Laura realized her mistake and apologized immediately.
In January 1946 Gerald was discharged from the army, and Laura invited Murray to their new place at 230 East 32nd Street. A husband, a wife, and her ex-lover. Reality staring four years of yearning in the face. Murray was polite, but in the pauses between conversation, in the stolen looks and averted glances, he could only wonder why Laura had married Gerald instead of waiting for him. How could he not feel abashed for dreaming of a life that might have been? Didn’t she realize that the very idea of her had sustained him, that she was the girl about whom he had spoken with Fred, George, and John throughout their captivity? Of course not. And of course he would never tell her.
The couple had tickets for a concert later that evening, and as they parted, it struck Gerald that Murray had no place to go.
It was time to move on—and Murray did, without ever seeing Laura again.
Soon Fred was engaged to Camille Pascale, “a wonderful person,” he wrote Murray. “So now—it is up to you to do your stuff. 1st Jake—then me—now you?—After all—you are the youngest.”
If the war confirmed Fred’s intention of becoming a navy surgeon and clarified John’s decision to go into internal medicine with a sub-specialty in metabolic diseases—particularly diabetes—it had, perhaps, the most direct influence on the path taken by my father.
Shortly after his repatriation, he began psychoanalysis to cope with the problems of reintegration. Then he entered the field of psychiatry itself. An indifferent medical school student, he worked feverishly to make up for lost time. After completing a neurology residency at the New York Neurological Institute, part of the Columbia University College of Medicine, he attended the Menninger Foundation School of Psychiatry in Topeka, Kansas, as a fellow. There he met Louise Johns, a stunning young doctor whom he married in 1950.
His postwar career in neurological research was launched at New York State Psychiatric Institute, and he won a position as an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia. His research took off, and in a double promotion he leaped over an associate professorship to become a full professor. He used his training in neurology to specialize in behavioral physiology, with a focus on the neural mechanisms in the brain that trigger responses with which he was all too familiar: fear, anxiety, and aggression.
The effects of the war lingered. He agonized over his papers for publication. An eloquent correspondent, he found himself staring at a blank page in a typewriter when it came time to publicly present his work. He obsessed over grammar, syntax, and spelling as if, like a starving man hoarding a few grains of rice, he was afraid to let go of all that he had left: words. He was riven with self-doubt. Was it good enough? Did it express what he meant to say? Did he speak with the authority he once had, or could readers sense that it had been stolen from him? He feared that his inadequacy, the paucity of ideas, his lack of self-worth, would be exposed. He couldn’t write.
Like many POWs, he rarely revealed his wartime experiences to his family. Having created the world anew by having children, were he and his fellow ex-POWs trying, like so many parents, to preserve a halo of innocence around them? Or was burying the past simply the most effective way of dealing with painful memories? Contrary to the basic tenets of traditional analysis—the “talking cure,” as it was known in its early days—there is a growing body of research, including studies of Holocaust survivors by Hanna Kaminer and Peretz Lavie, that supports the idea of repression as a means of helping survivors “to seal off the atrocities that they experienced.”
“We wanted to get on with our lives,” explained John. “We didn’t want people to feel sorry for us simply because we had been prisoners of war. We wanted to make it on our own.”
Murray and John became the very best of friends, and they remained lifelong friends with Fred. Reunions among the three of them were infrequent, though they were always glad to see one another, always glad to be, simply, present. “A man who has succceeded in living a day without physical suffering should consider himself perfectly happy,” wrote the poet Czeslaw Milosz in Visions of San Francisco Bay, and they were—as much as they could be. Invariably their war stories were accompanied by laughter. Lazarus-like, it emerged from the recesses of the past. But if laughter, as Viktor Frankl remarked in Man’s Search for Meaning, is “one of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation,” it can also be exclusive, defensive, the language of secret sharers: a dam shoring up tears.
If he can never never forgive Japan for its treatment of POWs in the Pacific, he finds the actions of the U.S. government almost as enigmatic: failing to prosecute Hirohito as a war criminal; drafting and signing the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which waived “all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan”; and continuing to uphold the treaty in spite of the fact that Great Britain, the Isle of Man, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, and New Zealand all passed legislation to compensate former POWs themselves.
The treaty, the reasoning went, was an assurance that Japan would be a bulwark against Communist aggression in Korea and elsewhere. The U.S. used the same rationale to exonerate Class A war criminals and to commute the sentences of those convicted of war crimes. Peggy and Sterling Seagrave have suggested a darker motive: secretly drafted by John Foster Dulles, the treaty enabled Washington to protect several billion dollars of Japanese war booty seized in the form of “gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems . . . to create a covert political worldwide action fund.”
Undaunted, a group of American ex-POWs who were defenders of Bataan and Corregidor filed suit seeking remuneration from Japanese industrialists who had exploited them as slave laborers in World War II. In November 2003 the California Fourth Appellate District Court of Appeals ruled that “the 1951 treaty is express in not allowing the claims of the plaintiffs.” In spite of its ruling, the court acknowledged that “this does not in any way diminish the heroism of these plaintiffs.”
But of course it does when you consider that in 1948 the U.S. government gave ex-POWs a paltry $1 for every day they were deprived of adequate rations and added another $1.50 per diem allowance in 1950 as reparations for forced labor and inhumane treatment. Fifty years after the war, by contrast, every Japanese-American interned in the United States—an egregious violation of civil liberties, to be sure—was awarded $20,000, even if interned for only a day. In 2001, Britain finally reached into its own coffers to pay former prisoners of the Japanese £10,000 apiece. Shortly afterward, the U.S. government handed over the back pay it owed ex-POWs for their promotions in captivity. By then, many veterans had died, which spared them the indignity of being compensated in wartime dollars, though their widows and families were not.
It is the principle, not a desire for profit, that chafes at my father. Of course cash settlements cannot compensate for suffering and loss, but they do constitute an admission of guilt and a token attempt at historical restitution. According to the late Iris Chang, Japan has forked over less than 1 percent of the war reparations paid by Germany, which recently awarded $401 million—roughly $3,000 per person—to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who worked as slave laborers under the Third Reich. Sixty years after the end of World War II, the thinning ranks of American ex-POWs have received neither compensation for their slave labor under the Rising Sun nor an apology from Japan.
My father has never used his POW experience as a marker or signifier in his own life. He would describe himself neither as a survivor, nor as a victim, nor as a veteran. His perspective is informed by a Kafkaesque sense of the absurd, a learned distrust of authority and a distinct distaste for the pomp and circumstance that attend it. Which is not to say that he is free of residual anger.
While John resisted speaking Japanese as a POW, he taught his children how to count from one to ten, how to say please, thank you, and you’re welcome. My father had no qualms about using the language of the conqueror, but I never heard him utter a word of it u
ntil we were in Tōkyō’s Narita Airport en route to the Philippines in 2001. It was his first trip to Japan since the end of the war. He purchased a fifth of duty-free Stolichnaya, twisted off the cap, and took a long swig of warm vodka as we waited for our connecting flight. An eighty-six-year-old man chugging booze out of a brown paper bag. A man, I might add, who was never a heavy drinker.
Once in Tōkyō, he tried to adjust his wartime memory of the city to the cosmopolis it has become. Our suite at the Imperial Hotel was elegant, the service solicitous. When I informed the general manager’s assistant that my father was an ex-POW who had last stayed in the Imperial Hotel in August 1945, he paused, shook his head, and said, “War is very, very bad.” I don’t think my father believed he was sincere. A part of him would have been just as happy, he admitted, to see Tōkyō razed to the ground.
He is convinced that dropping the atomic bomb was the most expedient way of ending the war in the Pacific, that it saved lives, American and Japanese. I am convinced that had the war not ended when it did, Fred Berley, John Bookman, my father, and thousands of other Allied POWs as well as Asian noncombatants would not have survived.
“My God, what have we done?” wrote airplane commander Captain Robert A. Lewis in his log as the Enola Gay circled the mushroom cloud that blossomed up from Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. What had we done, indeed.
I cannot find any moral justification for bombing a civilian population, any more than I can justify an artillery assault against a hospital or a submarine attack against an enemy transport carrying prisoners of war. But morality, of course, is the first casualty of war. German U-boats targeted British merchant shipping in World War I. Japan bombed China’s cities in the second Sino-Japanese War. The Condor Legion of the German Luftwaffe, under the command of General Francisco Franco, destroyed 70 percent of the Basque town of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. Germany’s blitz of Britain’s cities, from London to Liverpool, resulted in 40,000 civilian deaths in World War II. The RAF retaliated with night raids on German cities, the handiwork, screamed the Nazi press, of Churchill’s “criminal clique.”
Before World War II, the U.S. castigated Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull denounced “the use of incendiary bombs which inevitably and ruthlessly jeopardize non-military persons and property.” America changed course with a vengeance. The firebombing of Japanese cities was quickly branded “slaughter bombing” by Japanese Radio. According to Martin Caidin, in the six months of American firebombing beginning with the March 9, 1945, raid on Tōkyō, Japanese “civilian casualties were more than twice as great as total Japanese military casualties in forty-five months of war.” It was brutal, unethical, and immoral, but it also “clinched victory and almost certainly shortened the war in the Far East,” concluded historian Richard Overy.
The war ended the Japanese Empire and “precipitated everywhere the downfall of western power in Asia,” remarked Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint. But the atomic bomb also sealed humanity’s fate. To wish that it hadn’t been dropped is to wish that my father hadn’t lived.
I am not so much a baby boomer as a child of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Between 34 and 37 percent of American POWs of the Japanese died in captivity. The mortality rate for German POWs of the Russians was 45 percent, while that of Russian POWs captured by the Germans soared to 60 percent.
By contrast, the mortality rate for American POWs in the Mediterranean and European theaters was less than 1 percent. Historians have long used the high mortality rate of American POWs in the Pacific to emphasize the barbarity of the Japanese. But the picture changes when you take into account the fact that 93 percent of Allied POW deaths at sea in the Pacific theater were not due to ill treatment at the hands of the Japanese but were rather a “direct result,” according to Gregory F. Michno, “of Allied bullets, bombs, or torpedoes.” A staggering 19,000 POW deaths were caused by friendly fire, nearly a third of the total number of American casualties during the Vietnam War.
Those who survived were more than twice as likely to die in their first two years of freedom as World War II veterans who did not experience incarceration. Three and a half years in a Japanese prison camp, it has been estimated, aged a man by ten to fifteen years, though the Veterans Administration was painfully slow to recognize prison camp-related disabilities, whether physical or psychological.
The scars of the survivors bear witness. Otis King, the 4th Marine who swam from Bataan to Corregidor, still suffers from edema. He wears a size fourteen shoe to accommodate his size eleven feet when they swell up in the morning. His legs balloon, and you can press your fingers into his calves, leaving deep indentations as if his flesh were putty. His buddy Ted Williams lost his eyesight to xerophthalmia and corneal ulcers. Fiery John Kidd, Admiral Hart’s assistant in Manila, experienced a lifetime of medical complications following the abdominal sympathectomy that he was forced to undergo without anesthesia at Ichioka. Leatherneck James Fraser walks on two feet without toes, having amputated them after he developed gangrene while trying to relieve the symptoms of “burning feet” by burying them in the snow. On the back of Mike Christle’s head you can feel the deep indentation from where he was beaten with a shovel for cheering on American B-29s as they flew over Notogawa POW Camp. The hands of his pal, Everett Reamer, are gnarled from holding buckets of sand in front of him for days on end without food and water at Ōsaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp.
One study found that as many as 78 percent of former POWs of Japan still showed signs of peripheral neuropathy twenty to thirty-five years after the war. Then there are the psychiatric problems that have dogged ex-POWs, who were prone to elevated rates of suicide, accidental death, and hospitalization for psychoneuroses. John Nardini, who later became head of the Neuropsychiatric Branch of the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, was so bottled up with anger after the Japanese surrender that he contemplated killing a Japanese guard or staff member—any Japanese would do—until he weighed the practical consequences. According to one VA study conducted between 1968 and 1981, 82 percent of Pacific POWs experienced some kind of psychiatric impairment. Depression was three to five times that of the general population. Another study found that, forty years after the war, 70 percent of POW survivors “fulfilled the criteria for a current diagnosis of PTSD and 78% for a liftime diagnosis compared to 18% and 29% respectively, of combat veterans” of the Pacific theater. Not only do the psychiatric disorders persist among ex-POWs, but according to a third study, they have shown a marked increase in the last two decades, after peaking in the immediate postwar years and reaching an all-time low in the 1970s. In many cases their resurgence coincided with retirement, a time to reflect, reassess, and revisit the wartime years.
I speak with these men, who allow me into their fraternity as the son of a former POW. In their seventies, eighties, and nineties, they take me, a stranger, into their confidence at the veterans’ conventions where we meet, in the elevators, in the hallways, in their hotel bedrooms. They tell me they don’t know why they are telling me the things they do: humorous tales, episodes of bravery, brutality, humiliation, and perseverance. Their eyes well up with tears; their memories rouse them to anger. They tell me of nightmares that have suddenly come back after being in abeyance for years. They are surprised that anyone cares.
John Bookman always struck me as the most mild-mannered of men: soft-spoken, even-keeled, someone who would immediately win your trust as a physician. After the war he embarked on an illustrious career in medicine as an internist and then went on to become chief of the Diabetes Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital. The war, he maintained, had no lasting effect on him. It was a part of his life that was over. But the suffering he witnessed and the Japanese indifference to it continued to affect him. He confided to me in the very apartment he came home to in the fall of 1945: “Every once in a while I have a Japanese patient, and when I examine her throat, the thought goes through my mind of choking her.” S
ix months before John died suddenly in 1986 at the age of seventy-six, he began experiencing the symptoms of “burning feet.” The imprint of the past would never be erased.
Of the three surviving POW doctors, Fred Berley was the most willing to forgive the Japanese. A navy surgeon who retired as a rear admiral, he approached his life and work with military vigor. In December 1946 he sent a Christmas card to Ōhashi in which he spoke of his desire to visit the doctor in Wakayama, where Ōhashi had established a new practice. Ōhashi wrote back expressing “a heavy heart with penitence and thanks.” Fred would eventually visit Japan, entertain Japanese guests in his home, and even play host to Japanese foreign exchange students.
He would forgive, but he would never forget what he believed was the uniqueness of Japanese cruelty. “I wish we were fighting against Germans,” John Hersey quoted a marine on Guadalcanal as saying. “They are human beings, like us. . . . But the Japanese are like animals.” Indeed, Japan’s language, culture, and political heritage, even its conception of time, tied to the emperor’s reign, are unique. In the context of its history, Japan’s fifteen years of war were unique. But Japanese cruelty, I would argue, was not.
The Germans slaughtered 6 million Jews and 20 million Russians in World War II. From 1931 to 1945 the Japanese were responsible for 17,222,500 deaths, according to historian Robert Newman, many of whom were ethnic Chinese. The systematic ruthlessness forged by a modern military ethos that bent political and civilian life to its will was unique in the history of Japan. But in the larger context of the twentieth century, whose catalog of horrors began with the Philippine-American War and ended in Kosovo, a century that witnessed gruesome trench warfare in World War I, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden and Tōkyō, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the extermination of 1.65 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge, the Iraq-Iran war, the extermination in Rwanda of 800,000 Tutsis by the Hutu majority, the extermination of 7,000 Muslims in Srebenica by Bosnian Serbs, civil wars in Angola, Algeria, the Congo, Sudan, and Sierra Leone, a century in which 100 million people died in wars, was Japanese cruelty unique? It was unique insofar as there were standing orders to Japanese soldiers to take no captives, and insofar as cruelty to civilians and noncombatants, if not explicitly sanctioned by the state as in Nazi Germany, was tacitly approved by Hirohito’s failure to uphold the imperial rescripts of his father and grandfather that respected international law and the rights of prisoners of war.
Conduct Under Fire Page 63