No Ordinary Joes

by Larry Colton

  With so many POWs dying, Chuck had sat in on more than one conversation about survival. What allowed some men to keep going, whereas others gave up? No simple answer emerged. Some men said it was religion that kept them going. Some said it was focusing on home and loved ones, while others contended that it was easier for single guys because they didn’t have a wife or children to worry about. Some thought it was easier for married guys because they had somebody waiting for them at home, and they could escape to thoughts of being together again. Chuck didn’t think marital status had anything to do with it.

  Chuck concluded that whatever it was, he had to believe that life was still worth living and that he needed something to focus on, even if it was hatred of his captors, even if it was staying alive just to see these Jap bastards have to pay for their savage ways.

  But he couldn’t say for sure why he was alive, and others, such as his good friend Charles Doyle, died. Maybe it was easier for men like him, who had never had much in the way of luxury and didn’t expect too much out of life, who knew more about hard work and grit and getting up before sunrise.

  Chuck took comfort in a sense of brotherhood, the shared POW experience, though with 1,200 men in the camp it wasn’t one big united tribe. There were eight nationalities in the camp—American, British, Australian, Indian, Javanese, Dutch, Chinese, Portuguese—and everyone pretty much stuck close to his fellow countrymen; there was little fraternization among nationalities. Half the prisoners were Americans, and although they shared a natural patriotic bond, Army, Marine, and Navy personnel stayed primarily with others of the same service. Chuck noticed a special closeness within the Marines, maybe even tighter than the togetherness that he and his fellow submariners shared. He had developed a friendship with one of the Marines, Eugene Lutz, and they had even talked about getting together back home.

  As far as Chuck was concerned, the guys who caused trouble, like Tim, were taking too big a risk. Survival was a lot easier, he calculated, if you did everything possible to stay invisible, like he and Gordy. But maybe in the end, none of it made any difference. Survival was a mystery. Sometimes strong men died and weak ones lived. It was like his poker games, he concluded, it just came down to the luck of the draw. The will to live was a gift.

  Maybe it was an exercise in futility, but Chuck was writing a letter to Gwen back in Australia. Nothing gave him hope like his thoughts of Gwen and those glorious weeks they’d spent together in Perth and Fremantle. But he knew there was no guarantee the letter would be sent.

  For the prisoners, the chance to send a letter was given randomly, often months apart; it was another form of torture. Their words were tightly scripted, allowed only on a preworded card with no chance for real communication: I am interned at______. My health is good/fair/poor. I work in a______. I am treated well/exceptional. Please say hi to______. I look forward to______.

  Chuck knew that circling the more positive choice about his treatment did not improve the chances that the card would be sent. Recently, a batch of cards written two months before had been found in a bag in a storage room, a discovery that sucked the wind out of the prisoners, including Chuck.

  Some of the men had received a letter from home, but Chuck had not. For the men who’d gotten letters, they were a lifeline. Some shared their letters, others hoarded them, a treasure more nourishing than food. They read them over and over and carried them everywhere, kissing them, pressing them against their hearts.

  He closed his message to Gwen the same stilted way he had with his other letters to her: I look forward to seeing you again after the war. He hoped she could read between the lines—if she ever got it.

  Lying in bed, Chuck debated whether to chance going to the bathroom. Getting up in the middle of the night and walking through the darkened barracks was not easy.

  For one thing, there was the matter of the latrines. As disgusting as the bathing situation was in the camp, going to the toilet was even worse. The supply of toilet paper was always low, and the paper had the texture of 50-grit sandpaper. The stench from the latrines was constant, especially at night when the air was calmer. The tank was supposed to be emptied regularly, but it rarely was, and often overflowed. The job of cleaning it fell to the men in sick bay; they dipped the waste out with buckets and carried it to a small garden between the barracks where they poured it out as fertilizer. Oftentimes, guards would push them, spilling the contents of their buckets onto their legs.

  Chuck continued his mental debate about a latrine run. Despite the exhaustion from a twelve-hour workday, sleep did not always come easily. As a child he’d shared a bedroom with as many as six siblings, but here a hundred men were crammed into one barracks. At least back home he had had a pillow and blankets and clean sheets and a mattress, things he knew he’d never take for granted if he survived.

  The night was punctuated by men tossing and turning and snoring. Many of the prisoners had nightmares; they yelled out in their sleep, sometimes waking everyone close by. There were also men with “happy feet,” a painful condition caused by vitamin deficiency that affected the nerve endings in the feet, causing men to moan and groan through the night, or get up and shuffle back and forth through the barracks, hoping for relief. But those men were few compared with the number of prisoners with dysentery who had to take endless trips to the benjo.

  Deciding he couldn’t hold out until morning, Chuck rolled out of his bunk and tiptoed across the wooden planks of the barracks toward the latrine. Tonight, the stench was especially bad. At the end of the barracks he saw a shadowy figure and he paused, debating whether to return to his bunk. Too many times he’d heard men make their way to the latrine in the middle of the night only to be intercepted by a bored guard assigned to the night watch, with nothing better to do than administer a random beating.

  Before Chuck could turn around, the figure moved toward him. He braced himself.

  “There’s no toilet paper,” the man whispered.

  Chuck recognized his buddy Eugene Lutz.

  Chuck resumed his course. He hoped someone had left a Japanese newspaper or some scraps of paper on the floor. As a boy his family had often had to make do without toilet paper, sometimes using pages from a Sears catalog, which by his analysis were softer than the toilet paper the Japanese supplied. In any case, he wasn’t going to use the Dutch method. Like most of the other American prisoners, Chuck shared a lack of respect for the Dutch, partly because of what he perceived as their grumpy demeanor, and partly because of their propensity for not using toilet paper, a habit that even in the squalor of the prison camp Chuck found disgusting.

  Able to scrape together enough pieces of paper, he finished his business, as flies buzzed around his head and fleas clung to his legs. He stumbled back through the darkness to his bunk. Not wanting to disturb Johnny Johnson sleeping next to him, he lay motionless, feeling the bedbugs crawling over his legs and biting his legs so hard it felt as if they were taking a blood-bank donation.

  Hearing the grumbling and seeing the angry glares, Chuck slammed down his serving ladle and clenched his fist, ready to fight.

  It was dinnertime and Chuck had recently been put in charge of dishing up the rice. In a world where every grain of rice and sip of soup mattered, the man serving the food was God, only more closely scrutinized. At every meal, prisoners examined their portions like lab scientists, comparing it with others’. If they thought they got less, they shouted or whined, and tempers often flared.

  The position of server was coveted, and of all the jobs in camp, it was the most political in nature. In Chuck’s case, the ranking officer in his barracks had appointed him because he thought that Chuck could be fair and magnanimous, and that he was tough enough to fend off the criticisms and threats he would surely get.

  Chuck and the other servers went to the galley before every meal and filled up large pots with rice and the watery gruel the men called “Tojo Soup.” After carrying the pots back to the barracks, the server dished out equal portions to
all the men. No matter who was serving, the others accused him of favoritism, or of taking a hefty portion for himself before even leaving the galley.

  Every prisoner’s biggest concern was food—or lack of it—and obtaining it was every man’s obsession; almost all the deaths in camp were a result, directly or indirectly, of malnutrition. For Chuck, it was excruciating to watch once healthy men turn into skeletons or see once proud men rummaging through garbage cans, hoping to find a guard’s discarded orange peel.

  Chuck didn’t think anyone back home could possibly understand the extent to which hunger controlled his every waking hour. He compared it to his sex drive when he was a teenager. But now, if he could choose between a plate of meat and potatoes and a naked movie star, the plate of meat and potatoes would win.

  When Chuck looked around the camp, he feared that most of the men wouldn’t survive another winter, including Gordy, who was deteriorating daily. Pneumonia would most likely reach out and take them. But as much as he wanted to serve a larger portion to the most desperate, too many others were studying his every move.

  Chuck didn’t understand why some of the men faked illness in order to get out of work. He called them “babies.” Chuck still hadn’t missed a day of work, and figured he’d have to be on his deathbed before he would. It was well known that the Japanese, as a way to encourage productivity, served larger lunch portions to those who worked. There were others, however, who calculated that a hard day’s labor would use far more energy than a few extra grains of rice could ever replenish, and so a camp doctrine of malingering was firmly in place.

  Chuck also couldn’t understand why some guys willingly traded rice for cigarettes. That was suicidal in his book, although on more than one occasion he had paid off a poker loss with a serving of rice. There were a few among the crew who believed he did it by skimming off a little rice from the serving pots.

  Everyone in camp knew that to the Japanese, rice was life itself. One interpreter told Chuck that the Japanese had captured all the rice on earth, and without it, the rest of the world was doomed. But the rice served in camp tasted like mushy, goopy grits, only without any flavor. Half the time there were flies in it, and sometimes maggots. According to the Geneva conventions, prisoners were supposed to be fed food from their national and cultural background, but everyone in Fukuoka #3 knew better than to expect that. Of all the food cravings Chuck had, that for sugar was the worst. He would’ve gladly traded five bowls of rice for one more can of sweet cling peaches like the ones he’d had just before he dove off the submarine. Like everyone else, he hoped that more Red Cross parcels would arrive soon, and each prisoner would be given his fair share. Then maybe the guys would stop accusing him of cheating them out of food.

  Chuck had just finished his lunch in the pipe shop when he noticed Babe, one of the young pushers, coming toward him wearing a big grin; he was holding something behind his back.

  Chuck retreated a step, not sure what to think. Of all the pushers, he trusted Babe the most, but experience had taught Chuck not to trust any Japanese completely. A couple of days earlier a piece of pipe had needed to be bent, and when nobody else was able to get the job done, Chuck took a big sledgehammer and, wielding it like a baseball bat, shaped the pipe.

  Babe pulled his hand from behind his back and thrust it toward Chuck. In it he had two baseball gloves and a ball. He extended a glove toward Chuck, clearly an invitation to play catch. Chuck nodded, following him outside to a paved area.

  Without speaking they began tossing the ball back and forth. Chuck smiled, enjoying the moment. He loved baseball, and this brought back memories of all the games he’d played as a kid, and the endless summer hours he’d spent at the ball field, using bats held together by electrical tape and balls coming apart at the stitches, pretending he was Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig.

  Earlier in the summer, one of the interpreters had said that Ted Williams of the Red Sox and Bob Feller of the Indians had both been killed in action. Chuck doubted that it was true, but he knew that FDR had declared that major leaguers were not exempt from serving. Williams had enlisted as a Marine pilot and Feller had joined the Navy.

  Usually news arrived in camp by way of recently captured prisoners, but it was always hard to tell fact from fiction. Rumors were a constant. In the past few months, Chuck had heard plenty of them: Every POW was going to get a brand-new Ford when he arrived home. The Queen Mary had been sunk. Bob Hope had died in a plane crash. Malnutrition caused sterility.

  He and Babe continued their game of catch, each putting a little more zing on their throws. Chuck’s arm felt surprisingly good. When he was in high school and played on the town team, some of the older players liked to play burnout with him: a game of hardball chicken where two players stood fifty feet apart and threw progressively harder until they were firing as hard as they could and someone either cried uncle or got hit. He wondered if Babe knew the game. A few POWs and about a half dozen guards and pushers had gathered to watch them play.

  The news the POWs most wanted to hear, of course, was about the progress of the war. By the end of the summer of 1944, a lot of positive news had reached camp, giving cause for hope: The Allies had invaded France at Normandy and the Germans were on the run; the Marines had invaded Saipan and Guam in the Marianas, and were building airstrips that would make it much easier to launch air raids on Japan. There was also word that American subs were wreaking havoc on Japanese shipping and cutting off their supply lines. The most recent rumor was that MacArthur was getting ready to retake the Philippines. There was no way to confirm any of these rumors, but Chuck wanted to believe.

  Soon, he and Babe were throwing hard. Some of Babe’s throws were starting to sting his hand; the flimsy glove offered little padding. Babe smiled. He was handling Chuck’s throws with little effort.

  Chuck knew he could advance their friendly game of catch to a full-scale game of burnout, confident he had a better arm than Babe. It would be a nice little victory, a statement of American superiority. But what if he lost? Then again, if he won, Babe and the guards might be pissed and take it out on him and the other POWs, like the three Marines who had won a race against the guards.

  Deciding he was in a no-win situation, he eased up on his throws, and the lunch period ended with him and Babe back to where they started, a nice game of soft-toss catch, both of them smiling.

  36

  Bob Palmer

  Ashio

  Exhausted, Bob stood in front of the smelter at the Ashio copper mine, about to start the three-mile trudge back down the hill to the prison camp. It was March 1944. Bob and eleven of his Grenadier crewmates had recently been transferred from the interrogation camp at Ofuna to the prison camp at Ashio, a small mountainous town of 2,000 located about a hundred miles northwest of Tokyo. He and the others had suffered through six brutal months at Ofuna before the Japanese decided that they couldn’t beat any more useful information out of them and that they would be more valuable as slave laborers at the copper mine. Captain Fitzgerald and his top officers were still at Ofuna.

  Ashio was the site of the largest copper mine in Japan, producing 26 percent of the country’s total output and playing a significant role in the development of Japan’s economy. In the buildup to the war, the Ashio mine, by meeting increased demand needed for both foreign exchange and military purposes, was part of the foundation upon which Japan’s imperialism was being built. But even within the country, it had become hugely controversial and the site of riots and environmental challenges. In its two centuries of existence, the mine’s zealous pursuit of full production had eroded the surrounding hills, poisoned the farmland, and turned hundreds of square miles into an absolute wasteland. The once healthy forest that surrounded the refinery had been completely denuded. The sulfurous anhydrite from the smoke produced by the mining and smelting machinery had caused intractable pollution problems. Over the years, raging floods had carried poisonous waste from the mines, devastating the area’s rich agricultural ecosy
stem, depositing monstrous slag piles, and causing massive fish kills in the nearby Watarase River.

  But it was not ecological issues that Bob thought about as he continued slogging down the hill toward the camp; it was the angry citizens lining the road ahead, almost rabid in their hatred of America, every day a chance to spew their venom at the dirty, disheveled white men filing through their little town.

  A gob of spit hit Bob on his cheek. He slowed, glancing to his left, eyeing a woman a few feet away, his instinct to grab her by the neck. He kept walking.

  Sitting in her small apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco, Barbara read the certified letter from the Navy Department dated May 29, 1944, two months after she had said a tearful good-bye to Robert Kunhardt.

  Dear Mrs. Palmer:

  You have previously been informed by this Bureau that your husband, Robert Wiley Palmer, Yeoman first class, United States Navy, was being carried on the records of the Navy Department in the status of missing. He was on board the USS GRENADIER when that submarine was reported overdue and presumed lost from a mission against enemy shipping in the South Pacific area.