THE PIG BASKET ATROCITY
By Stephen H. Foreman
The brutality of war is not driven by human instinct, it is conjured by the ugly will of man to send terrifying messages and examples of horror that will force the enemy du jour to submit. In a way, the intent is altruistic: Making the enemy quit will curtail the overall deaths; the sooner the battles come to an end, the sooner human existence can continue—with the victors now free to decide what that existence will be. War engenders unspeakable horror, a fall from grace so irretrievable as to make God and His angels hide their faces in despair and mourn their creation. In World War II, at times, sharks became the method by which the horrific was so heartlessly achieved. History has written these events in blood. For writers, mere mortals, words are insufficient, although the need is to try with what few means of expression we have. The Japanese conjured such depraved methods—including the unholy incident of the Pig Basket Atrocity.
To kill in war means engaging the underbelly of the most feral aspect of the self, to slaughter without feeling, to rip apart the enemy with no mercy, to become inhuman—to attack, in other words, like a shark.
The terror wreaked by Japanese soldiers on both military and Chinese civilians when they invaded Nanjing (also called Nanking) in the Republic of China was so horrifying as to be nearly unfathomable. History knows it as “The Rape of Nanjing.” From December, 1937, to January, 1938, this one city in China had a death toll estimated to be more than the dead of the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—men, women, children, the elderly; a reliable estimate totals somewhere in the range of between 200,000 to 300,000 murdered. The operative strike was in the form of instant, unprovoked death, multiple rapes perpetrated on women of every age (as young as twelve, as old as seventy), and ghastly mutilation. People were herded into houses that were then set on fire. If they tried to escape the flames, they were gunned down as they ran out the door. Civilians were bayoneted, and the dead were used for bayonet practice. Babies were ripped from the bellies of pregnant women. Officers tested the sharpness of their swords by random decapitation. There was no thought given to this. The victims had only to be standing nearby when an officer decided to behead them.
There was little difference between shark attacks and the bloodbaths executed by the Japanese soldiers, the difference being that the Japanese soldiers were more imaginative. They even went so far as to make sharks their instruments of death. Of course, sharks are not imaginative or, in the human definition of the word, cruel. They don’t know or care if you are Jewish, Black, Chinese, Caucasian, or a pig that had the misfortune of falling into the water. All these creatures know is that food is up there on the water’s surface. They have no thought process, no concept of intention. Sharks simply act in the manner in which nature has programmed them. Human beings do have a thought process, intention, yet the terror inflicted by one man on another, the mortal dread, the blood-cold panic, the total absence of mercy—these were the common denominators. And so we have the Pig Basket Atrocities. However, even before that we have the German death camps and the Japanese Unit 731.
History attests to the fact that during World War II, Josef Mengele’s “medical” experiments at Auschwitz were notorious for the suffering coldly inflicted on people the Nazis deemed barely human. Mengele was known as “The Angel of Death.” One of his survivors said, “If there is a devil, it lives inside Josef Mengele.” Another said, “I was only alive as Josef Mengele wanted me alive.”
Imagine lying alone on a cold steel lab table watching as a man, calm and collected, nattily dressed, the object of deference from everyone around him, approached you with a rusty scalpel in his hand, knowing not what he was about to do but surely that you were seconds away from unimaginable pain. When asked why she didn’t try to escape, the survivor replied, “There was no place to go. They could do whatever they wanted.” And again, “I had difficulty coping with the fact that I was a nobody and a nothing—just a mass of cells to be studied.” Say it another way: “Just a hunk of food to be consumed.”
Understand, this is not an attempt to demonize sharks for doing what they have naturally evolved to do. Since the debut of the movie Jaws, such a cursed public image has infected the entire world with an unwarranted yet visceral sense of dread, resulting in the needless slaughter of literally millions of sharks, though many have also turned to a conservation-minded path, including the author of the novel, Peter Benchley. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that in our own enlightened country, the United States of America, there were also people once deemed barely human. They were kidnapped from Africa and called slaves.
And what could it have felt like for our sailors, soldiers, and airmen shot down or torpedoed during World War II, treading water in the ocean, knowing that under the fins circling around them were massive, murderous engines in search of food? Death machines that didn’t care or even comprehend what their victims were, even what victims were, guided by sheer instinct, knowing nothing, not even that they didn’t care, not even that they had no concept of care at all.
Please allow me to digress a bit into personal history. When I first set foot in Hollywood as a screenwriter decades ago, my mentor, a Major Shark, explained it this way: Hollywood is a giant shark pit. On the bottom level there are a bunch of little sharks who eat each other. On the next level exist the midsized sharks that eat one another as well as all the lesser ones. Then there is the top level—the great whites. They eat everybody. A conscience? What’s that?
I happened to become friendly with another great white, a studio chief. I don’t know why he liked me, but he did. In turn, he fascinated me. One day I was in his office when the door banged open and a furious producer rushed in. “Goddamn it,” he yelled at the studio chief, “Yesterday you told me such and such, and this morning I find out it wasn’t true!” The guy was apoplectic, definitely on target for a stroke. The studio chief remained as tranquil as Buddha under the bodhi tree, stared the poor fellow right in the eyes, and said, “I lied. So what? What’re you gonna do about it?” Dante put it best when writing about Hell, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
The Japanese version of Hell was Unit 731, truly another pit of horror, torturers and victims different only in skin color from their counterparts at Auschwitz. Indonesian and Filipino civilian populations were dissected alive without anesthetic because doctors wanted to see the effects of introduced pathogens on the organs without them becoming tainted by killing off the pain. Limbs were amputated and grafted to opposite sides of the body to see the effect of gangrene. Young women, aged eighteen and nineteen, had their wombs sliced open with scalpels as a lesson in sex education designed to instruct the younger soldiers who knew “very little about women.” When asked why, the reply was, “It was the Emperor’s orders, and the Emperor was a god.” (A crystal-clear example of why our Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, enshrined the need for separation of church and state in the new government of the United State of America.)
At Unit 731 prisoners were staked outside in bitter cold with ice water continually poured over an exposed arm to ascertain the length of time it took for frostbite to set in. To test whether or not it had, the arm was hit with a stick, and, if it made a hard, hollow ring, the limb was considered frostbitten. Others were put into decompression chambers to see how long it would take for their eyeballs to explode. Russian, Filipino, and allies were infected with anthrax, typhoid, dysentery, and cholera, and then pickled in formaldehyde. Liberating troops discovered a six-foot-tall glass jar holding the remains of a grown man. Yet, all these crimes went unpunished because our government provided immunity to the “researchers” in exchange for the results of their research. Could anything have been more horrid? Did knowledge obtained so unscrupulously trump the human heart?
Now, let’s talk about the Pig Basket Atrocities.
A pig basket is an oblong affair, three-feet long, made of bamboo, designed to hold pigs for transport. Ironically, it has the shape of
a cornucopia, a horn of plenty—wide at one end, narrow at the other. In ancient times, in a practice called zhu long, couples convicted of adultery were put into pig baskets—one for the male, one for the female—and then dropped into deep water and drowned.
During the Japanese invasion of Nanjing, a troop transport was torpedoed and sunk. Friendly fire was suspected. The general, Hitoshi Imamura, was forced to swim ashore, a singularly demoralizing experience guaranteed to leave an officer of his rank and status in a foul mood. The irony of this man, however, is that he was unusually lenient toward the local residents of the Dutch East Indies, an attitude that led him into conflict with his military senior staff. Nonetheless, he persisted, and his insistence on continuing with this policy minimized greatly problems with the occupation, and yet, only two years later, General Imamura was responsible for the Pig Basket Atrocity.
When the Japanese conquered East Java, two hundred Australian and British soldiers took to the hills and regrouped. From there they waged guerrilla warfare against the occupying forces. Although vastly outnumbered, they fought valiantly and held out far longer than seemed possible. Eventually, however, the Japanese hunted them down and captured them alive. Ten were immediately bayoneted to death. The rest were denied food and water, forced to stand in the hot, tropical sun for days. When their captors deemed these men weak enough, the prisoners were trussed hand and foot and forced into pig baskets, for the most part two per basket, one top, one bottom, face to face, under 100 degrees of broiling sun.
Civilian residents who survived as eye witnesses remembered the horror of these men screaming from cramps, crying, begging for water. They remember attempting to bring water to the prisoners only to have soldiers with bayonets prod them to keep them from getting close. Appalled neighbors tell of an elderly woman who managed to evade the guards with water for a dying prisoner. A quick flash of a sharp sword, and her severed head was left to rot in the sun.
Many years later, an elderly woman who observed this event as a child continued to hear the howls of pain and madness, the heart-wrenching cries for mercy until her death many years after the war. She saw a guard unzip his pants and urinate on the prisoners, and she watched as the pig baskets were loaded onto open trucks and transported to a railroad siding. There the pig baskets with their human cargo, nearly 200 men, were stacked onto flat, open cars and taken to a ship anchored off the coast of Suribaya, where they were transferred to its deck. The ship then put out to sea, and, when it reached shark-infested waters, the prisoners in their bamboo baskets were pitched overboard to die—to drown or be eaten—if they were not already dead.
No doubt these were the whitetip sharks so prevalent in deep-ocean and temperate water, the very species that likely accounts for more human kills than any other species in history, many more than the dreaded bull shark and certainly the great white. These are pelagic creatures, which means they only live in deep oceans, 150 to 450 feet below the surface. They rarely come near shore, which is why they are not so well known. Their attacks take place in the open ocean on the “survivors” of ships that have sunk and planes that have been shot down. At first there is only one shark, and then there are many, snapping, biting, attacking, and feeding in a frenzy. Throughout World War II, Japanese submarines and kamikazes made certain the whitetip sharks did not go hungry.
Imagine being bound and crammed into a bamboo basket, trussed like a pork loin straight from the butcher shop, and, if you were still alive, staring as the gaping jaws and knife-like teeth of a ten-foot-long predator weighing hundreds of pounds zeroes in on you. A man’s body weight would eventually sink the basket, and suspended in the surface zone the basket would be a tempting target for the host of aroused and fevered sharks. Maybe the weakened soldier would drown before the shark smashed the bamboo like so many toothpicks and the cloud of human blood spurred it and others on to feast on flesh.
Again, this was not a spur-of-the-moment punishment. Someone had to sit at his desk and think this one up. That someone was Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura.
Imamura’s was the benign face of a favorite uncle or a beloved grandfather, shaped like a melon or a ripe spaghetti squash, yet the man’s behavior was that of a sadistic killer, uncaring, with no conscience, ruthless, hungry to conquer, relentless in his desire to destroy in the cruelest way possible, without a shred of empathy. Some might say this was shark-like behavior. Negative. A shark may be hungry, but its sole purpose is to eat, not to conquer, never to intentionally inflict pain.
After the war, Imamura was convicted and served a ten-year prison sentence in Sugamo, Japan. His victims, were they alive, probably would have preferred he be crammed into his own custom-made pig basket and, very much alert, dumped overboard into very deep, very temperate, very whitetip shark–infested waters.
Now, visualize the following: from contemporary, state-of-the-art, underwater video of uncanny clarity, we’ve seen for ourselves how great white sharks reach a frenzy while biting their way through metal shark cages containing cowering tourists who paid to see sharks in their element. These primordial creatures can actually destroy a metal cage specifically designed and constructed to keep them out! They open their mouths, brandish those teeth, and charge. You see the caged humans instinctively leap backwards out of righteous terror. And again the sharks charge and batter the cage, this time breaching further, their heads penetrating within scant inches of a man’s face, near enough for the man to touch. There can be no doubt in the caged human’s mind that he is being attacked by a creature determined to tear him to shreds and devour him. One man had to throw himself on his back to escape a shark that had penetrated so deeply into the cage it nearly got him. Again, the shark charges—it is relentless in its attack—and eventually gets through the bars. The man I observed escaped by wriggling through the exact opening made by his attacker. He and his predator were actually side by side, only the shark was too intent on attacking the cage that it, for whatever reason, did not turn on the man. Imagine what he must have felt being in such dangerous water, his attacker’s natural habitat, trying and hoping to swim to safety?
There is aerial video footage taken from a helicopter of a summer beach day with hundreds of folks—families, the elderly—frolicking in the surf along a well-traveled vacation beach. Frolicking with them, swimming all around them, sharing the water, unseen and unknown, are sharks, many of them bull sharks, the species scientifically known for attacking human beings more than any other. There are also a number of underwater videos showing tourists romping with sharks, feeding them, smiling at the camera. Has anyone ever seen a shark smiling back? After scanning dozens of shark videos, I sure never have, and I’m sure as hell not going to get in the water with them, either (I’m even wary of swimming pools these days). My feeling is that this is lunacy. Maybe with dogs, maybe with horses, we share a connection—however, with most wild animals, no matter what a person fantasizes or believes, we are not kindred spirits. One can observe and know animals as only an observant human being can. Good deer hunters can strive to “become” their prey as they look for it. Their senses are attuned with the wind, with every step taken, but there are no ties of blood. They are not kin, certainly even less so with a fish than with a mammal, but even then we are not consanguineous or, to put it another way, collateral relatives.
Take Timothy Treadwell, for example. Treadwell spent years camping in grizzly territory in Alaska. In all that time, the man had no problem with the grizzlies—a number of which were always around. He became familiar with the bears, and they became familiar with him. He watched them from within their critical distance for a multitude of hours, especially one in particular, an immense male, 1,000 pounds, nearly ten feet tall when standing on his hind legs, a titan nearly twice as tall as the man, towering over him. When the bear was on all fours, he stared Treadway right smack in the man’s face. Any bear is a force, but one like this is a howling hurricane force, and, no matter what Treadway thought, like a hurricane, not to be trusted. Tread
way, of course, thought differently. He even brought his girlfriend out there with him. She was a photographer and took pictures of Timothy and his ursine friends.
The last anyone ever saw of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend were their remains in the giant bear’s stomach. A sound recording exists of the surprise attack with Treadwell screaming that the bear was killing him. A recording device happened to be on. His girlfriend watched the assault until Treadwell was dead. Then the grizzly turned and killed her, too.
No, dangerous animals are not propelled by vengeance or diabolical motives. They kill because they have to eat. Treadwell suffered the inevitable end that his constant proximity to wild grizzly bears ensured. Too often, so-called fearless adventurers take calculated risks that end with the animal doing what it instinctually does—kill what it then eats.
Shark attacks have increased in recent years. Why? Because we humans have breached their territory, entered into and modified their domain: by over-fishing their food supply, by hunting them for dorsal fins marketed as an ingredient for soup, by a tourist industry that beguiles its customers with unpredictable underwater encounters (such as the shark-cage episode described earlier), by a tourist industry that lures innocent yet ignorant customers to surf and swim in shark-infested waters.
The incontestable evidence is that animals in the wild are afraid of human beings. We stink of death. We carry it with us. That’s why they flee at the first sound, scent, or sight of us rather than seek us out—except the shark, a predatory creature that instills in us the same terror experienced by other animals when they encounter the most dangerous predator on earth, man.
MV DONA PAZ AND REQUIEM SHARKS
By Stephen H. Foreman
It was 10:30 p.m., December 20, 1987, in the waters of Tablas Strait near Leyte Island, the Philippines, a maritime nation with an encyclopedic record of disasters at sea stretching far back into recorded history. The moon was in a new phase, which meant there was zero ambient illumination. The night sky was pitch black, a preferred situation for sharks that prefer to hunt at night. The oceanic whitetip and the tiger shark in particular inhabited these waters: warm, temperate, tropic (68 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit), with extreme depths of 2,000 feet or more. The oceanic whitetip has been observed diving to that depth but usually spends its life cruising the top 490 feet of open ocean. At that exact time, there were two ships on a collision course, the MT Vector, an oil tanker with a crew of sixty-six, and the MV Dona Paz, a ferry, carrying 4,386 passengers.
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