by Larry Colton
In 1901 the Japanese government had built a steel mill at Yawata, convenient to Japan’s largest coalfield and iron ore from China. By World War II the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata had become the largest such complex in Japan. Yawata was known as the Pittsburgh of Japan. Gordy considered his assignment to the pipe shop in the steel mill a stroke of luck, even if he arrived at the job each day before sunrise and left after sunset. Others in the crew had been assigned outside jobs, and with winter fast approaching, the conditions were wet and miserable. Still other men had been assigned to the coal-hauling detail, where they had to breathe coal dust every day and deal with the soot and grime. The pipe shop was inside a large galvanized metal building, open on one end but sheltered from the rain and wind. Two small furnaces were usually going, which provided some heat, although keeping warm was often a struggle. Gordy’s job was to help put in the ends of the pipes before they were bent. Although it hadn’t been discussed, Gordy believed the pipes would be used on Japanese ships. POWs were not trusted to make the bend, except for Megeson.
Behind Megeson stood two army guards, as well as a “pusher.” The pushers, or managers, were usually ex-soldiers who’d fought in China and had been discharged because either they’d gotten wounded or they were too old. Most had lost some of the fire of patriotism and were not as hard on the prisoners as the guards were. Normally, there were always a couple of pushers on duty, with one guard patrolling the shop.
Gordy glanced at Megeson, resisting the urge to tell him to get screwed. He considered Megeson a turncoat of sorts, a snitch. A large, broad-shouldered man from California, Megeson had somehow wrangled his way into a favored position with the guards and pushers. A benefit of this elevated status was that he received extra food, which meant he hadn’t lost a lot of weight; in fact, he probably outweighed Gordy by a hundred pounds.
Gordy wasn’t alone in his contempt for Megeson; none of the prisoners liked him. On several occasions, Tim had told others in the crew that he wanted to give him “an old-fashioned Texas whipping.” But Gordy had no intention of fighting him, or anyone else. Stay invisible, he reminded himself. At the Castle, he never argued or showed disrespect to the guards, and at work, he always did as he was told. He made a point of going to the bathroom with at least one other prisoner so that the guards would never catch him alone.
Megeson moved closer to Gordy. “Are you just going to stand there?” he asked.
Gordy glanced up. Megeson was hovering over him. “Get away from me,” he muttered.
Megeson took one step back and sucker-punched him right between the eyes.
Gordy crumpled to the floor, blood gushing from his nose. Dazed, he looked up and saw Megeson straddling him, motioning for him to get up and fight. The two pushers stood right behind him, grinning. Gordy considered the situation.
He didn’t try to fight back.
* * *
Back in Yakima, Nellie Cox, Gordy’s mother, did not know yet that her son’s ship had been sunk and the crew captured. She continued to write:
March 11, 1943
Everybody is out in the garden now getting ready to plant. The government wants everyone to raise all their own food they can this year. We are starting food rationing now.… You would find everything very much different at home now, Gordon.… So many of the girls have gone soldier and sailor crazy and write to everyone they can get names of. Do you remember that redhead that lived in the little house up the street north of us? She is getting married to a sailor. She will be 16 this month. Just to get the guy’s money is all it is. It’s terrible such goings on.… I hope you don’t change too much and pray God will bring you safely home to us.
Slowly, painfully, Gordy trudged back up the hill in the rain to the Castle. Several days had passed since Megeson had knocked him down and broken his nose and blackened his eyes. The good news was Megeson hadn’t bothered him since.
Gordy dreaded that walk every evening after work. It was steep, and it took most of what little stamina he had just to trudge up the incline. He hated the Castle, with its concrete floors, long corridors, and cold rooms. He hated the guards. They seemed more vindictive than the previous guards they’d encountered, if that was possible. He guessed it was because they were bitter that they’d been assigned to guard POWs rather than to fight on the front line and earn glory for the empire.
In front of the Castle, he passed the guardhouse, a five-foot by five-foot hut with small windows. He heard moaning and the sound of someone being beaten. It was the same sound he heard almost every night when he and the other men returned from work. He was convinced that these nightly beatings were a way to remind the prisoners of Japanese superiority rather than for anything the prisoner might have done wrong. On this evening, the guards had the prisoner kneeling, a stick between his knees as they beat him. It was Al Rupp, the youngest member of the crew. Rupp had gotten himself assigned to an easy work detail—carrying crates of buns to be served to the Japanese workers—after he’d purposely broken his own arm with a hammer and then faked falling off a ladder in order to get out of more-strenuous work. Faking illness had become common, though the POWs in sick bay got less food than the men working. The strategy backfired on Rupp, however, when the guards caught him stealing buns. Gordy and the rest of the crew were finding it hard to be sympathetic to his plight.
That night Gordy had to sit through yet another indoctrination lecture. Every commander and interpreter Gordy had heard had bragged about how Japan had never been defeated, going all the way back to the thirteenth century when Kublai Khan first tried to invade Japan but was stopped by a giant typhoon that smashed Kublai’s armada, a divine wind the Japanese called kamikaze, which gave proof that their gods had protected them, and always would.
Leaving for work the next morning, Gordy passed the guardhouse, where Rupp remained on display, still moaning in pain.
Meanwhile, Gordy’s mother continued to write:
May 6, 1943
Well, what are you doing most of the time to keep out of mischief? Or do you? … Sunday is Mother’s Day. There will be a lot of lonesome mothers this year. I think such days bring only more heartache to the mothers who aren’t remembered.
When Gordy looked at the other prisoners, it was hard not to feel despair. They were all weak and emaciated, their ribs and hip bones protruding, their cheeks sunken and hollow.
In the weeks since the crew had arrived at the Castle, several of the prisoners from other countries had died. For Gordy, their deaths were hard to accept; he believed that with a little more food they might have lived. He also believed that it was possible to tell which of the prisoners was about to die. It was something intangible, a sense that they were no longer willing to fight for survival. It wasn’t just the vacant look in their eyes and the blank expression on their faces; it was in their voices and in the slump of their shoulders. For the first time, he’d seen the look of death in a couple of his crewmates. But Gordy refused to give in. Every night he told himself, “I made it through another day. That’s as good as I can hope for.”
It was hard to deal with the knowledge that the Japanese didn’t care if the prisoners died. Repeated requests for more food were ignored. It didn’t make sense to Gordy: if they fed the POWs more, they would be more productive. But the Japanese believed that Australia would be captured soon, and they’d have all the slave labor they needed.
There was a rumor going around the camp that the Red Cross had sent parcels, enough so that all 1,200 prisoners being held in Fukuoka Camp #3 would get one. Gordy was skeptical. Like everyone else on the crew, he knew very little about the Geneva conventions. The Geneva convention signed on July 27, 1929, laid out guidelines for the treatment of prisoners of war as proposed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It stated that POWs had a right to be treated with honor and respect, and forbade the use of torture to extract information. Captives were required to provide only their true name and rank. Opposing countries, referred to as belligerents, we
re mutually bound to notify each other of the capture of prisoners within the shortest period of time possible, and the conditions in the POW camps were to be similar to those in the base camps used by the country’s own soldiers; further, the POW camps could not be located near the war zone. Also, belligerents were to, “so far as possible, avoid assembling in a single camp prisoners of different races or nationalities.” By Gordy’s count, there were at least a dozen nationalities at Fukuoka #3.
Other mandates of the 1929 convention required food to be of a similar quality and quantity to that of a belligerent’s own soldiers, and POWs could not be denied food as a punishment. Adequate clothing had to be provided, and the sanitary conditions had to be sufficient to prevent disease. Medical services had to be provided, and provisions had to be made for religious, intellectual, and recreational pursuits. The labor of prisoners of war was to be safe and not war related. Prisoners were to be allowed to correspond with their family within a week of capture, and they were to be allowed to receive letters, parcels, books, food, and clothing. And if any escaped prisoners of war were retaken, they were to be liable only to disciplinary punishment.
In the eight months since their capture, none of the treatment that Gordy and his shipmates had experienced conformed to the Geneva convention of 1929. While he hoped the rumors of the Red Cross parcels were true, another week passed with still no sign of the packages.
After two weeks, Gordy walked past the area where the guards in the pipe shop ate their lunches. Seated at a table, two guards were passing a white box between them. Gordy did a double take. On the outside of the box, clearly marked, was the Red Cross insignia. Food wrappers lay scattered across the table. A guard reached inside the box, pulled out a Camel cigarette, and lit it, blowing the smoke in Gordy’s direction.
Back home, his mother wrote again:
May 21, 1943
How are you and what have you been doing with yourself? I hope to hear from you soon. It is about time now again.
29
Chuck Vervalin
Fukuoka #3
It was late morning, December 15, 1943, and the snow was falling in Fukuoka. Lined up outside the Castle, the crew of the Grenadier shivered, trying to figure out why they hadn’t been marched off to work this morning.
Chuck felt the cold penetrate to his bones. He’d seen his share of snow and cold as a boy growing up in upstate New York, but back then he could put on his long johns, or huddle around the furnace with his brothers and sisters, or be inside a warm schoolroom. Now he just had his thin prison uniform and wool coat, and in his deteriorating state, it was hard to keep from shivering.
“What are they doing with us?” he whispered to the man standing next to him.
Nobody knew.
Maybe the guards were going to blindfold them and take them to wherever it was that the twenty-nine other crewmen had been taken. Or maybe those guys had been executed. Getting shot was never far from a POW’s mind.
The cold air wasn’t helping Chuck’s toothache. His jaw was swollen, and the pain shot all the way up to his ear. He’d heard horror stories about the camp hospital—men having legs amputated without anesthetic, or men being given injections and dying a few minutes later. In the three months since they’d arrived in Japan, many of the crew had been to the hospital, mostly for treatment of dysentery, but some as a way to get out of going to work. Not Chuck. He was one of the few who hadn’t missed a day of work so far, although on many of those days he’d felt horrible. Part of it had to do with his natural stamina; he’d never missed work at any of his summer jobs or when he worked for the CCC at Watkins Glen. The other reason was that he didn’t want to go anywhere near that hospital. He’d take his chances at work.
Rubbing his jaw, trying to get relief from his toothache, he glanced down the hill that led up from the steel plant. A small unit of guards was marching toward them, bayonets fixed.
The Japanese victories in the early stages of the war in the Pacific had created a problem for the Imperial Japanese Army: what to do with the unexpected large number of POWs. In early 1942, only one POW camp in Japan proper existed. Almost all of the 140,000 Allied troops captured in the first year of the war were held in the territories where they’d been taken prisoner.
The Japanese Army Ministry in Tokyo established a POW Information Bureau to deal with the problem. Different solutions were discussed, including killing all the prisoners. But in April 1942 the government decided to begin transporting most of the Allied POWs to Japan to supplement the Japanese workforce, which was already running short on manpower. By February 1943, the Japanese had opened dozens of POW camps in Japan. To provide labor, most of the camps were located close to mines or industrial areas.
Chuck surveyed his new surroundings. The guards had marched the crew, along with all of the hundreds of other prisoners being held at the Castle, to a new prison site—but still called Fukuoka #3—ten miles to the east, located on the flat terrain just outside Tobata, about 300 yards from the bay and just west of the larger city of Kokura.
The new camp had been specifically built to house POWs. The Japanese army wanted to relocate them away from the steel mill, which they worried might eventually come under aerial attack by American planes. It wasn’t that they were concerned about the safety of the men; they wanted to protect their substantial labor force.
Chuck noticed that 500 yards from the new camp was an enormous power plant, with six giant smokestacks, each about a hundred feet high. He assumed that these smokestacks would become targets for American bombs, and with the camp so close, they wouldn’t be any safer than they had been back at the Castle. In fact, they might be less safe: whereas the Castle was concrete, the new camp structures were made mostly of wood. But he’d learned by now not to try to understand Japanese logic.
A tall wooden fence, topped with barbed concertina wire, surrounded the camp. Inside the compound stood ten barracks of very light frame construction, each building with a capacity of 150 men. There were two rows of two-tier bunks running the length of the building, the lower bunk six inches off the ground, the top tier reached by ladder. Each bunk contained a thin mat, and at the head of each bay was a small shelf where the prisoners could place their meager belongings and the pack of ten Japanese cigarettes they received each week. The floor was concrete, the roof a type of Japanese tile. There was no source of heat except for a small, charcoal-burning stove set in the middle of the room; it was to be lit only from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Light came from a single overhead bulb. Small windows provided light during the day, with special blackout curtains for air raids. The Grenadier crew would be sharing their quarters mostly with Marines and civilians who’d been captured by the Japanese on Wake Island in the fall of 1942.
To the rear of the barracks in a separate room there was a cement urinal and four sinks with cold water. The latrines were in another small room; there were six wooden stalls, each enclosing a hole to squat over. The waste was gathered in a large tank underneath the room, which had to be cleaned by the prisoners. For bathing there were two large cement tanks outside, each ten feet square and three feet deep. The galley was located in a wooden building containing large steam-operated pots for making rice and tea. The prisoners were in charge of cooking the meals under the supervision of a Japanese mess sergeant. Each barracks appointed men to bring food from the galley to the barracks in buckets.
Compared with the Castle, this new camp seemed like a resort on Seneca Lake to Chuck.
On his lunch break at the pipe shop, Chuck could barely stand the throbbing pain of his toothache; the pressure from the infection swelled the side of his face. Still, the last thing he wanted to do was ask a guard if he could have medical attention. He was more concerned about his crewmate and friend Charles Doyle, who’d been sent to work despite having pneumonia. Since arriving at work in the morning, Doyle had just sat hunched in a corner; his eyes were sunken, his breathing labored, and his legs covered with infected boils. He stared off into space with
the look all too familiar in the camp.
Chuck eased his way next to Doyle in the corner and gave him a nudge. Doyle didn’t respond.
A deathwatch had become part of the camp routine. The question “How many died today?” was asked every evening when the men returned to camp from work. Usually the answer was three or four, the numbers increasing with the onset of winter and the increase in cases of pneumonia. The guards and Japanese doctors were usually not sympathetic to the pneumonia cases, sending them to work anyway, although today the guards were not bothering Doyle.
Doyle, who was from Weymouth, Massachusetts, was one of Chuck’s best buddies on the crew. Chuck often teased him about his thick New England accent. In the evenings they liked to talk, sometimes about baseball. Doyle was a big Red Sox fan and argued that the Sox’s young phenom, Ted Williams, was a better hitter than the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio. They talked about going to a game together if they survived.
Doyle slumped over. Chuck urged him to get up, but Doyle didn’t respond.
* * *
Chuck squeezed the arms of the dentist’s chair. He’d finally caved in and asked a guard if he could see a dentist and they’d taken him to a clinic in nearby Tobata. The tooth was abscessed and infected, and the dentist had just informed him that he was going to have to pull it, without Novocain or any painkiller.
The guard had also let him know that as soon as the tooth was pulled, he had to go straight back to work. That was okay with Chuck. The routine of working in the pipe shop helped him keep his sanity.
Since being transferred to the new camp, Chuck and the prisoners had continued working at the steel mill, their routine the same every day: Get up at 5:30 a.m., form lines and count off, and eat a bowl of millet. Walk several hundred yards to a railroad switching station and climb onto an open flatbed car, then ride thirty minutes to the steel mill for their jobs as stevedores, mechanics, machinists, and pipe fitters. Chuck worked in the pipe shop alongside Gordy and Tim. Prisoners too sick to work either stayed in camp and were assigned jobs in the barracks, or were in the hospital. Workers at the steel plant usually received larger rations than those who stayed back, and that was one of the reasons that there wasn’t much protest over sick men such as Doyle being sent to work—not that protesting would’ve done any good. At the lunch break—which was usually thirty minutes, sometimes shorter—prisoners received another bowl of millet. Dinner was usually another small bowl of millet or daikon (a Japanese radish) soup.
