A Tale of Two Subs

by Jonathan J. McCullough

  Wild thoughts flashed through Rocek’s mind’s eye—the escape from belowdecks, the interrogators beating him on Truk, the sight of the dead sailor on the deck of the Sculpin as he abandoned ship—the flickering images of memory gathered in speed and intensity more vivid than life itself: the smell of a woman and the ocean on a starlit Brisbane beach, a sailor shaving his head after crossing the line, another sailor he knew at sub school, the smell of burning wood and singing songs around a campfire at a hometown pig roast, his first love, his boyhood friends under the glow of the street lamp outside the house, his father’s voice saying grace before Christmas dinner, his mother holding him in her arms, until finally a sense of himself long before he was aware of his name, like a glinting shard of diamond, glowing dimmer like the sun above him as he sank deeper toward the bottom of the ocean, until like some preconscious dream he felt his leg kick, and then the other kick, and his hand paddled, and then the Chuyo hundreds of feet below him turned sideways and rendered up its soul in the form of a gigantic bubble that had been trapped above the flight deck, approaching Rocek, overtaking him, raising his body to the surface, where he gasped as though for the first time, like a full-grown newborn man, looking with crazed eyes at the overwhelming splendor and the horror of his world.

  Jasper Holmes and Dick Voge got their first confirmation that Sailfish had made contact with the convoy in the form of a Japanese “submarine attack” message. Later, Bob Ward sent his first radio serial confirming the victory.

  Holmes and the sub command were jubilant, and he made out a large ceremonial check drawn “on Sailfish account” to settle his bet with Dick Voge, who framed the check and kept it over his desk.

  Only later would they realize what had happened on the Chuyo, that their ability to decrypt the message, indeed the ability to even make the attack on the Chuyo, was predicated on the fact that John Philip Cromwell had kept ULTRA’s secrets with him aboard the USS Sculpin, now under 5,000 fathoms of water.

  16

  The Torture Farm

  When the Sculpin survivors on the Unyo arrived at the Japanese naval port of Yokohama, their captors tied their hands and made them wear blindfolds. The weather at this time of the year—early December—was quite cold as compared to the tropical climate at Truk, and though there was frost on the ground the men received no shoes. After walking down the gangplank, they marched barefoot on frosty cobblestone streets until they reached a railroad station, where they took a train about thirty miles south to a place they learned was Ofuna, or “the torture farm.”

  Ofuna was a little larger than a football field and had three prisoners’ barracks arranged around the perimeter of the field. The men learned that the Japanese navy ran the camp to interrogate special prisoners, mostly submariners. They also discovered that through a cute interpretation of international law, the Japanese had classified them not as prisoners of war but “unarmed combatants.” As such they would be afforded no protections under the Geneva Conventions, including provisions governing contact with the outside world, how the guards would regard their dignity as human beings, and whether they would be tortured.

  Lieutenant Commander John Fitzgerald, former skipper of the USS Grenadier, had been captured several months previous, and had undergone several forms of torture. While interrogating him, his captors had run a penknife under his fingernails and had pried them off. They had stabbed his hands, and even more painful, they had driven pencils up between his fingers. One man was hanged from his thumbs for ten days, another lost a tooth during a beating.

  Fitzgerald had also undergone what he called “the water treatment.” The guards strapped him to a table, elevated his feet by about 30 degrees, covered his mouth with their hands, and poured water into his nostrils, asking questions all the while. After a few minutes he passed out, and when he came to, the process started all over again. For hours. He was barely able to muster any sort of answer, let alone tell them what they wanted to know, and when he was lucid he told them only lies and misleading half-truths. This was waterboarding. After the war the Allied war crimes tribunals classified the practice as a form of torture, a war crime, and handed down prison sentences spanning decades to its practitioners.

  After receiving canvas shoes, the men retired to the barracks. Each man occupied his own room of four feet by eight feet. The next day, they got a new prisoner, as Joe Baker recalled: “Just before lunch, George Rocek came into camp all black and burned as though he’d been in a fire. His clothes were all ripped and his eyes were sticking out of his head as though he had seen a ghost.”

  Rocek’s survival was nothing short of miraculous. Nearly everyone on the ill-fated Chuyo had died, including all of Rocek’s shipmates. After he rose to the surface, he spotted a raft with a Japanese officer on it. Several men were floating in the water and holding on for dear life as the mountainous sea swells rose up and down. Rocek tried to hold on to the makeshift raft along with the cook, Maxiso Barerra, and Ensign Charles Smith. Sometimes they’d lose their grip and have to swim in the cold water to get back to the raft. For hours they watched a Japanese destroyer going around in circles, charging up and down the waves at high speed. They hoped to God it wouldn’t leave them here, and eventually it slowed down to pick up survivors. Rocek grabbed on to a rope, but the Japanese officer on the raft stepped on his face and he was cast free until he got an elbow onto a Jacob’s ladder—a web made of rope slung over the side of the ship. He was by now so exhausted that he couldn’t get his feet into the web rungs, and held on for dear life as they pulled the Jacob’s ladder up onto the deck with him still attached like a crab. He flopped over the side facedown, where he panted stock-still until they turned him over and realized that he wasn’t a Japanese sailor. Yelling in Japanese, the sailors around him gave him some kicks and pulled him up to toss him overboard again, but someone intervened and he was spared. He watched as other sailors leaning over the rail on the fantail poked long sticks into the water—were they hitting Barrera and Smith, or trying to save them? Rocek never found out. He was the only American survivor of the catastrophe.

  Rocek was led to a door off the deck and stuck in a room, where one kindly machinist gave him biscuits, while another sailor came in drunk to beat him. Eventually he began to shiver uncontrollably, and sometime during the night he found a large vat of water. It felt so warm he took off his clothes and simply sat down in it, soaking up the warmth until the next morning. Eventually he was brought to Ofuna, where he took a hot bath with a couple of his shipmates, though none of them could talk about what had happened because of the guards.

  At Ofuna, the rules were simple: No talking among prisoners, ever. The punishment was a swift and savage beating with clubs—as Fitzgerald described it, like “the old circus tent stake driver pounding the peg into the ground.” The guards also meted out this punishment for a variety of other perceived infractions, including spilling food, going to the benjo (latrine) without asking permission, failing to salute in a manner to their liking, and just because they felt like it. Despite the dangers of punishment, the Ofuna prisoners carefully instructed the Sculpin survivors what they’d already revealed during interrogation, including the many lies they’d told, so that the new prisoners would perpetuate the misinformation. Another purpose was to avoid punishment; the interrogators compared answers from different sailors for contradictions and follow-up questions. Interrogations began the next day with particular emphasis on George Brown, whom they viewed as a particularly valuable source of information, and who suffered the most at their hands.

  During interrogation, the prisoner was literally under a gun. If he didn’t reply quickly enough he received a strike from a club. The interrogators, nicknamed the “Quiz Kids” or “QKs,” wore business suits and often identified themselves as graduates of American colleges. They usually spoke fair English, sometimes even pitch-perfect, but their knowledge of the language didn’t extend to American slang or common idioms, and the men frequently found themselves trying to formul
ate bum dope answers to avoid being a stool pigeon, if you catch the drift.

  During the sessions, the interrogators revealed the state of Japan and the war through their line of questioning: Were there sub bases in Fremantle and Brisbane? A secret fueling depot at the Australian port of Darwin? How did the sub command decide to recognize and reward whether a skipper damaged or sank a Japanese ship? When would the skipper send radio messages, and how would he code them? Where would the Allies strike next—the Marshalls, the Philippines, Formosa? Over time, the men could appreciate that the noose was slowly drawing closer around Japan, and that it was rapidly losing supplies. Most revealingly, the interrogators also fielded questions about the prospects for peace. Would the United States initiate negotiations? What terms would they seek? Could the Soviet Union—which at this time in the Pacific war was neutral—broker a peace agreement? Who would negotiate for the Allies? How should they interpret “unconditional”?

  When the men weren’t being interrogated, their days were fairly quiet and they sat on benches around the field. The guards sometimes held their bayonets to a dozing man’s eye, hoping to skewer it if he happened to startle awake. The prisoners developed a means of communicating with each other by exerting subtle leg pressure to the man next to them. When a guard withdrew, they’d cough to let the man know the coast was clear. They were fed three times a day, but throughout the winter the men rapidly lost weight. The daily allotted meal ration was precise to within a few grains of rice—213 grams—as well as 500 grams of vegetables, though they usually received only about 200 grams of vegetables, supplemented sometimes by soups made from bones and intestines from a local slaughterhouse.

  By late January, the interrogators had gleaned about as much as they thought they could from most of the Sculpin crew, and although the crew didn’t have a choice they were “offered” a transfer to a work prison, where they would be allowed to register with the International Red Cross as prisoners of war and write letters to their loved ones. This came as a great relief because they thought that nothing could be worse than Ofuna, and they seized on the opportunity to let their families and sweethearts know that they were alive.

  Eleven of the Sculpin men left Ofuna for the train station, bound for an old mining town in the mountains north of Tokyo called Ashio. They would be followed by their other shipmates in June and July of that year. As an officer with potentially relevant information, George Brown stayed at Ofuna. When the men arrived, they soon discovered that the conditions at Ashio were even worse than Ofuna.

  Since it was in the mountains, Ashio was colder. The men received thin blankets made from wood pulp and went to their barracks, a drafty, low-slung building with four ineffectual potbellied stoves. There they found some Javanese and Dutch prisoners captured earlier in the war. Their meals consisted of a gruel essentially made from chicken feed: a wormy mixture of corn, barley, and rice. Sometimes they received fish guts, shark heads, and small sand sharks. The tatami mats on their pallets were crawling with lice and fleas that infested their clothing and feasted on them all night long. Rats crawled all over the barracks at night, and the latrine was overflowing. The bath was frozen, so there was no opportunity for them to clean themselves or wash their clothes. With the unsanitary conditions and starvation diet, the men quickly succumbed to diarrhea and dysentery, and they started to lose weight even faster than at Ofuna. If they became too sick to work, they were put on a strict water diet, “for their health.”

  After their arrival they were marched through the little town of Ashio to their work duties. Curiously, the authorities decided to observe the Geneva Convention rule prohibiting the parading of prisoners as objects of curiosity and derision, and the people of Ashio were hustled inside their houses or along side alleys until the prisoners had gone past. Ungovernable as they are, preschool children sometimes raced out and made faces at them.

  Ashio was a 400-year-old copper mine that had ceased operations several years earlier. Safety issues and environmental degradation at the mine led to an unusual riot earlier in the century, and as the mine’s copper ran out the company owning the mine shuttered it. Since America’s submarines were by now strangling Japan’s access to raw materials, the need for electrical wiring and brass shell casings became acute, and the Japanese government decided to reopen the mine. The men divided into three groups: miners, loaders, and smelters. George Rocek and Bill Cooper went deep into the mine to drill holes for dynamite blasting. Others became muckers, and used shovels to fill a dozen or more mine trams—per man—with tons of raw ore during their ten- to fourteen-hour shifts. Others worked by transferring the ore into hopper cars, and yet others like Herbert Thomas worked in the smelter to boil the ore down into copper. It was heavy, dangerous, and toxic work that took its toll on all the prisoners.

  The men working in the mines started out by attaching a carbide helmet torch to their heads and stripping down; it was hot in the mine and they didn’t want to soak their uniforms. There were earthquakes and collapses while they worked; sometimes large boulders fell from the mine ceiling and crushed men. The work was also exhausting for men who were not sufficiently fed. When they left the mine, they were covered with sweat that saturated their clothes and made the trip back to the camp as cold as could be imagined. Some caught colds that developed into pneumonia. The Javanese prisoners were especially vulnerable, since they were unaccustomed to such cold, and several died.

  By the summertime, the men of the Sculpin resembled cavemen. They had not shaved or had haircuts for several months. The overflowing latrines attracted swarms of flies and maggots, and the exhausted men’s bodies gradually broke down. They contracted pellagra, a disease that covers the skin in lesions; it is caused by nutritional deficiencies in people who eat grains almost exclusively. Malnutrition also caused beriberi, with symptoms including an alarming swelling of limbs, numbness, joint pain, eventual incapacitation, and heart failure. Although the camp director had received boxes of goods from the Red Cross, he failed to distribute them, leading many of the men to suspect that the guards were simply stealing the foodstuffs and letting them starve. On the day one of the townswomen just outside the gate accused the prisoners of stealing one of her daikon radishes, the guards rounded up a suspect and nearly beat him to death.

  Despite the risk of being caught stealing, some prisoners did so anyway. When one Javanese man found three other Javanese stirring his pet dog in a cooking pot, he rounded up a posse of other Javanese and they killed the three offenders. During air raids, Herb Wyatt (“Earp”) would often raid a Korean workers’ commissary and hide the food. He was even so bold as to steal a Red Cross box from the camp commandant’s office. It was too big to conceal, so he tied it up with string and hung it from a nail on the underside of a plank of wood that served as a latrine seat. Every time they went to the benjo they reeled it back up, ate a can of Spam or a Hershey’s bar, then put it back down again.

  The number of air raids increased, and one day they even saw a B-29 Superfortress dumping metal chaff to confuse Japanese antiaircraft radar. They received little news of the war, and missed the American offensives on Peleliu, Iwo Jima, the Philippines, and Okinawa. They sensed the war was going badly for Germany, and eventually got news that FDR had died. It seemed the war was coming to a close; if the Americans were near enough to launch air raids on the mainland, they must have taken some islands nearby, or perhaps they were using bases in China.

  On August 14, 1945, Bill Cooper nearly died when a massive boulder fell near him, severing the pneumatic hose he used for his power drill. The honcho sent him back to the barracks, and the next day they were told that there would be no work; it was a holiday. The camp commandant and guards listened intently to the radio at noon that day as the emperor addressed the Japanese nation. It was the first time they had ever heard his voice, and his message was that Japan would surrender.

  The Sculpin survivors were jubilant, their captors dumbstruck at having the tables turned. Through their dark ordeal
for survival, the POWs had banded together and been as close to one another as brothers, and by looking out for each other they all survived. They’d each lost forty, fifty, even sixty pounds, and most of these once strong young men now weighed somewhere between ninety and 110 pounds. Though several were tempted to lash out at the camp guards who had made their lives so miserable, they preferred to raid the Red Cross boxes. Inside they found shoes, clothing, and food. They put on whatever they could and gave the rest to the townspeople who had shown them kindness by sometimes feeding them. They even gave candy to the children of the woman who had accused them of stealing the radish.

  The camp guards left, and others took their place to paint “PW” on the barracks roof. Soon, American planes began parachuting food and other supplies to the camp. Eventually they got authorization to leave Ashio, and took the train back to Yokohama. Traveling through the Japanese countryside, they cheered at the sight of the first razed town they saw, and every razed town after that until the realization sank in that Japan was absolutely devastated, its people starving.

  At the train station in Yokohama, they were reunited with George Brown, who was carrying forty-three small wooden boxes. He had been transferred out of Ofuna to another work camp where they were working on a dam under similarly hellish conditions. The boxes contained the cremated remains of the men who had died while working at the camp. The released prisoners were escorted to hospital ships in the harbor, and left Japan for Guam, where they received their final debriefing, this time by the submarine command. Though some were able to get a plane back to the States, most went in hospital ships or troop transports, and for them it was like their slow boat to China. There were standing orders to feed them anytime, day or night, as much as they pleased, and they took full advantage of the opportunity to eat everything in sight.