No Ordinary Joes

by Larry Colton

  June 22, 1944. Rumor has it that more men to be transferred soon.

  33

  Tim “Skeeter” McCoy

  Fukuoka #3

  Scrunched up in his little four-foot by four-foot cement cage after he was caught stealing beans, Tim heard bombs exploding in the distance, then the sound of planes high overhead. He could see Japanese guards running for cover. He knew that the main target for the bombs was the steel mill, where all of his crewmates were at work.

  It was June 15, 1944, and for the first time in the two years since Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo in April 1942, American planes were attacking the Japanese homeland. In a plan implemented at the direction of President Roosevelt called Operation Matterhorn, American’s newest weapon, the B-29, had been rushed into combat, its mission to destroy Japan’s ability and heart to wage war. Nicknamed the Superfortress, it was one of the most advanced bombers of its time, featuring a pressurized cabin, central fire-control system, and remote-controlled machine-gun turrets. Manufactured by Boeing and assembled in factories in Washington State, Kansas, Georgia, and Nebraska, the four-engine plane was designed for use primarily as a high-altitude daytime bomber, with a range of nearly 4,000 miles and a capability to fly at speeds up to 350 mph and at altitudes up to 40,000 feet, which was higher than the Japanese fighters could fly and out of range of almost all antiaircraft fire. The long-range plan was to have these planes attack Japan from bases in the Marianas, but American forces had not yet completed construction of the necessary airfields there, so President Roosevelt secured support from India and China to use bases in those countries for the attacks. This first attack was launched from Chengdu, China, with forty-seven B-29s all loaded with tons of bombs. Their target was the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata.

  For what seemed like forever, Tim lay curled in his box, helpless, listening to the explosions, worrying that his buddies were being blown to smithereens.

  A month had passed since the bombing. Surprisingly, little damage had been inflicted on the steel mill, and although the B-29s had been heard passing overhead again, there’d been no more attacks targeting Yawata. After five excruciating days in the cement tomb, Tim had finally been released, although he was back three weeks later. This time it was because the guards had found a stash of soybeans hidden under his bunk, a stash he was convinced Trigg had planted.

  During his second stay in the tomb, Tim received only one small rice ball per day. The rice had been laced with rock salt, which made him thirsty, a thirst that the spoonful of water he got each day didn’t quench. The guards beat him repeatedly, and every day that he was caged, he vowed that when he was released he’d find the “gutless sonuvabitch” responsible for doing this to him.

  Neither Tim nor Trigg had made any effort to hide their dislike for each other. Tim figured that Trigg just didn’t like any white people, which seemed like a tough cross to bear given that the Navy was practically all white. Tim had been raised to believe that it was best if the two races stayed apart. His dad had preached that, and so had his church. He’d never really known any blacks. Maybe if Trigg didn’t have such a chip on his shoulder (whether he had good cause to or not), then maybe Tim wouldn’t think he was such a prick. On more than one occasion, Tim had called him “a dumb nigger.” But so had everyone else on the crew, including Captain Fitzgerald.

  Tim was clearly not alone in his dislike of Trigg, and the animosity had gotten worse since they’d been captured. Everyone believed that Trigg had been getting special treatment from the guards. Nobody could remember him getting interrogated in Penang. He hadn’t been beaten as much, and he always seemed to be served more food. Plus, he often played sick to get out of work at the steel mill, and somehow got himself assigned to the galley, where he had access to the food supply. More than the other prisoners, he had maintained his weight, and was still an imposing figure. But Tim wasn’t intimidated.

  He pushed himself off his bunk and stormed in Trigg’s direction. “Get out of that bed!” he screamed.

  Trigg didn’t budge. “What’s your problem?” he said.

  “You planted those fuckin’ beans,” yelled Tim.

  “No I didn’t,” Trigg replied.

  Tim reached down and grabbed him by the shirt, jerking him to his feet. “God damn liar!”

  Trigg lunged at Tim, grabbing the wooden dog tag that hung by a chain from his neck. He pulled him toward him, their faces now a foot apart.

  “Let go!” warned Tim.

  Trigg twisted harder, Tim’s face turning red. With a strong upward sweep of his forearm, Tim knocked Trigg’s hand loose from its grip. Before Trigg could react, Tim took a quick step back and kicked him as hard as he could right square in the balls. Trigg crumpled to the floor, writhing in pain. Tim turned and returned to his bunk, congratulated by his crewmates.

  34

  Gordy Cox

  Fukuoka #3

  Nursing two black eyes and a broken nose, Gordy sat on the edge of his bunk, wondering if this hell was ever going to end. It was July 1944. The previous day, Water Snake, an eighteen-year-old civilian pusher at the mill, had beaten him senseless for no reason. Gordy’s face was so swollen he was hard to recognize.

  “Are you going to take a bath?” asked Tim.

  Gordy shook his head, an emphatic no. The prison compound included a bathhouse with two separate rooms, one for the Japanese guards, the other for prisoners, each room with a large concrete tub big enough to hold fifty to sixty men at a time. For the prisoners, the order of bathing was rotated by barracks number between the twelve barracks and 1,200 men. By the time the second barracks had finished bathing, the water was always filthy, and like most of the crew, Gordy skipped bathing most evenings. Some evenings the layer of scum on top of the water looked thick enough to walk on. Gordy never bathed when the two barracks with the Indian prisoners went ahead of him. Most of the Indians worked all day loading coal, and by the time they returned to camp they were caked with black soot, and sometimes they washed their clothes in the tub, which was supposedly forbidden. It was Gordy’s impression that the Japanese still believed that they could convert the Indians to their side, so they let them do things other prisoners couldn’t.

  He watched as some of his crewmates headed down to the bathhouse. This evening, he was passing the time picking bedbugs; it had become almost a sport for him to see how many he could kill. Of the many aggravations and hardships of prison camp, perhaps the most irritating were the bedbugs and lice. Gordy wasn’t always certain which bug was which; he just knew that most days they drove him nuts. The mat he slept on was always crawling with them, and sometimes when the person on the top bunk lay down, it unleashed a downpour of bugs. The bugs had crept their way into just about everything—clothes, food, hair, ears. But at least it was better than the infestation of crabs that some of the men had brought with them when they were first captured and taken to Penang. By now, most of the men, including Gordy, had shaved their heads in an effort to help relieve the discomfort. Many mornings his prison clothes would be filled with bugs. Prisoners were allowed to wash their clothes once a month, and within a day the lice and bedbugs were back. Still, Gordy considered himself lucky: a pusher at the pipe shop sometimes let him boil his clothes in a big pot next to the furnace.

  Gordy watched a guard slowly make his way through the barracks, checking to make sure nobody was lying down yet. The rule was that prisoners weren’t allowed to lie on their bunk until lights out, which meant no naps or resting in a prone position, not even after a twelve-hour workday.

  The guard eyed Gordy picking at the bugs. It struck Gordy that the guards and workers in the plant, who were infested with the lice and bedbugs just as badly as the prisoners, were not bothered by them. Maybe they’d just gotten used to it, he thought, or maybe the Japs were truly different, and were as oblivious to the bugs around them as they were to all the pain and suffering.

  Gordy reached up and plucked a louse from his eyebrow.

  Resting on his s
hovel, Gordy glanced to the sky, first spotting the vapor trail, then the sun glistening off the plane. He didn’t know what kind of plane it was, only that it was American and that almost every day it flew overhead, too high for Japanese antiaircraft. Initially, the Japanese had tried shooting it down, but the shells exploded halfway to their target. They’d tried to scramble fighter planes up to get it, but they couldn’t get close enough. Gordy had never seen the plane drop any bombs; it just flew in the same direction at about the same time every afternoon. To Gordy, it was a magnificent sight.

  As a guard stationed nearby edged toward him, Gordy looked back down and resumed shoveling in the sandy dirt. A few days earlier he’d learned his lesson the hard way when a guard caught him staring at the plane. He’d absorbed a few raps alongside the head for that little mistake. It almost made him laugh; it was as if these guards believed that the plane would disappear if the prisoners didn’t watch it. Clearly, it was making them jittery.

  Gordy continued shoveling. For over a week he had been too sick to go to work at the pipe shop but not sick enough to be confined to the hospital. The ambulatory sick like Gordy were assigned jobs around the camp. Gordy was part of a crew digging a bomb shelter behind the camp. To him this was just another case of how dumb his captors were; digging was a lot more strenuous than his work at the pipe shop. But he’d learned early on in his captivity that logic didn’t always apply here.

  The prisoners had taken to calling the plane Photo Joe, speculating it was taking reconnaissance pictures, gathering information for an impending invasion. The guards had threatened that if indeed there was an invasion, all the prisoners would be marched down to Moji Bay, lined up at the shoreline, and gunned down, letting the tide carry their bodies out to sea. Gordy wondered again if it would be better to take a bullet between the eyes rather than die an ugly death of starvation. Plus, it would mean that the Japs were about to get slaughtered in their own backyard.

  With Photo Joe out of sight, he turned his attention to the sand fleas. It wasn’t the exhaustion of shoveling the dirt that wore on him as much as it was the sand fleas. Each new turn of earth unleashed more of these biting, hopping little crustaceans, which could jump ten inches, making the pale ankles of the prisoners the perfect target. Gordy’s ankles were covered with welts and lesions, and it was hard to keep from scratching.

  He paused, remembering the bugs he’d encountered when he and his brothers and parents slept on the ground when they were picking fruit back in the Yakima Valley during the Depression. He was twelve then. He thought about how hungry he’d get working those long days in the fields, and how some of his classmates called him an Okie. Eight years later, as he reached down to knock away the sand fleas, those seemed like good times.

  After a week of missing work, Gordy convinced the Japanese doctor at the hospital that he was well enough to return to his job at the pipe shop. He wanted to work not so much because he was feeling better but because prisoners received more food at the steel mill. There were also more guards around the barracks, most of them with nothing better to do than make life miserable for the prisoners, showing off to each other about how sadistic they could be. In the pipe shop, Gordy could usually breathe a little easier, except when Water Snake (so named because of the way he slithered and snuck around) was on duty. Water Snake seemed to take special pride in picking on Gordy, maybe because Gordy was one of the smaller POWs.

  Gordy was looking forward to lunch. Rumor had it that all the POWs at the pipe shop would be receiving a Red Cross food box on this day. So far, no Red Cross supplies had reached the prisoners at Fukuoka #3.

  He took a seat at a lunch table across from Tim. Unlike Tim, Gordy hadn’t gotten involved in any stealing and bartering on a regular basis. There was one time when he and another prisoner mustered up enough courage to steel some peanut oil and to trade it with some Javanese prisoners for rice. They smuggled it past the guards in a canteen, but Gordy was so nervous that he said that was the last time he’d try something like that. He’d been the same way as a young boy. When the other boys dared him to steal a candy bar, he wouldn’t, not because of some higher moral code but because he didn’t want to get caught.

  Waiting at the lunch table with Tim, Chuck, and Robert York, Gordy spotted a guard heading their way. He was carrying one Red Cross box.

  For several months Red Cross packages had been arriving in camp, but the Japanese were using them for themselves. The prisoners knew this and had repeatedly complained, but to no avail. Sometimes the guards would eat from one of the packages right in front of the prisoners, just to taunt them. Attempts to sneak into the warehouse where the boxes were stored and steal some of them had become a regular, if not always successful, occurrence. When an attempt to steal boxes was successful, the contents were like gold. Sometimes the thief devoured the food himself. Other times he’d use it in trade; nothing on the black market commanded as much in return. But when the Japanese suspected someone had stolen one of the boxes, everyone paid the price, guards trashing the barracks trying to find the stolen goods. And if they couldn’t find the contraband, then they marched everyone outside and made them stand at attention all night.

  The guard stopped at their table and set down the box, indicating that its contents were to be divided among the four men. Gordy opened the box and looked inside. It contained a three-ounce can of sardines, a biscuit, four prunes, and a chocolate bar. As meager as the contents were, it looked like Christmas dinner to Gordy and the others. They divided the sardines, biscuit, and chocolate bar into four equal portions; each man got a prune.

  As Gordy put his piece of chocolate into his pocket to save for later, he looked up and saw Water Snake coming toward him, hand extended, demanding the prune.

  Three days later Gordy sat in the barracks, listening to the exploding bombs in the distance and hoping that his crewmates at the mill weren’t dead. He hadn’t gone to work on this day, August 20, 1944, because his left eye was swollen shut. Water Snake had celebrated his last day before heading off to the army by taking a welding arc and torching his left eye, just because he could. Dr. Markowitz told Gordy he was lucky that he didn’t lose the eye.

  The bombing had started around noon. Even though the camp was several miles from the factory and separated by a hill, Gordy could clearly see the bombers.

  Shortly after the first wave of B-29s had appeared, flying much lower than Photo Joe, ack-ack fire peppered the sky, and over a hundred Japanese fighters went up after them. From his vantage point, Gordy saw one of the fighters fly directly into a B-29’s wing, both planes exploding, the debris hitting another B-29 and bringing it down as well. He saw another Jap fighter shoot down a B-29, and when the pilot and crew bailed out, the fighter opened machine-gun fire on them as they floated down in their parachutes. One of the men’s chutes didn’t open and Gordy saw him fall to his death. He watched as another fighter blew the tail off of another B-29 and the plane spiraled to the ground like a leaf in a strong wind.

  With the war now going badly for the Japanese, the B-29 raids launched from the China-Burma-India theater were beginning to strike terror into the hearts of the Japanese public. Because of the long-distance fuel problems the B-29s were experiencing, they had been forced to reduce weight by carrying smaller bomb loads. They were not flying in formation, and were at a lower, more dangerous altitude, 27,000 feet, to take advantage of the jet stream. At this level, they were vulnerable to Japanese planes and antiaircraft fire. As ill-equipped to defend the home islands as it was, the Japanese Army Air Force, with the help of recently improved radar, had thrown itself fully into the task of stopping the B-29s. When earlier attempts to repel the higher-flying B-29s through conventional means had been unsuccessful, Japanese pilots had formed specialist-ramming flights, and this was the first time the strategy had been put to use. From Gordy’s viewpoint, it appeared to be having success.

  Finally, seven hours after the attack had begun, the last of the B-29s turned and headed back toward
China. The prisoners from the steel mill straggled back into camp. Gordy met them as they entered the barracks. To his surprise, there had been no casualties among the prisoners; they had spent the duration of the raid in one of the recently built bomb shelters. The bombs had fallen all around the steel mill, but somehow had missed the target.

  “A few sand-flea bites,” said Tim. “That’s it.”

  35

  Chuck Vervalin

  Fukuoka #3

  Chuck could hear the screams of one of the downed B-29 pilots, reminding him of the agonizing cries he’d heard from Captain Fitzgerald back in Penang. He hadn’t seen any of the downed pilots yet, but everyone in camp knew they were there. If the men of the Grenadier had been the Japanese’s most prized prisoners, the B-29 pilots had now replaced them.

  Like most of the prisoners, except for those who’d grown up on the West Coast, where most Japanese-Americans lived, Chuck had not known any Japanese growing up. In the year and a half of captivity, he’d learned to hate them with every fiber in his body. To him they were Japs, Nips, slant-eyes, yellow-bellied cockroaches, bucktoothed yellow monkeys. He went to sleep every night hating them, and woke up every morning hating them even more.

  During the buildup to the war, Chuck had thought the war in the Pacific was about halting Japan’s expansionism. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, for him revenge was a motivating factor. But now that he had experienced how much the Japanese people hated whites, it was about race, a primal conflict of good versus evil. He’d listened to the guards and interpreters harangue the men about their almighty warrior code of Bushido and how in their eyes the men—white, Chinese, Korean—who’d allowed themselves to be captured did not deserve respect, mercy, or restraint, and were despicable and deserved to die. Maybe the Japanese weren’t putting people in gas chambers like the Germans, but they were driving them to their deaths by the tens of thousands just the same, by starvation, malnourishment, dysentery, malaria, pneumonia, and beriberi. They beat them for no reason, then told them that the only reason that they were being allowed to live was that the emperor had graciously spared their lives. To Chuck, the Japanese were alien, grotesque, sadistic, brutal, and inhuman, and it scared him to think that at the time of his capture they ruled millions of square miles of the world—China, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and a large part of the Pacific.