Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  Ōsaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp provided medicine, clothing, and books for all POWs in central Japan—or at least it was supposed to. Subordinates such as Nosu appeared to wield enormous influence in day-to-day operations, but it was Murata who was ultimately accountable for the welfare of the POWs under his jurisdiction. As Kobayashi Kazuo, an interpreter in the Ōsaka-area camps, put it: “Nosu couldn’t do anything without the permission of Colonel Murata.”

  Tsumori’s camp commander, Lieutenant Habe Toshitarō, insisted on a rigorous military regimen, with frequent drills and inspections. POWs were awakened for tenko (roll call) in the middle of the night. The doctors had no medicine at Tsumori, but the Japanese did. Murata regaled the navy doctors with stories of the wonderful new hospital that was being built for them in Kōbe, but his words meant little to Tsumori’s inmates, whose health, John wrote, “had been none too good.”

  The winter of 1943-44 had been hard on them. Charcoal pits were recessed in the barracks room floors for heat, but charcoal itself was rare. Down by the docks men shivered with cold, trying to keep warm by lighting fires in 55-gallon oil drums, which they fed with scavenged wood. When wood grew scarce, they filched fuel in any way they could, in one instance lifting an entire gangplank from a trawler tied up at a dock. Many suffered frostbite in their fingers, toes, and limbs. Red Cross parcels were withheld; mail was never delivered. One of the American doctors designated a special latrine for diarrhea cases, but it soon made no difference because everyone had diarrhea.

  They were cold, they were hungry, and they were expected to work as welders, riggers, and riveters in the Fujinagata and Namura shipyards. POWs hauled rocks to fill in the boat basin, unloaded pig iron from lighters in Ōsaka Bay, toiled on destroyers, transports, and corvettes. Some were so weak they couldn’t lift the logs that were used to ease vessels off of dry docks.

  The poor food situation only hastened their decline. Rice, or barley and millet, was served three times a day. Greens and root vegetables, called slum, were added at suppertime, along with a ladle of daikon soup. To help control the runs, the men requested permission to bake bread from the last rice ration. One POW forged a key to a storehouse and managed to bring back some grub for his buddies. The Japanese thought a rat had gotten into their foodstuffs.

  At Tsumori the navy doctors and corpsmen interacted with prisoners of other nationalities for the first time. They met Englishmen who had been captured at the fall of Singapore, Australians who had survived the siege of Rabaul, and Dutch POWs who had surrendered in the East Indies. There were also American civilians who had worked for Pacific Naval Contractors on Wake before Wake was attacked on December 11, 1941. They had come to Tsumori by way of a camp in Kiangwan, north of Shanghai.

  Fred, John, and Murray refused to work in the shipyards. Not only was it hazardous, it was clearly related to war operations and hence prohibited under the terms of the Geneva Convention. They’d learned their lesson at Cabanatuan: they’d do what they were trained for and practice medicine, they asserted. No, they wouldn’t, the Japanese informed them. The doctors would work as sanitation men, sweeping the streets, cleaning out the benjo, and fertilizing the soil with their own shit. The Japanese made them pay for what they perceived as their pride, Murray thought. They rubbed their noses in it to remind them of their place. The humiliation was deliberate, persistent, and public, a constant debriding that tested one’s sense of self-worth.

  Stan Smith and another navy dental officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Wade H. Morgan, Jr., were allowed to practice dentistry once a week. The Japanese were among their patients. They supplied a little zinc oxide and some eugenol, and the dentists cooked up a local anesthetic, working gingerly when they heard the cry “Itai! Itai!” meaning “It hurts! It hurts!” Often they had no anesthesia at all.

  Down in the shipyards the enlisted men enjoyed generally good relations with Japanese civilian workers. The Japanese shared news of the war’s progress, but their accounts relied on the local press, whose stories had to conform to the Provisional Law for Control of Speech, Publications, Assembly, and Association, and were scripted by Imperial General Headquarters. News of the Japanese defeat at Midway was suppressed, military losses were valorized, and authors of journalistic exposés were rewarded by prosecution and conviction.

  For more accurate news POWs turned to secret shortwave radios. A Dutchman hid one, while a marine from Tientsin had another that was able to pick up broadcasts from Chiang Kai-shek in China. Seaman 2nd Class Richard L. Hotchkiss from Wake concealed a third set, until a fellow POW snitched on him.

  Punishments at Tsumori were severe. B.H.J. Boerboom, one of the old-timers, was captured by a Japanese Army unit at Bandoeng, Java, on March 8, 1942, and was imprisoned at Tjilatjap, Batavia, and in Singapore. He had been in Tsumori since December 5, 1943, and had seen two incidents he was unlikely to forget.

  Two Americans, Andrews and Cooley, had been caught stealing bread. They were beaten, thrown into the brig, and forced to stand at attention through the night. The first day of their confinement they were given no food or water. The second day they were allowed only two cups of rice and salty water and were permitted to use the latrine twice. One time, instead of going to the latrine, Andrews made a break for a wash-basin to drink from the tap. The guard beat him on the head with a bamboo club. Andrews put up his arms in self-defense, which infuriated his captor. Three other guards—Shiozumi, Kashiwangi, and Kino—joined in the attack. They broke Andrews’s arm, dislocated his shoulder, and four weeks later forced him to go back to work.

  On another occasion Boerboom accompanied a doctor to examine a Dutch POW who lay unconscious in his barracks. Kino maintained the prisoner wasn’t ill, he was just lazy. Kino went into the barracks with Kashiwangi, his fellow guard, and tried to make the man stand. When that proved impossible, Kino slapped him in the face. The guards left laughing. Two hours later the POW was dead.

  The cold of March 1944 was impossible to shake. The temperature inside the barracks ranged from freezing to 45 degrees. The prisoners’ clothing was cotton, as were their blankets, and they were so cold, Corporal Frank Gross admitted, they’d “double up at night with another guy” on their tatami mats. Nosu had the notion that in the mornings the POWs should throw open the windows and doors and vigorously massage their torsos with a towel to “make them strong and prevent pneumonia.” The only thing that kept them warm, said John, was a hot bath, Japanese style. But baths were infrequent. When Samuel Silverman, a civilian worker from Wake Island, was asked his rank, he joked that he was the rankest man in the Pacific. If they were lucky, they smuggled in “skid soap” from the shipyard in a rag, a sock, or below the waist, because soap of any kind was at a premium. But there was so little fuel, lamented Colonel Murata, that his own family could afford to bathe only twice a month. Once the hospital in Kōbe was completed, he promised, the POWs would be taking their ablutions every week.

  Tsukioka Yoshio used to watch them. He was a teenager whose father was in charge of the crematorium down the street from Tsumori. You weren’t supposed to look into the camp; it was surrounded by a high wooden fence, beyond which was an electrified wire. But Yoshio couldn’t resist peeking when the prisoners bathed in the large steel-bottomed tub that was warmed by a wood fire.

  Every morning he saw the men march in rows of four down to the dockyard. They looked exhausted, emaciated. One day Yoshio took one of his grandfather’s cigarettes and tossed it onto the street for a POW, who hastily picked it up. On another occasion Yoshio saw the Kempeitai arrive at Tsumori. They dragged a POW out of the camp and led him away in tears.

  Many POWs succumbed during the winter. When a buddy died, he was carried on a litter or cart to the funeral home of Tsukioka-san. A chaplain always presided over the ceremony, and during one procession Yoshio counted as many as thirty men. He watched them pray over the body, heard them mutter “Amen.” After the cremation the ashes were deposited in a small white box that found its final resting place in Juganji Tem
ple, a pagoda located then on Tanimachi Avenue in Chuo Ward, Ōsaka.

  Like other residents of Ōsaka and Kōbe,Yoshio’s family suffered from the cold and a shortage of food. The war with China placed tremendous demands on the domestic food supply. In 1939, the year the “Rising Sun bentō” was popularized, thistle and pokeweed were recommended as rice substitutes to be served alongside locust croquettes. Rationing began in Japan’s major cities on April 1, 1940, when Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa’s “no-rice cabinet” ordered people to sell their gold to the government. “No meat days” were mandated twice monthly, pork was prohibited in Tōkyō, and fruit and vegetable distribution was regulated.

  The Basic Necessities Control Ordinance of 1941 restricted goods for civilians, though senior army officers and bureaucrats never seemed to be lacking, due to their connections and black market contacts. By early 1942 Japan was already experiencing serious food shortages. The nutritional standard recommended by the Ministry of Health and Welfare for an adult Japanese male engaged in “medium-hard labor” fell from 2,400 calories a day to below 2,000. Military rations were roughly twice those for civilians.

  With the armed forces consuming so much oil, and oil imports sagging to all-time lows in 1944, gas stations on the Home Islands went out of business. Women and high school students dug pine roots to extract oil, which was mixed in with gasoline for aircraft fuel. Cars, trucks, and trains were powered by charcoal-burning engines. But coal and charcoal themselves were in such short supply that businesses such as Tōkyō’s posh Imperial Hotel were forced to regulate hot water use, while citizens economized by bathing infrequently, often without soap.

  As early as 1943 U.S. steel production surpassed Japan’s by “a ratio of one hundred to less than one,” complained Matsumae Shigeyoshi, director of the Engineering Bureau in the Ministry of Communications. “At our present rate of production continuing the war will reduce Japan to a miserable ruin, however strong our faith in ultimate Japanese triumph may be.” To augment dwindling scrap metal stocks, Japanese civilians donated buttons, nails, Buddhist temple gongs, pots, and pans; they even stole manhole covers to help the war effort. A popular story during the siege of Corregidor was that the Japanese had used Singer Sewing Machine parts in their shrapnel-laden bombs. After the island’s capitulation, they dismantled some of its guns and shipped them home for scrap. To conserve energy, officials were recommending in 1944 that families unscrew one bulb from the lamps in their houses and designated 2200 as the time for lights-out. Sweet potatoes were fermented and used as a rice substitute for making sake and later were sown by millions of families to generate synthetic fuel for Japanese bombers. And to save leather and rubber, civilians wore wooden clogs instead of shoes or sneakers.

  Extravagance, associated with Western values, was shunned in a spiritual mobilization campaign that dated back to 1938. Billboards proclaimed, “Luxury Is the Enemy.” Women shed dresses and kimonos for peasant pantaloons known as monpe. Cosmetics and permanent waves were prohibited. Books and magazines were purged of “dangerous thoughts.” Antiwar sympathizers were banned, as were authors of romances and even comic strips. Foreign films disappeared from movie houses, American jazz and popular music vanished from the airwaves, foreign words were excised from the Japanese language, and signs written in Roman letters were removed from public spaces. In baseball, a sport beloved in Japan, umpires had to learn the calls in their own language for the first time: yoshi hitotsu (strike one), dame (ball), and hike (you’re out). Foreign residents were rounded up and held in internment camps.

  Freedom of speech and assembly had been curtailed since 1941 in accordance with the National Defense Security Law and the Provisional Law for Control of Speech, Publications, and Assembly. Habeas corpus was skirted by the amended Peace Preservation Law.

  Restaurants, kabuki theaters, and geisha houses were shut down under the Outline of Decisive War Emergency Measures, approved by the cabinet in February 1944. “People’s bars”—government taverns with restricted amounts of liquor and cheap sake—took the place of neighborhood watering holes.

  Women shouldered the burden of civil defense. Neighborhood associations—tonari gumi—comprising fifteen to thirty households each, were under the control of the Home Ministry to organize air raid drills, firefighting, food rationing, and labor services. Members dug trenches, made shelters beneath their houses, sewed cotton masks, and set up water-bucket relays. With the threat of air raids, they assisted the Home and Welfare Ministries by checking area residents for their blood types.

  As of 1943, university, technical, and high school students were no longer exempt from military conscription. Boys as young as fifteen were drafted, while girls were pressured to become nurses, and the minimum age for cadet volunteers was lowered to fourteen. By 1944 millions of Japanese pupils above the age of ten were mobilized for war work in factories and fields. In Kōbe third- and fourth-year students, fifteen to sixteen years of age, toiled at Mitsubishi Heavy and Electric in some of the very same industries that exploited POW laborers. Schoolgirls helped assemble Shidenkai fighter planes, Japan’s most sophisticated aircraft. The elderly were compelled to work simply to make ends meet.

  Children were expected to bow at the hoanden, a small shrine at the entrance of every Japanese school that housed photographs of the emperor and empress, known as the “imperial likenesses.” From the sixth edition of the national history textbook published in 1944, they were instilled with the idea of emperor worship. Japan was a divine land, and the sun goddess would protect it through a mystical union of man and nature. For years the curriculum for middle schools and above had included military training conducted by active duty officers, but now the rhetoric took on an even more imperialist—and racist—bent. At one school in Tōkyō children shouted, “Annihilate America and England! One, two, three, four,” to the rhythm of their daily calisthenics.

  Japanese propaganda flooded the airwaves and newspapers. Imperial General Headquarters regularly fed the press, and Dōmei, the official wire service, obliged by putting the best slant on war news. Radio broadcasts boasted of soldiers who “met honorable death rather than the dishonor of surrender” and celebrated the banzai charge on Attu in the Aleutian Islands that sacrificed 1,000 Japanese lives in May 1943. Military marches and patriotic songs filled air time, to instill a martial spirit in the listening masses.

  Political dissent was rare and readily suppressed. There was no antiwar movement, Ienaga Saburō remarked, because the government was in total control of the instruments of power. Even when the Left was still active, before Pearl Harbor, few dissidents emigrated west to protest Japan’s expansionist polices in Asia. The kokutai, or national polity, predominated over the will of the people. As Tōjō Hideki remarked, “Truly it is time for the 100 million of us Japanese to dedicate all we have and sacrifice everything for our country’s cause.”

  In spite of the hardships his family endured, Yoshio felt sorry for the prisoners of war.

  On April 8, 1944, Fred and John were ordered to Lieutenant Habe Toshitarō’s office and told to strip down to the waist. A Japanese doctor looked them over “as you would look at cattle,” Fred recalled. Habe then instructed them to get their gear. Neither had any idea of their destination as they said goodbye to Murray. Nor did they know if they would ever see one another again. The group of four was in splinters, each man on his own.

  Under armed guard, John was taken sixty miles south of Osaka to Wakayama POW Camp. Ringed by the Kii Mountains and overlooking Wakahura Bay, Wakayama is perched on the largest peninsula in Japan. According to Japanese legend, Wakayama rose from sacred ground. Its sixteenth-century castle became the seat of power for the shogunate’s rule in western Japan. A temperate climate sustains farming, foresting, cultivating vegetables, flowers, and fruit—persimmons and plums, hassaku and mikan oranges. The Kuroshio current, off Wakayama, abounds with tuna, cutlass, and spiny lobster, but the fish supply in Japan declined by 60 percent due to a wartime labor shortage.


  It was a small camp, composed of 395 POWs who had been captured in Hong Kong, all of them British except for three Australians. They lived in seven wooden barracks surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence. A quarter mile away was Wakayama Iron Works, a branch of the Sumitomo Steel Industrial Company.

  Under 1st Lieutenant Kuranishi Taijirō, POW officers and enlisted men were divided into three eight-hour work shifts. The labor was arduous and dangerous. Production was low due to the shortage of raw materials, but the prisoners tended the blast furnace and manufactured steel pipe and bomb casings. There was a one-hour break for meals but no designated rest times. Breakfast and lunch were soup and rice; supper was simply rice. Meat and vegetables would disappear entirely. The POWs were doled out a small portion of fish once a week, if they received any at all.

  When prisoners first arrived in November 1943, they were dressed in short-sleeve shirts and tropical-weight shorts. Nearly a month elapsed before they were issued cotton army fatigues, overcoats, and canvas and rubber split-toed tabi. During that time eleven men died of pneumonia. Another was killed when a load of slag that he was preparing to dump toppled over and crushed him to death.

  The kitchens at Wakayama were unscreened. The latrines were open pits. When an epidemic of diarrhea broke out, John requested tar, oil, and lime to fly-proof them, but his request was denied.

  There was a four-room dispensary for the POWs at Wakayama, but no permanent medical care. A Japanese doctor made infrequent trips from Ōsaka. Between visits a Japanese medical corpsman by the name of Okazaki Isojirō stole Red Cross medicines as they came into camp. John could tell; he managed to obtain a passkey to Okazaki’s office where supplies were stored. Each night John held sick call and gave Okazaki a list of those too ill to work the next day. Invariably, sick POWs were forced to go to work anyway. Quotas had to be met. Wakayama Iron Works housed a large industrial hospital and was forced to provide medicine and food to POWs if they were to be productive as laborers. John wanted to use its facilities for surgical cases, but he was refused access.