D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  About fifty men died that first night, an unknown number of them strangled or beaten by other prisoners. Others were killed trying to stop them, in their frenzy, from murdering fellow Americans.

  The next morning the ship was bombed and strafed by Navy planes as it headed north, hugging the shore. The killing was above deck. More than 300 Japanese died and hundreds more were injured seriously. Waiting for the cover of night, the ship’s crew offloaded the passengers to the site of a former U.S. naval base, leaving only the guards, the gun crews, and the prisoners on the battered Oryoku Maru. That night, thirst-crazed men turned into “human vampires,” says Major John M. Wright, “biting men and sucking blood in their mad lust for liquid in any form.”7

  Toward morning it got quiet, as most of the exhausted prisoners passed out. sleeping fitfully in their own vomit and urine. Then the dive-bombers returned.

  “They put a 500-pound bomb in the hold with us,” recalls Colonel Maynard Booth, “and there was a terrible bloody mess. Arms and legs and blood and guts were flying all over the place, and one guy who got blasted to pieces landed right on top of me. About 200 guys were killed, and the whole ship was on fire. Then it got real quiet. And as you heard people groaning, the Japs ordered us to swim to shore, which was only a couple of hundreds of yards away. I stayed on the ship and went up into the cabins and got life preservers and put them on our wounded, and heaved these men over the side of the ship. Then I bailed out with my life preserver and started swimming. Japanese onshore were machine-gunning us, but most of us managed to make it.”

  “When we got to shore,” says Melvin Rosen, “they herded us into an old tennis court surrounded by a chicken-wire fence and gave each of us a tablespoon and a half of raw rice and a little water. That was our diet for the next five days. After that we were taken on trucks to a town we had passed through on the Bataan Death March, San Fernando, Pampanga.”

  “They said they were going to take our wounded to the hospital,” recalls Booth. “They were beat up real bad and the Japs didn’t have any medicine. They loaded fifteen of them on the back of a truck like they were sides of beef and went down the road two or three miles, kicked them out into a ditch, and [beheaded] them, as we found out later.”

  The 1,333 prisoners that survived were jammed into boxcars and taken to a small port on northern Luzon. “We were lined up and packed into two Jap freighters,” says Captain Marion “Manny” Lawton. “The Enoura Maru housed almost 1,000 of us. The rest were loaded on the Brazil Maru.”

  LIBERATED POWS IN THE PHILIPPINES (USN).

  “The Enoura Maru was a freighter that had just unloaded horses for the Japanese horse artillery,” says Booth. “There was horse manure on the floors and we were so hungry we picked the bugs out of it and ate them and crawled on the floor looking for barley that the horses hadn’t eaten.” As the two hell ships headed for Formosa, rice was lowered to the men in tubs. “The flies were like hornets coming out of their hive. When the tub got to the bottom you couldn’t see the rice for the flies,” says Lawton. “We were so hungry it didn’t make any difference.” Twenty-one POWs died along the way and their bodies were tossed overboard to the sharks. The ships arrived in Formosa on New Year’s Eve. Just after the prisoners on the Brazil Maru were transferred by barge to the Enoura Maru, an American dive bomber hit that ship and it sank at anchor in shallow water. Almost 300 men were killed instantly in the forward hold and at least another 250 were wounded. “The Japanese kept us down in the hold with our dead and wounded for three days, and then sent down a cargo net to load the dead,” says Rosen. “After a few days, sitting in the smashed hull, we were put on the Brazil Maru and headed in a convoy for Japan.” They left without four doctors who had died of exhaustion while assisting the wounded, using old razor blades and rusty scissors for surgical instruments.

  Only about 900 POWs remained and as many as thirty of them a day died on the two-week passage to Japan. Officers and men traded their wedding bands and service academy rings to their Japanese guards for cupfuls of water and dry rice, and the fighting continued. “Let me tell you what it felt like to be hungry all the time,” says Major William Adair. “It was a stomach pain. Not a great pain, but an annoying one. And it never went away while I was a prisoner. Never.”

  As they headed further north, they ran into snow and ice storms and men started coming down with pneumonia. A tarpaulin had been put over the hatch, but the freezing wind whipped through the hold. “When it rained, the dirty water from the deck would pour down on us. Men drank it—filthy, dirty water. The diarrhea and pneumonia just started wiping us out. We buried an average of twenty-five a day.” says Lawton.

  At least half of the prisoners had malaria; and the genitalia of men with beriberi swelled, causing excruciating pain. Men with dry beriberi experienced stabbing pains, like electric shocks, in their legs and feet, and almost everyone had dysentery. When they landed in northern Kyushu after a forty-eight-day journey, only 450 of the original 1,619 were still alive, and about 150 more died from maltreatment during the first week in Japan. “The Japanese weighed some of us when we came ashore,” says Rosen, “and I weighed exactly eighty-eight pounds.”

  The prisoners were divided into groups and sent to three different camps. When Manny Lawton arrived at Camp No. 5 there was snow on the ground and the men were moved into unheated barracks. Lawton learned from a corpsman that his closest friend, Captain Henry Leitner, had pneumonia. “The next morning I looked up and there was Henry in his undershorts, nothing else on, strolling toward the door. I called to him and asked him where he thought he was going. He said. ‘I’m going to get some of that snow. I’m thirsty.’ I said, ‘Henry, please come back. There’s plenty of hot tea here.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘m hot. I’ve got to have something cool.’ His fever was burning. He strolled on out. That night he died.”8

  “Unlike a lot of the guys, I don’t have nightmares today,” says Melvin Rosen. “But every morning when I come down and pick up the kettle on the stove and empty the old water in it, I think of how many lives that little bit of water might have saved when we were in those hell ships.”9

  Before being transferred to Korea, Rosen was taken to a slave labor camp on Kyushu, where one of the prisoners was Lester Tenney, a fellow survivor of the Bataan Death March. This was Fukuoka Camp No. 17 in Omuta, just east of Nagasaki. It was a compound built by the Mitsui Coal Mining Company and run by the army. And it had a reputation. “This camp was as tough as they came,” says Staff Sergeant Harold Feiner. “It was mean. If there was nothing else that had gone wrong, the work itself would have made it bad. We mined coal twelve hours a day, had a thirty-minute lunch break, and were given one day off every ten days.”10

  Lester Tenney had been with the original group of prisoners who opened the camp. When he was first taken underground he was ordered to build ceiling supports. “When I asked why this was needed, one of the civilian workers told me that the mine had been shut down years before because all the coal that was safe to extract had already been removed…. We paid a price for doing this…. Even with the ceiling sagging, and only three feet high, we went in and got the coal on our hands and knees; and men got hurt doing it—from cave-ins especially. A lot of guys died in that mine.”

  Men mutilated themselves to get out of work. Tenney describes how it was done:

  I TOOK A BIG STEEL LOCKING pin from one of the coal cars, put my hand over a piece of timber, and took that bar and smashed it into my hand as hard as I could. The pain was excruciating. But my hand started to swell up, and it looked like it was broken. I had to make it look like an accident. So I got a pickax and tore some coal down on myself and let out a yell. I showed my bleeding and swollen hand to the Japanese supervisor, but the hand wasn’t broken and I had to go to work the next day. The next time, I said to myself, I’ll go to an experienced bone breaker and have it done right.

  We had bone crushers, guys who would break a bone with a shovel or a jackhammer for a price, usually cigarettes or
rations of rice. A hand cost one ration of rice, a foot five to eight rations. You didn’t get out of work for long, even with a broken leg, but it was worth it to some guys who reached the point where they felt that if they went in that mine the next day they’d die there.

  Another way to get out of work was to manufacture ulcers on your feet, so you couldn’t put on a shoe. Making an ulcer was simple. I took a pin and pricked twenty or so holes in my foot in a pattern about the size of a dime. Then I got some lye from the bathroom and mixed it with lye soap to make a paste. I put that paste on the bleeding area and put a bandage over it. The next morning I took off the bandage and I had a nice burn scab. I picked away at the crust with a knife and saw that I had a beautiful, fresh-looking ulcer. Every day I made it bigger, until it was the size of a half-dollar. The medics, who were Americans, let me off work for a week.11

  There were other ways to make ulcers. Some men put battery acid from their miner’s lamps on their festering sores.

  “The diet of the prisoner of war was based solely on rice,” reported Thomas Hewlett, an American Army doctor at Omuta, “and all the men lived in a state of chronic starvation.” This led desperate men to steal food from the prison galley. Those caught were denied rice and water for days and were beaten with bamboo poles, baseball bats, and pick handles. When the guards were finished with them they would urinate in their faces. At Omuta, several prisoners were executed for stealing canned food and Red Cross parcels that were supposed to be given to them. Thirty-eight percent of the 36,260 American military personnel captured and interned by the Japanese died in captivity, a total of 13,851. By contrast, 99 percent of the 93,941 Americans captured by the Germans survived the war.12

  For some prisoners, tobacco was as essential as food. “They would desperately trade off some of their rice for a little bit of tobacco, either cigarettes or shaved tobacco, which they made into cigarettes with the thin rice paper of the little Bibles that GIs were issued,” said one prisoner.13 Traders would go around the camp calling out, “nicotine for protein,” and there were always takers. Some men smoked themselves to the point of death.14

  Conditions grew worse in the winter and spring of 1945 when Curtis LeMay’s B-29s began their fire raids against Japanese cities. “Instead of merely hitting us with their hands or fists, the Japanese used shovels, picks, and sections of steel chain,” says Tenney. “They swung the chains around overhead until they reached a high speed. Then, using the chain’s momentum, they inflicted brutal blows upon our bodies…. In one attack, my cheekbones were gashed, the skin above my eyebrow was broken, my nose … was smashed, and my entire chin was gushing with blood.” Dr. Hewlett told him his left scapula was broken, but he was sent back into the mine because he could still shovel coal with one hand. “The beatings were bad,” says Tenney, “but the more of them we got the better we felt about the war effort.”15

  The Japanese saved their cruelest treatment for downed American flyboys. On the desolate island of Chichi Jima in the Bonins, where the Japanese had an important communications post, eight captured Navy and Marine fliers were brutally executed and the officers of the garrison ate the flesh and livers of several of them at ceremonial dinners. (A ninth flier shot down over the island, Navy carrier pilot George H. W. Bush, a future President of the United States, was rescued at sea by the submarine Finback.)16 In Japan, captured “B-29ers” were segregated from other POWs, usually in small torture camps run by the Kempeitai, the Gestapo-like secret military police. They were interrogated and tortured. Some were put on public trial as war criminals and executed; others were beheaded or bayoneted on the spot. One group of fliers was shot with bows and arrows and then decapitated. At another camp, three airmen were tortured and burned alive. In one of the most ghastly atrocities, eight B-29 crewmen shot down near the end of the war were offered by the army to the medical professors at the prestigious Kyushu Imperial University, who used them as specimens for vivisection experiments. Under the direction of Dr. Fukujiro Ishiyama, one of Japan’s most respected surgeons, “the professors,” writes historian Gavan Daws, “cut them up alive, in a dirty room with a tin table where students dissected corpses. They drained blood and replaced it with sea water. They cut out the lungs, livers, and stomachs. They stopped blood flow in an artery near the heart, to see how long death took. They dug holes in a skull and stuck a knife into the living brain to see what would happen.”17 No anesthetics were administered.

  Records are incomplete, but it is likely that over 200 American fliers were killed after being captured by the Japanese military.

  Flying out of Saipan, a B-29 named Rover Boys Express was shot down by Japanese fighters over Tokyo on January 27, 1945. Five crew members survived a terrifying explosion, and with their ordinary escape hatch damaged, parachuted out of the bomb bay. One of them was Ray “Hap” Halloran, a twenty-two-year-old navigator from Cincinnati, Ohio. Japanese civilians followed the flight of his chute, captured him, and beat him into a state of unconsciousness with wooden and metal poles. Then they stoned him with large rocks. As Halloran slipped in and out of consciousness, he looked up and saw six military police standing over him. They cut his parachute, stuffed part of it into his mouth, tied his hands and feet, beat him with the butts of their rifles, and tossed him into the bed of a truck. After a brutal interrogation at a nearby air base, he was again beaten in the chest and back with rifle butts.

  THEY TOOK ME TO A SHOPPING area and made me stand and bow to jeering crowds of people. I think the purpose was to build morale among the civilians who had taken quite a beating from the B-29s. After people finished throwing stones at me, I was blindfolded again and taken to the Kempeitai torture prison in downtown Tokyo. That’s where I spent the next sixty-seven days in a cage.

  The cage was elevated about four feet off the floor. I was covered with blood. I was cold. And I was crying with pain. The other prisoners, Japanese conscientious objectors, complained to the guards that they couldn’t sleep with all the noise I was making. So they pulled me out of my cage and took me to a doctor. He had a big tube in his hand, with a needle at the end of it. There was green liquid in the tube. The doctor said this would make me sleep. Somehow I convinced him not to inject me. Later I learned the greenish liquid was poison. Six other prisoners were injected and died.

  HAP HALLORAN IN CAGE AT THE TOKYO ZOO (ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD ROCKWELL).

  After a few days, they carried me—I couldn’t walk—across a courtyard to what we called the Stables, and I was locked in another cage. It was small and you entered through a door on the floor. They pushed you in like you were a dog, and it really was a dog cage. I was ordered to lie in my cell with my head to the door, and the guards played a game of punching my head with their rifle butts.

  It was cold and I had only one blanket and there was a hole in the floor for a toilet. The biggest thing in my life was a rice ball the size of a golf ball that they’d roll in through a small feeding slot at the base of the door. I was a big guy and I lost over 100 pounds in prison.

  Firm rule. No speaking. No noise, here was one young guy in another cage, an eighteen-year-old gunner who kept saying, “Okay, Mom, I’ll be right down for breakfast.” He violated the rule. He was taken out and he never made it home.

  Each day, you try to hang in there. At first I tried to cope by thinking of my family but that was no good. It broke me down internally. I prayed a lot. I said, “Please God, I’m really in trouble. I need your help.” No one came to help me.

  I was always in darkness. The only light I ever saw was a low-wattage bulb on the ceiling of my cage. The darkness makes you go nuts. The only time I saw the light of day was from under a blindfold when they carried me out to interrogate me and beat me. But, crazily, I looked forward to the interrogations. They broke the everlasting boredom and were a chance to get out of the cavelike darkness. I missed them when they stopped.

  The next thing I remember is the big Tokyo fire raid of March 10. I heard multi-engine planes at low altitude
and I thought that was strange. We always flew at 30,000 feet. Then the bombs started to fall and my cage jumped; and for the next two or three hours fire was all around us. At the back of my cage was a small window. There was a black cloth covering it, but on that night I could see the red sky and the flames through the covered window. And though it had been a calm night before the bombers came, I heard the wind blowing like a tornado. I was frightened out of my mind, ’cause fire really scares me. I was convinced I was going to burn to death.

  RAY “HAP” HALLORAN (COURTESY OF RAY HALLORAN).

  I could hear mothers and children screaming and running. The prison was right across from the Emperor’s Palace and they were jumping into the moat to escape the flames and heat. But I didn’t know that at the time.

  The next morning an interpreter came in, a polite guy, and told me what had happened the night before, like he was trying to be informative. He spoke of bodies stacked three and four feet high in the streets and of thousands of bodies floating down the river to Tokyo Bay. Then he looked at me and said, “Hap, I regret to advise you that at our meeting this morning the decision was made to execute you B-29ers.”

  A few days later I was taken out and told to take off my shoes. I thought—death sentence. They blindfolded me, tied my hands and feet, and loaded me on a truck. They dropped me off at the Tokyo Zoo, just tossed me off the truck. Then they pulled off my blindfold, put me in a tiger cage, stripped off my clothes, and tied my hands to the bars. The purpose was to let civilians see me. “Do not fear these B-29 fliers. They are not super beings. Look at this one.” I was a pathetic sight, standing there, skinny as a rail, with a long, filthy beard, shivering from the cold, with my body covered with running sores from lice and fleas. I was trying desperately to act like an Air Corps guy, you know, with dignity. It was pretty tough, but you’ve got to do it, maintain your dignity as best you can.