Hiroshima Joe

by Booth, Martin

  ‘What about the sodding pails?’ complained a peeved voice in vain.

  There was a clamour of annoyance but this was cut by the lance-corporal’s shouting, ‘I think we bin torpedoed.’

  ‘Bollocks!’

  ‘What does he know? Bloody burke in the Pay Corps…’

  ‘Who’d do it? The Japs sink their own tub?’

  ‘Hell of a pricey way of doing for PoWs.’

  A loud hubbub of speculation ensured.

  ‘Quiet everyone!’ It was an officer’s command and a sergeant-major relayed it somewhat more exactingly.

  ‘SI-LENCE!’

  The racket died.

  The ship’s screws had stopped turning. The familiar, accepted throb of the propeller shaft and the undercurrent of hum was still.

  ‘She’s stopped engines,’ Tom observed, ‘but I can’t hear pumps.’

  There was a clatter of leather, tabi-clad feet across the deck high over their heads. Screamed orders in Japanese were just discernable.

  ‘Bit of a panic up there. Reckon they…’

  The sentence was cut short by the opening up of machine-gun fire from above.

  The prisoners were hushed. In many of their minds the expectation of a US Navy destroyer or frigate coming upon the scene was building. Liberation might be but a landing party away. On the other hand, they might be gunned down in the holds before the landing party could board. Would the Nips dare do that? It would mean a slow and steady death at the hands of the American sailors: not one of them would want that. Or would such a death be glorious in the eyes of the Emperor? Might it ensure their smooth transportation to the Heaven of the Rising Sun? Or would they believe the magic cloths they wore round their stomachs, with a thousand magical stitches in them, would protect them?

  The 6.5 mm machine-gun bursts were joined by rifle fire. Then, quite clearly, pistols came into play as well.

  There was another explosion. It was loud and below the waterline and it vibrated through the fabric of the ship.

  ‘Another hit?’

  Sandingham could sense the skin on his face tighten.

  ‘I don’t think so. Sounded as if it were short. I think they’ve bagged a torpedo on the run. Got it short of the ship.’

  The firing ceased. An aircraft could be heard, followed shortly afterwards by far-off explosions. Tom explained to Sandingham in a whisper that he was sure they had been hit by a single torpedo, very possibly two, and that the submarine that had fired them was now being depth-charged from the air.

  The senior officer climbed the companionway and shouted through the hatch covers for the attention of a Japanese officer who might fetch his opposite number.

  ‘Lieutenant Hideo Wada o yonde kudasai! Lieutenant Hideo Wada o yonde kudasai!’

  There was no reply. Instead, the prisoners could hear the tarpaulins being dragged over the hatch covers.

  ‘Jesus! We’ll suffocate!’

  Everyone started to slap their hands on any metal surface that they could reach. It was to no avail. Soon they stopped and sat in a desultory murmur of anxious, afraid mutterings.

  As the hours went by that day, two changes gradually occurred. At first they were so slight that no one noticed them, but by mid-afternoon they were obvious. One was that the smell in the hold was verging on the unbearable. The buckets were overflowing across the floor – more than half had not been emptied from the night before – and excrement was making it slippery. The other was that the ship was now listing at least five degrees to port. Everyone was breathing raspily and one man had died from suffocation exacerbated by claustrophobia. No one spoke now.

  Late in the afternoon they heard a ship drawing near. There was shouting on deck and the prisoners could hear rope ladders being thrown over the side. Much scrabbling down the sides of the hull followed, accompanied by the thuds and clangs of small boats coming alongside and bobbing there.

  ‘They’re abandoning ship,’ someone whispered hoarsely.

  No one answered, but a few people started banging on the bulkheads again. It was futile.

  The temperature in the hold was well into the nineties. Sandingham felt his sweat seeping his strength and will from him.

  Some time in the evening Tom nudged him.

  ‘Listen. Feel! We’re moving…’

  The ship was in motion. Still listing, she was nevertheless definitely under way.

  ‘We must be in tow.’

  The movement kept up for half an hour. Then there was a distant thonging noise and she stopped. Tom interpreted this as the tow-line parting.

  The heat increased and with it came a sense of light-headedness that at first worried Sandingham and then brought him an air of mental distancing as he might have felt in the first stages of getting well-and-truly plastered at a good mess night.

  The mutterings and moanings of the men around him transformed themselves into far-off music played on an organ. The sluicing of water in the bilges became the chiming of glasses and bottles. He heard a champagne cork pop and tasted the bittersweet and sharp bubbles on his cracked lips.

  Suddenly, he was alert and alive. He looked around himself with a critical and observing eye, at the prone and huddled figures in the half-light contorted by awkward postures in vain attempts to find sleep. He saw the protruding shoulder-blades of a man at his feet, the crooked blood vessels standing out on another’s skull, the drawn tendons on the back of a third man’s talon-like hand. He studied the shrinking muscles on his own arms but concluded, quite objectively, that his body wasn’t as bad as some of those about him.

  Quite why he wasn’t so emaciated as some of his comrades he could not understand. Perhaps, he reasoned, with inappropriate logic, his metabolism was different. Certainly, he’d not been eating rare beef while they’d had roast rat. And, peering into the gloom, he could see a few others in better condition than the majority. If they were dogs and being readied for a show, he thought, he’d stand a good chance of winning top of breed. Coat in fair shape – he rubbed the stubble on his chin appreciatively – nose not running, no waste flesh: lean and hungry-looking, like a whippet. Hungry, anyway. He drew his lips back in a snarl. Someone patted him. He turned to lick their hand but it was only another prisoner, shifting his position, accidentally nudging Sandingham with his foot.

  All that night, the men lay in the hold and wondered. At about two o’clock Sandingham fell into a dazed sleep.

  * * *

  ‘You’ve been able to sleep. Can you lend a hand up top?’ Captain Buzzard, affectionately nicknamed Baz by all ranks who came across him in Sham Shui Po and a man noted for his sense of dry humour, was tapping his shoulder. ‘We’ve got to get some fresh air in here. Some of us are going to try and penetrate the hatch covers.’

  ‘What with?’ Sandingham replied, incredulous.

  It transpired that Baz and another officer had found a tool box and sawed four angled metal struts off the cargo shelving units.

  Balancing on the top of the ladders, they started to hack at the planking. Splinters started to rain down. The wood, however, was inches thick and their work was at first unsuccessful. After a rest, they renewed their attack on the covers and a hole was made under the tarpaulin. This was enlarged until a length of plank could be cut free.

  ‘We’re through, sir!’ Baz called down.

  ‘Potter!’ instructed the senior officer, ‘you go up and try to talk with the Japs. Get to their CO if you can. Tell them we’ll all die down here if we don’t get air.’

  The canvas was ripped apart and Lieutenant Potter, once an officer in the St John’s Ambulance Brigade and a Japanese linguist, lifted himself through, promptly followed by Sandingham, Pedrick, Baz and several others.

  Potter stood on the deck and raised his hands.

  ‘Tasukete!’ he shouted, although he could not see a single Japanese. ‘Tasukete!’

  A soldier appeared on the bridge.

  ‘Tomatte kudasai! Kiite kudasai!’

  Another soldier on the wi
ng of the bridge aimed and fired. A man climbing from the hatch was hit, fell back into the hold. Another shot sounded and Potter crumpled forward on to the deck.

  ‘Cover!’ yelled Pedrick and the men scattered.

  Bullets bounced and whined around them. Some soldiers from the Royal Artillery had managed to breach the planking on Number Three hold and were coming out to meet a crossfire from the bridge and the sterncastle. They stopped in the safety of the bridge superstructure.

  Sandingham looked around him. With a clarity that surprised him he found himself taking in every fine detail of the day …

  It was a beautiful October morning. Brilliant sunshine coruscated off the waves and spray that were decorating a running four-foot swell. High, fair-weather clouds scudded over the Chinese mainland and some rocky islands a few miles off. In the same instant he was aware that several Imperial Japanese Navy gunboats were hove to off the starboard beam.

  ‘We’ve got to get the bastards overhead,’ Baz yelled from the cover of a deck winch housing.

  Crouching low and weaving to and fro, Sandingham joined him: they were safely out of view of the bridge.

  Tom Pedrick was lost from sight round a ventilator shaft inlet.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Baz hollered in Sandingham’s ear.

  Jumping clear of the winch, Sandingham entered the body of the ship through a varnished wooden door and ran down a corridor, expecting at any minute to be shot. He met no one. By what appeared to be the officers’ mess, he halted and cautiously looked in. Not a soul in sight. By the door was a fire cupboard. He opened it. Hanging from hooks were a long-handled axe and a hatchet in a holster on a belt. He put this on, took the axe and began to go up a set of stairs.

  The chartroom behind the bridge was empty. The wide drawers of the storage cupboards had semi-opened and spewed their contents. Maps and navigational instruments, fallen from the chart table, littered the floor. Mariners’ almanacs, tide tables and a military code book were splayed open on an upturned chair, their broad spines cracked. He was careful so that he might not be heard stepping on the crisp paper.

  Through the door to the bridge, he could see, by the ship’s wheel, a Japanese private. He was loading his carbine from an ammunition pouch at his waist.

  There was a snapping sound. The soldier lifted his head and looked sharply across the bridge but not in Sandingham’s direction.

  For a split moment, Sandingham knew what was registering in the enemy soldier’s eye: he could see beyond him and through a far door. A prisoner was creeping up on the Japanese who was standing on the wing concentrating, down the sights of a light machine-gun, on the expanse of ship below him. The private was fumbling in his loading of brass cartridges into the carbine’s breach. In his haste, he dropped two and the sound camouflaged Sandingham’s movement.

  Sandingham watched him, bemused. In a second or two, the man was going to die. He, Joseph Sandingham, was going to kill him. This wasn’t a shadowy figure in a building over the other side of the road, gliding about like some player in a magic-lantern show. This was a human being, a real living, working unit: flesh and blood existing in harmony to pump a heart, fill lungs with air, fight disease, digest food, flex muscles, spit and swallow, talk and laugh.

  ‘Ki o tsuke ro!’

  The soldier at the machine-gun abruptly turned. The prisoner behind him, whom Sandingham did not recognise, had in his hands a large can of bully beef. He swung it down at the guard’s head. It struck the Japanese heavily on the crown and he fell. His machine-gun overbalanced and toppled on to its side on the deck.

  Sandingham now lifted the fire axe. He swung it at his guard in the wheel house. The pointed spike of the reverse blade hit the Japanese on the shoulder, deflected upwards and struck him just above the ear. His skull cracked open with the crisp click of a ripe apple being divided by strong fingers. Pinkish-grey slush oozed through the split sutures. The man’s body slumped across the compass podium and collapsed on to the wooden flooring.

  The machine-gunner was dead as well. He had struck his neck on a projecting bracket as he had gone down and his head was angled back into the shoulders, the skin of his throat stretched and bruised. The soldier who had killed him had disappeared.

  An uncontrollable urge rose within Sandingham until it took over his whole being. It was like the mountain of emotion he had always felt at the moment of love-making, a terrible madness at once orgiastic and all-wonderful.

  He ran over to the dead soldier on the deck and turned the unconscious form on to its back. Knowing nothing, his brain blank of all but a primal desire, a sort of lust he could not understand or assimilate, he buried the hatchet deeply four times into the corpse’s sternum. Its legs jerked as each incision interrupted the closing-down of the circuits of the nerves.

  ‘Let’s get off this sodding liner!’ Baz’s voiced shouted from somewhere distant. ‘I’ve had enough of cruising.’

  As if to encourage him, the Lisbon Maru took a shuddering lurch and Sandingham half-slipped, half-rolled across the bridge. He clamped his fingers on to the chartroom door.

  ‘She’s going over! Jump!’

  Baz was at the end of the bridge. It was only thirty feet to the water.

  Dropping the blood-smeared hatchet, Sandingham, standing up at a crazy angle, looked over his shoulder, his eyes ranging backwards and forwards over the bridge. There was his own personal murder in a puddle of brain tissue, bone splinters and blood. His own shattered handiwork. He looked away from the body and his eyes searched for Tom Pedrick. He wanted to call out for him, but the words would not shape in his mouth.

  ‘Get a move on! Another five minutes and you’ll be listed missing on active service. Jump, for the love of God!’

  Baz waved his arm, beckoning to Sandingham. In doing so, he lost his equilibrium and fell towards the sea, changing his clumsy pitching into a dive on the way.

  The deck slewed a bit further. Spent cartridge cases clattered down the slope.

  Suddenly, Sandingham’s mind cleared. The power that had gripped his soul evaporated as rapidly as it had begun. He felt utterly emptied. If a man could change into a base animal and then return to human shape these would be his feelings.

  ‘Fuck!’ he screamed, unable to command another oath. ‘What for? God, what the hell for?’

  In his anguish, he swung the fire axe across the bridge. It arched through the air and shattered the circular glass of the ship’s engine-room telegraph. The brass handles protruding upwards bent awry.

  He scrambled down the deck. The angle was increasing and the surface of the sea was nearer now. Baz was in the water some yards off, waving to him again. He raised himself on to the rail, crouched, hugged his legs and let himself roll.

  * * *

  When he hit it, his knees bunched to his chest and held close by his arms, the water was not as cold as Sandingham had prepared himself to expect. Had he been able to look at himself he’d have been hard put not to have laughed. There is little more foolish than seeing an unmanly man trying to act the hero but playing the clown.

  Yet he had just killed another being, and this was what gods did. Now he was a god, for all his scrawny flesh and blotchy, sore-covered skin.

  As he surfaced, he heard Baz’s voice from nearby.

  ‘Over here, Joe. Paddle over here.’

  There was a swell running and the up-and-down motion made Sandingham dizzy for a few minutes before he could gather his senses. The ship was not so badly affected by the swell: it was obvious that the stern, now well submerged, had come to rest on a reef or sand bar. It was also just as obvious that no one in the stern hold could now be alive.

  ‘This way, Joe! Joe? Can you hear me? Where the fuck are you? Joe? Joe?’

  It was Baz’s voice again, but fainter. Sandingham wondered, in the bright, warm sunshine, if this was so because he was drifting away or because Baz was drowning.

  This made him strike out in the direction of the voice. He did not call out in return. What was the us
e of that in the circumstances? he thought. A voice gives nothing except comfort, and he had no comfort to give.

  The sound of Baz’s voice disappeared, lost in the hills and valleys of the ocean.

  The saltiness of the sea upon his many sores jerked Sandingham alert. The sting was not unbearable: more a prod to his senses than a power-sapping ache. The occasional spray off the swell tops brought tears to his eyes. In a moment of coherent thought he realised how lucky he was, in that there was no oil slick on the surface. Oil inhaled to the lungs or swallowed into the guts was a sure, slow and steady killer. That had been the fate of sailors in the Atlantic on convoys: he’d heard so from a tar he’d met in Hong Kong who had come east for some ‘sex, sun and fun far away from the sodding convoy patrols’ of the war in the west.

  Suddenly, thinking of this, Sandingham realised that the sailor had been one of the bodies he’d seen sprawled on the roadway at Wong Nai Chung Gap. How strange, he considered, that he remembered that now months (or was it years?) later, when at the time it had not registered on his brain at all. Or was this an illusion? Perhaps he was drowning and this was the first act in the last replay of his life that all dying men see …

  ‘Wake up!’ He spoke aloud.

  ‘I am awake,’ he answered himself.

  ‘Then don’t drop off. Stay alert. Where there’s life…’

  He chuckled.

  Someone else laughed.

  ‘… there’s hope. What a time for a cliché, dear boy.’

  He looked around. Halfway up a four-foot-high wall of swell was a head. It was bearing down on him. On it was a naval officer’s peaked cap. The crown and anchor badge glimmered in the reflected sun. It was a dress-uniform cap, not one to be worn on deck in action.

  ‘Didn’t Nelson wear dress uniform at Trafalgar?’ asked Sandingham as the current took him towards this apparition.

  ‘Trafalgar?’ The head pronounced it ‘Tra-fal-gar’, breaking the syllables up. ‘I believe he did. But I swore when they took me I’d not be parted from this cap. Besides,’ the head added, ‘I’ve yet to pay for it. Got the bill in the post the other week, believe it or not. “Gieve, Matthews & Seagrove, Ltd, 21, George St, Hanover Square, W. and all major ports.” Marvellously efficient! Why don’t you climb aboard?’