by Larry Colton
Originally, the prisoners at Fukuoka #3 received approximately two cups of food per day, but it had recently been reduced to one cup. There was some debate among the prisoners why their rations had been cut. One camp argued that it was to have them suffer a slow death by starvation. Another argument was that all of Japan was suffering from a food shortage, and it wasn’t just the prisoners who were getting less to eat. A third theory involved an incident that had happened a couple of months earlier. Several of the American Marines had boasted to the guards that they could beat them in a footrace. The guards accepted the challenge, and each side picked their three fastest men. The three Marines finished one-two-three. After the race, the guards concluded that the prisoners were too strong, so their rations were cut by a third. From his point of view, Chuck believed that the cut in rations was to starve them to death, yet keep them alive long enough that they could be productive laborers.
Using what looked to Chuck like an ordinary pair of pliers, the dentist climbed into position and yanked out the infected tooth. Chuck let out a fierce scream, doing everything possible to fight back the tears.
Twenty minutes later, his mouth filled with gauze, he was back on the job in the pipe shop.
Exhausted and cold, Chuck sat on the edge of his lower bunk in the barracks, waiting for another day to end. He was also waiting for the nightly poker game to end and his bunkmate, Johnny Johnson, the son of a coal miner from Cartonsville, Illinois, to come join him. To help protect themselves from the freezing cold, the two men had taken to sleeping in the same bunk together, using each other’s body heat and an extra blanket for warmth. Raised in a world where words such as “queer” and “faggot” were an accepted insult, neither man had given a second thought to spooning through the night; here survival trumped social stigma. Besides, others in the crew were doing the same thing.
The infection had finally subsided from Chuck’s pulled tooth. He had not received any instructions from the dentist on post-removal care, and he had kept the gauze in his mouth for three days. He took it out only after Johnny had complained about how much it stank.
Chuck was especially tired on this evening. He couldn’t explain why some nights after work he still had energy, while on others it was all he could do to climb into bed. Usually, when he felt better, he passed the evening playing poker after dinner. Gambling and poker had become his favorite recreation since joining the Navy. Back in Australia he’d been to the horse races several times, and on the sub he’d been a regular in the five-card-draw and seven-card-stud poker games. On one patrol on the Gudgeon, he’d won a couple of hundred dollars, which he sent home to his mother. In prison camp, he and the other gamblers had fashioned a deck of cards out of the discarded Japanese cigarette packs and used twigs gathered from the prison compound for chips. The men played for cigarettes, or sen, or in some cases food. Winners often bartered, maybe trading three cigarettes for half a bowl of millet. Or when somebody had been brazen enough to steal commodities such as beans or peanut oil from the galley, those items would be introduced into the economy. Chuck’s advantage was that he had quit smoking since being captured, and the cigarettes he received every week were valuable barter.
Stealing had become a way of life at Fukuoka #3, prisoners risking severe consequences to steal a handful of rice, a pack of cigarettes, or anything they thought might improve their situation, even if it was a stick found along the road leading to the camp. Most of the prisoners sent to the guardhouse who were severely beaten and put on display were there for stealing or for being suspected of stealing. This thievery included stealing from fellow prisoners, an offense that ran the risk of incurring even harsher vigilante justice from the other prisoners than the guards might inflict. The Marines were sometimes the target of the thieves because they seemed to have more-valuable items. After they’d been captured on Wake Island, they were allowed to bring clothes and other personal belongings to prison camp with them. Also, they had been assigned to work in truck and auto repair and had access to better stuff there.
On this night, Chuck was too exhausted for poker, content to let his mind drift to thoughts of Gwen and Leighton Beach. By his calculations, the patrol should have returned to Fremantle seven months ago; he assumed that by now she knew that something had happened. But did she know that the crew had been captured, or that they were now in a prison camp in Japan?
Chuck thought back to when he was in school, regretting that he was such a troublemaker and that he hadn’t tried harder in his studies. He wished he’d had the discipline and maturity he had in Submarine School back in high school. Now, sitting on the edge of his bunk in Fukuoka #3, he wondered why he’d been so hard on his teachers. They didn’t deserve all his pranks and back talk. If this POW nightmare ever ended, he promised himself, he would go back to the old school and apologize to the teachers.
Although he’d been raised a Catholic, religion was not a big part of Chuck’s life. More than once when he’d heard other prisoners praying for God to watch over them, he questioned how a benevolent God with all powers of good and kindness would allow such a barbaric situation to happen in the first place. There were occasional services on Sunday evenings conducted in another barracks by a priest who’d been captured in the Philippines, but the only time Chuck went was on Christmas. To him, the Saint Christopher’s medal Gwen had given him had become his vessel of faith and hope.
Still waiting for Johnny Johnson, Chuck heard a commotion near the front opening of the barracks. He looked up and saw three Marines push a battered and bloodied Thomas Trigg into the barracks. Trigg looked like he’d just gone ten rounds with Joe Louis.
“Let that be a lesson to you, nigger,” barked one of the Marines. “Don’t even think about stealing from us again.”
Trigg stumbled across the concrete floor, collapsing into his bunk. None of the Grenadier crew moved to help him. Although Chuck, like the rest of the men, disliked Trigg, there was a part of him that felt sorry for him. He was the only black man on the crew, and surely he had to feel alone and discriminated against. But when Chuck tried to put himself in Trigg’s shoes, he wondered why Trigg would have ever signed up for submarine service. But of course neither Chuck nor anyone else on the crew had ever sat down to talk to him about how he felt about the situation.
Finally, Johnny returned to the bunk, and he and Chuck lay down close together, holding on to each other, struggling to get warm.
Chuck shot straight up in bed, awakened by a screaming guard pointing a bayonet at his face. Everybody in the barracks was ordered to get up and stand at attention at the foot of his bed, “encouraged” by a dozen guards prodding them with bayonets. Like most of the other prisoners, Chuck had worn his prison uniform to bed to keep warm.
Being awakened in the middle of the night was nothing new to the crew, but this was the first time it had happened since they had been transferred to the new camp. It was late February 1944, and snow was still on the ground.
In the previous three weeks the crew had begun to face the reality that they might not all survive. On February 4, the first of the Grenadier crew passed away. Justiniano Guico, a Filipino of Chinese ancestry who’d been raised by an aunt in Los Angeles, had been a mess cook and the only other minority on the ship besides Trigg. A good-natured guy, he’d been treated especially badly by the guards, many of whom either had fought against the Chinese or hated anyone they suspected of being Chinese. Two weeks later, Charles Linder, a quiet married man from upper Michigan, died. Pneumonia was most likely the cause of death for both men, but Chuck believed they had just given up, losing the will or the strength to struggle. Their deaths had just strengthened his resolve to stay alive. Charles Doyle, despite his dire condition, was still alive, but just barely.
The guards ordered everyone to strip naked. As most of the guards began furiously pillaging through everything in the barracks, obviously searching for something, the other guards marched the prisoners outside into the snow and ordered them to stand at attention
. Chuck guessed the temperature was below freezing.
While the search inside continued, the men struggled to keep at attention. Chuck shivered and shriveled, the biting cold numbing every part of him. He heard the guards rampaging through their stuff, turning over bunks and ripping apart clothes. It was anybody’s guess what they were looking for; maybe stolen food that someone had stashed somewhere in the barracks.
An hour passed, and then another; now a freezing rain was falling. Chuck wondered if the men who were the sickest, especially Doyle, would survive this ordeal.
Of all the humiliation and degradation he’d suffered since his capture, this pissed him off more than anything else.
When the prisoners were finally allowed back into the barracks, it was a complete shambles, but evidently the guards hadn’t found what they were looking for. Chuck was furious, but not surprised, by this action. He knew that the Japanese had no respect for anyone who surrendered rather than fought to the death: that was Bushido, the national code by which all Japanese warriors lived and fought. But to him this incident felt more personal, more invasive. The guards had violated his personal property and home, even if that home was a POW barracks.
It wasn’t just the guards who had him pissed. He was angry that the prisoner responsible for the stolen goods—whether it was a crewmate or one of the men from Wake Island—didn’t have the balls to step forward, admit his guilt, and take his punishment so that everyone else didn’t have to suffer. But that kind of cowardice didn’t surprise him anymore; ten months as a POW had taught him that captivity and the constant threat of death had a way of making many men think more about their own self-preservation and survival than what was best for everyone.
Of course, there was also the possibility that nothing had really been stolen, and the search was just another form of psychological torture.
Later that day, Johnny Johnson told Chuck that Charles Doyle was dead.
Chuck struggled to stay composed. First Guico, then Linder, and now his buddy Doyle, the Red Sox fan. He and Doyle would never have a chance to go to a game together.
He volunteered to help dispose of the body. He lifted his friend onto a pushcart and, accompanied by a guard, wheeled Doyle out of the camp toward the town of Tobata, two miles away. The journey was slow, the road slippery and full of holes.
Chuck had never been philosophical or spiritual. But pushing Doyle’s body along the bumpy road gave him pause. Being a submariner had allowed him to maintain a distance from the violence. You fire a torpedo or a deck gun and you don’t see the eyes of the enemy. You don’t have your buddy blown to bits next to you in a foxhole or while landing on a beach. And even though other prisoners had been dying every day since they’d arrived in Japan, he didn’t know those men. This was different.
Pushing the cart, he glanced down at his dead friend. Doyle did not look comfortable even in death, his once sturdy body wasted away to skin and bones, his hollow eyes still wide open, his stare the same in death as it had been at the end of his life.
In Tobata, a large outdoor furnace awaited; the disposal of all the dead POWs was the same. Chuck wheeled the cart to its opening, then pulled Doyle’s stiff body off it and with a mighty heave threw him into the fire.
Stepping back, he pulled Gwen’s medal from his pocket and clutched it tight, tears flowing. Later, a small wooden box with Doyle’s ashes would be returned to the barracks wrapped in a purple handkerchief, to be placed on a shelf with a row of other small purple-wrapped boxes.
30
Bob Palmer
Ofuna
Bob took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh air. It was October 19, 1943, seven days after he and the other twenty-eight men, including the officers, had been blindfolded and separated from the rest of the crew. They’d been taken on a two-day train ride that ended at Ofuna, a railroad junction town on the eastern side of central Honshu, fifteen miles southwest of Yokohama and three and a half miles inland from Tokyo Bay. This was only the third time they’d been let out of solitary confinement.
Bob eased next to a crewmate and whispered a greeting. A guard standing nearby rifle-butted him in the back, knocking the wind out of him and sending him to his knees.
The prison camp at Ofuna was created as a “transit camp” where the kempeitai, the Japanese counterpart of the German Gestapo, interrogated prisoners, usually with the use of torture. Located on the site of a former school about a mile south through a tunnel from the railway station, the camp was on the opposite side of the road from a large temple and surrounded by hills. It had opened on April 7, 1942. Unlike all the other prison camps in Japan, which were controlled by the Japanese army and POW Information Bureau, the Ofuna camp was under the control of the Japanese navy. All the prisoners were captured Allied seamen or pilots, including many officers. Japanese officials had chosen the twenty-nine Grenadier crew members to come to Ofuna based on their rank or job on the ship as determined during the earlier interrogations. They believed each had special information and needed more-thorough and forceful interrogation. As the ship’s yeoman and record keeper, Bob had made the list.
The prison compound contained barracks of unpainted wood, with a tar-paper roof and wood-planked floors, built around a large, open area, surrounded by an eight-foot wooden fence with barbed wire on top. The prison barracks were connected, and each one was divided into small cells, six feet wide and nine feet long. There were ninety cells, each one housing one prisoner. Each cell had a thin bamboo mat for sleeping and a blanket that had to be kept folded during the day. There were no mattresses or pillows. The walls were thin and the floorboards were so widely spaced that the ground below could be seen; spiders and flies were regular visitors. The door into the cell had a peephole, and a small window facing out to the parade ground was at the top of one wall. The window in Bob’s cell was too high to see anything out of other than sky.
Bob was struck by the utter stillness of the camp. He’d been a chatty sort of guy growing up in Oregon, and the hardest part of Ofuna so far was being locked in solitary confinement. He and the other prisoners were supposed to be let out once a day in the morning for a brief period of forced exercise, usually about half an hour of running around the inside perimeter of the compound. Sometimes they weren’t let out at all. During this exercise time, guards closely monitored the prisoners, and anyone caught talking or passing a note was beaten. Whether it was being in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day, or the enforced silence, Bob felt more threatened by the guards. They’d all been given nicknames—Swivel Neck, The Termite, Smiling Jack, The Butcher, Liver Lips, and Big Stoop—names whispered during the exercise period.
As he and the other prisoners started running around the perimeter of the camp, he glanced to his left and spotted a familiar face. He could barely contain himself: it was Captain Fitzgerald. The last time he’d seen him was at the Convent on Light Street when Fitzgerald was being dragged away unconscious after being waterboarded.
* * *
Bob turned his back to the door of his cell, shielding his hands from view in case a guard was watching him through the peephole. It was Captain Fitzgerald’s birthday, and Bob was preparing a present for him, a ball of rice that he was crafting out of portions he’d set aside from his own servings over the last few days. If he was caught, surely he’d get another beating.
Still black and blue from the last beating administered for talking during an exercise period, Bob gently squeezed the rice ball, molding it into shape. To Bob’s surprise, the gummy rice was holding together well. He knew his biggest problem would be smuggling it out of his cell past the guards and sneaking it to Captain Fitzgerald during exercise, but it was worth the risk; Bob would do anything for his captain.
Bob Palmer’s hero wasn’t Joe DiMaggio, or FDR, or his father: it was Captain James Fitzgerald. He admired everything about the man: the fact that he’d been a boxing champ at the Naval Academy, the aggressive way he pursued the enemy, the considerate way he’d peek his head in
to the yeoman’s office and ask Bob how he was doing, the remarkable courage he’d demonstrated under torture. For Bob, who had been convinced that the Japanese had killed Fitzgerald, arriving at Ofuna and discovering that his revered captain was still alive lifted his spirits like nothing had since being captured.
By the rules of the Geneva convention of 1929, officers were not supposed to be beaten or made to perform labor. But of course the Japanese had not agreed to these rules, and had been even harsher in their treatment of Fitzgerald. In Penang, he and Lieutenant Whiting and Lieutenant Hardy were the only men who’d received the water torture, and Fitzgerald had been subjected to far worse. After one episode of his water torture he’d been beaten so badly that he couldn’t even move when he woke up. On the morning he was taken out of camp, he was told to take a bath, but his right arm was paralyzed and his body was so sore that Whiting had to bathe him.
Bob slowly paced his small cell, contemplating the best way to smuggle out the rice ball. Maybe he could hide it in his armpit. If he hid it in his crotch it might make him limp, though that wouldn’t necessarily raise suspicion.
Bob’s physical condition had deteriorated since his arrival at Ofuna. He hadn’t had a bowel movement in over two months; there were boils on his legs and he weighed less than 120 pounds. He had bruises all over his body. On his first night in camp, four guards entered his cell and beat and stomped him over and over while he curled into the fetal position, covering his head with his arms, just hoping to survive.
