Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  The only important thing that he knew and they apparently didn’t was the immutable certainty that Japan was going to lose this war. There were forces assembling 8,000 miles away that were going to purge the earth of this bizarre race. There were half a million troops being trained for one mission and one mission only: to invade this tiny island country and kill every goddamned Japanese man, woman, and child who stood up in front of them without waving a white flag, which really meant they were going to have to kill them all.

  He decided at that moment to answer any and all of this man’s questions, because nothing that he learned from Gar would change what was coming.

  “I was the commanding officer of the USS Dragonfish, an American submarine,” he said.

  The interrogator nodded pleasantly. Then he swung around in his chair and signaled for the guards to take the second prisoner away. Or so Gar thought. They grabbed the prisoner and pushed him down the corridor. As Gar sat back in his chair, relieved that he hadn’t caused the death of another prisoner, two shots rang out, followed by laughter and shouts of fake annoyance at another mess in the hallway.

  The interrogator looked at him as if to note his reaction, that infuriating smile still on his face. “Tomorrow,” he said. “We will talk some more tomorrow. No. You will talk some more tomorrow.”

  He rose, folded up his chair, and left the cell. The two young guards, still looking unsettled at the murder of the two prisoners, were being handed wet mops as Gar’s cell door was slammed shut.

  * * *

  The next morning they brought Gar a metal pitcher of water, a tin cup of tea, and some rice cakes. He was stiff and achy after a cold night curled up in a corner on the concrete floor. His shins had big red goose eggs on them, and he was very careful not to let anything touch them.

  It wasn’t much of a cell. A hole in the floor in the opposite corner served as the latrine. There was a single, foot-square window high up on the wall, which appeared to be open to the outside air. Twice during the night he’d heard locomotives huffing by the building, followed by the rattle of boxcars and squealing wheels. He’d also heard metal doors being opened and slammed shut throughout the night and wondered if this was some kind of transit station for POWs.

  When the food came, one guard pointed a bayonet at him while the other deposited the pitcher, the tin cup, and the tiny wooden box on the chair. Then they withdrew, slamming the door as if trying to break it. Gar used a little bit of the water to wash his hands and face and then ate the food quickly, standing by the chair. He tried to warm his hands with the cup of tea before drinking some. It was very weak, and there were tiny stem fragments in the bottom. When he’d finished, he put the cup in the food box and put the box by the door. Then he sat down in the chair, facing the metal door, and waited. He stank of fish, mud, and general filth; in a land where they would have preferred to bathe hourly, he must have been a towering olfactory disturbance.

  He awoke to the sound of keys in the door. He’d fallen back asleep without even realizing it. The door opened, and two different guards stepped in. These were not high school kids, Gar thought. These guys looked like battle-hardened infantry troops. They were not even armed. They motioned for him to stand up, and he did so, swaying a little on his badly bruised shins. One of them dropped a noose of rope around his neck, tightened it, and led him out of the cell. The other followed, leaving the cell door open. They went to the right, away from the scene of the butchery the evening before. At the end of the corridor they went outside into bright, gray light. They were walking across what looked like an army parade ground, surrounded by brick buildings of different sizes. Some were obviously barracks, the others offices or warehouses. A rail line ran behind the row of buildings on the end, not more than 100 yards from his cell house.

  They walked across the parade ground, one guard in front, one behind, and Gar in the middle with his neck rope. He had the sense that if he had tripped and fallen, the guard in the lead would not have noticed. They went into one of the office buildings and up a flight of wooden stairs. So far, Gar had seen no one other than his two guards. The parade ground was deserted, and many of the buildings also looked empty. They took him to a room that held a long green-felt-covered table surrounded by several armchairs, with Japanese national and regimental flags mounted in one corner. Three water pitchers with glasses had been placed in front of the chairs on one side of the table. The guards nodded at one of the chairs on the opposite side of the table, and Gar sat down. The guard did not remove the noose. He dropped the other end of the rope on the floor, and then the two of them stepped behind him and went to parade rest. One of them made a quiet noise of disgust as he caught Gar’s aroma; the other grunted agreement, and then they each took one step back. Gar tried to act unconcerned and closed his eyes. He had high hopes for a civilized interrogation; this didn’t look like a place where they shot people on the carpet. On the other hand, he was sitting there with a hangman’s noose around his neck.

  He was just about to doze off again when a door behind him opened and he heard low voices. He’d learned by then not to look around or do anything without being told, so he just sat there. Two Japanese officers in greenish uniforms came in and went around to the other side of the table. Each carried a notebook and wore a holstered pistol. Accompanying them was his interrogator from the night before, dressed in an army uniform and still smiling as if he hadn’t murdered any prisoners in at least, oh, eight hours. The naval officers sat down, and the one he’d been mentally calling the Priest cleared his throat and then rattled away in Japanese for a few minutes. Gar couldn’t tell if he was in charge or just a briefer here. One of the naval officers looked to be much older and carried himself with the gravitas of a senior officer. The other one was paying close attention to the Priest, while the older one seemed a bit disinterested. Then Gar realized that the Priest was speaking to him.

  “Tell us how you came to be here today,” he instructed. Gar proceeded to do so, while the Priest did a simultaneous translation into Japanese. He told them about ordering the boat to dive without him, then being captured by the minesweepers and taken to Kure and eventually the Shinano. When he said the word Shinano the older officer came awake. He asked a question in a voice that sounded like he regularly gargled with sandpaper.

  “He wants to know how you can know that name,” the Priest said. “That name is a great secret.”

  “It was our mission to penetrate the minefields of Bungo Suido and sink that ship,” Gar said. “Instead we had to attack her in dry dock. Later, after I was captured, I was aboard Shinano when she was torpedoed and sunk.”

  The Priest blinked and then gave him a long stare. The Captain, which is what Gar had decided to call the obviously senior officer, barked something.

  “Think carefully,” the Priest said. “No one here at this compound knows anything about a sinking. For your information, that is the official government line.”

  “You mean, Shinano wasn’t sunk?”

  “That ship was attacked at sea but shrugged off all attacks and has gone on to Yokosuka. Everyone knows that.”

  “What do you want me to say, then?” Gar asked. “Just so you know, I was the one who fired torpedoes at two destroyers, two ammunition barges, and then the dry-dock caisson wall at Kure. Once I was captured in the Hoyo Strait, a Kempeitai officer took me aboard the carrier for transport to Tokyo. The captain of the ship, Captain Abe, made me stand on the bridge so that I could see for myself that she was invulnerable. I was on the bridge when the four torpedoes hit, and an hour or so later I watched her sink, stern first, and take probably more than two thousand men with her.”

  The Priest hissed in annoyance and then spoke to the Captain, who had picked up on the name Abe. When the Priest was finished translating, the Captain spat out something that sounded to Gar a lot like the Japanese equivalent to “bullshit.” The other naval officer looked very apprehensive, as if he shouldn’t be hearing any of this. Then the Captain surprised him and s
poke in English.

  “Name of Kempeitai officer?”

  “Yamashita,” Gar said.

  The Captain grunted and then said something in Japanese to the Priest, who hesitated and then replied. Whatever he said made the Captain look truly surprised.

  “Why do you agree to talk to us?” the Captain asked.

  “Because whatever you learn from me does not matter.”

  The Captain thought that one over. “Tell me something important. Something I do not know.”

  “Our submarines can penetrate your minefields because we can see the mines,” Gar said.

  “That is lie,” the Captain scoffed.

  “We came through Bungo Suido. Is it not mined?”

  “You had chart. Someone betrayed us.”

  “Didn’t need a chart,” Gar said. “We can see the mines.”

  “How is this possible?”

  “Sonar,” Gar said.

  “More stupid lies.”

  “Did a submarine fire torpedoes into the caisson where Shinano was berthed? Sink two destroyers? Explode the ammunition barges?”

  More sucking in of air all around. The Priest had to translate some of the words.

  “You are spy,” the Captain concluded. “You have heard these things in one of the villages. In Kure, or Hiroshima City. None of this is true.”

  Gar sat back in his chair. If the Captain was going to label him a spy, he was a dead man.

  “Have you been to Kure recently?” Gar asked. “Make a phone call. Tell them you wish to come down there and inspect the waterfront. See what they say.”

  The Priest had to translate again. The Captain glared at Gar for a moment, banged his palm down on the table, nodded, got up, and left the room. The other officer spoke up once the Captain was gone. He, too, had English.

  “You must be much more careful,” he said. “Whether or not the things you say are true, they are not permitted to be spoken, do you understand? Listen to the major.”

  Gar wasn’t having it. “I understand,” he said, “that the General Imperial Staff or whatever you call it is deluding itself. Shinano has been destroyed. The Kure naval base waterfront is a mess. The submarine that was waiting for Shinano was one of many. If you intend to kill me because I speak the truth, then I can’t help that. But that won’t change the truth.”

  The officer had no reply to that. Gar asked them how it was that they all were able to speak English. The Priest, whom he now knew was a major, smiled. “I am Kempeitai, foreign espionage division. These officers are naval intelligence. Of course we can speak English. Do all your naval intelligence officers not speak Japanese?”

  The real answer to that was no—none that he had ever met, anyway. He shook his head.

  “Then how can they ever catch Japanese spies?” he asked.

  “They don’t try,” Gar said.

  “Explain.”

  “If we think someone is a Japanese spy, we leave him alone. We let him report on the true situation. That there are now so many American warships there is not room for them all to anchor in one harbor. That new ships arrive every week. That large American airfields are being built on Guam and Tinian. That two American armies have invaded the Philippines. That—”

  “Enough!” the Priest said. “This is propaganda.”

  At that moment a siren began wailing, and then a second one, more distant. The Priest made a face.

  “B-29?” Gar asked.

  The Priest shrugged, then nodded.

  “This doesn’t happen in America,” Gar pointed out.

  At that moment the Captain came back into the room and let fly with a torrent of rapid-fire Japanese. He seemed angrier with them than afraid of any impending air raid, if that’s what it was. More sirens were going off now, and Gar could hear people stirring out in the hallway. The two guards stepped back into the room. One came up and removed the noose.

  The major stood up, his face no longer quite so genial.

  “You go now. Go with them. Keep silent!”

  Gar turned around and followed one guard out the door while the other one fell in behind him. They didn’t put the noose back on this time, and everyone seemed to be in just a bit of a hurry. They took him back outside and toward his cell house. What Gar had thought to be unoccupied office buildings were emptying out onto the parade field. It looked like the men were all falling into some kind of formation. He would have thought they’d be heading for bomb shelters, but it was apparent they had defiance on their minds. Gar listened for the rumble of a bomber formation but heard none, and there was nothing visible in that cold gray sky as they went into the cell house. They marched him right back into his cell, where the guard obligingly threw in the noose, in case Gar might yet change his mind and do the honorable thing. Then the door was slammed.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  After an hour or so the sirens went off again, sounding a steady tone for the all clear. Gar never did hear any airplanes. They brought some food and water toward evening, and a wet towel, which allowed him to wash off some of the accumulated filth. Sometime after that he heard a commotion out in the corridor. It sounded like all the cells were being opened up, and then his door opened and he was yanked out into a line of prisoners in the corridor. The man ahead of him was wearing a hood, and a short rope hung down to his waist from underneath it. One guard bound Gar’s hands loosely with manila line and indicated that Gar should grab that man’s rope. Then Gar’s own noose, followed by a hood, was pulled down over Gar’s head. A moment later, the man behind him took hold of his trailing rope. When the man ahead of him started walking, Gar followed suit to keep from choking him. Fortunately the man behind him also understood the game.

  They were poked and prodded down the corridor and then outside, where rough hands kept them tripping down a set of stairs. Then more trudging, probably across that parade ground, until he heard the distinctive sounds of a steam locomotive idling somewhere ahead of them. They encountered a wooden ramp, where hands at the top guided them to the back walls of a boxcar and pushed them down into a seated position. Gar ended up in a corner, with another POW on his right. One of the guards shouted a series of commands, and then big doors rolled shut. Twenty minutes or so later, the steam engine started up with a jerk, and they were off, destination anybody’s guess.

  “Who are you?” the man on his right asked. Gar told him. The other man said he was army air force, Major Jimmy Franklin, pilot of a B-29 recce bird that had been taken down over Kyushu. He had a mild southern accent.

  “I thought you guys flew so high they couldn’t get at you,” Gar said.

  “We thought so, too,” he said. “We were at thirty-five thousand feet, but they’ve got a new tactic. Guy gets in a fighter plane, on oxygen, we think, and flies out ahead and above us. They’ve done something to the engine, because at the last minute he inverts and then flies right into us. Took our left wing right off. Copilot and I got out; another fighter strafed him in his chute, missed me, and here I am, lucky fucking me. We’re going to Tokyo, apparently.”

  “Why Tokyo?”

  “We were briefed back at home base that senior officers are taken to Tokyo so the expert interrogators get a shot at them. You were a CO, so it’s even more likely you’re going.”

  Gar told him about his sessions with the Kempeitai and the naval intelligence types.

  “You went beyond name, rank, and serial number?” Franklin asked. “You talked to them?”

  He seemed genuinely surprised, even disapproving, so Gar explained his reasoning. “The Japanese here in Japan apparently have no idea of how bad the war’s gone for them. I thought, hell, tell ’em, with a generous measure of bullshit, of course, and maybe open their eyes to the fact that they can’t win. Maybe they’ll give up. Plus that guy was going to shoot more prisoners until I gave him something.”

  A whiff of acrid coal smoke blew through the boxcar, making everyone cough. Having been around coal, Gar knew damned well that wasn’t quality fuel they were burning.r />
  “Yella bastards’ll never give up,” Franklin said. “We’re gonna have to bomb ’em back to the Stone Age, and then invade. I’m not gonna give ’em shit, no matter what they do.”

  Gar was about to say that he might be wrong about that, having watched the Priest casually murder two POWs as an inspiration for him to talk.

  “Is it true you can’t really bomb Japan from China?” Gar asked.

  “We can and we can’t. No escorts can make it that far and back, so we go high. Half the time we can’t see shit on the ground, but we have to drop our loads in order to be light enough to get back. Photo interpreters are sayin’ we’re not doing significant damage. The scuttlebutt is that we’re all goin’ to Tinian pretty soon. Then we’ll get P-51s to come along. You really tell ’em how many subs are sitting offshore?”

  “May have embellished it a bit, but, yes, I did. First time I was captured. That’s why I ended up on that carrier—they were going to show me how invincible she was.”

  ”What do you know about B-29s?”

  “Big, go a long way, carry lotsa bombs. That’s about it.”

  “Good,” Franklin said. “Stick with that.”

  They stopped talking after that. Gar had the clear impression Franklin thought he was some kind of traitor for talking to the Japanese intelligence officers, but he still thought it didn’t matter what they knew. If there were ten subs or even twenty operating off the Home Islands, the point was that they couldn’t leave port without being hunted by an entire pack of submarines. The U.S. Navy’s submarine noose was tightening every day. Eventually they’d quit leaving port, and it would be all over.

  The train went around a long, squealing curve. That changed the relative wind, and soon they were all sucking coal smoke again. The hood actually helped. He finally fell asleep.

  The train’s whistle shrieking into the morning air woke everyone up. They were creeping along the tracks, the regular banging of the wheels on the track seams keeping noisy time. Gar thought he could smell the sea between occasional puffs of coal smoke. Then the air brakes clamped down and they shuddered to a stop. The doors rolled open, and there was the usual shouting in Japanese. When Gar felt his neighbor getting yanked to his feet he got ready to stand up, but nothing happened. He could feel and hear the rest of the prisoners being taken out of the boxcar. For a moment he wondered if he was being taken somewhere else, or for one of those one-way rides out to a swamp somewhere. Then he heard a familiar voice. It was the Priest.