Читать книгу Death on the Hellships - Gregory F. Michno - Страница 10

1942

RELOCATING THE POWS

In the opening months of the war, the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army stormed through China, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and the western Pacific. They gobbled up millions of square miles and affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese captured Guam, Wake, and Hong Kong. They landed in the Philippines, Malaya, Borneo, and various islands of the Dutch East Indies. By February 1942, Singapore, Britain’s supposedly impregnable bastion, had fallen. Sumatra and Java were attacked. In six months, the Japanese had extended their conquests to Burma, north to the Aleutians, and south to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, threatening the American lifeline to Australia.

In the course of these conquests, the Japanese killed, wounded, or captured more than 300,000 Allied troops. The most significant surrenders were at Hong Kong, where nearly 14,000 Britons, Canadians, and Indians defended the island; on Java, with 25,000 Dutch and 7,000 British, Australian, and American troops; and in the Philippines, where 75,000 Americans and Filipinos surrendered. The worst single instance was the fall of Singapore, an event Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the greatest disaster and capitulation in British history.” In one swoop, 130,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops surrendered to fewer than that number of Japanese soldiers. It was the greatest land victory in Japan’s history.¹

The Imperial Army was unprepared for this influx of prisoners. What would they do with them? After a time they released the native prisoners—Indonesians who fought with the Dutch and Filipinos who fought with the Americans—and instituted a marginally successful campaign to enlist the Indians against their former British masters. All these actions were logistically sensible and calculated to earn propaganda points for them as racial liberators of Asia. Yet this still left 140,000 or more white prisoners of war.²

GUAM

Before the Japanese could make long-term plans for housing POWs, prisoners would have to be moved out of the forward battle zones. The first such move occurred on Guam. On the morning of 10 December 1941, about six thousand men of the Japanese 144th Regiment came ashore, quickly overrunning the island’s pitifully small number of American defenders. Cdr. Donald T. Giles, vice governor of Guam and executive officer of its naval station, was bitterly disappointed at what he called a shameful sacrifice by the U.S. government. Facing the Japanese with only a few hundred men armed with pistols and Springfield rifles, the Americans resisted for only twenty minutes. Even so, seventeen men had been killed and thirty-eight wounded before they gave up.

One month later, on 10 January 1942, they received an unusually hearty breakfast of lunch meat, a cold potato, and a sip of coffee. They were told that they would be heading south by ship, so they only needed to take their tropical clothing. From Piti Navy Yard in Apra Harbor they boarded what Giles called a beautiful passenger ship, the Argentina Maru. A twenty-knot luxury liner of 12,755 tons, capable of accommodating eight hundred passengers, the ship had traveled the Far East-South America route prior to being recalled for use as a troop transport. There would be no first-class accommodations for the prisoners, however. On deck, the governor of Guam tried to explain to the Japanese commander why they had surrendered. The officer slapped him in the face.

“You and your men are all cowards for surrendering,” he snapped, “and we will treat you accordingly. We will give you all the punishment that the human body can withstand!” Thus the Americans quickly learned what the Japanese thought about prisoners. They were sent four decks down and crammed into six-tiered shelves, with eight men lying side by side. There was little space between one’s face and the shelf above, and there was no ventilation or sanitation. As luxurious as the ship was, said Giles, she was never intended to carry prisoners: “Except for the lack of chains, we were there as galley slaves.”³

As the prisoners speculated as to which “tropical” destination they were bound, the Argentina Maru sailed north, unescorted and without zigzagging, causing Giles to worry about submarine attack. The temperature grew colder. The food served was described as “buckets of slop,” lowered on lines from the boat deck above. Marine private John B. Garrison complained about being forced to stay right above the engines and only being allowed on deck once a day for exercise. He thought there were about three hundred servicemen and four hundred civilians in the hold, all sleeping on steel shelves, side by side. Garrison weighed 140 pounds when he surrendered, only 110 by the time he got to Japan. Unaccustomed to the meager meals of rice spiced with daikons (pickled white radishes), he found it very hard to eat, even as hungry as he was. No one, said Commander Giles, who was ever a prisoner of the Japanese will ever complain about food again.⁴

On the morning of 15 January, as snow fell, the Argentina Maru sailed into the Inland Sea and anchored off Tadotsu on the island of Shikoku. The prisoners were ill prepared for the frigid cold. Giles remembered 420 of them being taken to Zentsuji Camp, about five miles southeast of Tadotsu. Zentsuji, the first POW camp established in Japan, was administered by reserve personnel, which perhaps worked in the prisoners’ favor. The POWs’ new home was a shock, yet all things considered, Zentsuji would prove to be one of the “better” Japanese POW camps in the empire.⁵

WAKE

Making a much better fight of it, the defenders of Wake Island actually repulsed the first Japanese invasion attempt on 11 December 1941. The small invasion force under Rear Adm. Kajioka Sadamichi,⁶ commanding Destroyer Squadron Six from the light cruiser Yubari, approached too close to the island and was surprised by still-operable shore batteries and planes. Down went the destroyer Hayate, the first Japanese warship to be lost in World War II, and the destroyer Kisaragi. Kajioka retreated. On 23 December he was back with reinforcements, but before surrender, the stubborn defenders inflicted nearly five hundred casualties on the attackers while losing only fourteen Marines and fourteen civilians. The Japanese had been roughly handled, and curses, kicks, and rifle butts emphasized their orders as they rounded up the Americans. Their valuables and clothes were stripped from them, and their hands were wired behind their backs with loops around their necks. “They stripped us down balls and ass naked and hog-tied us,” complained one Yank. Then they were lined up and covered by three machine guns. As they waited to be shot, a landing craft rammed onto the beach and out stepped Rear Admiral Kajioka, resplendent in a spotless white uniform. He ordered the machine gunners to remove their ammunition belts, and the prisoners realized they had been saved—for the moment.⁷

Almost sixteen hundred Americans, counting servicemen and civilian employees, were taken to the airfield. Kajioka had won his argument with the commanding Army officer. The interpreter passed along the gist of the exchange: “The emperor has gracefully presented you with your lives.” Out of the mass of hog-tied bodies, where civilian construction workers Oklahoma Atkinson and Harry Jeffries surveyed the scene, came the sarcastic response, “Well thank the son of a bitch.”

Eventually the prisoners were housed in the contractor’s barracks. They stayed until 11 January, when all but 388 of them were ordered down to the beach. Word was that they were going to Japan. Before they were lightered out to the waiting ship, they were sprayed with what Cpl. George W. McDaniel called a “smelly insecticide,” and the Japanese guards shook them down one more time. They clawed their way up rope ladders in heavy seas, and once aboard, new guards kicked and cursed them for being devoid of loot. After they were beaten with bamboo clubs while running through a gauntlet, all 1,187 of them were shoved into the forward cargo holds.

The 17,163-ton Nitta Maru, built as a luxury liner in 1939, sailed for Yokohama on 12 January 1942. Capable of making twenty-two knots, it was the holder of a transpacific speed record. It could accommodate 278 passengers, but there was no luxury for its current guests. Down in the holds, the POWs were packed in, body upon body, and ordered to sit still. Anyone who moved was beaten. Corporal McDaniel said he wasn’t allowed to stand up for fifteen days. Their toilets consisted of five-gallon pails. They were refused water, and some men tried to lick the condensation off the steel bulkheads. They were fed a thin rice gruel, so watery that many men went more than two weeks without a bowel movement. Others were plagued with dysentery. Civilians Jeffries and Atkinson said the gruel sometimes came with a few slivers of smelly pickled radish, other times with rotting fish heads or guts. Men couldn’t even make it to the slop buckets to relieve themselves. Not in such dire straits was Capt. Bryghte D. Godbold. He and a small group of men were placed in what appeared to be a mail room. There were even a few bunks for the older officers, while the younger ones slept on deck mats. Godbold ate rice, soup, pickles, and tea a couple of times a day. It was not pleasant, but there was no brutality shown. It was about what you’d expect on a prisoner ship, he said. Not so for the great majority, who would describe their trip on the Nitta Maru as the worst time of their captivity.⁸

The Nitta Maru was heading north to a freezing Japanese midwinter. The prisoners were issued one thin cotton blanket each, but it was not nearly enough. On 18 January, the engines quit vibrating and Nitta Maru docked at Yokohama. To celebrate their homecoming, the guards pulled back the hatches and threw snowballs at the prisoners. The commanders at Wake, Maj. James P. S. Devereaux and Cdr. Winfield S. Cunningham, and a few other officers were ordered to clean up and report to an upper deck room, where they were photographed, smiling for propaganda purposes, their pictures later appearing in English-language magazines. As compensation for their cooperation, they were allowed to send radiograms to their next of kin. About twenty other men, including Maj. George H. Potter Jr., Maj. Paul A. Putnam, and Cdr. Campbell Keene, all involved in aviation or communications intelligence, were removed from the ship for in-depth interrogation. Later in the month, when the Japanese were finished with them, one dozen were sent to Zentsuji prison camp.⁹

Nitta Maru. U.S. Naval Historical Center

When the voyage resumed on 20 January, the mistreatment turned deadly. A day or two out of Yokohama, five men were brought up from the holds. Seamen Theodore Franklin, John W. Lambert, and Roy J. Gonzales, and Sgts. Earl R. Hannum and Vincent W. Bailey, all with aviation backgrounds, probably thought they were going to be interrogated. Their comrades never saw them again. Blindfolded and bound, they did not know what was happening as they were brought up on deck and surrounded by about 150 guards and crewmen. Lt. Saito Toshio, commander of the guards, stood on a box to read the indictment: “You have killed many Japanese soldiers in battle. For what you have done you are now going to be killed—for revenge. You are here as representatives of your American soldiers and will be killed. You can now pray to be happy in the next world—in heaven.” One by one, each man was forced to kneel on the deck while sword-wielding guards stepped up behind them. A Japanese sailor described what happened: “The sword as brought down on the neck of the first victim made a swishing noise as it cut the air. As the blade hit and pierced the flesh it gave a resounding noise like a wet towel being flipped or shaken out. The body of the first victim lay quietly, half across a mat and half onto the wooden deck.” Four more times the swords flashed while the Japanese applauded. Afterward, some took turns trying to cut the corpses in two with a single sword stroke, like samurais of old. Then Saito had them propped up against barrels for bayonet practice. Finally the crowd dispersed and the bodies were thrown into the ocean. That evening, Saito invited guests to his cabin to celebrate the occasion.

On 23 January, the Nitta Maru made Shanghai, then traveled up the Whangpoo River to Woosung. The prisoners were marched five miles to their new camp—seven unheated, old wooden barracks surrounded by electric fences. Within a week they were joined by captured Marines from Peking and Tientsin, boosting their numbers to about fourteen hundred. Censored reports filtering back to America did not indicate that much was amiss. The wife of Dan Teeters, superintendent of the civilian construction workers on Wake, had a rosy picture painted for her. “We have no reason to think that the men have not received fairly decent treatment,” she told William Bradford Huie, who was writing the story of the construction battalion. Red Cross packages were arriving at the camp, and although there was a lack of warm clothing, she reported, “there have been no atrocities.”¹⁰

SINGAPORE

The capture of Guam and Wake were small operations compared to the invasions in the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. On the day they bombed Pearl Harbor, actually 8 December 1941 for the entire western Pacific, the Japanese also landed at Kota Bharu, on the east coast of the Malayan Peninsula. Throughout December and January they forced the British and Australian defenders back, as they moved inexorably south toward Singapore. The Japanese appeared unstoppable, and the Singapore area verged on chaos. At the same time that troop convoys were arriving in an attempt to shore up the rapidly deteriorating situation, thousands of people began to flee. Japanese planes and warships had field days. On 5 February 1942, dive bombers sank the arriving 16,909-ton transport Empress of Asia carrying units of the 18th Division. Between 13 and 17 February alone, about seventy ships, from small auxiliaries to gunboats, minelayers, and steamers, were lost while fleeing.¹¹

One typical escape attempt had a disastrous dénouement. On 12 February, three days before the fall of Singapore, the small steamer Vyner Brooke was loaded with more than two hundred elderly men and women, children, and sixty-five Australian Army nursing sisters. Two days later on the north Sumatra coast the ship blundered into an area where a Japanese convoy was unloading under the protection of the carrier Ryujo. The Vyner Brooke was bombed and sunk. Survivors headed to the nearest land. One group, with twenty-two nurses and a number of wounded men, made it ashore on Bangka Island. They were joined by about twenty-five surviving men from another sunken vessel. All were intercepted by a party of Japanese soldiers, who separated them into two groups. The men were marched out of sight behind a headland. Rifle shots were heard, and shortly thereafter the soldiers returned, cleaning their rifles and bayonets. The twenty-two nurses and one civilian were ordered to walk waist deep into the sea, when the Japanese opened fire on them. Nurse Vivien Bullwinkel took a bullet through her back. She fell and floated with the waves for ten minutes before being washed ashore. The Japanese were gone. Bullwinkel, the only survivor, dragged herself across the beach and into the jungle to hide. Another group of nurses who made it to shore were also captured. Although not executed, eight of them would later die in prison camps. Both the military and civilian population were rapidly discovering what it was like to fall into Japanese hands.¹²

PRISONERS FROM THE JAVA SEA

On 15 February 1942, the same day Singapore surrendered, Japanese forces landed on Sumatra. On the nineteenth they landed on Bali, while Vice Adm. Kondo Nobutake led his carrier armada into the Timor Sea to launch an attack on the harbor of Darwin, Australia, damaging eleven ships and sinking nine, including the U.S. Army transport Meigs and destroyer Peary. On the twenty-seventh, an invasion force including fifty-six transports approached western Java, and a second force including forty-one transports neared eastern Java. The proximity of all those juicy transports was more than enough to entice the American-British-Dutch-Australian (ABDA) fleet out from Surabaya to do battle. Rear Adm. Karel Doorman, in charge of the combined forces, charged out to fight but succeeded only in destroying his fleet. On 27 February, in the Battle of the Java Sea, he lost the Dutch destroyer Kortenaer, the British destroyers Electra and Jupiter, Dutch light cruisers Java and De Ruyter (his flagship), and his life. Meanwhile, south of Java, the seaplane tender Langley was sunk by aircraft. Damaged ships fled the scene, only to succumb on the bloody first of March. Destroyers Edsall and Pillsbury were caught south of Christmas Island by Kondo’s carrier planes and sunk. The U.S. heavy cruiser Houston and Australian light cruiser Perth blundered into the western Java invasion force and were sunk in Sunda Strait after a hard fight. Trying to escape the Java Sea, which had become a ship trap, the British heavy cruiser Exeter, which had figured in the destruction of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, the British destroyer Encounter, and the U.S. destroyer Pope, were all sent to the bottom by Japanese planes and surface ships.¹³

These appalling losses resulted in the Japanese reaping more prisoners from the sea. In the Indian Ocean south of Java, the Edsall, which had rescued 177 men from the Langley, transferred them to the tanker Pecos. Returning to Java, Edsall was sunk by Japanese heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma. Only 5 survivors reached land, all of whom later died as POWs. Meanwhile the Pecos, fleeing to Fremantle with 670 people on board, was sunk by aircraft from the carrier Soryu. This time the destroyer Whipple rescued 232 men and finally got them safely to Australia. In the same area on 2 March, the British destroyer Stronghold was intercepted by the heavy cruiser Maya. The battered DD went down, and 50 survivors were picked up by what appeared to be the Dutch steamer Duymaer van Twist. The ship, however, had been captured by the Japanese, and the luckless prisoners were transferred to the Maya.

Floating survivors of the Java Sea battle met various fates, depending solely on where they happened to drift, and which, if any, ship’s captain happened to discover them. The U.S. submarine S-38, under Lt. Henry G. Munson, was patrolling near Bawean Island, unaware of the great sea battle that was being fought. Late on the twenty-eighth, a call brought Munson to the bridge. The low, dark silhouette on the water could be either wreckage or sampans. Munson wasn’t sure, so the gun crew came topside and S-38 sped in for a look. As she neared the object, a voice cried out in the darkness, “My God, they’re not finished with us yet!”

Astonished at hearing English, Munson hailed back, “Who are you?”

Several voices called out, “We’re men of His Majesty’s Ship Electra!”

S-38 hove to and began pulling aboard men from life rafts and floating debris. The job was rushed, for dawn was tinting the sky when the last man was picked up. There were fifty-four of them, thirsty, oily, and burned. Seventeen were badly wounded and one was dying, but they were all carried to safety. It was the first of many rescues to be accomplished by submarines. As an encore, S-37, under Lt. James C. Dempsey, rescued two American sailors who had been on the De Ruyter and left five days’ worth of provisions for a boatload of the Dutch cruiser’s survivors.¹⁴

The Japanese destroyer Amatsukaze had been prowling the same area. Cdr. Hara Tameichi’s ship had been one of the escorts covering the eastern Java invasion force, when, on 26 February, he spotted a white-painted vessel. Halting it for inspection, he found it was the Dutch ship Op ten Noort, built in 1927 as a 6,076-ton passenger ship and recently converted to a hospital ship. Hara hustled the ship over to the care of his supply squadron commander, then sped back in time for the Java Sea fight. After the battle, low on fuel, the Amatsukaze was ordered to escort Op ten Noort to Borneo. Passing about sixty miles west of Bawean Island, Hara noticed more than a hundred Caucasians floating on wreckage, all with their hands held in the air and crying, “Water! Water!”

“The sight was pitiable,” said Hara. “I had no personal hatred for the drowning enemy. But what could I do? My small ship could take only forty or fifty of them, at most. How could I discriminate and pick only half of these survivors?” He radioed his superior about the drifting men. As they steamed close by, one of Hara’s lieutenants, who spoke English, called out to them to hang on, for they would soon be rescued. After taking the hospital ship to Bandjarmasin and refueling, the Amatsukaze passed the scene once again. The drifting survivors were nowhere to be found.¹⁵

The Exeter, damaged in the Battle of the Java Sea and accompanied by Encounter and Pope, headed along the Borneo coast in an attempt to reach Ceylon. It was hopeless, for they were caught by the Japanese heavy cruisers Nachi, Haguro, Ashigara, and Myoko, accompanying destroyers, and aircraft. Exeter was the first to be smothered with shells, then Encounter.

With the order to abandon the Exeter, Lt. R. Geoffrey Blain calmly removed his shoes, placed them at the rail, and stepped into the water. The cruisers moved away and Blain was left floating in his life vest with hundreds of others. That evening he noted how warm the sea was, though any exposed areas above the surface turned very cold. There were no sharks, but several men were bitten by sea snakes. The next morning two Japanese destroyers appeared. Blain later thought how ironic it was that they were so pleased at the time to climb up on a solid deck.

The destroyer Inazuma, under Lt. Cdr. Takeuchi Hajime, picked up 376 survivors, while Yamakaze, skippered by Lt. Cdr. Hamanaka Shuichi, rescued about 300 British seamen. Said Blain, “The conduct of the Japanese sailors was exemplary, and it was the high point of Japanese behavior during my three and one-half years in captivity.” As they headed for Bandjarmasin, they were cared for and given a meal of condensed milk and biscuits. “This standard of treatment,” said Blain, “was not to last.”¹⁶

As Exeter and Encounter succumbed, the old World War I four-stacker Pope seemed to have a chance to escape as she beat her way back to the east. But old age, as much as Japanese near-misses, caught up with her. Ammunition was exhausted. The brick walls of the number three boiler had caved in from repeated concussions. One underwater blast gashed the hull. The port propeller shaft went out of line and was shut down. Bomb blasts had opened up seams in the hull and water rapidly filled the compartments. The aft weather deck was awash before Lt. Cdr. Welford C. Blinn gave the order to abandon ship. Demolition charges were set and Pope was on her way to the bottom when a last shell hit her upturned bow, applying the coup de grâce.

The cruisers pulled away, leaving 143 men floating on a whaleboat, rafts, and wreckage. Miraculously, only 1 had been killed. Blinn had them all roped together as they rationed their small supply of food and water. Hope was that they would be found by a friendly submarine. That night a red flare was fired, but it accomplished little except to briefly illuminate the lonely sea with an eerie glow. In the gray and drizzling morning they started the whaleboat’s engine in the hope that the boat could tow them to Java. Near midnight they spotted four Japanese destroyers, but still hoping to be rescued by friends, they shut down the engine and remained silent. The DDs passed by at one thousand yards but did not spot them. On 3 March, the whaleboat’s engine ran out of fuel. A low-flying Japanese seaplane hovered over them for a time, then flew off. Almost out of food and water, many began to think that it might be better to be captured than to die at sea. That night the last of the supplies were consumed and they waited. Bright moonlight rippled the wavelets in silver, and they were settling down for another lonely night when a black shape loomed. A signalman hoisted a waterproof battle lantern. The ship slowed and turned on its recognition lights. It was the Inazuma again, back in the area after dropping off Exeter’s survivors. A voice called out in Japanese, and Lt. William R. Wilson, fluent in the language, quickly explained their predicament. The DD hove to, turning on her lights and dropping a Jacob’s ladder over the side.

Once on deck, Lt. (jg) John J. A. Michel was grabbed by two sailors while a third sprayed him with a carbolic acid mixture and a fourth rifled through his pockets and relieved him of his wallet and a rosary. Michel was taken to the forecastle, where the rest of the officers were assembled. Canvas screens and mats were rigged up, and they were motioned to sit. Michel was happy to comply, especially when given hardtack and a warm, sweet drink with a lemon flavor. They hungrily ate and lay down for a night’s sleep.¹⁷

More prisoners were caught as Allied ships fled Java. The Japanese destroyer Ikazuchi spotted an escaping Dutch tanker and tried to capture it, but the crew scuttled the ship. If he could not seize the ship, Lt. Cdr. Kudo Shunsaku would bag the crew. Ikazuchi gathered them up and carried them to Bandjarmasin.

Next to run afoul of the victorious Japanese was the U.S. submarine Perch. On 25 February off Celebes, Lt. Cdr. David A. Hurt was about to make a night surface attack on a lone merchant ship when its concealed deck gun put a shell through her conning tower fairwater. Perch pulled clear. Three nights later she received news of the Java Sea battle and was told to head for the scene. Early in the morning on 2 March, about 20 miles north of Surabaya, Perch was on the surface recharging batteries when she was spotted by Amatsukaze, once again combing the area. Hara spun his ship around and charged in, letting go several salvos and claiming a direct hit on the conning tower. Following behind, the Hatsukaze echoed Hara’s moves. But Hurt had already gone to periscope depth and watched the charging destroyers. With a zero angle on the bow, Hurt decided to head for 200 feet. Unfortunately, the sea bottom was at 140. As Perch punched into the mud, Amatsukaze crossed over with a string of charges, blasting the sub. Hurt cut the motors while Hatsukaze dropped her charges, shaking the boat again. The Perch was badly damaged: the engine-room gauges were broken or jammed, air banks in the after battery were leaking and the hull had been pushed in, the batteries showed full ground, the hull exhaust duct in the control room was flooded, the conning tower was dented in, the number two periscope was frozen, the crew’s toilets were shattered, and several hatches were leaking. The crew waited in silence.

Above, the Amatsukaze’s sonar could not pick up a target. The area smelled strongly of oil, and Hara was elated, certain that he had made his first definite kill. The destroyers steamed away. It was lucky for Perch that they did, for Hurt, also hearing nothing from above, started his motors and, after struggling for a while, broke free and rose to the surface at about 0300. He had missed the destroyers by minutes.

In the predawn, the crew came topside to assess the damage. The antenna and blinker lights were down and the number one main engine was malfunctioning. Worse, Perch had only been up an hour when two more destroyers were seen heading her way, this time the Ushio and Sazanami. Hurt took her down to rest on the bottom, this time at two hundred feet, but the DDs had seen her and dropped several strings of depth charges. Main ballast tanks one and three ruptured. The engines’ circulating water lines leaked. The bow planes were pushed in, and the rigging panel was burned. Torpedoes in number one and two tubes made hot runs. The hull over the officers’ staterooms was dished in. The electric and telephone circuits went dead. After these attacks, the Japanese destroyers again steamed away, confident that they had made a kill. This time, however, Perch could not free herself from the muddy bottom. Before the crew could go full throttle and blow all remaining ballast in the hope of rising to the surface, they would have to wait until dark.

For thirteen hours the crew suffered in silence, quietly making repairs to ready the boat. About 2000, Hurt gave the command for full power to both shafts. After several tries, full forward and full astern, Perch pulled loose. She popped to the surface once more at about 2100 on 2 March. The crew faced a seventeen-hundred-mile trip to Australia, uncertain if they could submerge with any hope of surfacing. The Perch crept along, heading east. An hour before sunrise on the third, Hurt decided to make a test dive to assess the boat’s condition. It didn’t work. They could flood down, but they could not blow out the water fast enough. By blowing all ballast, Perch barely clawed her way to the surface, but the water in the engine-room bilges was up to the generators. Only the pumps running at maximum could keep her afloat.

As luck would have it, the breaking dawn also brought back the snooping destroyers, followed by cruisers Nachi and Haguro. It was over. Hurt ordered Perch scuttled and abandoned. Torpedoman Sam Simpson passed through the control room and got the word that they had better hurry because the sub was already sinking. He rushed out the conning tower hatch, then ran aft and sat down and took off his shoes. Classified material was given the deep-six, flood valves were opened, and nine officers and fifty-three men went over the side. Simpson floated in the sea while guns flashed and shells fountained up geysers of water. The Perch seemed to slip backward, then her bow rose and she slid below, stern first. Within the hour the Ushio, under Cdr. Uesugi Yoshitake, picked up the entire crew and headed toward Borneo.¹⁸

It was a veritable ABDA sailors’ reunion in Bandjarmasin, although under the auspices of the Imperial Navy. Men from Exeter and Encounter were placed in the bowels of an old tanker, which contained four levels of wooden decks hastily constructed to carry Japanese troops to the beaches. “It was no consolation to us to know that we were being treated no worse than the Japanese soldiers,” said Lieutenant Blain. The hatches were open, and Blain complained that the temperature was 90 degrees in the shade. But, he said, “there was no shade, and more important, there was no ventilation in the tanks.”

They sat in the sweltering heat for three days. The Japanese had water, but the POWs had no containers to drink from. As men collapsed from heatstroke, they were brought on deck a few at a time. After another day of heat, thirst, and interrogation, Op ten Noort pulled alongside. The Japanese minelayer (CM) Tsubame was in port, and its sailors helped load and guard the more than nine hundred prisoners who transferred to the hospital ship. It was cleaner and cooler than the tanker, said Blain, but the Dutch crew shunned them, refusing even to treat their wounded. “What do you expect?” said one of the doctors. “You are only prisoners of war.” The British sailors were fed rice balls supplied by the Japanese, while the Dutch ate their own rations and made no secret of it.

After a few days of chasing Allied submarines across the Java Sea, the Amatsukaze also returned to Bandjarmasin for fuel and supplies. Hara, still concerned about the drifting sailors he had seen near Bawean Island a week earlier, visited the hospital ship. He was relieved to learn that almost everyone had been picked up and Op ten Noort was filled with nearly one thousand prisoners. Seeing the cramped men huddled in narrow spaces reminded Hara of his cadet days. It was distressing, and he made an earnest wish never to be captured. Soon after, Op ten Noort weighed anchor for the trip to Makassar, Celebes.

Meanwhile, Ushio brought her catch of Perch men directly to Makassar, as did Inazuma with the Pope survivors, reaching port the next day, 5 March. Embarking on a landing barge off Inazuma, Lieutenant Michel saw a hospital ship already docked in the harbor. An officer spoke to him. “I am sorry we could not make you more comfortable aboard this ship. When you go ashore you will learn true Japanese hospitality.”

Once ashore, however, they were all thrown in a prison. The cells contained a few buckets—some for drinking water, others for toilets. The farther from the ship they got, Michel thought, the worse their situation grew. Soon, Pope’s sailors discovered that other cells held men from the Exeter. Two weeks later they were all marched to the outskirts of Makassar to a prison camp that held captured Dutch troops. To their surprise, they also saw men from the Perch. Michel met a classmate from the Naval Academy, Jake Vandegrift, and his old instructor, Commander Hurt. They were allowed to move in together. It might have been cause for celebration, were it not for the fact that they were all POWs.¹⁹

After a few weeks of incarceration they received notice that a number of men would be sent to Japan. Thirty-two senior British and American officers were rounded up, including all five from Perch, four from Pope, and nine from Exeter. All the commanding officers went, along with communications and gunnery officers, plus some enlisted radiomen. Apparently the Japanese were selecting those most likely to have knowledge of war plans and codes. Perch sailor Sam Simpson recalled that Commander Hurt kindly divided all his remaining money among his crew; each man received sixty cents.

The departing prisoners looked like hobos, bearded and dressed in ill-fitting, cast-off civilian clothing perhaps looted from the Dutch. The Maru Ichi (one) left Makassar about 2 April 1942, northbound for Japan.²⁰ The ship sailed to Yokohama, via Takao, and everyone was taken to Ofuna Camp for interrogation. The Perch’s Jake Vandegrift was questioned about his submarine’s sonar gear. He pretended not to know what they were talking about. When pressed, he admitted that sonar was used for detection of ships, something they already knew. When asked how it worked, Vandegrift again pleaded ignorance. They asked what he did when it needed repair; he answered that it was sent to the sub tender to be fixed. They asked him why, if he was in charge of this equipment, he didn’t he even want to know how it worked. Vandegrift replied that he never liked his job and he was always off relaxing in Manila. At this, the interrogator stood up and shouted, “Get out. You are a disgrace to the American Navy.” Blinn’s and Hurt’s ignorance was not so readily accepted, and they were roughed up. Finally, after the Japanese had extracted all the information they could, the shaken prisoners were sent to their new home in Zentsuji. Nine of Perch’s crew would die as POWs.²¹

JAPANESE STRATEGY

The ABDA fleet was unsuccessful in keeping the Japanese off Java. Troops landed on opposite ends of the island and fought their way inland. The Perth and Houston had gone down in the Battle of Sunda Strait, after making a good fight against numerous destroyers and cruisers of the invasion’s covering force. Perth lost half her crew, but 320 men finally made it to land. Houston sank twenty minutes later. More than 600 went down with her, but 368 of her crew made the Java shore. Many of those who reached land were captured by the Javanese and turned over to the Japanese invaders.

Finding resistance hopeless, the Dutch governor and Gen. Hein ter Poorten surrendered their forces, about 25,000 men, along with a mediocre Indonesian Home Guard force of 40,000, on 8 March. The 7,000 British, Australian, and American troops on Java were forced to follow suit. Commonwealth units included two veteran Australian battalions that had fought in the Middle East and a squadron of British 3d Hussars. Most of the Americans, about 550 of them, belonged to the 2d Battalion, 131st Field Artillery Regiment, 36th Division—the “Lost Battalion.”

In Sumatra, escapees from Singapore had been streaming to the north and west coasts in the hope of catching ships to Ceylon. However, about 1,200 British escapees were rounded up in Padang and thrown in a Dutch barracks with men of the 18th Division and even sailors off the sunken Prince of Wales and Repulse. Swept up on Sumatra were also civilian escapees from Singapore, New Zealanders, and Royal Air Force (RAF) men without their planes. Farther north, some diehard Dutch troops fought on for three weeks after General ter Poorten surrendered his forces on Java, holding out near Kota Cane before giving up. The Japanese were aided by Indonesian rebels who did not want their land “scorched” by the retreating Dutch.²²

How might this new wealth of prisoners fit in with future Japanese plans? The great majority of Japanese divisions had always been kept in China, where they had waged war for several years. Yet the Chinese would not crack. Supplies helping to sustain them came through the “back door,” trucked along the tenuous Burma Road or flown over the “Hump” of the Himalayas in cargo planes. The Japanese could never conquer China while these reinforcement routes were open. Japan took Malaya with relative ease, and her occupation of Thailand was made even easier when the two countries signed a treaty in December 1941, permitting stationing and transit of Japanese troops. Japan was now poised on the Burma border, but crossing over was not easy due to the mountainous spine with four-thousand-foot peaks and steep river chasms separating the countries. Nevertheless, Japanese troops struggled over the mountains, and once in the relatively flat land beyond, hastened their drive across Burma to the Indian border.

Possession of Burma was far from being a panacea; on the contrary, it brought on a host of new problems. At the far end of its empire, Japan was now next door to British and Indian bases and open to counterattack. Poor land connections meant that sea communications were critical. Rangoon, near the mouths of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin Rivers, was the key to land communication in Burma. But to hold Rangoon, one had to control the Andaman Sea and much of the eastern Indian Ocean. It could perhaps be done, but it would take great number of ships and escorts. A round-trip sea journey from Singapore to Rangoon was more than twenty-two hundred miles. Japan started the war with about 6 million tons of shipping. She captured about 800,000 additional tons. Even so, by the end of the initial Burma campaign, in May 1942, Japan had lost about 314,000 tons of shipping. In other words, supplying Burma by sea was potentially a costly endeavor.

The distance from Bangkok to Rangoon by sea is about 2,000 miles; by land it is only 350 miles. Why not connect the two port cities by land? The route would be protected from Allied naval interception, and supplies along it could be moved much more quickly. A good railway already existed between Singapore and Bangkok; in fact, rails stretched west 40 miles from Bangkok to Ban Pong, and from Rangoon east to Moulmein and Thanbuyzayat. The gap between railheads was only about 250 miles. Why not extend the railway over the mountains and connect the railheads? The route had been explored before, by European powers, but the dense, hostile jungle, the engineering problems, and the high costs in dollars and, very likely, in human lives had been more than enough reasons to shelve the idea. Now the war brought a new imperative. There were mountains, jungles, tigers, pythons, kraits, scorpions, monsoons, floods, and diseases to contend with. The human cost, however, would be relatively insignificant: Japan had a great labor pool at its fingertips.²³

The contemplated Burma-Thailand Railway was not the only project that could employ prisoner labor. With every Japanese soldier needed at the front, prisoners could be used for scores of other tasks: to build and repair roads, load and unload ships, construct and maintain airfields, and toil in the mines and factories of the empire itself. In April 1942, the Japanese began marshaling their prisoners north for the preparations that would culminate in the great railway project. The move would require an increase in rail and sea voyages.

NORTH TO BURMA AND THAILAND

After the fall of Singapore, British and Australian prisoners were moved to various barracks at Changi, on the northeast tip of the island. The Indians were housed separately and were exhorted to break their allegiance to Britain, change sides, and join the pro-Japanese Indian National Army. About 40,000 out of 45,000 switched, becoming guards of their old masters or fighting directly against the British in Burma. On 4 April 1942, 1,125 British prisoners from Changi, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hugonin, were sent by rail up the Malay Peninsula to Bangkok and east to Saigon in French Indochina. They worked in the area for a year before half of them were sent back to Thailand to build the railway.

The next party to move north was designated A Force, a group of about 3,000 Australians, mostly from 22 Infantry Brigade, under forty-nine-year-old Brig. Arthur L. Varley. They went down to the wharf on 14 May and began loading. They were divided into three battalions of about 1,000 men each. The first, under Lt. Col. G. E. Ramsay of 2/18 Battalion, boarded Celebes Maru. The second, in command of Maj. D. R. Kerr of the 2/10 Field Regiment, and the third, under Maj. Charles B. Green of 2/4 Machine Gun Battalion, boarded the 7,031-ton cargo ship Toyohashi Maru.

Ken Williams, a corporal in the 27th Brigade, stood in line. He was already thirty-six years old, had a wife and two children, and probably shouldn’t have joined the army. The Depression, though, had hit him hard, especially working as a blacksmith for forty-eight shillings a week. By 1940, with the number of motorized trucks on the increase, Ken had decided that blacksmithing had no future. He joined the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF). And what did they need, but a blacksmith! Talk was that the force moving north was not to be a working party, so there was no need to take medical supplies or equipment. Waiting to board, however, Williams began to have second thoughts as he saw hundreds of picks and shovels being loaded.

“Holy Hell,” exploded one soldier who used to work the Fremantle docks and was familiar with Celebes Maru. The single-screw freighter of 5,824 tons, built by Kawasaki in 1917, was 385 feet long, with a top speed of thirteen knots and a cargo capacity of about 2,000 tons. The soldier called the maru “old blue-bottle” and complained, “If we are to go aboard that thing we’ll be in sheep pens. Pre-war, I helped load thousands onto that old bucket and the poor old sheep had barely enough room to stand.”

The “bucket,” however, was to be their new home. While waiting for hours to load, a few Aussies managed to purloin some edibles from a nearby godown (warehouse). They were bashed with rifle butts or hung up by their thumbs. The prisoners loaded through the day, slowly crawling up rope ladders, and did not finish until 0100, 15 May. One lad fell from deck level and broke his leg. He was sent back to Changi—one of the lucky ones.

True to the former dockworker’s word, Celebes Maru contained sheep pens. About 640 men were put in the largest aft hold, and the remaining 360 were put in the forward hold. The air was fetid. When they were fed, the sweat from bodies on the upper levels dripped down into the men’s rice below. Those afflicted with dysentery fouled themselves, but not until Lieutenant Colonel Ramsay pleaded for them to be allowed to use the two, three-hole “toilets.” Even so, it was not enough; the deck was fouled, and the returning users spread excrement from stem to stern. It was so hot below decks that Ramsay again pleaded to the ship’s captain to have a windsock rigged to funnel some air into the holds. They thus made their way to Sumatra.²⁴

On 9 May, before A Force was collected, groups of Allied POWs on Sumatra were being gathered on the south coast at Padang. The British Sumatra Battalion, a group of 498 British and 2 Australian officers, all under Maj. Dudley Apthorpe, joined 1,200 Dutch troops and began the journey. They went north by road and rail, through the mountains and past the beautiful Lake Toba district. On the twelfth, trucks carried them to Medan on the north coast, and they were placed in the Uni Kampong Camp, which was then occupied by Dutch civilians. On the fifteenth, they hiked the last miles to the port of Belawan and boarded the ironically named England Maru, a 5,038-ton cargo ship built in 1919 and owned by Yamasita Kisen Company. In the holds they packed into a four-foot-high wooden tier that had been built around the hull to accommodate troops. The Dutch climbed on the 5,493-ton Kyokusei Maru, a former Canadian ship built in 1920.

After one false start, the ships returned to Belawan to await the arrival of the two ships from Singapore. On the sixteenth, 350 Japanese troops boarded the heavily laden Celebes Maru. They were joined by a minesweeper, and the five-ship convoy headed north through the Strait of Malacca. The weather remained hot, and below decks men became seasick, adding to their misery. Constant protests by the officers finally resulted in groups of 50 men being allowed on deck for twenty minutes at a time. The fresh air, plus a brief hose down with salt water, was almost heaven. On England Maru the officers were segregated from the men, but Major Apthorpe went down to see them, and on one occasion passed some stolen Japanese cigarettes to a Sergeant Pearce. The next day, Apthorpe was beaten for stealing cigarettes. Pearce sought out the major and said he was sorry for what happened.

“Sergeant,” Apthorpe asked, “did you enjoy smoking them?”

“Of course,” Pearce replied, though he added that it did not seem worth the beating.

“Then that’s all that matters,” said Apthorpe. “I enjoyed stealing them, it was just unfortunate that we were caught.”

On 20 May, after a voyage described as “appalling,” the convoy stopped at Victoria Point, at the southern tip of Burma, where the 1,017 Aussies of Green Force were taken off the Toyohashi Maru by barges and the Dutch were unloaded off Kyokusei Maru. They were to work either at the Victoria Point wharves or at the nearby airfield. Next stop was Mergui, where on 24 May the Celebes Maru disgorged Ramsay Force and England Maru deposited the British Sumatra Battalion. They were put to work building an airstrip. Toyohashi Maru carried Major Kerr’s remaining 983 Australians to Tavoy on 26 May, where they came under command of senior officer Lt. Col. Charles Anderson and were thereafter known as Anderson Force.²⁵

The unloaded convoy remained at Tavoy until 1 June, when it sailed back for Singapore without an escort. Patrolling at the north end of Malacca Strait was the British submarine HMS Trusty on her third patrol, under Lieutenant Commander Balston. In the predawn darkness of 4 June, he noticed four ships steaming south, about seventy miles southwest of Phucket, Malaya. Picking out the largest target, the Trusty fired a salvo of torpedoes at the unsuspecting ships. At 0335, two torpedoes hit Toyohashi Maru, striking holds one and seven on the starboard side. Heavy explosions shook her and she flooded quickly. The ship, built by Kawasaki in 1915, owned by the Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) Line, and carrying thirty-five shipping engineers, went down at 0400. Sixteen gunnery force members and one crewmen were killed, while the survivors were picked up by Kyokusei Maru. The remaining three ships quickly headed for Penang, Malaya. The Toyohashi Maru was the first of the hellships to be sunk. Had Trusty found the convoy on its outward voyage, there might have been a disaster for the Allies.²⁶

TO AND FROM SINGAPORE

On the same day Toyohashi Maru was torpedoed another ship was bringing more prisoners to Singapore, among them Frans J. N. Ponder of the Royal Netherlands-Indies Army (KNIL). Ponder, who had been ashamed when General ter Poorten surrendered almost without a shot, had been shifted to a number of camps in Java before ending up in Batavia. On 4 June, he and about five hundred Dutch prisoners boarded Maru Ni (two), an old freighter of about three thousand tons. Most of them were packed into the hold by the liberal use of rifle butts, but Ponder was lucky enough to be given a spot topside.

The maru steamed laboriously out of the harbor, only to be buffeted with strong winds and rough water. Since the toilets were located on deck, those below who became seasick could not climb up in time; many vomited on the ladders or on deck. Said Ponder, “In no time there was an unbelievably smelly mess.” In addition to seasickness, many had diarrhea. Japanese guards were posted to control toilet usage, but it was a losing battle. During the five-day journey to Singapore, a number of POWs died and were buried at sea. When they disembarked on 9 June, the filthy men were lined up on deck and washed down with hoses. The Dutchmen were marched to Changi.²⁷

Not all the parties passing through Singapore went by sea. A group of six hundred prisoners left Changi on 18 June for the Singapore rail depot, where they were packed in boxcars and sent north. They were followed by four more six-hundred-man trainloads at two-day intervals. This was a mixed group of incomplete units, consisting of III Indian Corps, the British 18th Division, Singapore garrison troops, and the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force, a unit consisting of local Europeans. The tired, underfed, dispirited work force of three thousand detrained at Ban Pong, the junction where the rails went either east to Bangkok or west, up the new railway to Burma. Over the next two years, Ban Pong would be the transit camp where thousands of workers would assemble.

Not all the prisoners leaving Singapore were destined for the Burma Railway project. In early July, Yamada Masaharu, a staff officer at Kuching Headquarters in Borneo, visited Changi looking for laborers. He selected about 1,500 Australians, including 145 officers, to sail to another one of those mythical new camps where work would be light and food plentiful. B Force, under Lt. Col. A. W. Walsh of 2/10 Battalion, boarded Ume Maru, a 5,859-ton cargo ship built by Kawasaki in 1919. The prisoners filed into three holds—340 in the forward, 760 in the center, and 400 aft—and sailed on 7 July. Pvt. Tom Burns, 2/20 Battalion, wrote in his diary that there were only two water tanks, about two square meters each, at the bow and stern. In three days they were empty, and the men had to scrounge water from the winches or Japanese supplies—both prohibited. The ship had recently carried coal, and between decks everything was covered with fine black dust that seeped into every pore of the body.

“It reminds me of those pictures of the slave ship days,” Burns wrote. “Well I say that nothing can compare with this dreadful boat.” Noticing that they had no escort, and seeing very few sailors or guards, the prisoners discussed the possibility of taking over the ship, but the senior officers decided to wait for a better opportunity.

William Young, a sixteen-year-old private in 2/29 Battalion, AIF, had a presentiment. He couldn’t help but feel that Ume Maru was a ghost ship and the passengers only spirits embarking on their final journey. He knew it would be a one-way trip. They were crammed together like sardines in the holds, the men trying desperately to breathe in the humid steam. Finally, the Japanese rigged a canvas sail that scooped air into the holds. “Not wanting to spoil their record against humanity,” Young sarcastically commented, “they proceeded to feed us rice, green with lime and smelling of sulphur—making a most appropriate gruel for a hell ship.” Many came down with dysentery—the “squitters,” as Young called it. He said he finally came to know what was meant by the phrase “To shit through the eye of a needle.” The benjos (latrines), built over the sides of the ship, were too few and too far away. Many could not wait in line long enough, before the “bomb bays” opened prematurely. There was one consolation, however: they believed that the bad smell kept the guards away.

“My God, this is dreadful,” Tom Burns wrote a few days after sailing. “I am sure there will be a lot who won’t survive the trip, as most are very sick men just out of hospital.”

With a cruising speed of only nine knots, Ume Maru crept eastward along the equator. “Talk about the Slow Boat to China,” complained Young, “this thing we were on went backwards more often than forwards.” And it was hot. “If we had the eggs we could have fried them on the deck,” he said, adding, “Umm, if only we had the eggs, and some salt—perhaps some tomatoes and bacon?” Someone speculated that they were going to Japan, another said Sandakan.

“Where the hell is Sandakan?” one man asked.

“In Bloody Borneo!” came the reply.

“Borneo! Where’s Borneo?” said another.

No one knew for sure. Their first stop was at Miri, an oil town two-thirds of the way up the west coast. That night, Bill Young and Joey Crome stood at the rail in a niche between the benjos and a storage box. They saw the lights of Miri twinkling across the surface of a black, calm sea, and they talked about trying to swim to shore.

“Whaddya think? Just a bit of a paddle,” said one.

“Yea, piece of cake,” came the reply.

“You go first.”

“Naw, you go first.”

Just then the galley door opened and out came a Japanese cook with a bucket of swill that he cast overboard. The garbage no sooner hit the water than the sea boiled up with a hundred fish, streaking fluorescent trails, fighting over the meal. Then up from the depths came a great shark, scattering the small fry and making off with the prize. The two soldiers stood silent for a moment. The ghostly lights of Miri looked a little colder, and the ship’s hold took on a cozier glow. They went below.

The Ume Maru reached Sandakan on 17 July. The capital of North Borneo, Sandakan was home to only seventy Europeans, who were not incarcerated until May 1942, four months after the Japanese landed. They were then rounded up and sent to Berhala, a small island off the coast containing a leper colony. B Force unloaded. Tom Burns, black with coal, haggard, and unshaven, was glad to get out and stretch his limbs. He thought Sandakan was picturesque, framed by cliffs and interspersed with many single-story, red-roofed buildings. Native huts were built on pilings at the waterfront, while beautiful homes dotted the surrounding hills. They marched, singing “Waltzing Matilda,” about eight miles inland from the port, to an internment camp on what had been a British experimental farm. The site was first meant to hold two hundred Japanese residents of Borneo. With the tables turned, however, fifteen hundred Australians now occupied the camp. The prisoners were to build an airfield and a road to connect it to the port at Sandakan.²⁸

The Japanese could find many uses for their prisoners, not all of them requiring muscle power. On 4 March 1942, a telegram was received by the Japanese War Ministry, sent by Gen. Itagaki Seishiro of the Chosen Army in Korea: “As it would be very effective in stamping out the respect and admiration of the Korean people for Britain and America, and also in establishing in them a strong faith in [our] victory, and as the Governor General [Taisho Minami] and the Army are both strongly desirous of it, we wish you would intern 1,000 British and 1,000 American prisoners of war in Korea. Kindly give this matter special consideration.” A reply was sent the next day that a thousand “white prisoners of war” would be sent to Korea. The appearance of British and American POWs in chains was deemed to be of great psychological value in winning the hearts and minds of the Koreans. Consequently, in May, Lt. Gen. Kusaba Tatsumi of the 25th Army in Malaya was ordered to hand over white POWs to the Korean Army.

On 12 August, fifteen hundred prisoners were marched to the Singapore docks. Lt. Tom Henling Wade of the East Surrey Regiment stood in line with the rest. His unit was one of many that had voted for the trip to Japan. The rationale: a temperate and healthier climate. Wade wasn’t convinced. He abstained from voting but decided to go along to keep the unit together. On the waterfront they were confronted by a rusty old freighter so low in the water that only the bridge and funnel were visible above the pier. They were supposed to fit themselves in among the loads of bauxite. Groans were heard. “You could sink that ship with a .303 bullet,” said one man.

Standing in line with the rest was Lt. Gen. Arthur E. Percival, the man who carried the stigma of having surrendered Singapore. About four hundred of the fifteen hundred men were high-ranking technicians, engineers, and officers. For three hours the generals vehemently protested that there was no way sixteen hundred men could be crammed into that ship. Surprisingly, they won their argument. The four hundred were put into the hold of the larger England Maru. As on most voyages of this type, there was a complete lack of privacy for basic latrine functions. Percival’s aide said he “felt terribly sorry for the General,” adding that he was also “bloody sorry for myself.”

Wade, with the eleven hundred remaining POWs, were put aboard the 3,829-ton cargo ship Fukkai Maru. It was ancient and rusty, built in England in 1898 with an extra-tall, old-fashioned funnel. Wade called it a “fumigation ship.” The men undressed, were disinfected and powdered for lice, then redressed and embarked. They were divided between the forward and aft holds. The upper part of each had been divided by a shelf, leaving about three feet of space above and below the tiers. No one could stand or kneel; they had to lie, sit, or crawl. It was four days before they got underway, and the men stripped down to their shorts and sat motionless on the straw matting. There was not much more room on deck, as it was crowded with winches, vats, rafts, crates, a cookhouse, an icebox, and a water tank. They were fed rice twice a day, with a thin soup made of flour and water. The big treat came when eighteen tins of Irish stew was divided among them. The contingent was all British except for about one hundred Australians. Wade was pleased to have the Australians aboard, for he loved to hear them sing “Waltzing Matilda” late at night. As the Southern Cross slowly dipped below the horizon, Wade dreamed of freedom and wondered if he had made the right choice.

The convoy made a brief stop at Saigon, then on to Formosa, arriving at Takao on 29 August. According to H. M. “Dutchy” Holland of 2/4 Battalion, “The trip was pretty rough, we ran into three typhoons in the China Sea. Food was fair, we were in the ‘dog houses’ in the hold; double tiered bunks with about three feet of head room and limited space to lie down.” At Takao, England Maru disgorged its party of officers, which moved on to Heito. Percival noted the camp had “no redeeming feature.” They were paraded in front of the silent Formosans and forced to sign a “no escape” paper. Some stayed at Heito; others were sent to the east coast at Karenko, where they would meet other high-ranking American officers from the Philippines.

Those on Fukkai Maru were forced to work as stevedores, unloading bauxite, coal, and rice for a fortnight before continuing the voyage. Twenty-four seriously ill dysentery patients were left at Takao. The weather turned chilly and stormy. The food ran low, and the “icebox” was opened to expose its contents of rotten pork, bright with emerald patches. The cooks sliced off the worst parts and the rest went into the prisoners’ soup. Said Lieutenant Wade, “All eleven hundred of us developed diarrhea.” The lines to the six wooden latrines grew longer.

Finally, on 22 September, forty-one days after boarding in Singapore, they docked in Pusan, Korea. One ritual shared by almost all POWs landing in the empire was to drop his trousers and bend over, while Japanese doctors inserted glass rods up their rectums. No one was quite sure what was done with these “specimens,” but the procedure certainly resulted in no special medical care. Within two weeks, ten men died of dysentery.

After the prisoners pulled up their pants, they were photographed and given another going over by the Kempeitai, Japan’s secret police, an organization similar to Germany’s Gestapo. A whole company of them in their red pigskin boots, with ken hei (thought soldier) on their brassards, inspected the sorry prisoners, stealing their last few rings, watches, and personal items.

The Koreans of Pusan had been marshaled along the streets, and the POWs were lined up in columns of fours and marched up and down the main thoroughfares. Mounted Japanese officers rode at the head while guards walked alongside. They marched under the hot sun all day, only twice allowed to rest, both times near the playgrounds of schools, where children were allowed to spit on them.

The ordeal completed, they were taken to the train station and shipped to Seoul, where they once again performed the parade of jeers. Finally, they reached the camp that was to be their home for the next two years. Several of them died within the next few days. The Kempeitai was pleased with the public propaganda spectacle. Official humiliation of the enemy, which would become common practice in Japanese-occupied areas, went well.²⁹

PRISONERS FROM THE BISMARCKS

Lying between the tail of the New Guinea “bird” and the equator, the Bismarck Archipelago was the scene of some of the toughest fighting in the Pacific in 1942–43. Simpson Harbor and Rabaul, on the east end of New Britain, was the major Japanese base in the area for two years. The initial landing came on 22 January 1942, with an amphibious assault under the Japanese Fourth Fleet, which had much the same composition as the one that attacked Wake. This time it was supported by Admiral Nagumo’s carrier force, and no Allied ships opposed it.

For years the only “defenders” of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands were the Australian coastwatchers, a network of local volunteers under the auspices of the Royal Australian Navy who kept an eye on the vast unguarded coast. By 1941, there were more than seven hundred coastwatchers on the rolls, placed at one hundred coast watching stations along a twenty-five-hundred-mile crescent of islands. The station at Rabaul coordinated operations in that sector. These men were watchers only; any serious defense would need armed troops. With that in mind, 23 Brigade of the 8th Division was sent as a nucleus of forces to be placed at various islands north of Australia. The 2/40 Battalion, or “Sparrow Force,” went to Timor, 2/21 Battalion, or “Gull Force,” went to Ambon, and 2/22 Battalion, “Lark Force,” went to Rabaul.

Australia had neither the naval nor air power to support these forces in the event of a major Japanese thrust. There seems to have been no contingency plans to assist the battalions after being placed in such exposed positions. In fact, it was thought that their only function was to “put up a jolly good show.”

Montevideo Maru. U.S. Naval Historical Center

When the Japanese landed, they quickly punched a hole in the coastwatchers’ fence. The volunteers and about four hundred men of Lark Force either fell back into the jungle or retreated along the coasts back to New Guinea. The remaining eleven hundred men put up a brief fight, but the next day they surrendered the city and airfield. Thereafter they languished as prisoners at the Malaguna Road Camp until 22 June 1942, when they were separated into kumis of fifty men each, then bundled off to Simpson Harbor. Perhaps fearing an uprising, the officers were left behind, awaiting another ship.

About 1,050 men, mostly of 2/22 Battalion, together with 200 civilians, many of them Australian administrative personnel, were loaded on the Montevideo Maru. She was a passenger-cargo ship of 7,266 tons built by Mitsubishi in 1926 and was capable of eighteen knots, which was probably enough to outrun all but the latest fleet submarines in a surface chase. Subsequently, she was not escorted. Montevideo Maru cut through the dangerous “Red Channel” west of New Ireland, then northwest through the Philippine Sea, heading for Samah on the island of Hainan. Conditions were crowded, with little food, water, or amenities, much as on other hellships. However, no Australian soldier or civilian left a record of the voyage, for Montevideo Maru was fated to cross paths with the USS Sturgeon.

Late on 30 June, Lt. Cdr. William L. “Bull” Wright conned his submarine about sixty miles northwest of Cape Bojeador, Luzon. At 2216, lookouts sighted a darkened ship to the south. After a few minutes of tracking, it was decided that the ship was on a westerly course, running at high speed. Wright guessed the ship had gone through Babuyan Channel and was headed for Hainan. Sturgeon worked up to full power and headed west in an attempt to get ahead. However, logged Wright, “for an hour and a half we couldn’t make a nickel. This fellow was really going, making at least seventeen knots, and probably a bit more, as he appeared to be zig-zagging.”

It looked hopeless, but Wright hung on, hoping the ship would slow or change course. The range stayed about eighteen thousand yards, but sure enough, about midnight, the ship slowed to twelve knots. Said Wright, “After that it was easy.”

Sturgeon altered course to get ahead in good firing position, dove, and waited. At five thousand yards, Wright discovered the maru’s course was a little south of west, so Sturgeon altered her own course to compensate. With only three torpedoes left in the forward tubes, Wright maneuvered to expose the stern tubes. Even so, it was nearly four thousand yards to the target—a very long shot.

At 0225 on 1 July, the four stern fish were racing toward the darkened, unsuspecting ship. Perhaps all of the prisoners were sleeping in the holds; perhaps there were a few on deck who witnessed the approaching torpedo wakes. At 0229, Wright heard and observed an explosion less than one hundred feet abaft the stack. Finally, lights came on, but they soon flickered out as the ship lost power. In six minutes the bow was high in the air, and in eleven minutes the ship was completely gone. “He was a big one,” Wright noted in the log. Sturgeon surfaced at 0250, completed her battery charge, and proceeded unconcernedly out of the area, unaware of the human toll she had exacted.

On board Montevideo Maru, Japanese survivors indicated that two torpedoes struck in the number four and five holds and in the number five oil tank. Oil gushed into the engine room. Pumps were started but were unable to quell the rapid flooding. Holds filled, and the ship listed to starboard and down by the stern. Within minutes the captain ordered abandon ship. No one bothered about the prisoners deep in the holds. Three lifeboats were lowered, but all capsized, one severely damaged. After being righted, the two remaining boats searched the area until midmorning, then headed for the coast of Luzon, reaching there the evening of the following day. They set out on a trek to find the nearest Japanese base but were harassed and attacked by the natives. Not until 25 July did eighteen wretched survivors reach an Army outpost.

Sturgeon (SS 187). U.S. Naval Institute

No Australians survived. Either they all went down with the explosion and crush of water or those who escaped were abandoned by the Japanese in their lifeboats. The relatives of the men of Lark Force perhaps endured more anguish than any, having to wait almost four years before being informed by the Japanese what had happened to the men taken prisoner in Rabaul. Montevideo Maru was the first hellship loaded with POWs to be sunk by a U.S. submarine. It would not be the last.³⁰

Lark Force soldiers had been separated from their officers in Rabaul. Whether this was because the Japanese feared a mutiny is unknown. In any event, on 6 July, six days after their men were already dead, sixty officers under Colonel Scanlan, six Australian military nurses, and thirteen female Australian civilians were taken to Simpson Harbor. They boarded the Naruto Maru, a 7,148-ton passenger ship built in 1934, now serving as an ammunition supply ship. The only concession to privacy was a rope across one hold, separating male from female quarters. One nurse called it “a dirty old freighter” and said, “We were all mixed together and spent nine days sweating and starving before we reached Japan.” The convoy reached Yokohama on 15 July. The Aussie officers ended up at Zentsuji Camp, the women at Totsuka. They all survived the war. The Japanese destroyer Akikaze was a convoy escort as far as Saipan, where she was detached and returned to Rabaul via Truk. Akikaze would herself be involved in an incident resulting in a prisoner massacre the following year.³¹

CAPTURE OF THE PHILIPPINES

In December 1941, the Japanese landed on Luzon, the main northern island of the Philippines. Unlike Japan’s other conquests in Southeast Asia and the East Indies, the Philippines proved a tougher nut to crack. Several landings were made between the tenth and twenty-fourth of the month, at Aparri, Vigan, Legaspi, and Lamon Bay, but the main force boiled ashore in Lingayen Gulf. The Japanese 16th and 48th Divisions and supporting elements pushed rapidly inland, racing south down the central valley for Manila. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s troops fought holding actions while other elements, including soldiers, sailors, civilians, and Filipinos, fell back to defend the Bataan Peninsula. As in the Malayan campaign, the Allied force was pushed back by a Japanese force inferior in numbers. The Japanese were doing so well that, against the protests of Gen. Homma Masaharu, the 48th Division was recalled to prepare for the East Indies operation. Once the U.S.-Filipino army caught its breath and consolidated, however, the Japanese were stymied. They battered themselves against a series of defensive lines stretched across the Bataan Peninsula. By mid-February, battle casualties, disease, and short supplies forced a temporary end to offensive operations. Both sides waited.

By early March, elements of the Japanese 4th and 21st Divisions had arrived to renew the battle. Ordered by President Franklin Roosevelt to vacate the Philippines, MacArthur left by PT boat on 11 March, leaving newly promoted Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright in charge. To many of those left behind, “Dugout Doug” MacArthur had fled, leaving them holding the bag. The remnants of the U.S. 11th, 21st, 31st, 41st, 51st, 71st, and 91st Divisions would fight on, without additional supplies or reinforcements.

The end on Bataan came on 9 April, more the result of a lack of food, medicine, and supplies than Japanese assaults. Unable to continue the struggle, Gen. Edward P. King Jr. called it off. Some men were struck by the date; the last time a U.S. army had surrendered was also on 9 April, when Robert E. Lee did so at Appomattox in 1865.

Still holding out on the island of Corregidor were Wainwright’s eleven thousand men of the 31st Division, 4th Marine Regiment, and soldiers of various units that had managed to get ashore from Bataan. They fought for twenty-seven more days, until the Japanese landed on the island and Wainwright, facing the annihilation of his entire command, went to see General Homma.³²

Those who surrendered on Bataan suffered through the hell of the Death March. The Japanese had plans for taking prisoners, but they were based on faulty assumptions. First, they assumed that the prisoners would be in good physical condition, which they were not. There was no plan for caring for sick, hungry, and wounded men. Second was the assumption that their own food supplies and logistical planning would be up to the task, which it was not. Third, the Japanese assumed they might have to transfer twenty-five thousand captives to POW camps. Their estimate was far from accurate.

About ten thousand Americans and sixty-two thousand Filipinos were forced to walk sixty miles up the Bataan Peninsula and east to the railhead at San Fernando. They then rode in boxcars for twenty miles, finally marching an additional ten miles to Camp O’Donnell. Along the way they were subjected to countless robberies, brutalities, and killings. Many Filipinos were able to escape from the columns, darting into the jungles and villages, relatively safe among their own people. Even so, perhaps five thousand Filipinos and seven hundred Americans died before reaching the camp. But O’Donnell was no haven, for even more were to die there in the upcoming months from disease, starvation, and beatings.

The soldiers and marines who surrendered on Corregidor did not suffer the same death march, and their casualties were less horrific. There were other prison camps on Luzon, among them Cabanatuan, Tarlac, Las Pinas, Nichols Field, Pasay, Fort McKinley, and Bilibid Prison. Civilian internment centers were opened at Santo Tomas, Camp John Hay, and Los Banos, among other sites, containing about seventy-eight hundred men, women, and children.³³

PRISONER MOVES FROM THE PHILIPPINES

Other than on Luzon, the main strength of the U.S.-Filipino force was on Mindanao. Brig. Gen. William F. Sharp commanded the 61st, 81st, and 101st Divisions, composed almost entirely of Filipino troops. Their surrender came on 8 May, two days after Wainwright’s. Many of the Filipinos were able to melt back into the countryside, whereas the Americans were imprisoned at Del Monte, on the north coast, or at Malabalay, in Mindanao’s central valley.³⁴

Almost immediately the Japanese began moving prisoners among the islands. At Camp O’Donnell in July, groups of volunteers were asked to move to several Philippine islands. Many grasped the chance, willing to try anything to get out of the O’Donnell hellhole. One group included Sidney Stewart, a peculiar sort of soldier who became ill every time he saw blood or saw someone get hurt. Stewart found himself on a small interisland steamer with a few hundred others, traveling from Manila to Cebu City, to Zamboanga on Mindanao’s southwest peninsula, then to Davao. Conditions on the steamer were much better than in the camp. There was sufficient food, and the guards even joked and laughed. In the ports, they allowed Filipinos to throw fruit to them. They disembarked at Davao and were trucked north to the former Davao Penal Colony, whose criminal occupants had been sent to the leper colony on the island of Palawan. During the following weeks, Army Air Corps arrivals from Del Monte swelled the prison camp’s numbers.

The island of Luzon, showing the route of the Bataan Death March and prison and internment centers, 1942–45.

In July, Camp O’Donnell was closed down and most of the prisoners were removed to one of the Cabanatuan camps. On 24 July, another call for men was made, and 346 prisoners from Cabanatuan were selected. They traveled, a hundred men to a rail car, to Bilibid Prison, and from there to the famous million-dollar Pier Seven on the Manila waterfront. On the twenty-ninth, they boarded the Sanko Maru, a 5,461-ton turbine steamer built in 1939. The entire party was quartered in one hold, where the interpreter told them they were going on a “three-month detail,” they would be fed “American food,” and things “would be very enjoyable.”

Among them was 4th Marine Sgt. Donald H. Thomas, who was captured at Corregidor and had spent the previous few months in Bilibid Prison. Thomas called the steamer a “middle-sized freighter, hauling supplies and Jap soldiers.” Generally a man did not take many trips on a prison ship, but Thomas called it “one of the best prison ships I was on.” The voyage was uneventful, and the prisoners even had the freedom to roam the vessel. The steamer made the 350-mile trip to Palawan, stopped at a leper colony, and docked at Puerto Princesa on 1 August.

Making the journey was PO Henry Clay Henderson, who had been aboard the sub tender Canopus and was left to fight on Corregidor after the tender had been bombed and scuttled. Henderson said they were all in a weakened condition after months of immobility at Cabanatuan. He thought it would be impossible to work, until they were “immediately introduced to the ‘Vitamin stick,’” which was “adequate incentive to work.” They cut down mahogany and coconut trees, and in no time their hands were bloody pulps from using the juji (pick ax) and impi (shovel). “We worked almost naked in this boiling hot sun for the next twenty-seven months,” Henderson said.

They lived at Camp 10-A in unused, dilapidated constabulary buildings. Fourth Marine corporal George Burlage actually thought the site was pretty. It was built in a hollow square, each building had a veranda, and the central plaza was filled with coconut trees. Their building was on a slope, with a first floor galley and storeroom. More than three hundred men were expected to live in the barracks. “We were allotted a space of about six feet long, three feet wide,” said Burlage, “a burial plot!”

For two years they built an airfield. Clearing the jungle, crushing coral with hammers, and mixing and pouring acres of concrete, they constructed a strip more than fifteen hundred yards long and seventy-five yards wide. During the ordeal, about fifty prisoners died from overwork, starvation, and lack of medical care. Back in Manila, prisoners who worked on the docks, among them J. D. Merritt, hauled supplies for those on Palawan whose “lot was much harder than ours.” Merritt worked the old-fashioned hand winches that loaded the small interisland steamers, the Naga and Isla Princesa, which occasionally ferried supplies to Palawan. Merritt had “some real donnybrooks” with several of the “miscreants” among them who tried to steal precious Red Cross parcels meant for “our little brothers” in Palawan.³⁵

On 15 August at Camp Casising, near Malabalay, Mindanao, all the generals, colonels, and their orderlies, about one hundred men in all, were gathered for shipment north on a small freighter, the Maru San (three). Among them were Brig. Gens. William Sharp, Guy O. Fort, Joseph P. Vachon, and Manuel A. Roxas. The latter would become the first president of the Philippines after the war. They were sent to various camps in Formosa and Korea.

At the same time, a larger party was being assembled on Luzon. General Wainwright, who had been in Manila since the surrender, was taken to Tarlac Camp on 9 June, along with other senior officers from O’Donnell and Bilibid. On 11 August, they were fed an early breakfast and shuffled along the road to the train station. Fifteen generals, 106 colonels, and a number of orderlies rode the rails south. They were then trucked back to the Manila docks, where they found a “good-sized” ship that they called the “Stinko Maru.”

The Nagara Maru was a 7,149-ton passenger-cargo ship built in 1934 by Yokohama Dock Company and owned by the NYK Line. After standing on the pier for more than an hour watching the ship being loaded, the prisoners were abruptly ordered to about-face. Wainwright peered over his shoulder to see why. A long line of Japanese soldiers, like men in an old fire-bucket brigade, stood on the pier. For the next two hours they passed hundreds of small, labeled cardboard boxes onto the ship. Each box contained the ashes of a Japanese soldier being sent to the home shrines, and they did not want the POWs to know about their casualties.

Nagara Maru. U.S. Naval Historical Center

While waiting, Wainwright was engaged by an English-speaking Japanese officer. They were being sent to Karenko, Formosa, he said, not to Japan. Wainwright would love Karenko, said the officer; there was plenty of fish, fruit, meat, and sugar, and even a fine bathing beach. Wainwright wanly smiled, having heard similar promises before.

There were only about 180 prisoners making the two-day voyage. Even so, all but Wainwright and General King were stuffed in a hold like cattle. They made their beds on two long, wooden shelves that extended six feet out from the bulkheads. Each man had about two and a half feet of space. Wainwright and King shared a cabin on the boat deck. They were ordered not to leave the room. Even so, it was perhaps the most comfortable accommodations any POWs ever had.

On 14 August, Nagara Maru pulled in to the nearly landlocked harbor of Takao, on Formosa’s southwest coast. She anchored astern of a large liner. They recognized her as the SS President Harrison, which had been captured early in the war and renamed the Kakko Maru, and was later to be named the Kachidoki Maru. She too would become a hellship.

The POWs were lined up on deck and subjected to another distressing physical exam, which, Wainwright explained, “centered around the rectum.” This time all of them were sent back into the hold, which was alive with millions of bedbugs, and battened down in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees. The next morning they were released. Wainwright, the big prize, was forced to pose for photographers and a Japanese artist. His group then boarded an “evil little steamer” for the trip up the east coast to Karenko.

They were the first to reach their new home. Arriving in the next few weeks were contingents from Southeast Asia, the East Indies, and Philippines, including Sir Arthur Percival and British generals Ian McRae, L. M. Heath, and Merton Beckwith-Smith, along with General Sharp and the rest of the Mindanao contingent. Karenko was loaded with 405 of the top officers and administrators from the southwestern Pacific theater.³⁶

The first group of prisoners from the Philippines to reach Japan assembled in Manila in early September. As usual, the rumor mill was pumping. Talk was that the Red Cross had negotiated a prisoner exchange. One of five hundred men selected from the Cabanatuan camp, Lester I. Tenney of Company B, 192d Tank Battalion, was trucked to Manila in an exultant mood. He was going to board a ship to freedom.

In Manila Bay, Tenney’s hopes were dashed. Their destination was Japan, and they were traveling there on a small, dilapidated freighter that appeared to be at least thirty years old. Said Tenney, “It needed a paint job just to keep the steel from rusting out.” Tenney walked up the gangplank to the Toko Maru, watching as a contingent of American prisoners working on the docks flashed them the “V” sign. The boat did not look seaworthy, even to a landlubber like Tenney.³⁷

Although he knew nothing about the job, Tenney volunteered to be a cook so he would have more hours on deck. The Toko Maru sailed on 5 September, but it did not take long for Tenney to realize he had chosen the wrong job; a seasick cook was not needed. An old salt soon realized why Lester was spending so much time hanging over the railing. He baited him, telling him how a real sailor could swallow a piece of salt pork tied to a string, then slowly pull it back out without vomiting. That was all Lester needed; he was quickly back at the rail, heaving his guts out. A Japanese officer saw him, and that was the end of his days as a cook. Back he went into the hold with 496 other men.

Without fresh air and a horizon to look at, Tenney only got sicker, and the trip north was pure hell. The box was fifty by fifty feet; about five square feet per man. It was twenty feet to the top, where the only light and air came from the occasionally open hatch. A single ladder led to the deck. They disposed of their waste matter by carrying pails up the ladder and heaving the contents overboard. Wooden planks covered the lower metal deck, for on a previous trip, the ship transported horses. They slept on the wooden planks, which had soaked up all the horse urine. Their clothes and bodies were permeated with the smell of horses. Tenney would have given anything for a hot bath and to be rid of the horrible stench.

Japanese officers suggested that they exercise in the hold to keep fit, which was laughable for men starving on a daily ration of a couple of rice balls and a cup of watery soup. They were all between 30 and 40 percent underweight. Every night someone would have a malaria attack, crying for blankets because he was freezing or screaming that his body was burning up. Tenney hated the noises in the darkness. Every minute was everlasting. The sounds of men breathing could tear through him like fingernails scratching on a blackboard. Men broke down and cried because they could not take it any more.

To keep sane, Tenney managed to join up with a corporal from New Mexico, Jesus Silva of the 200th Coast Artillery. Silva had a pair of dice, and after negotiating a deal, they began to run a craps game. Over the days they won a good sum of money, before another soldier with a hot hand eventually broke them. At any rate, it distracted them from their worries for a time.

Badly in need of repair, Toko Maru took fourteen days to reach Takao. While being fixed, the POWs were put to work picking bananas and hauling them aboard for shipment to the empire. They were warned not to eat any. After six days, Toko Maru was seaworthy enough to resume her voyage. Before sailing on the twenty-fifth, the prisoners were given a written set of instructions: they should eliminate bowels and bladder before boarding; they would only get one portion of rice, twice a day; they should not complain about the food; when toilet buckets were full, they should notify a guard and haul up the bucket to throw its contents overboard; no one was to climb the ladder without orders; no one was to touch anything on the ship; no one was to disobey an order; no one was to talk loudly; and no one was to move anywhere except within the hold.

The Japanese meant business. One night, a prisoner suffering from malaria and dysentery screamed that he had to be let topside for some air. They could not stop his yelling, or his rush for the ladder. A guard opened the hatch and motioned him up. As the sick man stuck his head up to deck level, the guard shoved a bayonet into his neck. He toppled and fell. It was an hour before the medics could stop the bleeding and sew him up. Because one man had disobeyed the rules, the rest would only get one ration of rice that day—Japanese justice.

Tenney hoped with all his might that he could end this horrible journey, and almost in answer to his pleas, he heard the ship’s horn. It was 7 October and they had reached Moji, Japan. In a dockside godown they stripped and were sprayed with delousing chemicals. They were given split-toed sandals and Japanese-style clothing, all too small. Tenney and his group of five hundred were sent to Fukuoka 17 Camp to work in the coal mines.³⁸

A smaller contingent left Cabanatuan on 17 September. About three hundred men marched south to Manila, where they waited for three days in Bilibid Prison before boarding the 6,989-ton Lima Maru. The twin-screwed vessel, owned by the NYK Line, was built in 1920, was 445 feet long, and had a cruising speed of twelve knots. Otis H. King, Fourth Marines, called it “an old rusty freighter.” He heard that thirteen POW colonels and three generals were in the group, some of them with their orderlies still carrying their golf clubs. He doubted that the Japanese would allow the officers any golf time.

The three hundred were placed into a small forward hold, where the air immediately became stale as they packed in shoulder to shoulder. The hatch was covered, and only two forty-watt bulbs swinging overhead provided illumination. There were also two thousand Japanese soldiers in the other holds. “I was reminded of pictures I had seen of crowded slave ships of old,” King said. He was lucky to be against a bulkhead on which to rest, but those in the middle had to lay on top of each other to sleep. There were no toilet facilities. One prisoner guessed they were headed to Japan; another disagreed, believing Japan was too overpopulated to accommodate them. Not yet having lost his sense of humor, another man suggested that they had already killed enough Japanese in the Philippines to make room for them, and, he said, “maybe their women need our services.”

The Lima Maru sailed on 21 September. After four days the men were let out on deck to use the outboard latrines and wash in salt water, letting the waste water run down the decks and over the side. Daily meals came in individual boxes consisting of two rice balls and a watery soup. No one was pleased with the accommodations, but, King admitted, “it was like a tourist trip on an ocean cruise liner compared to the ‘Hell Ships’ that followed in our wake.” Even so, eight men died on the voyage.

Hellships Lima Maru and Lisbon Maru. U.S. Navy

It took thirteen days to reach Takao. The next morning, 5 October, they debarked and took a train north, to a town that King remembered as Tychu. Their trip to Japan would be delayed, as they spent the next month working in a rock quarry. Before sailing, the prisoners were required to indicate their professions, and King and a buddy said “telephone line repairmen” in the hope that they would be given outdoor work and, consequently, a better chance to escape. When they eventually reached Japan, they would end up in an electric shop in Yokohama.³⁹

By September, more prisoners were being shifted to Changi, Singapore, which was a collection point for distribution to Burma, Borneo, and Japan. More than one thousand Australians of Sparrow Force had been captured on Timor and were put in Usapa Besar Camp for six months, where conditions were fair and treatment reasonable. The prisoners could sit among the coconut trees near the beach and wistfully wonder when the Australian forces would rescue them; after all, they were only four hundred miles from Darwin. There would be no rescue. Instead, on 26 July, the 1,871-ton Samurusan Maru, an ex-Dutch ship, carried a number of them from Kupang, Timor, to Java, arriving on 5 August. In early September, Nishi Maru, called “a dirty, rusty old tramp steamer,” sailed from Timor, to Java. It had been the British ship Kalgan, a 2,655-ton passenger-cargo vessel built by Scott’s Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in 1921 and seized in Bangkok in December 1941. After a stop at Surabaya, Nishi Maru took fifteen hundred Dutch KNIL and Aussies to Tanjong Priok, arriving on 12 September. Following behind was the 5,813-ton Dainichi Maru, built in 1922 and now owned by the Itaya Shosen Company. Hauling more Dutch POWs and the remainder of Sparrow Force, it sailed from Kupang on 23 September and arrived in Surabaya on the twenty-ninth.

The men from Nishi Maru found themselves in Bicycle Camp, Batavia, which at this time contained about 500 British, 500 American, and 2,000 Australian prisoners under Brig. A. S. Blackburn. Notice was given to the British to start packing. After midnight on 14 September, they were rousted out of bed to begin the march to the harbor. There were 473 British POWs, mostly of the RAF, and 1 Australian. Flt. Lt. Charles Johnstone was born near Melbourne but joined the RAF in 1940 when it was recruiting Australian pilots. Now he trudged along with his unit, exhausted upon reaching the docks in the late afternoon. Waiting for them was ship “No. 2106.” They were lined up, counted, and their kits were sprayed with a disinfectant. Once aboard they were given a towel ten inches by twenty-seven inches. With a piece of string to secure it, it would become a loincloth—standard clothing. The guards ordered them not to mix with the other prisoners, but they could not tell RAF from AIF, and the men mingled freely. Johnstone was glad to see the last of Batavia. “We thought we had been given a bad time and things could not be worse,” he said. “What little we knew of the future.”

The RAF contingent was placed in one small hold, where tiers of bed spaces had been built up along the sides. They couldn’t fit. The other POWs who had been aboard since Timor, told them it was best to have some men sleep at night, and some during the day. Only half of them were allowed on deck at any one time, so a roster system was instituted to assure every man had a turn. Six small “cabinets” were built over the side, but with dysentery rampant, they were crowded twenty-four hours a day. But, said Johnstone, “we were allowed to urinate over the stern.”

They ate rice and fish-head soup, served twice a day in buckets carried down to the holds. One storage room was packed with fish. The cooks cut off the heads and tails and boiled them up with some stale Soya sauce. The heads floated on top. “With all these eyes looking up at you and the stuff smelling, looking, and tasting like vomit,” said Johnstone, “there were always plenty of leftovers.” The guards ate clean slabs of dried fish, laughing at the POWs’ discomfort. Charlie sarcastically concluded, “This soup was a masterpiece. Not only did the Japanese get square with the white races, they got rid of their offal, and at no cost.”

It took four days for Nishi Maru to reach Singapore. Three men died and were buried at sea. No cause of death was given, but dysentery was the likely agent. Many men were afflicted and unable to reach the latrines. The stench and the rolling of the ship caused an overpowering seasickness that could not be overcome. Johnstone recalled one man who climbed up the ladder, was unable to control an abdominal cramp, and defecated in the face of the man below him.

They nearly cheered when the freighter dropped anchor. Such a dirty, smelly lot created amusement for those watching along the waterfront. With their heads recently shorn of all hair in Batavia, they looked more like pigs just released from a sty. As they marched the ten miles to Changi, one more man collapsed and died. It was midnight when they reached an old, empty Indian barracks, found bags spread on the floor, and flopped down to a fitful sleep. In three weeks they would continue their journey.⁴⁰

THE OCTOBER VOYAGES

By the fall of 1942, Japanese prisoner distribution had formed a pattern. First, the large manpower pool still in Java and Singapore would be tapped for the Burma Railway project, resulting in a flow of men from the outer islands to the Asian mainland. Second, the successful experiment to bring white POWs north for the edification of the Koreans would be continued. Realizing, however, that the POWs could be used for more than propaganda purposes, they were shipped in droves to the empire as slave laborers. Prisoners could work at scores of jobs, in dockyards, factories, cottage industries, shipyards, coal and copper mines, and on construction gangs. Third, on a smaller scale, and almost as a cross-current to the first two trends, ad hoc prisoner groups continued to be shipped among the conquered islands for a number of reasons. At least eighteen POW shipments during October was the highest number for any month of the war.

In Hong Kong, few prisoners had been moved prior to October. The British colony had already suffered its own miniature “Rape of Nanking” when, on Christmas Day, 1941, Japanese troops had entered St. Stephen’s College and the temporary Jockey Club hospital in Stanley, systematically bayoneting, raping, and killing about 160 prisoners, wounded men, and nurses. Those who managed to surrender and live were segregated by nationality. The Americans and other European nationals were kept at an internment camp on the island at Stanley. About five thousand British were imprisoned on the mainland at Shamshuipo Camp, on the waterfront in Kowloon. The Canadians went to North Point on the island, and the Indians went to Mautauchung. As in Singapore, the Indians were pressured to join the Indian National Army, and about two hundred of fifteen hundred complied.⁴¹

In September, the Canadians at North Point were moved across the harbor to Shamshuipo. With their arrival, a draft of 616 British POWs departed from Hong Kong for Japan on the Maru Shi (four) on 3 September. Later that month, it was decided to move a larger contingent of British soldiers to Japan. About 1,816 men were assembled on the parade ground of Shamshuipo Camp and were addressed by Lt. Wada Hideo, assisted by interpreter Niimori Genichiro. “You are going to be taken to a beautiful country,” Niimori translated, “away from Hong Kong, where you will be well looked after and well treated. I will be in charge of you. So remember my face.”

Wada may have been in charge, but Niimori, the chief interpreter in the Hong Kong area, wielded more power than his appointment would indicate. He was a small man with pointed ears and usually wore military field boots and a khaki cloak, although he held no Army commission. Nicknamed “Panama Pete” by the prisoners, he had been educated and lived for a time in the United States, where he worked at rodeos and amusement parks and picked up many colloquialisms. He could sound like a American gangster, with his oft-repeated use of “Youse guys.” Other times his mispronunciations or misunderstandings could be comical. He, and Col. Tokunaga Isao, commandant of the Stanley camp, liked to play bridge. Often, unwilling Europeans would be asked to join them. During one evening game, Niimori suddenly asked an internee, “Do you know anything about fucking?”

“Yes, a bit,” replied the puzzled man.

“I used to own one,” Niimori said proudly.

“Is that so?” said the prisoner, unsure of just what Niimori was talking about and trying to maintain his composure.

One learned not to laugh in Niimori’s face. He would blow hot or cold, becoming a kind friend or a sadistic brute, on a whim. When some Canadians were recaptured after an escape attempt, Niimori and a lieutenant spent an hour bashing them with baseball bats.

Niimori Genichiro would be responsible for the POWs on their journey. The men were divided into kumis of 50, given the usual medical inspection, and loaded on the 7,053-ton passenger-cargo ship Lisbon Maru. The twin-screwed vessel, built in 1920, was 445 feet long, with a beam of 58 feet, a loaded draught of 27 feet, and a cruising speed of twelve knots. It was owned by the NYK Line and had a crew of 65. The number one hold took contingents of the Royal Navy and the 1st and 2d Battalion Royal Scots. Number two hold took the Middlesex Regiment, and number three held Royal Artillery men. Lastly came 778 Japanese troops returning home, plus 25 guards.

Men had to take turns lying down, shoulder to shoulder on roughly constructed platforms. Surprisingly, the food was decent by POW standards: rice and tea in the morning, and rice, tea, vegetables, and a bit of bully beef in the evening. There was an adequate supply of drinking water, but none for washing. The prisoners were allowed on deck to queue up for the wooden latrines hanging over the side. Half of them were given kapok life belts.

Lisbon Maru steamed off on 27 September. Four days of uneventful sailing passed until early in the morning of 1 October. Patrolling the East China Sea south of Shanghai was the Grouper, on her second patrol and skippered by Lt. Cdr. Rob Roy McGregor. On the surface in the darkness, lookouts had spotted nothing but sampans until, at 0400, a freighter appeared on the southern horizon. McGregor approached for a closer look but figured a night surface attack in the bright moonlight was too risky. Grouper ran parallel to the target to determine her course and speed, hoping to get in position ahead for an underwater daylight attack. The freighter appeared to be heavily laden, moving at a speed of eight knots.

At daylight Lisbon Maru changed course 50 degrees, leaving Grouper in a poor attack position. McGregor dove, and at 0704 fired three torpedoes from thirty-two hundred yards. All either missed or failed to explode. The Lisbon Maru continued on unaware, and McGregor fired a fourth fish. Two minutes and ten seconds later a loud explosion was heard. McGregor peered through the scope. He could see no sign of damage, but the ship changed course another 50 degrees to starboard and slowly came to a stop. She hoisted a flag that resembled “Baker” and began firing a small-caliber gun in the direction of the periscope.

On board Lisbon Maru, first warning that they were being stalked by a submarine came when Grouper’s torpedo slammed into the starboard coal bunker. The engines stopped and the lights went out. No POWs were injured by the explosion, so they could only guess what had happened. The few of them topside were immediately sent below, while extra sentries were placed at the hatches to make sure they stayed there. Niimori ordered tarpaulins stretched across the hatches and fastened with ropes.

Meanwhile, McGregor closed to one thousand yards and at 0845 fired again. Another miss. McGregor was furious. He was sure his calculations had been accurate and the poor results were due to malfunctioning torpedoes. He conned Grouper to a new position about one thousand yards off the port bow and, at 0938, fired a sixth fish from a stern tube, set to run at zero feet. Upon firing, McGregor spotted a plane and dove to one hundred feet. About forty seconds into the dive, he heard another explosion. Two minutes later the plane dropped three depth bombs in the submarine’s vicinity but caused no damage. The torpedo might have been a premature, for no one aboard the Lisbon Maru felt additional hits.

Grouper (SS 214). U.S. Naval Institute

Grouper popped back up to periscope depth at 1000. The plane was still there, but McGregor could see no target. Since it hadn’t moved for two and a half hours, McGregor logged, “Assume she sunk.” They went back down and stayed in the vicinity throughout the day, hearing occasional explosions of distant depth charges. At 1905, under an overcast sky, Grouper surfaced and hauled clear.⁴²

After the initial shock of the torpedo hit, the Japanese calmed down, but they became very uncooperative. During a long, uncomfortable day, it was apparent to the POWs below that the ship was listing to starboard, but they were given no information. The water supply had run out, there was no food, and the battened hatches left the air supply foul. British officers appealed to Niimori to be allowed on deck for air and to use the latrines, but to no avail. “You have nothing to worry about,” Niimori said, “you are bred like rats, and so you can stay like rats.”

Later in the day, the old Momi-class destroyer Kuri and freighter Toyokuni Maru came to help. Since they were unable to restart the engines, it was decided to transfer the 778 Japanese soldiers to Toyokuni Maru and tow Lisbon Maru to shallow water. After removing the troops, Lieutenant Wada, Niimori, and Lisbon’s captain, Kyode Shigeru, discussed what to do with the POWs. Wada said it would be impossible for his small guard force to supervise the transfer of so many men. His solution was to leave the hatches closed and tow them to shore. The captain protested, saying that the ventilation was very bad and in case of another attack the ship would sink with needless loss of life. Not until 2100 did Wada make up his mind; the POWs would remain under closed hatches. They were his responsibility and the captain should not interfere.

Conditions worsened through the night. Hold three was slowly taking on water, and the prisoners had to man the pumps for their lives, although lack of food, water, and air meant a man could only manage about six strokes at the pump before fainting. By 0400 on 2 October, they could pump no more. The many men with dysentery and diarrhea had already fouled the entire area. Niimori, with a sick sense of humor, temporarily opened one tarp and let down a bucket of liquid. The men thirstily grabbed for it but quickly found it was filled with urine.

At dawn, about twenty-four hours after being torpedoed, Lisbon Maru gave a lurch. It was apparent she was in imminent danger of sinking. The captain requested permission for everyone to be allowed to abandon ship. He was refused. In the holds the prisoners felt the ship stop, probably when the tow lines were cut. It was time to take matters in their own hands. One of the soldiers somehow produced a long butcher knife, climbed the ladder, and sliced through the tarp. Lieutenant Colonel Stewart organized a small party to try to break out. Still hoping not to antagonize the Japanese, Lieutenants Howell and Potter, with a few other prisoners, calmly climbed through the opening and walked toward the bridge to negotiate their release from the holds. Seeing the ship nearly abandoned, they realized at last what a predicament they were in. Instead of talking, however, the Japanese guards began to shoot. Lieutenant Howell took a mortal wound. The men ran back to the hold.

Had the ship gone down then, almost everyone would have drowned, but the shallow water gave them a few more minutes. Lisbon Maru’s stern sank, but hit bottom on a sand bar. Panic set in. There was no more holding the prisoners below decks. They came tearing through the tarps, swarming on deck, and diving overboard while the Japanese fired on them from above. The men aft were in the most danger, since the water was about to pour into the number three hold. Lt. G. C. Hamilton of the Royal Scots led men in cutting the tarp and removing the timbers. They formed lines and climbed out in as perfect order as possible. It was not fast enough. The sea reached the now-open hole on the deck and rushed in. Many drowned. Lieutenant Hamilton heard gunfire. He saw some small islands about three miles away, dove in, and began swimming.

Four small Japanese boats were nearby, rope ladders dangling from their sides, but they were only picking up their countrymen. Prisoners were kicked off as they tried to climb up. All of the survivors would probably have drowned had it not been for a number of Chinese junks and sampans that came to the scene. Seeing some prisoners swimming to the nearby islands and realizing that there might be escapees to tell the story, the Japanese had a change of heart and began picking up survivors. After swimming for half an hour, Lieutenant Hamilton noticed a Japanese craft rescuing British soldiers and he swam over. Someone threw him a rope. He spent the next three days on the patrol vessel with a number of other prisoners, sheltered by a tarp on deck, until taken to Shanghai.

About two hundred British prisoners managed to escape the Japanese net and reach the nearby islands. They were fed and cared for by the Chinese until Japanese destroyers came during the next few days to collect them all. Even so, three were hidden by a villager who arranged their escape to Chungking.

By 5 October, the survivors were collected on a Shanghai quay to resume the journey. Of the original 1,816 POWs, 842 had drowned or been killed. They were brought in piecemeal, destitute, nearly naked; some had waited on the pier for three days. Except for what some of them had been given by the Chinese, they had not been fed until the morning of the fifth. Niimori was there to further harass them, telling the guards to beat those who could no longer stand at attention.

Thirty-five seriously ill or wounded men were left in Shanghai, and 3 were still in hiding. The remaining 936 were loaded aboard the Shinsei Maru, a 4,476-ton supply ship. Before they embarked, Niimori ordered them to hand over all that was left of their clothing. One sergeant refused and Niimori viciously kicked him in the testicles. Once at sea, Niimori spoke to his charges, leaving them in no doubt that their survival was a great disappointment to him. “You should have gone with the others,” he said. Five more POWs died during the trip to Moji. Of those left behind in Shanghai, or distributed among the POW camps in Japan, about 244 more would die. Thus, only about 40 percent of those who embarked on Lisbon Maru and Shinsei Maru would live to see freedom in 1945.⁴³

In early October, 5th Air Base personnel and 268 “specialists” from the 14th, 28th, and 30th Bomb Squadrons left Camp Casising, Mindanao, for a march north to the harbor at Bugo. The Japanese had called for a group of men with a variety of technical skills for “special” projects in Japan, a promise the men had heard before.

Capt. Alfred B. Dreher was commander of the 440th Ordnance Company. His unit had spent much of its time at Del Monte Plantation and had been forced to surrender after the fall of Corregidor. As “specialists,” they were rounded up and loaded on the Tamahoko Maru, a 6,780-ton passenger-cargo ship built in 1919, originally named Yone Maru, and now owned by the Kaiyo Kisen Company. It was 425 feet in length with a 53-foot beam, and driven by a single propeller capable of a maximum speed of twelve knots. Tamahoko Maru left on 3 October for a three-day trip to Manila. It was not crowded and was not nearly as bad as subsequent hellships. The prisoners were quickly unloaded, marched to Bilibid Prison for one night, then hurried back to the docks the next morning. There, Dreher found more than one thousand additional prisoners gathering to board another ship.⁴⁴

The chief of staff of the Kwantung Army (Manchuria) had made a plea for fifteen hundred prisoners with technical expertise to help run the Manchurian Machine Tool Company, a plant involved in aircraft production. A new POW camp would be opened nearby to house the workers. They hoped to have the operation up and running before winter and wished to expedite the transfer.

At the Cabanatuan camps, rumors abounded. Most men thought they would be going to Japan and that anything had to be better than the treatment they were receiving in the Philippines. Those with no experience at all instantly became mining engineers or airplane mechanics. Assembling on 6 October at Pier Seven in Manila were about 31 officers and 1,930 enlisted men. They boarded the 5,973-ton Tottori Maru, built in 1913 by Russell and Company in Glasgow, now owned by the NYK Line and operating out of Dairen. It was 423 feet long with a 56-foot beam, and its coal-burning power plant and single screw could generate a cruising speed of eleven knots.

Most of the prisoners were funneled into two large holds, which were soon filled to capacity. The remainder of the Americans had to stay on deck, actually not a bad deal given the conditions below. Army Air Force private Sigmund Schreiner, who kept a secret diary, said it was so crowded that “you couldn’t put a piece of paper between the bodies.” The holds were divided by horizontal wooden sleeping racks with very little headroom. Wooden latrines were constructed and draped over the sides off the top deck.

Tottori Maru. U.S. Navy

They waited all day in the harbor. The ship’s steel sides grew hot, and the air in the far corners was almost unbreathable. Once in, few could get out in time to use the latrines. The stench became so bad that Joseph A. Petak, a photographer in the 228th Signal Corps, forced his way to the center, prime real estate, directly under the open hatch. In the morning, about one thousand Japanese troops were placed in an upper central hold. On 8 October, the engines finally started and they got underway.

Captain Dreher’s men from Bilibid were some of the last to board and spent the next thirty-three days on the open deck. They were given cardboard boxes, each containing three buns, but the buns tasted like soap. Dreher timed the lines: one hour and twenty minutes to get food and forty-five minutes for water. Below, the men were unable to get out to use the latrines, and a relief pattern developed. They urinated in the corners because no one could breath in the unventilated nooks nearest the bulkheads. Others defecated in the central space under the hatch when they couldn’t climb out in time. The men moved into zones, avoiding the central morass of feces and the regions next to the hulls, which were awash with pools of urine. Petak had to abandon his central real estate.

The odor was so bad that the Japanese troops in the central hold complained about the smell. Petak wondered at the way the Japanese planned things. He thought they had screwed up handling the men on Bataan. It was almost as bad on Corregidor. The O’Donnell fiasco was worse, and the Cabanatuan move was horrible. It was no wonder the Japanese could not take the Philippines any faster. “The poor bastards couldn’t plan properly,” Petak thought.

Petak and his cousin, Johnny Urban, could take it no longer and fought their way topside, shouldering a place against the outer rail. The air and sun revived them. At sunset, they got in line for some food, which consisted of a small cloth bag with a few sugar balls and hardtack crackers, the latter promptly dubbed “dog biscuits.” Each man was given one canteen cup of water. Petak was thankful he had gotten out. He slept uncomfortably on the steel deck, hearing the constant moaning from the hold. One man tried to cut his wrists and commit suicide but was stopped and patched up. Already there had been more than twenty bodies removed and thrown overboard. Fighting broke out after midnight, and the Japanese guards threatened to shoot into the hold. A cool wind with rain developed during the night, and finally the majority drifted off into a fitful sleep.

Petak awoke with the sunrise. He and Johnny exchanged places with two other men to give them a place at the rail. They pretended to cook breakfast, flipping pancakes, pouring syrup, and savoring every bite. Those around them figured they were crazy and gave them wide berth.

After “breakfast,” Petak was trying to relax when he heard the shout, “Torpedoes!” He did not know which direction they were coming from. He looked around the deck wildly. There were no life jackets.

Perched high on a winch and wearing nothing but a G-string, Sgt. Angelo H. Sakelares of the 200th Coast Artillery stoically sat and watched the torpedo approach. Cpl. Cone J. Munsey of the 200th had a similar reaction: “I felt if this was the way it was to end, I would welcome it.”

Pvt. Wallace R. Phillips, also in the same unit, didn’t know which way to run. “Then I decided it wouldn’t matter,” he said, “so I went to watch them coming. They were shallow, and as they’d cross a trough, they’d make spray. Three were coming at us, and another far off.”

Joe Petak climbed on the hatch cover, looking east. He could see two frothy trails approaching. Finally, men on the starboard side began to scramble to port. A bell clanged and the ship’s whistle shrieked. Japanese troops emerged. Many of the men in the holds heard the commotion and began clawing their way topside. Some remained. Sgt. Russell A. Grokett and a buddy sat in their wooden berth and watched prisoners run by in panic. They decided to open and eat a can of food they had been saving. If they had to go into the water, they might as well have a little strength. As they ate, someone shouted, “The ship’s going to be blown up. Why are you just sitting there?”

Grokett replied, “Tell me which end will be hit by the torpedo and I’ll be on the other.”

On deck, Phillips could see the captain on the bridge. “He was a little fellow in a navy-blue suit and white whiskers. He waited until he saw the divergence of the torpedoes, then turned and backed into the widest space, so they went on either side.”

The ship heeled hard to port and the deck tilted. To Petak, it seemed that everything was moving in slow motion—the torpedoes, the turn, the men running as if slogging through molasses. He saw the wakes pass by on the port side and disappear.

“One didn’t miss us more than eight feet,” said Phillips. “That maneuver saved our bacon.”

Prisoners and Japanese whooped and hollered, applauding the captain. From the bridge, the whiskered little man turned and bowed. Petak was astounded. “Believe in Fate if you wish,” he said, “but somebody up there sure had something to do with it.” He recorded the time as 0815 to 0830, 9 October, and said, “If I find any guy that was on that sub I’ll buy him a drink.” There would come a time on later hellships when men wished the torpedoes would hit.⁴⁵

When the excitement died down, the Japanese responded by shoving all the men off the decks and into the holds. The situation became even more intolerable, but there were no more submarine attacks. Joe Petak managed to get into the central hold, where the Japanese troops were berthed. He had been studying Japanese and wanted to practice what he had learned. He didn’t know how his intrusion would be received, but he managed to strike up a tentative conversation. It turned out that the soldiers he met weren’t bad fellows. They appeared to get a kick out of teaching an American their language. Once, while talking and bumming cigarettes, a shot rang out, echoing in the steel hull. When the commotion subsided, Petak asked what had happened.

“It is in the prisoner section,” a soldier answered.

“What prisoner section?” Petak asked.

“We have prisoners,” the soldier explained. Joe learned that the troops were also guarding a number of their own men who were being returned to Japan for various offenses. One had wrested a gun from a guard, and to prevent the disgrace of going to prison, he had shot himself. It was an honorable way out. There were no condolences. Everyone returned to his own business.

The eleventh of October was a rough day. The weather was making up, the seas heavy, and many were seasick. On deck, Captain Dreher held on as giant waves broke over the bow and spray cascaded over them. They seemed to have lost the other ships in the convoy; word had it that the ship had a bent prop and could only make five knots. One Japanese guard forced Dreher to trade his wristwatch for a boiled duck egg. The threat of a bayonet sealed the deal.

On 12 October, to everyone’s relief, Tottori Maru pulled into Takao. They remained in the harbor four days, and most of the Japanese troops disembarked. The men began fighting over rations, for they received only one eight-ounce can of milk for forty-five men and a pail of rice and seaweed for every thirty men. Johnny Urban was sick with malaria and dysentery and was getting worse. Once again, Petak used his Japanese on an officer to plead for help. He couldn’t believe his luck, for the next day, hospital orderlies came to take Urban and three other very ill men ashore, and Joe got to accompany them to the hospital.

The Tottori Maru took on coal and water and headed north once more. Half way up the Formosa coast, she turned around and headed back to Takao, docking again late on the sixteenth. No one knew what the problem was—engine trouble, waiting for another convoy to form up, avoiding U.S. submarines, or just typically poor Japanese planning. Dreher saw Tamahoko Maru and the hospital ship, Manila Maru, in the harbor.

They sailed again on the eighteenth, but only as far as Bako in the Pescadore Islands. There, storms and rough seas kept them at anchor for eight days. Dreher was in misery; cold, wet, hungry, sick—and to top it off, a filling fell out of one of his molars. He saw at least three men die topside, and one Japanese noncom committed suicide. On 27 October, they finally sailed, but back to Takao once again.

This time all the POWs were offloaded while a crew of Korean laborers boarded to scrub and fumigate. They commented about the ship being one giant benjo and wondered how men could be kept in such unsanitary conditions. The prisoners were given soap and water and allowed to scrub down. Everyone had body lice, and most of them shaved their heads. They tried to clean the bugs out of their clothes and blankets, and although they were unsuccessful, they felt better. Sadly, however, Petak learned that his cousin had died in the hospital.

When they pulled out on 30 October, the latest word was that they were going to a very cold country to work in a factory. All correctly assumed it was to be Manchuria. In no time, the holds became almost as bad as before. The only saving grace was that they were now in a temperate climate and the heat was not so overwhelming. “Sig” Schreiner noticed an increase in diarrhea and intestinal problems. The reason for it, he said, “was discovered when someone happened to glance into the water tank and saw a pair of dirty shorts floating around.” The tank was cleaned, but they had no medicine to help those who had become ill. “A few men died,” Schreiner said, “and were thrown over the side with a piece of scrap iron tied to their feet.”

Captain Dreher felt better because they were now getting two meals a day of rice and fish soup. Unfortunately, there were worms in the soup. Petak, assigned to a chow detail, had managed to steal some onions, which were bought, sold, and traded like gold. Japanese noncom Suzuki Yukinoro, from whom Petak had been learning the language, suspected Petak had been stealing but refrained from turning him in. He was thinking about the future. One night while talking, Suzuki suggested that their families visit after the war was over.

“Japan will win,” he said. “We must win. We are small and China is full. No place to go. Korea . . . cold. Only place to go is United States. . . . Japan is very old. More than three thousand years. We know what to do to survive. United States young. Not very smart. We will make a colony there. We have plans for the next hundred years. We will go there.”

On 9 November, Tottori Maru finally docked at Pusan. A large group, about 14 officers and 1,288 men, received winter clothes and were sent by train north to Mukden, Manchuria. About 580 Americans, including Dreher’s men, were placed back aboard, and, after a stop at Moji, Tottori Maru reached Osaka, Japan, on 11 November. They were sent to Kawasaki and Omori to work in chemical plants and steelworks. More than 50 men had been left in the hospitals of Takao and Pusan, and about 30 had died on board. Many more would not survive the subzero winter of Mukden.⁴⁶

Other ships carried prisoners to Japan from various islands. The 16,975-ton liner Tatsuta Maru brought two hundred laborers to Wake Island on 12 March 1942. The 9,816-ton Heiyo Maru took off two hundred civilian contractors from Wake in July, and the 1,772-ton Tachibana Maru, built in 1935 and requisitioned as a hospital ship, steamed to Wake in September. She was there to pick up two hundred more civilian contractors. They sailed off on 20 September without incident, arriving in Japan about 1 October.

Japan reached as far south as the Celebes to bring men with technical expertise to the empire. Many officers had been sent in April, but now the Japanese demanded information on everyone in the Makassar camp. About 1,000 men—25 American, 225 British, and 750 Dutch—were selected because they supposedly had special skills. In answer to complaints that the men had no warm clothing for a northern climate, the Japanese sent a party through all the Dutch homes in the area to clear out the closets. The prisoners donned trousers, pajamas, tropical suits, lightweight shirts, and even sarongs, looking like “as fine a group of scarecrows as one could wish for.” It did not matter to the American and British POWs that they were leaving, but Makassar was home to many of the Dutch, and the sounds of weeping women tore at their hearts.

The Op ten Noort was still anchored in the harbor, along with several other ships, the largest being the transport Asama Maru: 16,975 tons, 583 feet long, with a cruising speed of seventeen knots. It had been a luxury liner before the war, with berths for 680 passengers, and it still made a favorable impression. The British and Americans were slated to have third-class accommodations, but the Dutch got to the Japanese and persuaded them that it would be better to put the British and Americans in the hold because there were fewer of them and they would have more room. The Dutch plan did not last. Finding the holds “hotter than hell,” the British enlisted men forced their way into the Dutch area. If they couldn’t have rooms, they would bed down in the passageways. The Dutch protested to the British officers, but were told that if they didn’t like it, they would have to throw them back into the hold by force. Both sides backed off in an uneasy truce.

Officers of all nationalities were given “state rooms.” As the only American officer, Lt. John Michel roomed with the British, where eleven of them shared six bunks and a transom—not a bad deal, all things considered. Michel saw to it that the twenty-four American enlisted men under him stayed out of the hold and had them camp on the companionway near a ladder leading topside. Before they left, Michel instructed them to always remain together. He had a bad feeling that they might be torpedoed and saw to it that they got life jackets. He hoped that if the worst happened, they would all be plucked from the sea once again.

They sailed before sunset on 10 October, following a small steam frigate. The next morning they were fed rice and stew, a rather tasty fare. At times they even received fresh scallions and considered it quite a luxury. When the weather got rough, the British and American sailors collected food from seasick Dutch soldiers. They had never eaten as well during the past half year at Makassar.

It still remained hot below decks, and the men were given permission to go to the forecastle for fresh air, and there was plenty of water for drinking and washing. Lieutenant Michel and British lieutenant Geoffrey Blain did have one complaint: they had to share their washroom with a crated Komodo dragon on its way to the Tokyo Zoo. The huge lizard, which was fed live chickens by one of its handlers, ate better than the men. Said Michel, “The stench was overwhelming, and we prayed regularly that the awful thing would die and be tossed overboard.” But the reptile remained healthy the entire trip, smelling worse every day.

Some believed they would make a stop in the Philippines, but they sailed on, making a steady fifteen knots with few course changes. The temperature became cooler, and they began to don and layer the assortment of clothing given them at departure. The last day before arrival, cold winds buffeted the ship and the men shivered too much to fall asleep. Peering out of the portholes they could see uninviting islands shrouded by cold mists. On 23 October, Asama Maru dropped anchor outside of Nagasaki, and the next day ferry boats came alongside to take them to shore. Most of them were destined for Camp Fukuoka No. 2 and the Zosen shipyard. They were exhausted and demoralized, and, said Blain, “that caused us to lose more people that first winter, mostly from pneumonia, than we did during the rest of our time in Nagasaki.”⁴⁷

After depositing her human cargo, Asama Maru promptly took on supplies, sailed to Yokosuka, then headed for Wake Island. Reaching there about the last day of October, she picked up the last twenty servicemen who had been wounded or too sick to make the trip on the previous ships. They were served sugar and rice, all they could eat, and actually got to use the ship’s swimming pool. They sailed to Yokohama, then went to Ofuna Camp, and, after one month of questioning, ended up at Zentsuji. This left about 168 civilian contractors who remained behind to strengthen Wake’s defenses. They were worked so unremittingly, with a lack of nourishment and medical care, that about 45 of them died by December. The Japanese had another surprise planned for the survivors.⁴⁸

The prisoners from the Nishi Maru deposited in Singapore on 18 September were moved in to a vacated barracks that once housed Indian troops. Changi at this time housed the remnants of six divisions, including the British 11th and 18th. Since many thousands had already been shipped north to Burma and Thailand, conditions were not crowded, and Changi appeared to many as a haven. Lieutenant Johnstone hardly saw a Japanese guard. “What a restful, peaceful camp it was,” he said. The worst problem was in walking between divisions, when one had to be escorted by the sometimes brutal Indian Sikhs. The idyll came to an end in three weeks when they were told to be ready to move to a new overseas destination.

The initial RAF party was joined by some British soldiers, increasing their number to about 810. Flt. Lt. Peter E. Lee thanked their 18th Division hosts, especially for sharing some of the recently received Red Cross packages, and they smartly hiked to the wharves. Through the afternoon of 9 October, they sat on the dock in the hot sun and watched a large passenger liner, painted white with a large red cross on the side, sail through the harbor. The guards said it was loaded with diplomats and internees returning to Japan after an exchange for British and American civilians. The ship was likely the Teia Maru on a return voyage from India.

Late in the afternoon they boarded “a big, dirty, rusty cargo ship,” an old ex-British freighter of about six thousand tons. Japanese medical orderlies had the newcomers drop their pants and bend over. Those not quick enough were cracked in the head with batons. The glass-rod-in-the-anus routine was greeted by ribald laughter and cheering from the twelve hundred POWs already aboard the ship. They sailed to Singapore Roads and anchored for the night, sailing on the morning of 10 October. At sea, the Japanese told them that their destination was Borneo.

Lieutenant Lee thought that conditions were better than on the Nishi Maru; it was less crowded, but the facilities were fewer. There was little drinking water and none for bathing. The 810 RAF and infantry, called “Java One Party,” were placed in the forward holds and on deck. Those topside watched the miles of endless sea sweep by. At nightfall the ship began to zigzag. The food was better, without the fish heads of the previous voyage and with an occasional piece of meat. On 13 October, they reached Kuching, Borneo, and a thousand prisoners were offloaded by diesel-engined lighters. The food became so poor that they had to dip into their precious Red Cross packages to supplement it.

Loading of supplies continued the next day, the men hungrily watching the passing of hundreds of bags of sugar and tapioca, depressed by the backdrop of “the steamy swamps of Kuching.” The picture brightened for a few, however, when some of the bags dropped and burst. Airmen and soldiers scrambled for the spilled treasure. Major Suga, commandant of all the prisoners in Borneo, came aboard to give them a speech on how they were to conduct themselves in his domain. The POWs were not impressed.

The next day the ship continued up the coast. The water shortage became so serious that men’s tongues were badly swollen. Some crept up to the steam winches and opened the taps to release a few drops of water. A few careless ones were caught and bashed for their efforts. The ship stayed in sight of the coast, reaching Miri on the sixteenth, what Lee called “the last place God made.” They unloaded crates, batteries, paints, engineering equipment, and about five hundred tires. Sailing north the next day under a gray sky with alternating drizzles and downpours, the men were forced to spend much of the time in the holds. Those who braved the elements were caught in the gusty wind and rain and coated with black soot from the smoke stack. Dysentery was rife again, and the stench of vomit and excrement was shocking. Nine men died. One fellow who had spent much time hanging on the rail and staring out to sea, could take no more of the strain and terror and jumped overboard. The officers told others he had fallen. Said Johnstone, “We did not want our men to learn of this suicide as it would have further depressed them.”

Deep in the holds, some men pried up a plank on the floor and got into a room of bagged sugar, tinned fish, and meat. Much of it was quickly consumed, and the rest went into kit bags and pockets. They put the room back in order and no one was any the wiser. On 19 October, they anchored at Jesselton, lying on the coast with the forested 13,455-foot Mount Kinabalu looming on the horizon. The eight hundred British POWs were taken to a camp and lodged in atap huts; the officers were put in a native jail, two to each six-by-eight cell. They would remain in Jesselton for six months.⁴⁹

The October transports also moved men from Java to Burma. Construction of the main line of the Burma Railway was about to begin, and manpower levels were upped accordingly. A Force had been preparing the ground along the Burma coast for the past several months. Ken Williams worked at the Mergui docks, unloading petrol drums. He felt humiliated. A few months ago, he and his mates had tossed pennies to the natives, and now “the natives were tossing us cigars.” They received many “bashings,” from both the Japanese and the natives. Beriberi struck. Wooden coffins were supplied by the Burmese. Solemn rites were read, “Last Post” was played, and at least, said Williams, the dead “would know no more barbarous treatment from the Japanese.” There was no escape. Three Australians tried, but they were caught by the Burmese and returned, then tied to trees and shot. The Burmese were paid two hundred rupees a head.