Belly of the Beast

by Judith L. Pearson

  It was dark and cold before the grueling procedure was complete. Through it all, Wada seemed to take great pleasure at the prisoners’ struggles, his sadistic smile never fading at their travails.

  Once again the POWs were impossibly forced into a single hold near the ship’s stern that was insufficient in size for their number. The hold was divided into bays fifteen feet long by ten feet deep, previously used to transport cargo. The commanding officers still possessing any strength arranged the POWs into twenty-man groups. Each group could decide on one of two body positions: they could sit with their legs extended, or lie with their knees drawn up. Standing fully or lying down flat were not options, and everyone in the group had to assume the same position.

  The wounded were arranged in the only open space available in the hold, the hatch cover leading to another hold below. Having the patients concentrated in a single area would make it easier for the medical corps to care for them.

  Under a blanket of darkness on January 13, the ship slipped out of the Takao Harbor.

  On the day that Myers and the others were beginning the next leg of their blighted odyssey to the Home Islands, Hirohito had been Japan’s Emperor for eighteen years. The Japanese people had never heard his voice, nor could they print or utter his name. No one was allowed to look at him and all heads had to be bowed if he passed. The Emperor rode a white horse, therefore no one else in Japan could own one. It was also forbidden to look down upon the Emperor, so no buildings taller than the palace could be built in its vicinity.

  The traditions that fostered the Emperor’s existence were completely alien to Americans. Even a basic understanding of them might have shed light as to why Wada and Toshino, Homma and Yamashita, in fact most of the men in the Japanese military behaved as they did during the war.

  The Japanese Emperors were direct descendants of Emperor Jimmu, who founded Japan in 660 B.C. They were the inheritors of the divine command known as Hakko Ichiu, the bringing together of the eight corners of the world. The emperors were neither men nor gods. Rather, they were the country’s spiritual institution, the center of its energy, loyalty, and morality. The Emperors were the physical incarnation of the state. They were Japan.

  When Hirohito became Emperor in 1926 at the age of twenty-five, his character was unusual for a Japanese Emperor. The bespectacled, diminutive man played tennis and golf, although he was indifferent to both. He studied marine biology and wrote poetry. Most important, he was bored by foreign policies and army maneuvers.

  Hirohito, consequently, adopted a mythological status, choosing not to be involved in his government’s actions or decisions. With no one at the helm of the country’s foreign policy, an oligarchy developed, the power vested in two dominant forces.

  One faction, a small, select group of successful industrialists, sought to make certain that Japan was run in a manner that would be most advantageous to their bank accounts. The other faction, a band of top-ranking generals and admirals, strove to maintain Japan’s military supremacy at home and abroad.

  The two groups’ goals always conflicted, but their motivations were startlingly similar. Both were self-serving, and based their decisions on greed for wealth and power. They vied for control of Japan, yet they were forced to cooperate. The wealthy industrialists knew they did not possess the skills to oversee an army; the military powers reluctantly realized they could not run the factories. And the one who could have been the deciding factor in all issues, the Emperor himself, deliberately absented himself from any decision-making.

  The two power-hungry groups cleverly used the Emperor’s absence to their respective advantages by inventing the Kodo-Ha, the “Way of the Emperor.” The Kodo-Ha was used as the reason behind all Japanese government actions. It made the Emperor responsible for all decisions, although he wasn’t involved in any of them.

  The Kodo-Ha developed long before the war had escalated to its ultimate global proportions. In the early 1930s, the Japanese military strongly opposed a disarmament treaty. The industrialists realized open armament would risk alienating their important foreign trading partners. So to thwart the military, the industrialists invoked the Kodo-Ha, asserting that it was the Emperor who supported the disarmament.

  In a like manner during the late thirties and early forties, when the Japanese military wanted to join the Rome-Berlin Axis, withdraw Japan from the League of Nations, and declare war on the United States, they employed the Kodo-Ha. The military assured the members of the Japanese government that these actions were the Emperor’s wishes. The name of the Emperor was sacred in Japan. It was the name, not the man, that carried the weight.

  By the time Japan was fully immersed in World War II, the industrialists’ power had evaporated, leaving the military in total control. It was convenient for the military to continue the charade of the Kodo-Ha throughout the war. In doing so, they never had to be accountable for their actions. The decisions made by every one of them, from top generals to the lowliest prison guards, were always attributed to the Kodo-Ha, the will of the Emperor.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Death Hatch

  The Brazil Maru joined with a convoy of ancillary vessels at about 2200 hours on January 13 and headed out across the East China Sea. For the POWs in her hold, there was little difference between the nightmares of sleep and those of the waking hours. But one thing Myers knew for sure as he drifted in and out on that first night out of Formosa: he was more determined than ever to survive. He may have suffered to the limit of his endurance, but he told himself that to give in to death now meant that all his suffering would have been for naught.

  As medical personnel moved among their patients, their attempts at comfort were mostly psychological. Caring for physical ailments was not possible; instead, the doctors and corpsmen aspired to give hope to the sick by pointing out that since they were aboard a ship at sea, they were considerably safer than when they had been a motionless target in the harbor. In addition to that scrap of bright news, Myers attempted to encourage all the POWs, patients and not, by telling them that this was certainly the last leg of their journey, and that there would be very little more they would have to endure. He wasn’t certain if it made any difference to his fellow prisoners, but each time he said it, he believed it a little bit more himself.

  In reality, this was to be the worst trial these men would face. Because of the lack of sanitation, all of the men, including Myers and Tarpy, were stricken with dysentery or some other form of diarrhea. The prisoners were allowed to empty the scant number of benjo buckets only when the Japanese would authorize it. This authorization had no relation whatsoever to when the buckets became full. They overflowed and the feces were walked through and further spread as the ship churned through the waves.

  The cruelest irony was that the prisoners were surrounded by water and still forcibly dehydrated. When the ship left Formosa, her water tanks had been filled to the brim, but the first two days out of Takao, the prisoners received nothing to drink. Neither would the Japanese give them seawater with which to clean themselves and their mess utensils.

  The air temperature dropped rapidly as the ship made her way northward. The hatch cover had to be kept open if the prisoners wanted any fresh air, plus it was their only source of light. But this meant they left themselves exposed to the elements—the frigid winds, freezing rains, and driving snow. The problem of the elements was made worse by a ventilator located in the hold, which caused a powerful draft of cold air to blow over the scarcely clad, trembling Americans. The POWs begged Wada to allow them to stuff the ventilator with one of their straw sleeping mats, but the answer was always the same: “No need.”

  The wind and cold temperatures brought with them a new enemy to the men’s already weakened immune systems: pneumonia. A prisoner who contracted the disease, as many did almost immediately in their immobile state, could drag himself to where the draft was strongest and bring his suffering to a permanent conclusion. Before long, the pris
oners began calling the cold the “Wind of Death.”

  After a day on the Brazil Maru, Tarpy mumbled weakly to Myers, “Bastards! What the hell is the point? Isn’t it bad enough that they’ve beaten us, shot us, tortured, and suffocated us? Now they’re trying to kill us from thirst and exposure? Makes no sense.”

  “Give up on making sense of this,” Myers told him. “Just keep thinking about surviving.”

  Everything in the hold, the floor, the walls, the sleeping bays, was constructed of steel, which immediately became as frigid as the air. There were some straw mats available to use for protection from the cold steel, but there were only enough for about a third of the men. Groups of friends huddled together under a single mat, trying to fend off the frigid temperature settling over the hold.

  The seriously ill and wounded suffered the most from the radical drop in temperature. The plan to use the hatch cover as the hospital area seemed practical in Formosa, but once underway, the patients near it were exposed to the cold air and snow.

  Finally, on January 15, black, salty, unpalatable water was doled out to the POWs, one canteen cupful to be divided among eight men. Next came their ration of rice, one canteen cupful for every four men. The men received these allotments twice a day.

  In the face of the myriad of threats, it was soon obvious to most that only the strongest would live. By common consent, the commanding officers decided that since the medical staff was doing most of the physical work, their ration should be greater. The inequity was immediately distasteful to Myers, who argued the point with the officers. He was only convinced when it was pointed out to him that the medical staff needed to maintain as much strength as possible since they were responsible for more than just their own lives.

  The death rate rapidly escalated. The first day out, Myers counted fifty dead. In addition to the Americans still trying to keep track of their living, the Japanese were now also calling roll each day. The guards stood imperiously at the edge of the hatch, calling out with great difficulty the unfamiliar names. Their voices droned on for nearly two hours at a time.

  If an American didn’t answer to his name, Wada simply drew a line through it on his manifest, silently and without question. He was not interested in how, or even if, a man had actually died. He was concerned only with the total number. While the logical assumption would be that the fewer men there were to feed, the more food each man should receive, Wada stubbornly refused to make the adjustment. The galley still produced only enough rice for a quarter cupful per man.

  There was madness evident in this hold, too, as there had been aboard the Oryoku Maru. Some of the cases stemmed from the crowded conditions. The men were less violent than previously, but still made verbal threats of murder, the result of arguments over space, rations, or a ludicrous claim like whose mother made the best cakes. But no one had enough strength left to do bodily harm to anyone. Other cases of madness were the result of disease and deprivation, manifested in the men who were muttering incoherently, or lying quietly, their glazed eyes rolling, seeing nothing.

  The morning of January 16, Wada inadvertently sent down some good news into the hold. He announced to the prisoners that anyone caught stealing from this ship’s cargo would be severely beaten and then shot to death. He promised not to be as lenient with would-be thieves as he had been previously. This was good news. It meant that there was something on board that was worth stealing, and those who were able began an immediate search for it. It wasn’t long before the cache was discovered.

  “Hey, Myers,” one of the prisoners called later in the day. “There’s sugar in the hold below this one. You better get yourself some.”

  Although the offer sounded tempting, Myers wasn’t sure his system could take it. Pretty soon, though, he saw prisoners in every bay licking the unrefined sugar out of their grubby paws. Myers gave in to the temptation. He asked one of the guys who had originally found the stuff for a handful. That proved to be a foolish request. As he had feared, Myers’ body could not digest anything so rich as the sugar after having been deprived of food for so long and he had violent diarrhea for several hours.

  Tarpy took care of him, sharing his next ration of water to replenish some of the fluids Myers had lost. It was the closest brush with death Myers had had, but it also gave him an idea.

  Once he regained his strength, he sought out the prisoner who’d offered him the sugar the day before.

  “Hey, fella,” Myers said when he found the man, “that sugar in the hold below us, is it in bags?”

  The man told him it was.

  “Well, we sure could use the bags to keep some of these guys from freezing to death. Think you could haul a few of ’em up here?”

  Several intrepid POWs volunteered to go into the sugar hold with the first man. They returned hauling as many bags as they were able to. That started an entire lineup of men bringing up the bags of sugar, looking like a colony of ants that had just found a picnic to feast on. They dumped the sugar onto the floor of the hold and covered themselves up with the bags.

  The best element to this thievery was that no one feared retribution. Wada’s threat of death was not much of a deterrent, since the men figured they had been living with that threat since their capture. Furthermore, the prisoners knew this sugar theft would never be discovered. The sty in which they lived was so vile, the Japanese were afraid to descend into it for fear of catching their diseases.

  On January 18, after four days at sea, some of the corpsmen remarked that they hadn’t seen Lieutenant Toshino in quite some time. He was supposedly still the man in charge of this prisoner movement but had made himself scarce. Someone wondered out loud if he’d been the victim of an American shell. If not that, then perhaps he was sequestered in his quartets trying to figure out an adequate excuse to give his superiors for the dismal condition in which his cargo would arrive.

  The men were packed into every square inch of the hold, including the hatch in the center of the hold, which was always left open and was the coldest spot. The remaining commanding officers made the difficult decision that only the most seriously ill would have to endure it. It became their Zero Ward, but they called it the Death Hatch, the place where those who were beyond help were brought to die.

  The corpsmen and doctors continued their care of these hopeless cases, but the medical staff was barely clinging to existence themselves, and not immune to the effects of the cold and the wind. So they kept their vigil over their failing companions in shifts. They listened to feverish mumblings, held dirty, frail hands, and promised to get word to families back home. The last faces these dying men looked upon were those of the medical staff, and the enormity of that fact didn’t escape Myers. Never would he have dreamed that by following an innocent recommendation to join the hospital corps, he would be a witness to so much needless death, and be so powerless to prevent it.

  Each time Myers took his shift at the Death Hatch, it challenged his effort to maintain a positive attitude about his own future. Gradually, he reached the point where he felt he was beyond being able to withstand any more of the anguish and unanswerable queries that crowded his mind. There was a recurring challenge whose answer, Myers feared, would rock the very foundation of his faith: what, in the end, was God’s ultimate purpose in this war?

  Myers’ question to his Maker was far more profound than that of a simple patriot. He understood that the United States was waging war against Japan in the name of freedom. But why, day after miserable day, had he been chosen to continue dragging himself through this bondage while others slipped through his fingers into eternal sleep? And from the depths of that dung-laden hold, the largest imponderable of all was whether he was surviving because of the grace of God or a curse of Satan himself.

  On Saturday, January 20, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt celebrated his unprecedented fourth inauguration as President of the United States. In deference to the hardships the war had caused, he delivered his inaugural address without fanfar
e from the south portico of the White House.

  In the days and in the years that are to come, we shall work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war. We can and we will achieve such a peace. We shall strive for perfection. We shall not achieve it immediately—but we still shall strive. We may make mistakes—but they must never be mistakes which result from the faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.

  These strong words of conviction propelled the United States forward in the crusade to reestablish freedom in the Pacific Theater of the war. As the Japanese steadfastly refused to withdraw from the islands they had captured without bloody, protracted fights, it became apparent to American government and military officials alike that the only solution to end the fighting would be an invasion of Japan herself.

  So the Allies pulled more vigorously on the ever-tightening noose around Japan’s Home Islands. Japan’s defense was still keenly centered in the Philippines, primarily Luzon and Formosa, and these, along with the Home Islands themselves, became principal Allied targets. Huge carrier task forces commanded by Admiral Nimitz sailed closer and closer to Tokyo, while American B-29s rained fire and death upon Imperial troops and citizenry alike below.

  The B-29 had become the ultimate air weapon of war. It was capable of flying, fully loaded, for sixteen hours without stopping. Airdromes large enough to accommodate the Superfortresses were carved out of jungle on the islands that the Allies recaptured. Thirty-eight-year-old General Curtis LeMay, who had taken command of the XXI Bomber Command on January 19, led daylight, close-formation raids. These raids inflicted terrible damage, hitting the aircraft factories and harbors of mainland Japan. They hammered the main cities, one by one.