Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  It was into these waters that the POW doctors and corpsmen were headed on March 5, 1944.

  They marched from Azcarraga Street to Quezon Boulevard, past Quiapo Church, then over Quezon Bridge and into the Old City. In the distance they could see the Army-Navy Club and the Manila Hotel, memories of another lifetime. Tied up at battle-scarred Pier 7 was an unmarked, rusty old freighter, the 5,000-ton Kenwa Maru. Japanese civilians stood on line in front of them. What a difference, John Bumgarner thought, from the fanfare that had greeted him on his arrival in Manila three years earlier. The Japanese handed out a full page of “Regulations for Prisoners” that began with a list of offenses punishable “with immediate death” ranging from disobedience to the unpardonable act of using more than two blankets, to attempted escape. Prepared by the “Commander of the Prisoner Escort, Navy of the Great Japanese Empire,” it concluded in roughly translated English:Navy of the Great Japanese Empire will not try to punish you all with death. Those obeying all the rules and regulations, and believing the action and purpose of the Japanese Navy, cooperating with Japan in constructing the “New Order of the Great Asia” which lend to the world’s peace will be well treated.

  The civilians walked up the gangplank, then down into the forward hold. The 200 POWs followed, prodded by Japanese guards into the aft hold. With only passengers as cargo, the Kenwa Maru rode high in the water. The ship moved out into the North Channel near Corregidor, where it anchored before leaving that night. The sky was so clear you could see the Southern Cross.

  The hold was an open quadrangle flanked on either side by two double-tiered bays. There was no fresh air unless the hatch was open. The POWs were given a pint of water daily and a honey bucket in which to urinate. Food was lowered through the hatch by pail. They were allowed topside only fifteen minutes each day for exercise. The benjo hung from the deck rail with a metal scupper that ran down the side of the ship, but to use it you first had to salute the armed guard, request permission, and then wait until permission was granted. Ernie Irvin volunteered to flush the benjo. Perhaps, he thought, he could sneak in a little bath with the saltwater hose when no one was looking. The hold was infested with vermin. On more than one occasion John Bumgarner was startled awake by rats running across his face and chest.

  Eleven vessels were in the convoy. To evade submarines, the captain of the Kenwa Maru steered a defensive zigzag course. He had reason to be concerned, so did his passengers. The Kenwa Maru’s route was being tracked.

  A radio message intercepted that day by the United States from the Japanese Army Air Service and translated by the Army Security Agency back in Arlington, Virginia, conveniently identified the ship, its ports of embarkation and destination, and the passengers on board:Msg Manila to Tokyo. In accordance with RIKU A MITSU Message [Army Top Secret] #114, the 200 medical personnel prisoners who are to be transferred to Japan embarked on the KENWA MARU. They are scheduled to debark at Moji.

  Message addressed to: Ass’t Chief of Staff, Prisoner Office.

  The next day the United States intercepted another message, this time from Japanese Water Transport, which disclosed the number and names of the ships in convoy. “MATA” was the Japanese abbreviation for ships traveling from Manila to Takao.

  Msg Manila to Hiroshima. Mata #10 Convoy ll ships: Kenwa, Kooho, Soorachi, Ogura #1 and Tachibana Marus; Navy ships, Sandiego, *Taketsu, *Nichitetsu Maru and 2 Unident Marus; privately owned ship *Sonyasu Maru.--naval Karukaya [Translator’s note: a naval escort ship].

  The seas turned rough, and many POWs sickened from the roll of the ship. To add to their unease, the Kenwa Maru made occasional stops for sonar checks on Allied submarine activity. The men wondered what the Japanese would do if they were torpedoed, whether there were enough lifeboats, and how far they were from land. Some men prayed. Fred had the crazy thought that he could swim to Formosa and escape. They pushed such thoughts aside by playing bridge, poker, and craps. They even staged a variety show.

  Then one night the POWs heard the sound they were all dreading: a submarine alarm. The Japanese rushed to batten down the hatches. They turned off the lights. The men below heard frantic activity up on the deck as they waited, listening, invisible. “I was seized with an almost panic state,” said Bumgarner. “For what seemed an eternity, we were in pitch darkness and heard the sound of many depth charges.”

  Only one POW had a view of the action topside: corpsman Ernie Irvin. Through the cracks in the benjo, he swore he saw a cruiser sink stern first. The Japanese claimed it was all a drill, but the next morning Irvin counted the ships in the convoy and found one was missing. But the only American submarine remotely near MATA No. 10 convoy in the first two weeks of March 1944 was the Lapon, which on March 9 torpedoed the Toyokuni Maru, a 5,792-ton cargo ship, and the 5,396-ton Nichirei Maru, far west of the northern tip of Luzon and halfway to Hainan. No other American submarines were even close. What Ernie Irvin saw was fear.

  The skies turned gray. Major James Bahrenburg, a trained pediatrician, was called into the forward hold to attend to Japanese children who had fallen ill. John Bumgarner accompanied him. Living conditions were no better for the Japanese civilians, he realized.

  Finally on March 12, after six days at sea, the Kenwa Maru pulled into Takao Harbor, Formosa, a hundred miles east of southern China. American intelligence intercepted the news:Mesg Takao to Hiroshima. Tachibana, Ogura #1, Sorachi, *Koho and *Kenwa Marus arrrived safely from Manila, 12 Mar/1200.

  Takao was the principal port on Formosa’s southern coast, and the site of a major Japanese naval base. While the Kenwa Maru anchored there for two days, scores of Korean women helped load 200-pound sacks of raw sugar into small lighters. The bags were hoisted on board the Kenwa Maru by grappling hooks, and then the women lowered them into the hold below the POWs, where they stacked them neatly against the ship’s ribs.

  The sugar was unrefined, and the Japanese planned on converting it, through a process of fermentation, into airplane fuel. But sugar it was, and its sweetness beckoned to the hungry POWs. They crawled down the sea ladder, and like children opening presents before their parents have awakened on Christmas Day, they carefully slit open the sacks with their mess-kit knives. Then they stuffed their Klim dried milk cans and gas mask bags, pants pockets and socks, with sugar. They added sugar to tea, sugar to rice, sugar to the burned scrapings at the bottom of the soup cauldron, which tasted, as Ernie Irvin said, just like popcorn. Or they ate it as they found it: raw.

  “The sugar ship,” as some POWs called it, resumed its journey on March 15, passing through the Formosa Strait and then heading north into the East China Sea, where it ran into a typhoon. Before long the POWs could make out Okinawa to the east. The ship continued on a northeasterly course up the west coast of Kysh, passed Nagasaki and Fukuoka, and finally threaded its way through the narrow Strait of Shimonoseki. After nearly a month at sea, the Kenwa Maru arrived at the port of Moji on March 25. They had made it safely to Japan.

  Moji was a major rail terminus at the northern tip of Kysh, connected by the recently completed Kammon Tunnel to Shimonoseki on the island of Honsh. The quaint train station, with its pagoda-style eaves, was one of the oldest in the country and made for an attractive port of entry against the backdrop of Mt. Yahazu. But the prisoners were not there for sightseeing. A former YMCA building near the docks served as the main barracks of Fukuoka No. 4, which housed American, British, and Dutch Indonesian POWs who worked as stevedores or on the railroad.

  Customs officers frisked the men disembarking from the Kenwa Maru but failed to find any incriminating evidence. Nor did they notice that the Kenwa Maru’s cargo had mysteriously diminished in size during transit. The POWs were removed to Fukuoka No. 4, where they had their first bath in two and a half years. They were coated with dirt, and easing down into the warm water of the communal tub felt luxuriously good. After they were cleaned up—or as clean as they could be—each of the four groups was assigned to a Japanese officer.

  Alfred Wei
nstein was sent to Shinagawa, which was part of Ōmori Main Camp, the sole hospital facility for POWs in Tōkyō as well as for many camps in northern Honsh. Lieutenant Nosu Shichi ushered the men in his charge onto a coal-burning locomotive: Fred, John, Murray, Stan Smith, and corpsmen Ernie Irvin, Bernard Hildebrand, Bud Flood, Richard Wallace, and Bernard Stradley along with the forty-one others in his group. The train headed north from Moji, rattled through the Kammon Tunnel, and chugged up through Honsh, but its windows were shuttered so the POWs couldn’t see where they were going. They were handed a boxed lunch (bentō) of pickled white radish (daikon), seaweed, a little fish, and rice. They ate with chopsticks and the fare turned out to be far better than anything they’d been given on the Kenwa Maru.

  A bath, a decent meal—so far so good. But there was something more than a little odd about Lieutenant Nosu. His head sloped to his brow, his ears protruded, and he walked with a pronounced limp in his left leg, but it wasn’t any of those things; it was the way he spoke. Nosu had little English, yet he insisted on interrogating each doctor himself, and in a most exaggerated fashion: “I, Dr. Nosu, speak English poorly, understand very well. I opulate [operate], and I teach you doctors; you no good I send you to the mountains. I speak Deutschland, go to Deutschland medical school; English, American schools no good! Deutschland medical schools, number one. I teach you!”

  Nosu was medical officer of the Ōsaka area POW camps, but he sounded like an idiot. Murray tried engaging him in German, but Nosu’s German was even worse than his English. Did Nosu know anything about medicine? Murray wondered. As doctors, did the Americans and Japanese speak the same language?

  18

  Bridge over Hell

  IN THE MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY Portuguese castaways were washed up on Tanegashima’s shores, Lusitanian ships began trading in Kysh, and in 1549 Saint Francis Xavier and two Spanish Jesuits introduced Catholicism to Japan. In 1600 a Dutch vessel piloted by the Englishman William Adams was blown off course and landed on the shores of Bungo.

  Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, allowed Holland to open a trading post at Hirado and permitted the British to establish a factory there in 1613. But by 1616 Christian missionaries were expelled, free residence for Westerners came to an end, and trade was restricted to the ports of Hirado and Nagasaki. The English, convinced that neither a manufacturing nor an export business with Japan would ever be profitable, departed voluntarily in 1623. In 1630 Shogun Iemitsu issued the Edict of Kan’ei, which prohibited the import of books that propagated Christianity. From 1640 until Commodore Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1853, Japan was a country closed (sakoku) largely to Western influence. Of the early Occidental visitors, only the Dutch, who managed to persuade the Japanese that Holland was not a Christian country, were allowed to remain, though they would be removed to the artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbor, where the Portuguese had previously been confined.

  During the sakoku period, inevitably, Japanese interpreters of the Dutch had the most contact with European ideas. An interpreter corps in Nagasaki stimulated Dutch learning, or rangaku. Its scholars—rangakusha—were steeped in neo-Confucianism and concentrated on those areas that had the most practical applications in Japan: astronomy, to better understand the agricultural cycle, and medicine.

  The interpreters did more than merely interpret speech and translate books from the Dutch that were not specifically banned under the Edict of Kan’ei. They were keen observers who accompanied Dutch doctors into the homes of the ill, where they studied symptoms and watched Dutch physicians prescribe treatment and practice surgery. Classical Chinese medicine, by contrast, was based on theories of balance and cosmology, the yin/yang polarity, and the cycle of Five Elements known as wu-hsing. The interpreters learned chemistry and physics, botany and zoology, pharmacopoeia and mineralogy as those fields were understood in mid-seventeenth-century Holland and Germany. They absorbed the work of Casper Schamberger, Willem Hoffman, Andries Cleijer, the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer, and Ten Rhijne, who was employed by the Dutch East India Company in Deshima. The lessons they learned enabled them to adapt the principles of European medicine to East Asian tradition. In so doing, they became cultural intermediaries between the West and the Orient. Their contributions, notably Kaitai Shinsho, the Japanese translation of an eighteenth-century anatomical text by German physician Johann Adam Kulmus, heralded the era of modern Japanese medicine and a science based on empirical observation. The interpreters became doctors.

  The journey from Moji took more than twelve hours. At one transfer station the POWs watched as numerous white boxes were being unloaded from a train: ashes, they surmised, of Japanese war dead. Nosu was furious. He screamed at Navy Lieutenant J. R. “Jack” George for disrespect as guards hustled the Americans away.

  On March 26, 1944, the men entered Subcamp No. 13-B in the Ōsaka Prisoner of War Camp Area. Otherwise known as Tsumori, it sat opposite the Kizugawa Cement Factory on the Kizugawa River in an industrial landscape dominated by docks and shipyards.

  The camp consisted of five wooden barracks 150 to 200 feet long and 30 to 40 feet wide. The barracks had bays on both sides and a walkway that ran down the middle. Officers had a separate office in the corner, which doubled as a two-man berth. The “drab-looking buildings,” said Stan Smith, were “built on the soot-covered, cinder-strewn ground.” Tsumori was a study in gray: gray sea, gray sky, gray earth. There had been frequent snow and sleet that month.

  “Put your gear over here, fellows, and the commanding officer will be here in a jiffy to speak to you.”

  His accent was flawless, and his dress could have been mistaken for POW fatigues. Lieutenant Jack George put out his hand in greeting, but the American-educated Fujimoto Haruki quickly rebuffed him. He was an interpreter at Tsumori, and fraternizing with POWs, he curtly reminded them, was prohibited.

  The new arrivals were shaken down by guards, who discovered the sweet lucre they had pocketed from the Kenwa Maru. “They took away all our medicines, some food, playing cards, books, games, and many personal and Red Cross items recently received,” John noted in his diary. “A dreary, dirty, depressing camp.”

  It was strange, too, without George. They felt diminished not only in ability but potential. He was the one man among them who had the kind of life they wished they had waiting for them back home. They missed his sly humor and that quizzical expression even when he was deadly earnest. They missed the way he saw the human body as a beautiful mechanism made up of intricate parts, each with a specific bearing on the whole.They missed his letters from Lucy and his unquestioning faith. If Carey Smith was their adopted father, Fred now assumed the role of eldest brother, sharp and incisive. Murray was the youngest and in some ways most unpredictable. And John was the fulcrum upon which both of them depended. They had lost their fourth, and his absence brought them closer together.

  Ōsaka, the second-largest city in Japan, was the country’s commercial and industrial heart. Perched on Ōsaka Bay and defined by the Yodo River, it was a major exporter to the East and import customer of the United States, China, and India. Legend has it that in the seventh century B.C. the first emperor, Jimmu, subdued cave-dwellers called

  Tsuchigumo (Earth Spiders) in Naniwa (Ōsaka) before pacifying all of Yamato and founding the seat of his empire. The city was celebrated for its doll theater (ningyō-shibai), which evolved in the mid-seventeenth century, and it was home to the prolific playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, widely regarded as “Japan’s Shakespeare.”

  In 1940 Ōsaka’s population stood at 3.25 million, a figure that would shrink by nearly a third due to conscription and the war industry. The city became a major supplier of wartime ships, electrical equipment, machinery, and tools. Her arsenal alone provided 20 percent of the ordnance required by the Imperial Japanese Army. Nearly one-quarter of her half-million work force toiled in the manufacture of airplane parts.

  The Ōsaka Prisoner of War Camp Area was under the command of Colonel Murata Sōtarō, who
was based at Osaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp. Army Air Force doctor Lieutenant David Hochman, who had bumped into John on Bataan, was among the first Americans to arrive there on November 11, 1942, after a thirty-two-day voyage aboard the Tottori Maru.

  Hochman reported to Nosu and found his behavior nothing short of bizarre. Nosu once applied a stethoscope to a patient’s knee to diagnose beriberi. He did a chest examination while his stethoscope was pressed to a patient’s earlobe. He diagnosed diarrhea and dysentery by listening to a patient’s abdomen. He appeared to be completely ignorant of sulfa drugs, plasma, and the arsenical Mapharsen. He insisted on sending to work in the shipyards POWs who were too sick to be ambulatory. And he repeatedly stole drugs from the headquarters camp, which deprived seriously ill patients in the subcamps of desperately needed medicine. Hochman suspected that Nosu wasn’t a doctor at all. Or if he was, he was the kind who stood on street corners peddling patent medicines.

  By contrast, the fifty-three-year-old Murata, to whom Nosu reported, struck Hochman as an affable man. He was a widower whose three young children lived with their maternal grandmother in Kyōto. But his responsibilities extended over more than twenty-two camps holding thousands of Allied prisoners and allowed him to visit his family only once a month.

  Others saw him as a clean-shaven, bullet-headed colonel with steel spectacles, clipped mustache, and the swagger of a Prussian officer. He warned prisoners that if they did not do their best for the empire, they would probably never see their loved ones again: “Our people will not forget that you shot at our brothers and sons. . . . For this you must pay your toll very heavily.”