Belly of the Beast

by Judith L. Pearson

  The Imperial commander-in-chief of the Philippine operations, General Yamashita, determined that to defend Japan he must defend Luzon. He had carefully studied the mistakes made by the Allies when Japan invaded the Philippines three years earlier. Troops and supplies spread too thinly were not wise. Yamashita chose to divide his mote than two hundred fifty thousand forces between three mountain strongholds on Luzon.

  The most important stronghold was located north-northeast of Lingayen Gulf. From his headquarters in the town of Baguio, Yamashita would command these one hundred fifty-two thousand men himself. His second concentration would defend southern Luzon from the hills east and northeast of Manila. The eighty thousand men encamped here would be led by Lieutenant General Shizuo Yokoyama.

  Yamashita’s third force was in the Zambales Mountains, west of the Central Plains. From a network of air bases, including Clark Field, Major General Rikichi Tsukada would command thirty thousand men. Yamashita felt confident that his defense plans were sound and dug in with the purpose of exacting the maximum number of casualties possible on the Allies.

  For the retaking of Luzon, MacArthur had chosen Lieutenant General Walter Krueger and his 6th Army, along with Nimitz’s 7th Fleet. The forces would begin with the landings at Lingayen Gulf in nearly the same spots that the Japanese had landed in December 1941. The Allied landings began on January 9, 1945. Two corps, containing four assault divisions, landed side by side on twelve separate beaches. As Yamashita had no intention of sending troops to defend the beaches from his mountain strongholds, the landings went virtually unopposed.

  By noon on landing day, an infantry regiment was six miles inland and another had pushed through the town of Lingayen. By evening, the Allies had sixty-eight thousand troops ashore and a beachhead on the gulf twenty miles wide and nearly four miles deep. Over the next two days, the Allied troops moved cautiously farther inland. MacArthur and Krueger’s plan for retaking Luzon was complicated, calling for strategies and counterstrategies.

  Yamashita’s men had been progressively weakened throughout the month of January by continuous Allied bombardment and frequent attacks by the Filipino guerrilla forces that now infested Luzon. These, combined with the sophisticated American offensive, proved too much for Yamashita’s forces and the Imperial defense of Luzon soon began to crack.

  This weakening was exactly what MacArthur and Krueger had hoped for. The race toward Manila was on, with one clear goal in mind: to liberate the Allied prisoners of war they knew were somewhere in the city.

  To Myers and the other men in the hold of the Brazil Maru, their imprisonment in Manila felt like an experience that had occurred in another lifetime. They were absorbed only with their survival in the present. That meant, among other things, the constant effort to keep from freezing to death. The barely surviving POWs eyed the clothing of those on the Death Hatch like vultures observing prey in the desert. The addition of more clothes of any kind would surely help assuage their cold. They wanted to be close at hand when death finally and inevitably came, and the scraps of cloths would be redistributed to new owners.

  In a feckless attempt at the equitable division of the clothing, the prisoners selected a committee whose job it was to remove the clothing from the corpses and redistribute it in accordance with the survivors’ need. But oftentimes men died during the night and some of the mote clever prisoners were able to get the best clothing before the committee even realized they had a new corpse to contend with.

  A notable discovery was made on January 21. One of the men found a few life vests hidden in a corner that had been overlooked by the Japanese when they made a final search of the hold before the prisoners were loaded. The POWs tore the vests open and pulled out the contents, stuffing it into the arms and legs of their shirts and pants, if they still had them. Their appearance was instantly transformed from raw-boned and grimy men to fat, dingy teddy beats.

  One of the overstuffed prisoners, scratching ferociously, dragged himself over to Myers as he sat next to a dying man on the Death Hatch.

  “Hey, Doc, I itch all over,” he complained in a raspy voice. “What the hell’s wrong with me now?”

  Myers surveyed the stuffing protruding from the man’s pant legs. “Those life vests, who knows how long they’ve been down here,” Myers told him. “They’re probably full of lice or some kind of critters.”

  The man pulled up a pant leg and squinted at his dirty shin in the dim light coming from the open hatch. After a couple of minutes he looked back at Myers and said, “Good diagnosis, Doc.” He got up and stumbled away, still scratching, and cursing the lice, the life vests, and, most of all, the Japanese. Before long, several other men who’d stuffed their clothes with the filling were doing the same.

  The prisoners were now perishing at the rate of between twenty and thirty a day. Wada had permitted a burial detail to be formed and allowed the detail to perform the odious task of burying the dead at sea on a daily basis. Each time the detail returned to the hold, it was with a new tidbit of information.

  The first news flash, which had come in three days after they’d been out of Takao Harbor, was that the Brazil Maru was traveling in a submarine zone. The burial crew had noticed that they were now towing a crippled ship, probably victim of a torpedo. They continued towing it for a day, which further hampered their already slothful progress. Just as the disabled craft was picked up by a smaller, more nimble ship sent to haul it in, the Brazil Maru was ordered to turn back toward the direction she had just come for yet another vessel in distress. This one was towed for two days. The backtracking and slow speed levied a heavy price on the prisoners: the longer they were at sea, the higher the death toll would climb. It reached forty dead men on January 21 alone.

  The second fact that the burial detail discerned was that the ship’s course did not appear to be set straight across open sea for Japan. Rather, the men said, they were cruising by a series of ugly, barren islands, surrounded by nasty yellow mud.

  Two naval officers guessed they were hugging the Chinese coastline. Myers overheard them and weighed in with his opinion.

  “I’ll bet we’re near the mouth of the Yangtze or Whangpoo Rivers. I was stationed in Shanghai back in forty-one.” Myers shook his head. “The ugliest, stinkingest rivers God ever made are in Shanghai.”

  “I saw that shit out there,” another prisoner said. “All this time I thought dying was the worst thing that could happen to me. It ain’t. The worst thing is dying here and being tossed into that Chinese muck for all eternity.”

  Each time an officer or doctor got the chance, he pled with Wada to increase the prisoners’ food and water rations, which Wada flatly refused to do. He informed them that there wasn’t any more of either available. But while the Japanese had no water, food, or cigarettes to give the prisoners, they had plenty to sell. The transactions took place through the open gratings, the same ones responsible for the Wind of Death that blew through the hold. After three years in captivity, the Americans had very few possessions left. Most of them had held onto whatever it was they treasured the most, a wedding ring or West Point ring.

  These items the Japanese couldn’t resist. A thick, heavy, solid gold wedding ring bought five canteens full of water. The military rings were a poor second to the wedding rings, initially bringing in four cigarettes, and later, as the market became glutted, only two. A lieutenant from Albuquerque had guarded a heavy Navajo turquoise ring through all his trials. By this stage, though, he gladly traded it for two straw mats to save his own life and that of another officer.

  A pair of the prisoners’ shoes was good for two cans of tomatoes or salmon, or a handful of tangerines. The prisoners were most in need of heavier clothing, since anything they had was inadequate to fend off the fierce Manchurian wind blowing through the hold. Clothing, however, was never a commodity the Japanese had enough of to trade.

  Most of the time, the men huddled as far back in the hold’s putrid corners as possible. They didn
’t move, they didn’t speak. Those who were still in possession of their faculties remained still to conserve as much energy as they could. The others were no longer capable of anything but staring dully into the void around them. The only consistent sound was that of raspy coughs from parched throats.

  The morning of January 23, a lieutenant colonel caught the attention of a Japanese guard staring down into the sorry pit of humanity. The American knew the guard could understand a little English.

  “Listen,” the lieutenant colonel implored, “can’t you get us some water? If these men don’t get water, they’ll all die!”

  The guard sneered back, “Everybody potal, dead—okay, okay.” He dismissed the American with a wave of his rifle and the officer sank back down to his straw mat in dejection.

  Each morning, as the Brazil Maru journeyed on while trying to hide from prowling submarines, POWs who had seemed fairly hardy the day before would be found dead in their bays. It soon became so commonplace that the corpsmen made rounds every day, shouting to bay leaders, “Roll out your dead.”

  One bay, which had been the home to some of the strongest prisoners in the early stages of this part of the voyage, had lost a third of its men. In other bays, the counts were much worse. Often the corpses would already be stripped naked, leaving nothing for the clothing committee to do but shake their heads.

  The remaining few chaplains gathered the men together each night to pray before the evening rations arrived. They prayed for strength over their fear of death. Myers couldn’t imagine his own death; it didn’t seem feasible to him to die after being in captivity for so long. Yet he and some others had developed a rather callous attitude toward it. If you made it, you made it. If not, you died. That was all there was to it.

  One chaplain consistently gave away his rations of food and water to the sick, telling the protesting corpsmen that he felt fine and would keep his next ration. But he would give the next one away, too, making the same promise until finally, after praying with the men on January 24, his weakened body gave out.

  Other brief glimpses of human decency occurred amid the rancor and despair. Two brothers were among the POWs. After one passed away on the Death Hatch, the corpsmen prepared to haul his body over to the stack where the dead were kept before being hauled up on deck for disposal.

  “Handle this one with care,” Myers whispered to the others. “His brother’s watching from the upper bay.”

  The surviving man stood feebly over his brother, his matted head bent in mourning as he climbed slowly back into his bay. A brief time later, he, too, died.

  For the prisoners who had enough remaining strength, the search for water became an all-consuming task. Sometimes, if the snow fell heavily enough and the ship slowed a little, the tiny, pristine flakes fluttered through the hatch and into the hold. Prisoners struggled to their feet, clutching their mess kits, or whatever fouled containers they possessed, and waved them in the air to catch what ice or snow they could. If they had no container, they held up a shred of cloth and licked and sucked on it when it had been dampened enough by the snow. Those who had no possessions at all turned their filthy faces skyward and tried to catch the flakes on their tongues like little children.

  Dead bodies that created obstacles for the men in their quest for the snow were tugged out of the way to clear a path. Invariably, the corpses would then block the paths of other men, who would move them again. Frequently the bodies would have been dragged back and forth under the open hatch several times before the corpsmen could stack them with the others.

  The concentration of snow and ice was greatest up on deck. Those who volunteered to empty benjo buckets would furtively scoop up handfuls of snow from the ship’s deck and shove it into their mouths on their way back to the hold. This only helped a few men, since no more than six were allowed on deck at a time. Others had discovered a steam winch that stood on the deck near the hatch. One of the pipes dripped and a clever man could capture anywhere from a few spoonfuls to an entire flaskful of water.

  Getting to the steam winch also required getting permission from the guards to come on deck. Some of the men asked to relieve themselves over the side, while others were able to convince the Japanese they were toxan bioki, very sick. Both groups positioned themselves so that the winch was between them and the guard, and while pretending to urinate or vomit would capture as much of the dripping liquid as they could.

  On January 25, the POWs had been at sea on this leg of the journey for twelve days. Wada proclaimed that he would allow the men one bucket of seawater per day for the POWs to clean themselves and the hold in which they lived. The prisoners begged him to reconsider, telling him that was not nearly enough to make the remaining five hundred or so clean. Washing mess kits and canteen cups was out of the question. What a senseless, tyrannical rule to deny them additional seawater, especially when their number was dwindling. After all, they were afloat on the world’s largest ocean.

  The prisoners thought that if they took their case to Toshino, he might rule in their favor. They asked Wada for him and the interpreter refused. They shouted loudly for Toshino and Wada came to the edge of the hatch.

  “If you do that,” he screeched down at them, “I get guards and order them to shoot into the holds.”

  This threat, which once had carried some weight with it, was now without power over the prisoners. One of them yelled back, “To hell with you! We’re all going to die anyway, aren’t we?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  To Suffer and Die

  For the men clinging to their tenuous strand of life aboard the Brazil Maru, thirst was the greatest menace of all their ailments. Those who finally succumbed to it suffered horribly the last twenty-four hours of their lives.

  The thirst victims went completely out of their minds at the end. They stumbled over the other prisoners in the hold or tried to climb the ladder that led to the deck, where guards waited ready to cut them down with rifle blasts. The POWs appointed a stair guard to keep these men from wandering up on deck, but one day a prisoner managed to get up there without permission anyway. Before the guard could raise his rifle, the man threw himself over the side of the ship.

  In their thirst-driven madness, some men held one-sided conversations with friends who had died days earlier. Some discoursed with inanimate objects: the remains of a life vest, a canteen cup, or a benjo bucket. To watch a man in this condition was a particular hardship to the corpsmen still functioning in their hospital duties. Myers, Tarpy, and a handful of others from the original Canacao group worked ceaselessly to comfort and aid their fellow prisoners. But when yet another man slipped into the dark recesses of thirst-driven madness, the corpsmen all felt as though they weren’t working hard enough to save those around them. They redoubled their efforts, pulling long shifts on the Death Hatch throughout the night, working in total darkness, with patience and kindness. They were rewarded with very little sleep during the day because of their increased activities in the hold.

  The POWs who were crippled relied solely on the corpsmen for their base existence. They shifted bony, feeble bodies into less painful positions, although there was no position of actual comfort for these poor men. They carried the benjo buckets around to those in need, helping the dying men use them. The corpsmen listened to the incessant babbling of some, and answered all the questions and requests of others, even those which were impossible. An eternity ago, as freshly graduated hospital assistants, the corpsmen had made a solemn promise in their oath, saying, “I dedicate my heart, mind, and strength to the work before me.”

  The corpsmen may have questioned themselves and their God, as Myers did, asking what benefit would come of the sorrowful anguish around them. But they never complained that their job was too difficult, too strenuous, or too odious to perform. The closing line of the corpsman’s oath was the creed they lived by still: “I shall do all within my power to show in myself an example of all that is good and honorable throughout my n
aval career, so help me God.”

  One of the doctors squatted down next to Myers on the morning of January 28 and said, “Well, I figure we’ve lost more than a thousand men. Last count the bay leaders took came out to about five hundred.”

  Myers looked at those who remained. They looked more like feral beasts than men. Their four weeks’ growth of beard and their hair was matted with one another’s excrement; their skin was drawn tightly over their bones; their eyes were hollow and glassy.

  Myers couldn’t think of an appropriate response to the doctor’s comment but the doctor hadn’t waited for one, anyway. He had shaken his head and moved on.

  The men continued their quarreling, one of the most contentious disputes being how often to change positions in the bays. They were no longer interlocked in their bays because of crowding but for warmth. Still, they all had to turn over at the same time or none of them could. Some of them were wounded on their right side and didn’t want to put their now insignificant body weight on their wounds, while others didn’t want to lie on injuries on their left side. So the arguments continued.

  The thieving among some of the POWs had never ceased, even in their infirm conditions. Burglars, stronger than the rest because of their thefts, prowled the hold day and night. Some could sit down next to a sleeping man, open his canteen, and drink all the water in it without making a sound. Even the prisoners who tried to sleep with their fingers locked around their canteen’s plug weren’t immune. Every morning someone would sit up, yelling, “Where’s the dirty bastard who stole my water?”

  The stealing from the Japanese never ceased and they were now taking the coarse brown sugar from the hold below with great abandon. Those who ate measured amounts were able to digest it, but those who gobbled up handfuls at a time always paid for it as it made their chronic diarrhea worse.