Baa Baa Black Sheep

by Gregory Boyington

  When I was a little fellow, I was told a few things about the Japanese. One thing was how they would take off their shoes before entering a house. I found that to be very true. I was also told that they had advanced so far that they no longer used human excretions for fertilizer. But that is not so. It is not so because I had to carry many buckets, just like a coolie, of human crap and urine to put on this garden or that garden. We would have to go around to collect this fertilizer from the toilets of bombed-out houses. The buildings were completely gone, but the toilet-like affair is just kind of a cement bowl under the ground, and we dipped this human crap out of these old toilets. I think that is what is wrong with my sense of smell now. I used to have a keen sense before the war, but now I can smell hardly anything, all of which was probably nature’s way of taking care of me during those assignments. Not to forget some of the foul-smelling joints I sold beer to for over six years after the war.

  The Japanese certainly must be the world’s greatest gardeners, because some of this soil was practically half masonry and the rest volcanic ash. But with their means of fertilizing and watering we grew some beautiful vegetables with that prisoner work. The only trouble was we did not get enough of them to eat.

  Some of the guards, of course, were better than others, and when the vegetables started growing, some of them let us steal the vegetables and cook them on fires in back lots. These good guards told us to be careful that none of the officers saw us do it, so we would keep boys posted, and when we saw an officer coming down the street—they usually came on bicycles—we would ditch the stewpot, which had nothing in it but green vegetables. An exceptional stew was one in which we put radishes or turnips or anything solid. Occasionally a good guard would get some fish from some of the civilians and let us throw that in. This was really Number One, as we called things out there.

  During the last four and a half months we had B-29s coming over daily and nightly. We were not allowed to get into air-raid shelters because we were still “special prisoners.” We would have to sweat it out on top, but, even so, each raid was just so much more good news to us. And even though not allowed the protection of an air-raid shelter, these ragged, starved prisoners had a hard time concealing their delight from the Japanese. We realized that we had to go through so much in order to get out of there. We knew that some of us would be killed, but that the majority of us would get out.

  To prevent the Japanese from understanding what we were talking about, we called the B-29s coming over “The Music.” We originated the term from the sound made by the siren warning. Also, the prisoners would bet a part of their meager rations of food that “The Music” would come before such and such a time. This meant we were betting mighty high stakes, in as much as we received only a three-quarter ration of what was received by the regular prisoners of war.

  During one of these raids I was returning from the latrine to the room we were kept in, and a dive bomber hit the causeway between the sandspit our camp was constructed on and shore. A tremendous piece of concrete—it must have weighed a half ton—sank into the roadbed about twenty feet in front of me. There was nothing I could do, I was not allowed into any shelter, so I just had to walk calmly into where the rest of the prisoners were being held under guard at bayonet point. There I sat down and started talking with the rest of the prisoners in a low voice. For we did not want to show any signs of excitement when a raid was going on. Any time we were caught smiling, during one of these raids, we were hit with a rifle butt or called to attention and struck in the face. And sometimes we were just slugged because feelings were running a bit high.

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  32

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  Months or weeks afterward, on being brought back to the United States, I was to learn how much confusion had been in the minds of the people here as both wars neared their ferocious close. And so it was in Japan, too. Rumors were followed by denials, and then by rumors again.

  I must say, though, that even if we prisoners were not allowed any military information from the Japanese, we were nevertheless able to follow the war rather closely. We received some of it from the new prisoners who came into the camp, men who were just recently captured. We were not supposed to talk to any of them but managed to do so now and then secretly. Our main source of information was, of all things, the Japanese newspaper.

  During our almost two years of being captives we finally had learned how to read a few printed characters in the Japanese language. Some of the boys were better than others, and they became more or less our official code breakers. They didn’t deliver us the daily paper, or anything as easy as that. But when we cleaned out the Japanese living quarters each day, we would pick up the papers the officers had been reading. They were one or two days old, and we would smuggle them out to some secluded place, away from the guards, like in the toilets, and there we would get our code-breaking staff together and pore over these papers.

  We found, as a general rule, that the first paragraph or so in each article, whenever there was an Allied victory, was perfectly correct. Then the articles would go on at great length to say: “The great Japan will shove them back off into the sea; we will counterattack.…” and so forth. But during the next two or three days we would see nothing in the paper about anybody being shoved back into the sea, so we knew it was the same old story again. Our people had gotten on another piece of ground closer to Japan.

  The articles the Japanese papers printed on Germany were always true. There was no camouflage whatsoever. The articles told the actual facts, naming the towns, showing all the fronts, having the casualty lists, even diagrams we could follow to show us what was going on in the German theater. We got the word when Germany went out of the war. In fact, we knew just about everything that was going on. We never were in the dark, even though the Japanese were not allowed to give us any military information. But some of the better-educated Japanese had secretly given us their own predictions. This had occurred at many points all along the line, even as far back as Truk. An educated interpreter told me then that if we survived our own bombs we would be free men in a year and a half. The time, of course, was a wee bit longer than that. But just the same, it seemed at the time a funny prediction for him to make because the campaign in the South Pacific was going slowly for us then. We were behind schedule in everything we did, and there had been no second front in Europe. We figured, well, at least three years of this.

  In Camp Ofuna, the civilian cook, Curly, spoke to me the night before I was taken away to Camp Omouri. He was well educated but had not talked to me about the war during the whole six months I had worked in the kitchen with him. That night he told me that there would be a lot of war in the next four and half months, and he added: “It will be all over and you can go back to your mama and papa.”

  At another time, just one month before the end of the war, another informed Japanese called me to one side and asked me how my morale was. I told him it was fine. He said: “Well, it will only be another month or so and the thing will be all over. I will be just as happy as anybody in the world, myself.”

  Meanwhile the final bombings of Japan were something to behold, great hordes of silver B-29s coming over in the daylight. They looked beautiful. Occasionally we would see some lone Japanese fighter plane try to tangle with them. It would come streaking down in flames, and we could hear it crash to the ground. Then the beautiful silver things would start releasing their eggs, and the ground would shake. The windows would tremble and shake, and the sills on the doors would creak back and forth. Yet this was not so bothersome as at night, when the B-29s came over low, at around four to six thousand feet. We could hear them swoop down and dive, the engines roaring. We didn’t know where they were, didn’t know when to duck. We could just put our faces down into our cotton blankets—and hope.

  About a month before the end of the war we were taken off our garden work and the clearing of debris and were set to digging huge tunnels in the hillsides on the outskirts of Yokohama. We
worked at this twelve hours a day, just like muckers in a mine. I was familiar with this sort of labor, for I had spent a summer vacation while going to college working in a gold mine in Golden, Idaho. These tunnels were two hundred feet under the surface of the earth. One of the guards told me this was to be an air-raid shelter, but I couldn’t imagine what kinds of bombs were going to be dropped to necessitate a tunnel two hundred feet underground.

  Then one day a non-commissioned officer tried to tell me about the atomic bomb. He could speak no English, it was all in Japanese, and I couldn’t fathom at first that it was only one bomb he was talking about. I thought it was just some more Japanese propaganda. But he said no, that his family had lived in the city of Nagasaki, and that only one bomb had been dropped on the city. He said that people were still dying there, and that he had not been allowed even within the city limits to look for his lost family.

  I had no conception of what kind of bomb it might be, but I knew that it must be something horrible the way we were being rushed on digging those tunnels. I didn’t fully believe this story about the atomic bomb, even though I was helping to dig the tunnel. I didn’t fully believe it until after the war.

  On my way from Japan by DC-4, after the surrender had been signed, I was thumbing through some current magazines left aboard the plane, and there it was—pictures and the works. The atomic bomb was no myth.

  It has often puzzled me how I could figure out some things so easily, while others never dawned upon me with all the evidence apparently staring me right in the face. The truly master puzzler of mine was alcohol, but I have come to find that I am far from being alone in my past bewilderment, because approximately 5 per cent of the world’s populace shouldn’t drink at all. But this atomic puzzler was staring me in the face as well.

  Shortly after the first bomb was dropped, we prisoners, old or fresh—it made no difference—seemed to have a lot of new company, for the Japanese moved about a hundred college-boy soldiers, a sort of Japanese F.B.I., into the camp. They were to be found everywhere, listening and watching us. No matter which direction we turned, no matter where we were, we could see them lurking around in the vicinity—day, night, toilets, mealtimes, everywhere.

  They tried to conceal the fact that they could read, write, speak, and understand English fluently. But we got wise to them over something very simple, and they became dead giveaways, even though none of us had any more than the remotest knowledge of the existence of the bomb.

  One of my boys had picked up a coil while working in the bombed-out city and had taken it back to our cell for an express purpose. He had bared the electric-light wires and arranged the coil so that when he made contact, the coil would heat up red-hot, thus providing an excellent cigarette lighter. He had gotten sick and tired of asking a guard for a “matchee” and being turned down. We had been using this coil for some time and thought nothing about it, although we hadn’t advertised its use, naturally. But the first time one of these English-speaking F.B.I. fellows took a gander at our contraption he shouted for everybody in camp. This is when we knew how well they spoke and understood English. This poor jerk was positive that this innovation of ours, which looked like a Rube Goldberg affair, had some very definite connection with the atomic bomb. But even if it had, the Japanese had lost both secrecy and surprise in the battle royal that ensued over this petty contraption. Poor Mr. Kono, the prisoners’ benefactor, our friend, could not talk everybody into any semblance of order this time.

  Kono, the person who explained the singsong-sounding Japanese prayer I couldn’t understand all those many months, was without a doubt one of the greatest men I ever met. He had been a wealthy importer, was around thirty years old, and had decided that the only way he could help matters was to act as an interpreter, or a referee of sorts. He wore a uniform but held no rank. I knew that he was a Christian, although he never told me so. Kono’s heart was being torn out most of the time, a combination of pity for the ignorance and brutality of some of his own countrymen and a complete understanding of the suffering of the prisoners. But my admiration came, not from the way he felt, especially, but from the manner in which he handled himself with no outward fear of consequences—not even death. Yet he never violated the military ethics of his countrymen, as I saw it, while doing acts of kindness too numerable to mention. But if ever there was a man who could read between the lines in the Japanese orders and the Bible combined, it was Mr. Kono. This man’s courage in saving lives and preventing hardship will apparently go unrewarded in the ordinary sense—like medals from either Japan or the United States. But I can assure you that he will stay in the hearts of many men—for there was a far braver man than I.

  Because the people of our own American cities have been spared so far the cataclysm of aerial bombardment we can only guess how our own people will behave when the time comes. We know how the English behaved, the Italians and the Germans, the French, the Russians. We know how some of these nationalities behaved differently from others. But our own American cities, being composed of a composite of races and nationalities, may behave accordingly. Some racial sections may go completely crazy; other racial sections in the same city may be calm. But at most we can only guess, too, how enemy prisoners will be treated immediately after being shot down during the heat of one of these catastrophes. People whose homes and families have just been destroyed will be wild then—and we can only guess what some Americans might do. Yes, we can only guess.

  But we don’t have to guess how the civilian population of Japan behaved. Or at least most of us prisoners who were there at the time don’t have to guess. But to keep all things clear, I will limit these observations to just what I myself saw or underwent.

  While in this second and last camp I really got to know the population of Japan quite well. In our daily work of removing the destroyed homes of the Japanese civilians, and even when they had lost members of their families, relatives, or friends, I did not seem to notice any belligerence toward us. I walked by the crowds of civilians, within three or four feet of them, in rags and half starved, and never once did I have any occasion to fear them, before or after the B-29 raids.

  Shortly after I was released, I read articles by correspondents who had gone into Japan, and they told about the surly mobs standing around. But I cannot understand this, the way I look at it, because, to the contrary, the majority of civilians were very good to us. We were not allowed to speak to them, and they were not allowed to help us in any way. Yet despite this order they risked beatings to help us out by giving us cigarettes and small pieces of food. I saw many of them punished for trying to help us. In fact, practically every day I saw at least two or three beaten by the guards who were standing on duty over us. Even the policemen had the right to strike civilians. If one were caught jaywalking, for example, the policeman ordered him over, the civilian would stand at attention, and the policeman would then strike his face, first with one fist and then with the other. When civilians came near us, one of them might say hello in their language, and the guard would call the civilian and have him stand at attention while hitting him repeatedly.

  I never will forget one little old man with snow-white hair. I judged him to be about seventy. He came over to light his pipe in one of our trash fires. He had not spoken to any of us, yet the guard called him over. The little old man laid down his bundle and bowed three or four times, then the guard laid into him with his fists. He knocked the little fellow down, I would say, a half-dozen times. Finally the man’s face was bloody, and then the guard, when he was through, said a few more words to the old man, who bowed two or three times, walked over and picked up his bundle, and went on down the street.

  The civilian population going to and fro on the street never even looked up while this beating took place. They were used to it.

  Unlike those few educated Japanese I have mentioned who seemed to have a savvy about the outcome of the war, the majority of civilians had no idea that Japan was not going to win. Yet they still were kind.<
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  There was one lady who lived in back of a partly demolished store. She had two or three daughters and an elderly father. In this instance we happened to have one particularly good guard on duty whom we called “Limpy” because he had half of a foot shot off. Yet he was about one of the fairest and squarest guards I ever saw. He would permit this lady to cook up food for the eighteen of us when we were out working around where her store was.

  Then one day the guard said that the lady, her girls, and the old man were going to leave. They had all their belongings packed up on a truck. I went over and in my politest Japanese bowed to her, just like old-home week, and told her how much we had appreciated the things she had done for us. She was all smiles and, speaking perfect Japanese, told me what nice boys she thought we were. Then, after they got all the kids and their belongings on the truck, the lady and the old man got on too, and as they started to drive off, the eighteen of us half-starved prisoners stood there waving good-by, just like you would wave at any friends back home going away on a train trip.

  A few of the dried-fish peddlers around town occasionally would slip one of the boys a fish, and when we had these stews, cooking up the vegetables, we would throw in the fish to give the stew a little flavor. Any time the guards caught any of the civilians doing such things, or even talking to us, they invariably called them over and we had to witness the beatings.

  One day while we were working out in a garden, a soldier came up to me and in perfect English asked me if I were an American or an Englishman. I told him, and he said: “You know that President Roosevelt died?” There was so much sincerity in his voice that I knew he was not joking with me. Then he told me that he was very sorry about it, and so forth. All of a sudden the guard with us came up and told me that I was not supposed to talk to any guards outside of our own camp, that I would be beaten the next time I was caught talking to any other guard. This meant, then, that I could not talk even to people in uniform from anyplace other than my own camp.