Among its many miscalculations in going to war with the West, Japan, a maritime nation, grossly underestimated the number of merchant ships it would need—ships to ferry troops and supplies to far-flung battlefields, ships to carry raw materials back to the homeland, ships to import enough food to feed Japan’s people. By the end of 1942, Allied aircraft and submarines plying the southwest Pacific had sunk more than a million tons of Japanese shipping, one-fifth of its already inadequate fleet, and by the beginning of 1944 the Japanese had lost at least another fifth.3
As these merchant losses mounted, the remaining ships were forced to carry more and more cargo, which included consignments of prisoners of war, thousands of men jammed and stuffed into the tiers, racks, platforms, and shelves belowdecks. Under normal conditions, steaming night and day, a Japanese merchant ship, turning an average of 13 knots, could make the 1,276 nautical miles between Manila and Moji, Japan’s main port of arrival for POWs, in fifteen days or less. But by the middle of 1944, harassed by Allied aircraft and roving submarine packs or slowed by aging boilers and engines, Japanese cargo ships frequently had to stop and hide or put into a friendly port for repairs, and a journey of fifteen days could easily turn into a month or more belowdecks.
THE CANADIAN INVENTOR sat at the dock for a day and a half, her two holds packed with American prisoners of war, then, on the morning of July 4, the ship finally set sail. Less than twenty-four hours later, she was back at anchor with boiler trouble, and she sat in Manila Bay awaiting repairs. The air temperature was near 90°, the humidity about 75 percent. The rainy season with its cooling overcast was late that year, so a bright sun beat down on the metal hull and deck.4
The ship’s holds were not ventilated, and during the day the Japanese refused to remove the hatch covers, lest some of their human cargo escape. After a few hours sitting in the sun, the holds became like bake ovens.
“This is damn near unbearable,” Ben Steele thought.
The men tried to settle down, but wherever they sat, squatted, or lay in the hold, either on the side tiers or on the bare deck in the middle of the hold, they were wedged arm to arm, belly to back. The press of men was so intense they started pouring sweat. Within an hour they were beginning to dehydrate, and by the afternoon they were clammy and lightheaded, the first symptoms of men failing from thirst.
Many worried they might faint and never wake, and that sense of doom left them anxious, panting. The faster they tried to breathe, the more their hearts raced, and it wasn’t long before they could feel their pulse pounding in their heads and chests. They needed air, they needed water, they needed to get out of that damn baking box.
That night, the Japanese finally peeled back the hatches and lowered buckets of water and rice. Not enough, of course. Never enough. (What was it the war minister had said? “There is no need to pamper the POWs.”) At sea, it seemed, their short rations would be shorter—a couple of handfuls of rice and less than a canteen of water (sixteen ounces) per man per day5
The first day a large number of men went without any food or drink at all. No one, no officer or senior sergeant, stepped forward to organize them, and the men standing directly under the hatch openings grabbed what they could while the sick and the weak and those crammed into the back reaches of the holds got nothing at all.
Here and there in the hold were five-gallon latrine buckets, which in the crowding and dark often got kicked over, spilling the contents on the men lying and sitting nearby. At some point after dark, the Japanese allowed groups of prisoners to come topside for a few moments of air, then it was back down into the stink and heat until the next night.
And so it went for eleven days, broiling in the airless hold, until the afternoon of July 16, when the Canadian Inventor, her boiler finally fixed, joined a small convoy of ships sailing out of Manila Bay.
Once under way, the Japanese removed the hatch covers, which allowed a bit of air to find its way down into the holds. The fresh air seemed to calm the men who were delirious and screaming and yelling. Someone stepped forward to organize the chow detail, and every man got a bite of food and a sip of water. Just enough to keep them starving and so thirsty they could think of little else.
Twenty-four hours out of port the seas became heavy and the ship ran into huge swells and squall-like winds, a Pacific typhoon. Still riding high in the water with a light cargo, the Canadian Inventor bobbed and tossed in the stormy seas, pitching and rolling so severely her yards and braces sometimes seemed to touch the surface of the water.
Ben Steele knew about bad weather, but he had never been through a storm at sea with swirling clouds, seventy-mile-an-hour winds, and torrents of rain. From his position in the forward hold just below the open hatch, he could see the tops of thirty-foot waves crashing across the deck, and when the ship pitched forward in a trough between giant swells, he thought, “The whole damn front end is going under the water,” and he was afraid.
Men thrown off their feet went flying across the hold, bouncing off one another and tumbling and rolling from bulkhead to bulkhead. Soon the hold was a tangle of limbs and bodies sliding around in pools of vomit and excreta from the latrine buckets. In all that sliding, Air Corps Private John Crago of Huntington, Indiana, noticed that the skin on his legs, buttocks, and lower back had been scraped raw, and he tried to wedge himself in a corner of the hold and grab a beam to steady himself against the storm.
At first the Japanese left the hatches open, and the men, thirsty and filthy, welcomed the sheets of rain coming into the open holds. Then the waves started sweeping the deck, the holds took on seawater, and the Japanese slammed the hatch covers shut, leaving the prisoners rolling in the reeking dark.
When the winds finally calmed and the waves flattened, the crew discovered more boiler trouble, and the Canadian Inventor left her small convoy and made for Formosa. The prisoners were allowed to rotate up on deck now for a breath of air or to use one of the five benjo (latrine seats the Japanese also called “birdcages”) that hung over the rail on ropes. A few days later, July 23, the Inventor tied up at the docks at Takao.
After twenty-one days in the holds, her bearded human cargo looked begrimed and smelled worse, and the Japanese ran them all up on deck and washed them down with fire hoses, then sprayed water into the holds and pumped the vile bilge into the harbor.
One day passed, two. The ship took on a large load of salt in its lower holds, then she just sat there day after day. At the end of the month she was still waiting for repairs. (Matte-Matte Maru, the men nicknamed the old bucket, “the Waiting-Waiting Ship.”) At last, on August 4, twelve days after the ship had put into Takao, she sortied again, but after a few hours’ steaming, she turned toward shore, this time putting in at the port of Keelung. More boiler trouble. More waiting for the Matte-Matte Maru.
In the close and crowded spaces belowdecks, tempers were growing short. The vermin (fleas, lice, rats), the starvation rations, the filth (men with dysentery and diarrhea had trouble getting through the crowd in time to use a benjo topside or a latrine bucket in the hold), the thick suffocating air—all of it was wearing on everyone.
Fistfights broke out over nothing, feeble men flailing at one other. (Any man suspected of stealing food or water became a whipping boy for those around him.) Some men lost control of themselves and began to scream and yell and thrash around in the reeking gloom.
“Grab him,” his shipmates would yell. “Keep him fucking quiet.”
All the yelling and fighting filled the hold with a din. “I’m going mad,” Gene Jacobsen thought, “stark raving mad.” From his sleeping shelf, Jacobsen watched a party of goons go after a hysterical man in the bottom of the forward hold. Jacobsen couldn’t see clearly, but he could hear a lot of grumbling and commotion down there, then the body of the man who had been “quieted” by his bunkmates was hauled up through the hatch cover to the top deck and tossed into the sea.
After twelve days at Keelung, the Inventor set sail again. For the next seventeen d
ays, she crept north, nursing her sick boiler, heeding reports of enemy submarines, and hiding in coves and inlets along the way.
The weather was better, cooler, and the prisoners were allowed on deck more often now. Each time the ship anchored offshore, they begged the guards to let them jump in the water and wash off the muck from the holds, but the nervous sentries refused.
The last ten days of the journey were among the worst. Most of the time the prisoners just sat and stared at one another or busied themselves picking off fleas and killing bedbugs. Finally on September i, sixty-two days after boarding the ship in Manila, the American prisoners of war—beards long, hair matted, skin covered with ulcers and open sores—came stumbling down the gangway of the Matte-Matte Maru at Moji, Japan.
At the bottom of the gangway, a line of Japanese soldiers stood with hoses and canisters. They sprayed the prisoners down with seawater and doused them with a white powder that smelled like disinfectant, then they issued them light cotton clothing and marched them through the streets to a warehouse where the men were fed bean soup and bread, food that tasted like a feast. The detail was then separated into groups, and it was obvious to the men that they were being sent to different places.
Ben Steele was in a group of 255 men who were marched to a ferry. The ferry carried them across the narrow strait between Moji and Shimonoseki. There they boarded a train with seats. Seats! Ben Steele thought. “A real luxury.” Then he remembered where he was. And what he was.
“HELLSHIPS,” the prisoners of war came to call them. Between January 1942 and July 1945, the Japanese transported 156 shiploads of Allied POWs from battlefields and camps in the southwest Pacific to slave labor sites in their territories and home islands. Although they packed the prisoners in the same spaces they used for their own troops, they stuffed those spaces as if they were shipping livestock, then, out of expediency, spite, or both, denied them adequate air, food, and water. More than 126,000 Allied prisoners of war and native laborers made these journeys, and more than 21,000 died en route or went down with the ships. The prisoners on the Canadian Inventor fared better than most; during their passage only a handful of bodies were hauled topside and tossed into the sea. Later voyages were much crueler, and a lot more deadly6
On October 11, 1944, the freighter Arisan Maru left Manila for Japan with some eighteen hundred prisoners of war in her main hold. The fall of 1944 was a dangerous time for Japanese merchant ships plying the waters of the South China Sea. The United States had assembled a massive armada to invade the southern Philippine island of Leyte (about four hundred miles south of Manila), the key stepping-stone, as MacArthur saw it, to taking the Philippine islands back from Japan. As a prelude to the Leyte invasion, the U.S. Navy positioned a task force of aircraft carriers near the islands, and carrier-based fighter planes and bombers began to attack Japanese targets on land and in the South China and East China seas. The Navy also dispatched submarine packs in those waters—“Convoy College,” the skippers called the area, because they were going to school on any Japanese ships that sailed there. In just ninety days, September through November 1944, American air and naval forces sank 347 Japanese merchantmen (an astonishing 1,382,516 tons of shipping).
Since the hellships were never marked as prisoner of war transports (they often carried war matériel as well), American pilots and submarine skippers had no way of knowing they were shooting at fellow Americans. When they looked in their sights and lined up their targets, all they saw was the enemy7
Boarding the Arisan Maru, Sergeant Calvin R. Graef, a coast artilleryman from Silver City, New Mexico, had been pressed into service as a deckhand and ordered to help remove the tarpaulins from the largest of the Arisan’s holds. When he pulled back the hatch cover and looked down, he guessed the hold could accommodate some 200 men. The Japanese jammed 1,805 into that space.8
After two days at sea, days of boiling heat, thick noxious air, vermin, short rations, and little water, five men were dead, likely from heat stroke and heart failure. At last, heeding the prisoners’ incessant pleas, the Japanese moved six hundred men from the most crowded bays belowdecks into the ship’s coal bin, a large storage space reached only by rope ladders. Six hundred men sitting and sleeping on a mound of hard black rocks.
Graef, meanwhile, and a few others who’d worked as camp cooks ashore, were selected to make the twice-daily rice ration for the cargo of captives. They did their cooking on deck, and Graef was grateful for the assignment, a couple of hours of fresh air every day. Life belowdecks had become intolerable. Men were yelling and moaning and keeling over; most had developed heat blisters (to Graef, their skin looked like “raw hamburger”).
Around 5:00 p.m. on October 24, thirteen days out of port, Graef was topside cooking rice. Half the company of prisoners had been fed; the deck was rolling in a rough sea and the cooks must have had a hard time with their steam pots. All at once Japanese guards and deckhands started running wildly toward the bow, and when Graef looked back to see what had scared them, he saw a torpedo in the water astern pass within feet of the fantail. Then the gaggle of deckhands reversed itself and dashed back toward him—another torpedo, this one across the bow.
“What gives?” yelled one of the prisoners from below.
“Submarines, school offish!” one of the cooks shouted back.
“Please, God, don’t let them miss!”9
Seconds later three torpedoes hit the hull. The Japanese shoved the cooks belowdecks, covered the hatches, then cut the rope ladders to the coal bin and raced for the lifeboats, leaving the prisoners trapped.
In the coal hole, a few boys managed to shimmy up a pole and reattach the ropes, and in the main holds the strongest of them mounted ladders and pushed off the hatch covers.
When Graef finally got up on deck, the Japanese were gone, and the stern of the ship was already underwater. Then the boilers exploded, the ship started to slip under, and Graef was in the water.
No one could say how many men were killed belowdecks and how many made it topside into the sea—two hundred, three hundred, more. About twenty-five men, Graef among them, started swimming toward a Japanese destroyer that had come to the Arisan’s aid, but when they reached the destroyer’s side, Japanese sailors standing along her rail grabbed grappling poles, leaned over the side, and began to push the Americans underwater.
Graef swam off and joined a group of survivors clinging to some wreckage floating nearby. At dusk he spotted two bamboo poles in the water and swam out to fetch them, but when he turned around in the gloaming to swim back, he couldn’t find the wreckage and his companions. Using the poles as a makeshift raft, he drifted for what seemed like a long time, through the day and night and into the next day, when he looked up and saw a lifeboat drifting nearby.
“Hey, boat, anybody there?”
Four heads popped up. Prisoners from the ship!
The five survivors rigged a sail and decided to head west toward China, hoping to encounter friendly faces. Three days later they happened upon some Chinese junks, and with the aid of their crews, the Americans made it to the Chinese coast and, finally, into American hands.
Some eighteen hundred military and civilian prisoners of war had been belowdecks on the Arisan Mam when she broke in half and started to slip beneath the waves. Nine survived.
Among those who did not was Sergeant Dalton Russell, the man who had helped keep Ben Steele alive on the rocks at Tayabas Road.
BY THE PALL OP 1944, the Allies had retaken the Pacific island of Guam and were moving their air bases closer and closer to Japan. MacArthur was on the southern Philippine island of Leyte with 200,000 combat troops, and his force had pushed north to the island of Mindoro. The Japanese were rapidly losing ground, and they began to salvage and ship home what they could from the colonies they had left.
The Oryoku Maru, a passenger liner designed to haul cargo as well, was part of this anxious falling back under fire. On the day she was scheduled to leave Manila, the cabins and bays of her
white superstructure were occupied by seven hundred Japanese civilians, women and children mostly, and a thousand Japanese sailors off sunken Japanese ships. In the middle and bottom decks of her deep cargo holds was loot from the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, including some 1,600 American prisoners of war, more than two-thirds of them officers, including Tom Hayes and most of the Navy doctors and corpsmen who had run the prison hospital at Bilibid.10
Japan had recently lost 122 merchant ships in the same shipping lanes the Oryoku planned to ply. With such losses, and with MacArthur poised to invade the big island of Luzon, the Japanese must have known that the Oryoku Maru would be among the last vessels able to leave Manila. And they packed her holds tight.
The crowding belowdecks was criminal. Prisoners were stuffed into the side shelves and sleeping platforms. In the open area in the middle of the holds, men were made to stand so tightly bunched that, looking down from the hatch above, the Japanese guards could see only heads and shoulders, like the tops of pickles jammed into a jar.
Tears in the Darkness Page 35