast enabled the men to escape through a breach. They scrambled to save the contents of the quartermaster store and stocks of medicine. Kōbe House was obliterated, but only one POW was lost. Three Japanese guards died when their shelter was splashed with incendiaries.
A plume of smoke rose 22,000 feet high as fires roared through downtown Kōbe. Bombs landed on a streetcar, incinerating straphangers. A friend of Ferid Kilki, a young Muslim who lived near the Kōbe POW Hospital, was tapped on the shoulder by an incendiary and instantly reduced to carbon. Dozens of women and children walked into a reservoir, only to drown.
Meanwhile, the fires in the hospital compound were burning out of control. POWs threw buckets of water onto the wards and a building nearby. Their efforts were mostly futile, though without realizing it, they had helped save Kōbe’s art museum.
Staff evacuated patients up the hill, where Japanese civilians were sitting, lying, and moaning beside the road. Doctors and corpsmen administered first aid, liberally giving injections of morphine to alleviate the searing pain suffered by burn victims. Then, from their perch above Kōbe, they watched Japan’s most cosmopolitan city disintegrate before their eyes.
From Kasugano Avenue, the B-29s looked to Tomonaga Kiyoko like a swarm of dragonflies. Her husband had told he
r to run for safety when the first incendiary bombs sprinkled down “like a shower.” Tugging her four-year-old daughter by the hand and carrying her one-and-a-half-year-old son on her back, she fled westward to an elevated road. By the time she reached Wakana Elementary School, people were climbing wooden utility poles trying to escape the flames. The sea was scarlet; the very mountains seemed to be on fire. Burning bodies clung to one another, writhing on the ground. The pavement was so hot that it was difficult to walk. Kiyoko’s children were too scared to cry.
Over in Higashi Nada Ward the air raid corps was fighting a losing battle. Araki Kiyoshi threw buckets of water on the entryway to his house and ran. He saw the mother of a classmate get hit by an incendiary and feared he would be next. There were no ambulances in operation. Casualties were rushed to the Minato Minami Hospital on planks, boards, doors—anything that could be used as a litter.
The B-29s departed by heading southeast over the water. In their wake they left buildings stripped to their foundations. Utility wires hung as limply as loose strings. Bottles lay on the ground deformed by the heat. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to embers. Then the rains came, black with ash. Kiyoshi would never forget one burn victim whose body had turned the color of coal: “Under the air-raid hood, the skin had peeled away. It looked like a boiled octopus.”
Once the air raid warnings were over, the people of Kōbe began to emerge from the ruins of their city. Men, women, and children carried whatever possessions they could salvage from their homes in baskets and boxes, on their shoulders or atop bicycles. But over on Mt. Nunobiki, in the northeastern part of the city, they saw an ominous sight: a strange red glow in the darkened sky that they feared was another terrible weapon. They panicked at its approach, breaking into a run as it seemed to get nearer and larger. Only when they looked back did they realize what they were fleeing: the sun.
By late afternoon the fires in Kōbe had died down, and the POW doctors returned to the site of their hospital. Paul Haemmelgar was dead; only his torso was recovered. Two tubercular patients were killed, identifiable by their remains: Private Samuel J. Byall, a 4th Marine who had been stationed at Cavite, and Aubrie Arthur Knight. Seventeen POWs sustained first-, second-, and third-degree burns; four others suffered cuts, bruises, and abrasions. It was a miracle that the casualties to POW patients and staff alike were so light.
The OR was gone. The meticulously kept patient records were gone. Most of the food, medicine, and supplies were gone, except for sixty sulfa tablets and four emergency medical kits. The few belongings Murray had tried to save by storing them outside were gone. Ōhashi’s office was left standing, and he allowed Fred, John, and four corpsmen to use it as a temporary aid station. The seriously injured were moved into the hospital morgue. The doctors worked until 1800 that evening tending the wounded.
In less than an hour and a half, 473 B-29s had dropped 3,006 tons of incendiaries and 71 tons of high explosives over Kōbe. Within the city 4.35 square miles were leveled; 51,399 buildings were destroyed; 3,614 people were killed; 10,064 were injured; and 179,980 were left homeless. Opposition was the stiffest to date. Between 150 and 160 Japanese interceptors made 647 atttacks. Ray Brashear’s Betty Bee was rammed and lost its right horizontal elevator. In all, nine B-29s were missing due to fighters and flak and two due to mechanical problems; another 176 were damaged. Mission No. 188 had been an unqualified success.
“Good results,” Ed Keyser jotted nonchalantly in his notepad on the way back to Saipan. “Mod. Acc. Flak. Mod. Agg. Ft’rs.” To his entries in Esquire’s Date Book he added, “Huge fires on M.P.I. [main point of impact].”
Since the bombing campaign began, almost nine square miles of Kōbe—a city the size of Baltimore—had been burned out. Nearly three-quarters of its residences and more than half of its industrial structures had been razed to the ground. The largest urban area attack in the region, the June 5, 1945, raid eliminated Kōbe from the list of incendiary targets for the XXI Bomber Command.
Murray refused to believe the casualty figures when he later learned them. It seemed impossible that so many had survived. You couldn’t even recognize the city’s downtown except for the confluence of streetcar tracks, though some buildings in the industrial area stood out from the path of destruction. “I couldn’t tell where we were,” he said, “because everything was burned down.” Kōbe was a wasteland. When Murray gazed at it from the slopes of the Rokkō Mountains, he saw a city of the dead.
24
Darkness Before Dawn
IT WAS COLD that night. They slept on the ground, many without blankets. The next morning, June 6, 1945, Page and Murray led fifty-seven ambulatory patients on an eight-mile trek to Maruyama, a POW camp in the hills northwest of Kōbe. Any wounded Japanese they came across they treated as if they were their own men. They feared retaliation for the bombings.
The burn wounds were horrendous. Skin ignites because of hydrocarbons in fat that make bodies blaze like fuel. Flesh bubbles with blisters. Noses and ears melt down to cartilage. In second-degree burns, a breath of air can cause unbearable pain. In third-degree burns, limbs char or turn a ghostly white. Patients in such cases are almost beyond pain because the nerve endings themselves have been destroyed. Shock, renal failure, and septicemia are the greatest perils. Without hospitalization, serious burn cases will die.
The POW doctors had no saline solution for fluid replacement. They had no tannic acid or silver nitrate to prevent infection. They had no sterile cotton applicators. They had only morphine to relieve pain. The Japanese were grateful. They welcomed help of any kind. They knew the difference between the POWs and their attackers.
An eerie quiet fell over Kōbe. Smoke rose from ruins as far as the eye could see. Rooftops lay at jagged angles, exposing iron girders twisted from the heat. Lone chimneys poked up through the rubble like the pilings of abandoned wharves. The streets were deserted, littered with burned-out trucks, cars, and trolleys.
Fred and John remained behind with corpsmen Bolster, Hildebrand, and Williams, and Private Allen Beauchamp. There were thirty-nine stretcher cases and thirteen patients who could walk only with assistance—men suffering from malnutrition and tuberculosis and recovering from surgery. Seventeen of them had second- and third-degree burns. The doctors needed help with the evacuation, and they needed food. Fred requested the services of 200 POWs from Kōbe House. In the meantime, they scavenged through a few homes that had escaped the bombing, but found nothing to eat. They picked some green tomatoes that were growing by the creek and made a meal of watery soup. The skies were threatening, and by evening the wind began to blow, presaging rain.
Just as the patients were bedded down for the night, Sergeant Usui Sōcho, assistant to Dr. Ōhashi, arrived with ten soldiers, three litters, and 100 POWs from Kōbe House. Usui told them they had to leave—at once. The corpsmen improvised six stretchers from doors the stevedores brought with them, so now they had a total of nine. Then Fred had to make one of the most difficult decisions in his life: choose who would be carried and who would have to walk, winnowing out the weak from the weakest.
By 2200 the rain turned into a downpour and the wind into a gale. They wandered for miles through the darkness, a pathetic procession of sick and wounded, the half-starved and half-dead, tuberculars who looked like skeletons in the faint glow of embers.
It took four men to bear a stretcher; others shouldered the infirm like human crutches. The guards urged the patients on. Fred pleaded with Ōhashi to slow down.
“Dr. Berley,” Ōhashi turned to him and said, “this is one night you will never forget.”
“No,” Fred swore, “I will never forget it.”
They stumbled through the gloom, counting off paces, fighting off sleep. Condemned men, shackled to responsibility, weighed down by adversity. A slip on a rock, a misstep over a root, and you felt like you might break apart because you were shivering with cold, you were caked with mud, you were bone-tired—and hungry.
In the middle of the n
ight Corpsman Richard Bolster was overcome with despair. Hope seemed to have passed him by. This truly was the valley of the shadow of death, he thought, but he found no solace in Scripture. And yet they couldn’t stop, they couldn’t let their patients down. They could no more ignore the sounds of their suffering than they could turn a deaf ear to a child’s cries for help. There was little consolation in company. But through a last summoning of will, through some unknown inner reserve of strength, the doctors and corpsmen shepherded the sick to safety.
Four hours later they arrived at the Kawasaki train station. Ōhashi roused the stationmaster from his sleep so they could take an electric up the toughest part of the grade. When they got off, they faced a steep hike up a narrow, winding street. At 0400 on June 7 the last refugees from the Kōbe POW Hospital finally arrived at Maruyama.
The nightmarish journey had a deleterious effect. A British POW named Cook expired almost immediately. Fred collapsed onto the floor and fell into a deep asleep.
Later that day 458 B-29s returned to hammer the east-central section of Ōsaka. Planes from the 58th Wing carried 1,000-pound highexplosive bombs to knock out the Ōsaka Army Arsenal; 2,540 tons of bombs consumed another 2.21 square miles of the city and destroyed 55,333 buildings. The Ōhashi family home was one of them.
Conduct Under Fire Page 55