To a man, they also remembered a voice. When the bedlam was at its height, when men were screaming and moaning and begging for their lives, Father William T. Cummings, the Maryknoll priest who in Bilibid had read Ben Steele the last rites, would make his way to the middle of the hold and shout to be heard.
“Listen to me,” he would yell. “You must listen to me!”
Then, in a clear but calming voice, he would recite a prayer.23
Our Father, who art in heaven . . .
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us . . .
He recited that same evensong every night, a prayer for the living, a prayer of thanks, a prayer for the dead.
The priest ministered to anyone who needed him, and almost everyone did. In a month he recited more last rites than most padres offer in a year of combat, then berated himself openly for not being able to hold the hand and ease the dying angst of every man in the ship who needed him.
“Father, please, pray for me,” they begged, or, “Baptize me, Father. I don’t want to die without being baptized.”
He was a short, thin man, forty-one years old, in constant pain from an old back injury that had required spinal fusion. He had chronic asthma as well, and the close air in the holds must have been torture for him. Nothing, however, seemed to slow his ministrations. He played medic as well as priest, crawling over and across men to get to the worst of the wretches in the back of the holds. To some men, Cummings’s soft incantations—“humming whispers,” Sidney Stewart called them—sounded like the voice of God; to others it was the voice of faith, or a friend.24
Each night he tried to take his rice with a different circle of men. One night he talked of his days in Manila before the war. He liked working with indigents, street children, he said, and if he survived, he planned to continue the same kind of missionary work in Tokyo.
“The bastards are hopeless,” one of the men said.
“Son,” Cummings came back, “no one is hopeless.”25
Bill Cummings died on a Sunday in the hold of the Brazil Maru, two days short of making port at Moji.
* * *
TWELVE
September 1, 1944, Shimonoseki, Japan
AS THE TRAIN carrying Ben Steele and some 250 other Americans headed east from Shimonoseki, the men sat quietly and stared out the windows at the stops along the way—Chōfu, Ozuki, Habu. At the Asagawa River, the tracks turned sharply north into the highlands, one sylvan valley after another hemmed by hillsides draped with evergreens and stands of jade bamboo.
At length they came to the city of Mine (pronounced Min-ay) in Yamaguchi Prefecture, some twenty-four linear miles from Shimonoseki. They disembarked and walked for what seemed a long way, all of it uphill, until they reached Mugikawa. On a flat of land across from the village was a large compound surrounded by a high wooden fence. Inside the compound were rows of two-story wood buildings connected by well-groomed walkways. This, they were told, was to be their new camp. “Omine-machi,” the guards called it, “big mountain town,” mountains that had been a rich source of anthracite coal for almost seventy years.
During his time as a prisoner of war, Ben Steele had worked as a road builder, a stevedore, a farm hand. Soon he would add coal miner to his wartime résumé.
THE BARRACKS were the best the prisoners had seen, but the work they were forced to perform was grueling, especially for men so malnourished. They worked underground, twelve-hour shifts around the clock, ten days at a stretch with one day off. They were convict labor, picking and shoveling and hauling and loading in a labyrinth of damp laterals, long diagonals, and cramped coal drifts a half mile underground. They worked sick, they worked hungry, they worked hurt.
They worked and waited. That was the worst of it, the waiting, marking time, the days since surrender (871 . . . 906 . . . 1,002). Rescue, liberation, freedom—they could think of little else. Often they’d look up and see flights of American bombers overhead, and a short time later they would hear the faint report of explosions, like far-off thunder. Surely their deliverance was at hand. Just stay alive, they told one another, and be careful. Like all the places where they had been penned, Omine-machi had its share of thugs and sadists, civilian and ex-military guards who carried a kombō, a short, curved, hardwood club that could break a man’s bones or crack a man’s skull. A prisoner might not recover from a beating like that. All this way to end as ashes.
THE BARRACKS compound was a mile from the colliery and mine heads. Four men lived in a ten-by-ten room, eight rooms on each floor. The floors were covered with tatami, woven straw mats on which the men slept. The doors, windows, and sliding walls were rice paper and wood decorated with pieces of seashell. The barracks had electric lights but no heat, and winter in Mine, roughly the same latitude as Oklahoma City, was cold. (The men were issued cotton bed quilts, but these “little old comforters,” as one of the boys referred to them, were too small to cover the large gaijin, foreigners.) Each barracks had its own privy, but they shared a communal bath, two large concrete tubs under an outdoor pavilion.
Breakfast and supper, the beginning-of-shift and end-of-shift meals, were served in a mess hall; their midshift meal they carried to work in wooden boxes (bentō) tied with a piece of string. Breakfast was rice-barley gruel, often laced with weevils; lunch was cooked rice with a sprinkling of vegetables, various greens, and tubers; dinner, more rice with vegetables and perhaps fish, always stinking or spoiled. The fish was usually mackerel or tuna, but there was never enough for individual portions, and it was served as a condiment on rice or in soup. At each meal the men also got soybean buns, a wartime staple in Japan, as tough to chew as hardtack.
The overall individual ration was small, an average of twenty-two ounces of food a day. The Japanese said their own people were starving, and the prisoners should expect to suffer along with everyone else, and by and large that was true. Cold weather had hurt the fall harvest of 1944, and by early 1945 the United States had control of the sea-lanes around Japan, in effect blockading the country and preventing vital shipments of foodstuffs from the south. Often the only place a Japanese shufu, housewife, could buy food was on the black market, where rice sold for seventy times the normal price. In short, the Nipponjin were hungry, but not nearly as hungry as the skeletons in prison drag who watched their Japanese overseers wolf down meals that seemed a lot more substantial and appetizing than the pathetic rations put in front of the prisoners.1
The first week in camp each prisoner was issued two sets of clothes (plain army uniforms), a pair of zori (sandals), cloth work boots, and a wool overcoat (captured swag) for the winter. The day the prisoners got their issue, the Japanese shaved their heads, a prophylactic against parasites, then they gave each man a prisoner number. Ben Steele was sanbyaku gojū kyū, 359. The numbers were afixed to their uniforms, then the prisoners were told to sit on a bench and face a camera. These mug shots were pasted on individual cards, the man’s number on top, his name below. 291, Private, Woodrow Smith . . . 326, Private, Gerald Greenman . . . 435, Private, Dan Pinkston. Different men with the same face—tight lips, insolent jaw, smoldering eyes—sending their captives the same message.
WHEN THE AMERICANS ARRIVED in camp, they joined 180 British prisoners of war captured in the Dutch East Indies and already working there. The British, who occupied five of the eleven barracks in the compound, apparently felt that their tenure gave them certain privileges. In the mess hall, for example, they liked to cut ahead of the Americans on the chow line. The Americans, naturally, refused to step aside (they figured their ancestors had long since settled the issue of superiority with the British) and there followed what Army Private Dan Pinkston of Naples, Florida, called, some “downright knock-’em-down, drag-’emout fistfights.” It took more than “a few whippings,” Pinkston noted, to get the British “educated to the fact that the line formed in the rear.”2
The Japanese were hap
py with their British prisoners. The Englishmen were neat and well mannered. Most of the time they followed orders and worked cooperatively to meet their production quotas. The Americajin, by contrast, were unruly malingerers, always complaining. Those Americans! the Japanese supervisors would say, karera ni wa takusan no ketten ga atta, “they have many faults.” So many that there was a waiting line of Americans for the compound’s dokubō, its solitary confinement cell. After a while the Japanese got the idea that the two groups of gaijin didn’t get along and stopped trying to mingle them. And in time the colonials and red coats reached a rapprochement: they agreed they would never understand each other.
“You know what you’ve done?” a Brit told Irwin Scott. “You’ve gone and ruined our prison camp.”
“How the hell do you ruin a prison camp?” Scott said.3
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go.
It’s a long way to Tipperary
To the sweetest girl I know!
From the start, they liked the same marching song, about the only thing the two groups could agree on. The British sang it every day walking to work, and the Americans, their Anglophobia tempered, picked up on the tune and often sang it coming out of the mines.
Nobuyasu Sugiyama thought the song so catchy, he learned every word of the chorus, and many of the verses, too. Sugiyama started working at the mine in the fall of 1942, a seventeen-year-old civilian supervisor assigned to shepherd the British prisoners between the compound and the mine head. They marched, he marched; they sang, he sang, too.
Goodbye Piccadilly,
Farewell Leicester Square!
It’s a long long way to Tipperary,
But my heart’s right there.
The Tommies must have enjoyed this subtle subversion, their Japanese overseer marching along, pumping his arms, joining them in a song intended to boost their morale. Nobuyasu Sugiyama thought nothing of it. He liked the British. They worked hard and did what they were asked to do.
He liked his job as well. At sixteen he had graduated from the mining branch of a prefecture technical school and the next year started working for the Sanyo Muen Mine at Omine-machi. He was a good-looking, agreeable boy, and his bosses were impressed that someone so young went about his work with such purpose. His father had died when he was a child, and now he was the sole support and head of his household—mother, grandfather, two younger brothers, and a cousin. He’d been at the mine only a short time in the fall of 1942 when the British prisoners arrived, but already he’d decided to make mining his career and thought of himself as a loyal company man. Company officials responded by putting him in charge of the British prisoners, whom, by all accounts, he treated well, slipping them extra food from his own stores, buying them tobacco in town.
When three hundred Americans arrived at Omine-machi in the fall of 1944, the mine bosses thought Nobuyasu Sugiyama the right man to take them over. He’d done a good job with the British; he’d do a good job with this new group of gaijin.
Sugiyama assumed, as would most Japanese, that there was little difference between white English-speaking foreigners, and he expected that his relationship with the Americans would be as harmonious as it was with the British. But to the hard-bitten Yanks, Sugiyama was just another Jap jailer, and a wet-behind-the-ears jailer at that. At first they dubbed him “the Boy.” “Hey, Junior,” they would sometimes yell, and Nobuyasu Sugiyama could tell from their tone that the term was no compliment. These American furyo (POWs) were different, he thought. With them, there would be no singing.4
SOMETIMES, walking the mile from the barracks to the colliery to begin his shift, Ben Steele would survey the countryside—the emerald green hills and mountains, the odd little homes in the village, the women coming down from the slopes with firewood in baskets on their backs. “This place is quite scenic,” he’d think. Then he’d remember how tired and hungry he was or, looking himself over, scowl at the accumulated layers of soot and mine grime on his trouser legs and think about the long day he was about to spend in a dark hole under tons of rock.
The colliery—a collection of buildings and sheds on the surface connected by a lattice of pipes, chutes, conduits, and spillways—was spread out in a valley and occupied the slopes of Mount Botayama, a region that had produced a granular, oil-rich variety of coal since 1877. Here and there in the valley were a dozen mine heads, arched entranceways leading to a subterranean complex of diagonals, tunnels, laterals, and dusty coal drifts, “the sunless depths of the earth,” as Stephen Crane described the nocturnal world where men spend long hours digging and shoveling in the dark.5
At the beginning of a shift (5:30 a.m. for the early shift, 4:30 p.m. for the late), the men gathered at the mine head and boarded a small cable-car train that carried them into the heart of the mountain. The main tunnels and most of the side laterals had electric lights, but not the coal drifts. There men wielded picks and shovels in a gloom, the beams from their hat lamps flipping this way and that like miniature searchlights.
The prisoners worked in seven-man crews. Ben Steele was assigned to roku shotai muen, coal crew number six. Each day his crew descended into the mountain and disembarked in one of the main tunnels, then walked a half mile to the coal drift (the side lateral) they were working. Two men with picks loosened the coal, then two others with shovels threw it onto a V-shaped metal trough that ran back down the drift to a connecting lateral and a conveyor belt that emptied into a large hopper, which, in turn, filled coal cars bound for the surface.
It was eerie down there in the stygian caverns and drifts, their headlamps throwing shadows on the cave walls. After an hour digging and shoveling, the men were covered in black dust. The dust filled their lungs, of course—the makeshift masks they fashioned from rags were poor filters—and they always finished a shift coughing and hacking and blowing their noses.
Sometimes they also came out shaken, for mine work was dangerous. The weight of the mountain was always pushing down on the timber braces that supported the ceilings, and these braces frequently collapsed, burying part of the drift and sending thick black clouds billowing out into the main tunnels. None of the Americans were killed in these cave-ins—Japanese miners had long since mapped escape routes for just such emergencies—but each collapse left everyone, including the Japanese supervisors, on edge.
WHEN THEIR SHIFT WAS DONE, the men headed for the sentō, the communal bath, for their group soak. The etiquette of the communal hot tub called for a dirty bather to soap up and rinse off at a faucet before slipping into the water. The Americans, naturally, just piled in. The rock crews, timber crews, and men working topside quickly learned to get to the tubs ahead of the coal crews, whose grimy members always left the water the color and consistency of ink.
On their one day off in ten, the men washed and repaired clothing, cleaned the latrines and dumped the honey pots, picked lice off one another, reread the shredded stack of letters they carried from camp to camp. Most of the time they sat around gabbing, and the talk always turned to food. Sizzling steaks and chops, plump chickens, mounds of mashed potatoes and butter, bowls of applesauce and ice cream.
When they weren’t talking about food, they were trying to scrounge or steal it. They stole from the gardens of the locals and from the guards’ cabbage patch but rarely from one another. In a society of hungry captives, taking another man’s grub was considered a capital crime, the lowest and most craven form of behavior. In November and December 1944, every American in camp received an eleven-pound Red Cross package. And just in time. Working in the cold had left them even hungrier, if that was possible, and the packages helped the men survive into the new year. In February 1945 a much smaller shipment of Red Cross boxes arrived, one package shared among six. Ben Steele collected the cans allotted him, scratched his initials on the tops with a rock, and stowed them in his room. A few nights later returning to his barracks, he discovered his stash gone. Checking through the barracks, he met another man who’d
been robbed, Sergeant Ralph Keenan of Denver. The two nosed around the compound, and it wasn’t long before they had a line on the thief.
What should they do? they asked each other. No point reporting the theft to the Japanese—they wouldn’t give a damn. And the two hungry prisoners were also certain that their own officers, a couple of captains who had never exerted their authority, would just shrug the matter off. If they wanted their supplies back, they concluded, they’d have to go after the stuff themselves.
They found the pilferer hiding in his room. Turned out he’d eaten almost every damn can he’d filched. They stood there for a few seconds thinking about their empty stomachs, then they took off their belts, wrapped the rough strands of hemp around their knuckles, and began to beat the robber bloody.
“Stop!” he begged them. “Please, stop.”
But his assailants kept flailing away.
“We ought to kill you,” Ben Steele yelled, kicking and punching the man. “Kill you, you lousy son of a bitch.”
THE JAPANESE HAD CAPTURED 192,600 Allied military prisoners of war—Americans, Britons, Australians, Indians, Dutchmen. They penned their captives in 367 prisons and work camps located along what has come to be called the Pacific Rim—Japan, Manchuria, Formosa, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, Burma, Siam, French Indochina, Malaya, and the islands of the Dutch East Indies. One hundred and sixty-five of these work camps were in Japan and Manchuria. Together they served as a source of slave labor for vital Japanese industries: tanneries, textile factories, steel and lumber mills, coal and iron and copper mines, chemical plants, dry docks, wharfs, rail yards and terminals, construction and irrigation projects, processing plants, and refineries.6
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