Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  Maruyama means “a circle of mountains.” Also known as Kawasaki, the camp was established on December 8, 1942, to house Australian C Force POWs, who helped build an aircraft carrier at the Kawasaki shipyard. Unlike the wood shingle buildings that composed the Kōbe POW Hospital or the brick godowns of Kōbe House, Maruyama consisted of three barracks made from bamboo frame and mud, a guardhouse, a kitchen, and a hospital ward. The compound was surrounded by a twelve-foot board fence.

  There had been a shortage of water and food but no shortage of cruelty. The Japanese guards lived up to their nicknames: Dog Face, Black John, Ragged Ass, and Snake. The sole Negro POW in the camp was beaten continually, kept in the guardhouse, and eventually starved to death. As the food situation deteriorated throughout Japan, the POWs were fed “navy stew,” a concoction of rice, fish, fish bones, matchboxes, and cigarette butts. Two POWs who had been caught stealing food were strung up by their thumbs from a tree until their feet barely touched the ground; then they were thrashed by the guards in front of the entire camp. The punishment stopped only when the men lost consciousness.

  Retribution came from another direction on June 15, 1945, when 444 B-29s dropped 3,157 tons of bombs over Osaka and Amagasaki, destroying 1.9 square miles of the former and 0.59 mile of the latter. After three months of bombing raids, 53 percent of Ōsaka—a city the size of Chicago—was wiped out. Two million residents were forced to flee to the countryside. Phase 1 of the urban area program of the XXI Bomber Command was complete. Japan’s six most important industrial cities had been burned to the ground. In Phase 2 the Superforts turned their wrath on sixty of Japan’s smaller cities, with populations ranging from 100,000 to 350,000. Sometimes they hit as many as four targets in one day.

  Ten more patients died as a result of the march from Kōbe to Maruyama. The death toll might have been worse had it not been for Ōhashi’s efforts. On June 17, 1945, the POW doctors wrote a letter of appreciation for his assistance under circumstances that beggared description:Dear Dr. Ohashi

  We, the medical officers of the Kobe Prisoner of War Hospital, acting on behalf of the staff and patients of the hospital, wish to offer our deep appreciation and gratitude to you and your staff for the very considerate and kind treatment accorded to us during the past two weeks during which time our hospital has come to such an unhappy end.

  Knowing full well of the extent of the disaster which the people of Kobe have experienced and the difficulties which have arisen as a result, we have nothing but praise and thanks for the sincere and untiring efforts which were made by the Nipponese Hospital and Medical Authorities to feed and house us, and to make the sick and injured comfortable.

  In our long years spent as Prisoners of War this experience has been one of the most tragic, but its discomforts and hardships have to a very great extent been alleviated by the care which has been given to us.

  We therefore hope sincerely for the personal safety and welfare of yourself and your staff and that the future will bring about an early end to this state of danger and anxiety.

  We remain, Dr. Ohashi,

  Yours sincerely,

  John A. Page, Surg. Lieut. Cmdr, R.N.

  Stanley W. Smith, Lt. (DC) U.S.N.

  Ferdinand V. Berley, Lt. (MC), U.S.N.

  Louis Indorf, R.M.O.II., Dutch Army.

  M. Glusman, Lt. (jg) MC, U.S.N.R.

  J. Bookman, Lt. (jg), MC, U.S.N.R.

  E.M. Gonie, R.M.O. II, Dutch Army.

  That same day Imperial General Headquarters issued a statement that read, “The day is near when the 100,000,000 people as one man will be in active resistance to the enemy who does not allow any consideration of humanity and of cultural values to stand in the way of establishing a hegemony over the world.”

  The British and Australian POWs from Kōbe House stayed at Maruyama less than two weeks. On June 19 they were transferred to Wakinohama, a former primary school on the Kōbe-saka highway, in front of the Kawasaki Steel Rolling Mill and near the railway tracks that ran toward the docks. Flanked on one side by a tank factory with forty-eight chimneys and on the other by a gas works and railway viaduct, Wakinohama had survived the bombing of Kōbe unscathed. Thereafter the Kōbe POW Hospital staff and patients remained the sole inhabitants of Maruyama.

  The camp was plagued with problems. It was filthy, sewage flowed freely into an open pit, and the roofs leaked. There was a shortage of potable water, while an infestation of fleas made it impossible to get any rest at night. So the doctors hung their blankets on clotheslines and shook them out before using them. Instead of turning in on beds or bays, they slept on top of tables after placing the table legs in cans of water to deter the fleas. At least there weren’t any lice—fleas sucked the blood out of the pesky parasites before they could feed on human hosts.

  “We had no medicines, bandages, soap, mess gear—well, in fact we had nothing,” said Fred, whose notes on the June 5 air raid were written in the only ink at his disposal: methylene blue dye.

  But they knew from Bilibid, Cabanatuan, Tsumori, and Ichioka exactly what they had to do, and after two weeks the buildings had all been scrubbed down, the garbage was collected and burned, the sewage pit was covered, and a fly-catching campaign was under way. Rags were used as bandages, then washed and dried in the sun so they could be used again every three or four days. When the doctors discovered maggots inside wounds, they were at first repulsed and then amazed at how effective the creatures were at debriding, dissolving dead tissue, and stimulating healing. One British burn victim, Tom Taylor of the Royal Navy, later reported to Fred that his maggot-cleansed wound had left “just a few small scars here and there.” The larvae of blowflies, maggots were indefatigable, but once they began to nibble on raw flesh and nerve endings, it became “extremely uncomfortable for the poor patients,” noted Fred.

  By the summer of 1945 the average daily caloric intake for Japanese civilians had plummeted to 1,680. By then the government had reduced the staple food ration from 1,160 to 1,040 calories a day. Nearly a quarter of Japan’s urban population was afflicted with serious nutritional deficiencies.

  In contrast, POWs at Maruyama consumed roughly half the national average. Fred took to bending a pin into a hook to catch finger-sized fish from the camp pond, which he gave to the sick. There was little else the doctors could do to improve their lot. Without access to the black market, the money they had was useless. Food stocks were kept in reserve for the military. Civilians were told to supplement their meals with weeds—chickweed, mugwort, plantain, and thistle. Elsewhere in Japan children were literally starving to death.

  POWs received 70 grams of millet a day, a small bun and a half, and either a small squash or a portion from eight eggplants that were divided among 129 men. For an entire week, the daily intake at Maruyama hovered around 800 calories. At that rate the body begins to consume itself. In Western Europe during the winter of 1944-45, the diet had been even less, but it was comparatively rich in whole grain breads and vegetables. Undernourished since MacArthur officially implemented half rations in January 1942, the navy doctors estimated that they had six to eight weeks to live.

  “So many could only be described realistically,” said Stan Smith, “as healthy-looking cadavers.”

  Fred, whose weight had dropped from 150 to 110 pounds, was so exhausted that all he could do was make his sick calls in the morning, lie down and rest, make another round of sick calls in the afternoon, and rest again. Murray’s weight had plunged from 200 to 159 pounds. John went from 150 to less than 112 pounds. Akeroyd, who in good health was a robust 260 pounds, weighed less than 100, and Allen Beauchamp checked in at 85. A loss of 25 to 30 percent of original body weight constitutes severe semistarvation. Most human beings won’t survive weight losses exceeding 35 to 40 percent.

  Starvation lowers blood pressure, weakens the pulse, and causes a decrease in the basal metabolic rate. Desperate for sustenance, the body burns tissue for fuel. Your neck thins, your shoulders lose their padding. Fat around the but
tocks and abdomen melts away. Your waistline cinches. Ribs and vertebrae poke through a taut envelope of skin. Your bones actually grow thinner, and your skeleton may shrink. As your muscles atrophy—conspicuously on the upper arms and thighs—your vital organs and glands get smaller. The hair on your head turns coarse, but facial hair feels silky soft—babylike. Fingernails no longer grow as quickly as they used to, your face may discolor, and your urine might turn pale. Movement takes greater effort, muscles ache, and extremities can tingle with heat or cold. But while you have less energy, less strength, and less endurance, and you may suffer a loss in visual acuity, your brain remains unaffected until you lapse into unconsciousness.

  The POWs grew anxious, irritable, and depressed. They fought over rations and stole from one another. They bartered for morsels and debased themselves before their captors. Some gulped down their food. Others played with it or squirreled it away to make it last as long as possible. They no longer dreamed at night. They no longer fantasized. They lost their faith in God. All day long a queasy emptiness gnawed at their stomachs, though in the final stages of starvation, you experience no hunger at all.

  Some POWs were suspicious of one another, fearful and angry. They sniffed out food wherever they thought there might be something edible, convinced that others were getting more while they had less. Sometimes they were right.

  One day the Japanese quartermaster embarked on an eight-mile trek with two Americans, two Englishmen, and one Australian for a salvage detail at the former Kōbe POW Hospital. Their reward, said the quartermaster, would be a noontime meal. It was a lovely summer day, but hunger clutched at their stomachs. They grated on one another, knowing what a man would say before he even said it—or at least thinking they knew—and wishing he would shut up. But they always shared their tobacco.

  By the time they arrived at the old hospital at 1400, they still hadn’t eaten. With hope and hesitation in their voices, they asked the quartermaster when they would have their promised meal.

  He smiled, baring broken teeth, and said, “Ima,” meaning now. “Meshi, meshi,” he added, meaning food, or rice.

  “How much?” asked the corpsmen.

  “Takusan,” he replied, or plenty.

  The word, said Richard Bolster, “threw us into ecstasy.”

  The scene took on a luminous quality. Hope shone through the destruction around them. The evergreens on the slopes, the soft afternoon sky, the harbor shimmering in the distance. “A beautiful rosebush clung bravely to a trellis,” remarked Bolster, “both adjacent to a tree that had been scorched. I thought then how inseparable are life and death, but it was still a rosebush and still alive and therefore still beautiful.”

  The quartermaster led them to a rusty cauldron and a sack of rice. Almost simultaneously the five POWs burst into laughter. Suddenly everything seemed all right. Tensions relaxed, animosities were forgotten, and friendships were rekindled because there was food, and plenty of it for everyone. They cleaned the rice, set a fire, scoured the cauldron, and then watched the grains turn plump and soft in the boiling water until they were cooked to delectation.

  “Rice was life,” affirmed Bolster, “and we had takusan.” After a second bowlful, they saved the leftovers in a wooden bucket, placed it in a hand-held cart beside the burned hospital blankets they recovered, and began the journey back to Maruyama. They were halfway home by dusk when they stopped for a break. The quartermaster advised them not to eat in front of Japanese civilians. So much food was bound to raise questions when so many had so little. The moon was high by the time they climbed the last steep hill to Maruyama. A dog barked in the distance. Birds chirped in the pine trees. Said Bolster:

  I remember musing that somewhere, people walked arm in arm and found love and beauty in each other, things that we had all but forgotten. The camp seemed right for us. It was a dim dream that we had ever been free men. It was an even stranger fantasy that we would ever be free again, though we sensed that enough. . . .

  Right then we had had enough and still had enough rice. That was the important thing.

  But enough for some wasn’t enough for everyone. One day Fred, John, and Murray watched a cat crawl over a fence. A symbol of healing in ancient Egypt, a gastronomic delicacy in China, a beloved house pet in the West, it was something a hawk might swoop down on and devour if one were spotted unawares on a country road, something a coyote might kill, a dog might attack—certainly not what an American, even one mired in poverty, would consider consuming. But the doctors were far beyond any such consideration. They had no moral or ethical qualms, no shred of feline affection, no gustatory contempt. They saw one thing only: food.

  “You could see the same thought cross our faces at the same time,” John said. They trapped the cat, “expertly disemboweled it, as you would expect of doctors,” he added, and tossed it into a pot of water, which was brought to a boil on a hot plate wired by one of the POWs from Wake Island. They added a few greens, cooked it until tender, and ate it. Fred couldn’t stomach the broth, but meat was meat, even if, to Murray’s taste, it was “gamey as hell.”

  The guards at Maruyama had become more belligerent and were practicing their swordstrokes. This time Murray had the good sense not to join them. Fred had found four iron rods and told John, Murray, and Richard Bolster about them. They also located in the floor of a deserted building a tunnel that they believed ran outside the camp. An escape hatch, if they needed one. In fact, two POWs—Private Rodaway and

  Private Smith—had attempted escape from Maruyama in June. They were caught, tried, and sentenced to fifteen years in Osaka Military Prison. The navy doctors shared their secret with only a few other POWs. Fred assumed the Japanese would kill them all should the Americans invade Japan—if they hadn’t starved to death in the meantime. And the Americans were tantalizingly close to achieving that goal.

  Okinawa was the Normandy of the Pacific. Operation Iceberg succeeded in securing the island as a stepping-stone for the invasion of Kysh. American casualties were high; Japanese losses were catastrophic. General Ushijima’s ill-conceived counteroffensive of May 5 alone cost 5,000 Japanese lives. Native Okinawans searched desperately for cover as the two lines grew closer together. Mothers in hiding were told to hush their babies: the Americans, who rooted out the Japanese with flamethrowers in cave-to-cave fighting, would hear them. On May 31 Shura was captured, and on June 21 Ushijima issued his final order for the continuation of a guerrilla war. Then he committed suicide.

  Should the Americans capture Okinawa, “every man will be killed, flattened under bulldozers, every woman will be raped and re-raped,” heitai-san (friendly soldiers) warned students of the Okinawa First Girls’ High School who had been mobilized as nurses. Captain Akamatsu Yoshiji ordered the islanders to commit mass suicide. Thousands leaped to their deaths from Mabuni Cliff.

  In the Battle for Okinawa 7,830 Japanese planes were downed. The Thirty-second Army was decimated. The mighty Yamato, the world’s largest battleship, was sunk. As many as 110,000 to 150,000 civilian lives were lost, including 1,105 high school boys and 263 girls. An unprecedented 11,000 Japanese were eventually taken captive; 12,500 Americans were killed—more than the entire American contingent on Corregidor—among them Lieutenant General Simon Buckner, four days short of his objective of capturing the island. Celebrated war correspondent Ernie Pyle died in a hail of machine-gun fire during the fight for Ie-Shima. Some 49,000 Americans were wounded.

  “If Okinawa is lost,” Colonel Yahara heard Japanese officers say during the final stage of fighting, “Japan will certainly fall.” But Yahara himself believed there would be one last battle for the homeland.

  On July 26, 1945, the United States, Britain, and China delivered Japan an ultimatum that had been drawn up in Potsdam, Germany, over the preceding two weeks. The Potsdam Declaration was a thirteen-point proclamation that called for the elimination of “the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest”
; adherence to the Cairo Declaration of November 1943, confining Japanese sovereignty to the four main islands, Honsh, Hokkaidō, Kysh, Shikoku; the prosecution of Japanese war criminals; the removal by the Japanese government of any hindrance to democracy; and “the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces.” “The alternative for Japan,” the Potsdam Declaration concluded, “is prompt and utter destruction.”

  MacArthur was never consulted by the Allied leadership before the terms of the Potsdam Declaration were aired. Had his advice been solicited, he would have made his position clear: the Japanese people had to be reassured that the emperor would remain on the throne.

  The response of Japan’s Supreme War Leadership Council to the Potsdam Declaration was divided. Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori thought the terms were less severe than the Cairo Declaration, which demanded the “unconditional surrender of Japan.” That view was supported by Navy Minister Admiral Yonai and Prime Minister Suzuki. Through the “good offices” of the Soviet Union, they hoped to achieve an honorable peace. But General Anami Korechika, the army minister, General Umezu Yōshijirō, the army chief of staff, and Admiral Toyoda Soemu, navy chief of staff and a member of Umezu’s family clan, dissented. They were resolved to prosecute the war unless their terms were met: the Allies had to acknowledge the emperor’s inviolability; there could be only minimal occupation of Japan, from which Tōkyō was exempt; and Japan would disarm herself and try her own war criminals. At a July 29 press conference, Suzuki announced only, “We will simply mokusatsu it,” meaning “kill it with silence.” His ominous ambiguity was interpreted as a flat-out rejection of the Allied ultimatum.

  General Anami had expected the United States to invade the Japanese mainland as early as July, then revised his estimate to August 1945. The Imperial Japanese Army’s strategy was to amass a force twice the size of the enemy’s in the hopes of destroying two-thirds of the invaders at sea and on the beaches and the remaining one-third inland.