Tears in the Darkness
Page 49
6. Hayes, “Notebook,” book I, 45–46.
7. Ibid., book II, 38.
8. Kramerich, interview, 1999.
9. Hayes, “Notebook,” book II, 39.
10. Ibid., book I, 7.
11. Richard Beck, interview, 1999.
12. Fowler, Recipes out of Bilibid, 23, 30, 44.
13. Hayes, “Notebook,” book I, 14–15.
14. Ibid., book II, 30.
15. Des Pres, Survivor, 186.
16. Hayes, “Notebook,” book II, 24, 75, 67, 96.
17. Ibid., book III, 61–62.
18. Dostoevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, 200.
19. Scott, interview, 2000.
20. Kramerich, interview, 1999.
21. The details of Robinson’s life were supplied by Zoeth Skinner.
22. Hayes, “Notebook,” book III, 20–24.
23. American National Red Cross, Prisoners of War Bulletin, 9.
24. Hayes, “Notebook,” book II, 8.
25. Ibid.
26. Schloat’s story is drawn from Schloat, Freedom!, and from a day-long 1999 interview at his home in California.
27. Hayes, “Notebook,” book III, 100.
28. Ibid., 106.
29. John Dower’s War Without Mercy details the raw enmity of the Pacific War; Hayes, “Notebook,” book II, 83, 101.
30. IMTFE, “Line of Communication and Treatment of POWs,” 14,287; see Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese, in general for figures on Allied POWs in the Pacific.
31. IMTFE, “Instructions of War Minister Hideki Tojo,” 14,428–430.
32. IMTFE, “Report on POW Labor Conditions,” 14,493–496.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. The Canadian Inventor was part of a merchant fleet Canada built after World War I. At 8,100 dead weight tons, she was among the largest of that fleet, 400 feet long and 52 feet wide, with a depth of 28.5 feet and a top speed of 13 knots. Between the world wars, Canada realized it could not compete for business in the world shipping market and began to sell off many of its merchant vessels. Japan, meanwhile, had been acquiring merchant ships on the open market.
2. Tsuji, Japan’s Greatest Victory, 246–49.
3. For a concise explanation of Japanese losses, see Calvocoressi, Wint, and Pritchard, Total War, 1092–93, 1150–57.
4. The July 1944 voyage of the Canadian Inventor is drawn from interviews with John Crago, Dan Irwin, Gene Jacobsen, and Ben Steele. Also see Nordin, We Were Next to Nothing; Gautier, I Came Back from Bataan; Jacobsen, Who Refused to Die; Hoover, Affidavit/Statement, 1.
5. Hata, “From Consideration to Contempt,” 266.
6. Hellship figures vary widely among the many accounts of these voyages. There were no official postwar lists or totals. We cite Michno, Death on the Hellships, 317. Also see Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese, 167–68. Waterford lists 56 transports carrying some 68,000 passengers. Michno’s figures are likely much higher because, as his notes indicate, he built on the work of others, including Waterford. The two authors agree roughly on the number of prisoners of war and captives lost at sea, some 22,000 men.
7. Figures come from Keegan, Times Atlas of the Second World War, 164–65, 194–95. Also see Morison, Two-Ocean War, 504. Morison (511–12) also reports that during four years of war, American forces sank 2,117 Japanese merchant vessels (8 million tons). In July 1944 alone, the month the Canadian Inventor sailed from Manila, 40 were sunk.
8. For the story of the Arisan Maru, we rely heavily on Graef, “We Prayed to Die.”
9. Ibid., 178.
10. The story of the Oryoku Maru is summarized in many books about World War II in the Pacific and in accounts from and about prisoners of war. The most dramatic and detailed is George Weller’s “Horror of Jap Prison Ship Told,” an eighteen-part series syndicated by the Chicago Daily News Foreign Press Service and appearing in several American newspapers in 1945. It is the first full account and stands still as the most dramatic of the secondary sources. Among primary sources, the most clear-eyed and accurate are Curtis Beecher, “A Survivor’s Account,” and Carey Smith, “Memoir.” The secondary sources are often in conflict on many points in the story. Even in the primary accounts, it is well nigh impossible to reconcile the disparities in numbers, names, and the sequence of events. We relied on Smith, a physician, and Colonel Beecher, the man who really led the detail. To help establish the sequence of events, we also used “Outline of Trip,” Roy Bodine’s day-by-day record of the journeys.
11. Stewart, “Give Us This Day,” 120.
12. Ibid.
13. Espy, “Cruise of Death,” 6.
14. Beecher, “A Survivor’s Account,” 72.
15. Espy, “Cruise of Death,” 8.
16. Hobbes, Leviathan, 70.
17. Beecher, “A Survivor’s Account,” 73.
18. The accounts of drinking blood on the Oryoku Maru come from, among others, Beecher, “A Survivor’s Account”; O. Wilson, “After Bataan”; Smith, “Memoir”; an interview with Ernie Bale; and Wolf, Thirst, 250, 340, 378, 402, 406.
19. Beecher, “A Survivor’s Account,” 72.
20. Ibid., 73–74.
21. Ibid., 77.
22. Ibid., 87.
23. The most detailed account of Father Cummings’s work on the Oryoku Maru comes from Stewart, Give Us This Day, 120–71. He is also mentioned in Beecher, “A Survivor’s Account.” Roper, Brothers of Paul, 87–94, pulls together material from a number of sources, including Louis Kolger, whom we interviewed. It was our general impression from scores of interviews that every man who’d met “Father Bill” remembered him.
24. Stewart, Give Us This Day, 152.
25. Ibid., 150.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1. Interviews with Ben Steele; Gibbs, “Omine”; McClain, Japan, 507; ATIS, Interrogation Report No. 0447, 25–26.
2. We take our Omine-machi numbers from Gibbs, “Omine,” and from interviews with Dan Pinkston Irwin, who supplied valuable data and documents, including a detailed roster of Americans at the camp and a number of mug shots of the prisoners.
3. Scott, interview, 1999.
4. Nobuyasu Sugiyama, interview, 2000; Military Commission, “Trial and Appeal of . . . Nobuyasu Sugiyama,” 1, 31–32, 36, 41, 46–47, 49, 52, 69.
5. Crane, “In the Depths of a Coal Mine.”
6. Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese, 144.
7. Military Commission, “Trial and Appeal of . . . Nobuyasu Sugiyama,” 1–3; Sugiyama, interview, 2000.
8. In 1947, Nobuyasu Sugiyama was tried as a Class-C war criminal (crimes against humanity) by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Allied war crimes court, meeting in Yokohama. He was charged with violating the laws and customs of war and convicted of seven counts of mistreating prisoners of war. In November 1948, after appeals, he began a sentence of twenty years at hard labor. He served six years and eleven months of that sentence at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo before his sentence was reduced, a common practice for many of those convicted of war crimes.
9. No one can say how much war news reached the prisoners of war working in the slave labor camps. Likely very little, unless they had hidden radios. The Japanese people knew the war was going badly, but their news was heavily censored. Most men had no idea that the Philippines, and the former places of confinement, had been liberated.
10. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 598–600.
11. The Berlin (Potsdam) Conference, “Project, Protocol of the Proceedings of the Potsdam Conference.”
12. A number of writers have attempted discover whether Imperial Army Headquarters issued so-called Kill-All orders—directives to exterminate all POWs—in the late spring or early summer of 1945. No such orders were found. However, as United Press correspondent Arnold Brackman points out in The Other Nuremberg, 40, in the weeks between the emperor’s announcement of surrender and the appearance of American forces in the streets of Tokyo, “bonfires glowed day and night” at the War Ministry offices of Ic
higaya Hill “as tons of records were burned.” Fragments of orders issued by field commanders in the territories outside Japan, as well as war crimes testimony and diaries and other documents introduced into evidence at the Tokyo war crimes trials, suggest that at least some prison camp commanders, and perhaps some high-ranking officers at headquarters in Tokyo, either acting on their own or perhaps on what they thought were the wishes of superiors, made preparations for a “final disposition” of the prisoner problem, as one order put it (IMTFE, “Prosecution Exhibit 2701”). The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Judgment, chap. 8, 1001) concluded that across the course of the war there were a “vast” number of such “atrocities” and that the pattern of butchery was so common “in all theaters” of the Pacific war, it was clear that such acts “were either secretly ordered or willfully permitted by the Japanese Government or individual members thereof and by the leaders of the armed forces.”
13. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 685.
14. Courtesy of Ben Steele.
15. Ship’s log, USS Consolation.
16. Schwartz, “My Three Months,” 84–85.
17. Grinker and Spiegel, Men Under Stress, 184–88, 443–57.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1. Lael, Yamashita Precedent, 56–60; “MacArthur ‘Wanted’ List,” 1; “Atrocities?” 5.
2. The material on Ed Dyess and the release of the death march material that follows is drawn from Dyess, Dyess Story; Dyess, “Tells Jap Torture”; Leahy, Memorandum for the President; Dyess’s “Statement”; Leavelle, “Tribune’s Fight”; Marshall, Memorandum for the President: (Gripsholm); Marshall, Memorandum for the President: Major Dyess’s Report; Dyess, Statement of Maj. William E. Dyess; “The Story Behind the Story,” 3, 6.
3. Letters to FDR.
4. Trohan, “Call For New Blows,” 1–2.
5. All of Masaharu Homma’s diary entries and poems are from General Homma’s Prison Diary; Sugamo Isho Hensankai, Last Letters of the Century; Tsunoda, Once There Was a Dream. All other material on Homma is from Okada, “The Tragic General”; Imamura, Memoirs; Swinson, Four Samurai; Tatsumi, “About General Homma”; interview and correspondence with Masahiko Homma, as well as photographs and family documents supplied by Mr. Homma; interviews with Robert Pelz, 1999, as well as trial notes, documents, and correspondence supplied by Pelz.
6. Tsunoda, Once There Was a Dream, 52.
7. “Homma, Kuroda Placed in Prison at Yokohama,” 1.
8. “Yamashita to Face Trial,” 1.
9. Material on the life, career, and trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita is from Kenworthy, Tiger of Malaya; Lael, Yamashita Precedent; Piccigallo, Japanese on Trial; Stratton, “Tiger of Malaya”; Swinson, Four Samurai.
10. Kishimoto, “Some Japanese Cultural Traits,” 119.
11. Drummond, “Britain and the United States,” 1.
12. Hull quoted in Lael, Yamashita Precedent, 45; Brook, “Cabinet Secretaries’ Notebooks,” December 14, 1942.
13. Fitch, “Regulations,” 4.
14. Truman quoted in Lael, Yamashita Precedent, 67.
15. “Yamashita Trial Starts,” 2.
16. Lael, Yamashita Precedent, 80; United Nations War Crimes Commission, Law Reports, vol. 4, 3.
17. Guy, “In Defense of Yamashita,” 158.
18. For the particulars of the Yamashita proceedings, see United Nations War Crimes Commission, Law Reports, vol. 4, case 21.
19. Lael, Yamashita Precedent, 90–91, 138–39; Reel, Case of General Yamashita, 39, 85–86, 241; United Nations War Crimes Commission, Law Reports, vol. 4, 17.
20. The material on Robert Pelz is from Pelz, correspondence; Pelz, Journal, vol. 4; Pelz, Scrapbook; Robert L. Pelz, interviews; Mary Jane Pelz, interview, 1999; photographs, trial notes, and private memoranda supplied by Mr. Pelz.
21. Piccigallo, Japanese on Trial, 67.
22. Lael, Yamashita Precedent, 101–102.
23. Reel, Case of General Yamashita, 27–28.
24. USA v. Homma, 844, 876–78.
25. “The Last Word.”
26. USA v. Homma, 1016–18.
27. “The Wives.”
28. Fujiko Homma, “Why Did Homma Masaharu Die?” See also Homma, Prison Diary, January 24, 1946.
29. Homma, Letters. Additional letters in Sugamo Isho Hensankai, Last Letters of the Century.
30. USA v. Homma, 2439–43.
31. Trumball, “Lines of Defense,” 10; USA v. Homma, 2464, 2484.
32. USA v. Homma, 2509–11.
33. Ibid., 2737.
34. The information on Tsuji and on his activities on Bataan comes from Tsuji, Underground Escape and Japan’s Greatest Victory; Ward, Killer They Called a God; Toland, Rising Sun; Toland, interview with Nobuhiko Jimbo; Yamamoto, “Information on Lt. Col Tsuji.” In November 2000, attempting to verify some of the information about Tsuji, we received the following from G. L. Moulton, executive secretary, Agency Release Panel, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C.: “In response to your . . . request for information pertaining to ‘Masanobu Tsuji, former officer in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II’ . . . we are neither confirming nor denying that such documents exist. It has been determined that such information—that is, whether or not any responsive records exist—would be classified for reasons of national security.”
35. USA v. Homma, 2478–80, 2548.
36. Imai, “A Strange Order.”
37. In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 16.
38. Ibid., 42, 45, 79, 80.
39. Ibid., 27–29, 41.
40. USA v. Homma, 3029–32, 3036–37.
41. Coox, Year of the Tiger, 40.
42. USA v. Homma, 3072–80.
43. Ibid., 3166–68, 3199–200.
44. Ibid., 3210–11.
45. F. Homma, “Why Did Homma Masaharu Die?”
46. USA v. Homma, 3281–82.
47. F. Homma, “Why Did Homma Masaharu Die?”
48. USA v. Homma, 3330–63.
49. Ibid., 3333.
50. Ibid., 3334.
51. Ibid., 3342.
52. Ibid., 3352–56.
53. Ibid., 3364–65.
54. In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 759.
55. “Homma’s Wife Makes Appeal”; F. Homma, correspondence to MacArthur; “MacArthur Begins Final Review,” 2; “Mrs. Homma Today.”
56. MacArthur, Reminiscences, 296–98.
57. Sugamo Isho Hensankai, Last Letters of the Century, 579.
58. Ibid., 580.
59. Homma, Letters.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Sugamo Isho Hensankai, Last Letters of the Century, 578–80.
63. Ivan Birrer, interview, 2000.
64. Fonvielle, “Payment.”
65. MacArthur, Reminiscences, 296–97.
IMAGINE, AFTER EVERYTHING, THIS
1. This chapter is drawn from interviews with Ben Steele, Shirley Steele, Bobbie (Mellis) Miller, Rosemarie Steele, Julie (Steele) Jorgenson, Lois Bent, Elizabeth McNamer, Scott Millikan, Michelle Motherway, and Julia Johnson; Ben Steele’s medical records; as well as various reports and emergency department medical/nursing records, Deaconess Hospital, Billings, Montana, 1999. Bess Steele died in 1972; the Old Man followed her six years later.
* * *
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
These citations represent only those sources in the Notes.
ARCHIVES
BUMED
U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Washington, D.C.
DCM
Douglas County Museum, Roseburg, Oregon
FDR
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, New Hyde Park, New York
GCM
George C. Marshall Research Foundation, Lexington, Virginia
MAC
MacArthur Memorial Library and Archives, Norfolk, Virginia
NARA
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
USMA
United State
s Military Academy Library, West Point, New York
USMHI
United States Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
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——. Terrain Handbook 49 (Camarines) Philippine Series. 3/3/1945.
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——. Interrogation Report No. 0447. No. 21-M-1. Microform. 5/7/1945.
——. Japan’s Decision to Fight. No. 131, no. 10-RR-31. Microform. 12/1/1945.
——. Luzon Campaign of 16th Division 24 December 1941—3 January 1942. No. 355, no. 10-EP-355. Microform. 1946.
——. 65th Combat Brigade Report on Philippines Operation. January 19, 1945.
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Ancheta, Celedonio, ed. The Wainwright Papers. Vol.4. Detroit: New Day, 1980–.
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Ashmead-Bartlett, Ellis. Port Arthur: The Siege and Capitulation. 2d ed. London: William Blackwood, 1906.
Ashton, Paul. And Somebody Gives a Damn! Santa Barbara: Ashton Publications, 1990.
——. Bataan Diary. Santa Barbara: Ashton Publications, 1984.
“Atrocities? Why Homma Never Heard of Them!—Says Yanks Got Food on Death March.” The Chicago Daily Tribune, September 16, 1945.
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