Shiki Haruko was seventeen years old when she was put to work at the mill. The civilians were isolated from the POWs, but one day she saw a line of prisoners walking to the plant with guards at either end. “They were thin, exhausted,” she said, and roped together to prevent escapes. POWs who died were cremated on a hill south of Wakayama. The ashes of civilians were deposited in Gokurakuji Temple, but those of the prisoners at Wakayama were never found.
The POW camp was a block from the beach in Wakayama and just across the street from Kasuga Shrine. But John and the other prisoners had little chance to partake of nature’s bounty on the lovely Kii Peninsula, where elementary schoolchildren as young as seven-year-old Nakamura Ryichirō were taught the expression Ki chiku bei ei, which means “devil-animal-American-British.” Still, Wakayama was a holiday at the shore compared to Fred’s experience in Osaka.
It was a bizarre location for a so-called POW hospital, a latter-day coliseum for the condemned. Ichioka was located beneath the concrete grandstand of a stadium at the Ichioka Athletic Field, not far from Ōsaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp. The hospital was established on October 19, 1942, for casualties of the Lisbon Maru, which had been torpedoed on September 27, 1942, by an American submarine, the USS Grouper, while on its way from Hong Kong to Shanghai. Of the 1,816 POWs aboard, there were 974 survivors, many of whom suffered from pneumonia, dysentery, and diphtheria contracted during the journey.
Ichioka was shaped like an attic space with a roof that met the floor on one side. A stone walkway fifty meters long divided the six sick bays that accommodated on average 100 patients. Wooden bays were placed eighteen inches above the floor, perpendicular to the walls, so patients lay on straw mattresses with their feet pointing toward the center. There were no windows, and there was no ventilation. Many of the sick were too weak to bathe at the wash trough. They lay curled up beneath wood fiber blankets, infested with lice, their hips covered with bedsores. These weren’t humans, Fred thought; they were scarecrows.
The POWs at Ichioka were predominantly American, English, and Australian. Two British Army regiments were represented, the Royal Scots and the Middlesex, who had served with the China Fleet in Hong Kong. The Australians came mostly from C Force, having surrendered in Singapore. There were also Canadians and Javanese, along with a half-dozen lascars, Chinese, and a Swede—merchant seamen who had been captured by a German surface raider in the Pacific. Together they had sailed from Singapore on November 28, 1942, aboard the Kamakura Maru and arrived in Nagasaki on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
At first, Surgeon-Lieutenant Charles Anthony Jackson, a Royal Navy volunteer reserve, was the sole POW physician at Ichioka. Three naval sick berth attendants and three men from the Royal Army Medical Corps assisted him. A big, bewhiskered man with a reassuring bedside manner, Jackson had been a Harley Street surgeon back in London. Jack Hughieson, a Royal Navy telegraphist whom Jackson enlisted to help set up the hospital at Ichioka, described his initial impression:Our first reaction to the conditions we found was one of complete disbelief. The stench, as we entered the tight, enclosed space, was so bad, breathing was extremely difficult, and most of us suffered periods of vomiting. Mountains of rotten clothing, canvas sacking in a pulp condition, and soggy cardboard lay all around mixed with human excrement. Rats were everywhere, that scattered with our every move.
Although one or two shovels were made available, most of us were forced to move this filth with our bare hands, and bury it in holes outside the confinement, in the surrounding grounds; which, when fenced in was to become our parade ground. If the Japanese Military really wanted to tell us what they thought of us POWs, this camp said it all.
Ichioka filled up with patients from POW camps in Kōbe and Osaka who were too ill to work. Others had just disembarked from transport ships or died on the trucks conveying them to the hospital. The dead were piled up at one end of the camp. Rats feasted on corpses. Empty soy bean barrels were used as coffins. The Japanese insisted that two bodies fit into one barrel, which meant that POWs had to dislocate the bones of the deceased or break them to squeeze them in. Then the barrels were hauled outside the camp, doused with kerosene, and set afire.
One of Hughieson’s jobs was down at a warehouse near the Osaka docks, shoveling rice from huge piles into sacks that he loaded onto Japanese Army transport trucks. Only when he finished was he allowed to sweep up the spillage, which included cigarette butts, matchsticks, and rat droppings. These became POW rations.
Jackson was livid, and when he asked the Japanese for an explanation, they answered him with a beating. In the meantime the men soaked the rice overnight so it would be clean before they cooked it, and they supplemented their diet by stealing fish heads at a dockside market. They had a watery bowl of rice for breakfast; a thin vegetable soup with three tiny finger rolls for lunch; and a small bowl of rice and barley porridge for dinner. When the Red Cross sent cough medicine to the camp, the POWs used it to flavor their rice and soup. They made tea by bringing water in an American canteen to a boil. Once the beverage was brewed, they removed the tea leaves so they could be dried and smoked. Nothing was wasted, and if you didn’t have any tea, you simply drank hot water.
Medical supplies were furnished monthly by the Ōsaka Military Hospital, but the stocks of magnesium sulfate, kaolin, and atropine were limited. The Japanese at Ichioka didn’t just rifle Red Cross parcels, they stole them outright. Some drugs could be purchased illegally from the guards, but there was no anesthesia. For surgery, Jackson used a razor as a scalpel and a hacksaw blade for amputations, sterilizing them first in the water that had been boiled for rice. He turned to his corpsmen to hold down patients during operations. Once Jackson resorted to using his own nail clippers to amputate the toes of a POW who had developed gangrene as a result of “painful feet.”
From November 1942 until July 1943, 2nd Lieutenant Nishiura Kazuhiko was the Japanese medical officer in charge of Ichioka, and he took every opportunity to tell Jackson that the sooner his patients died, the better. The purpose of Ichioka was to weed out the sick patients from the healthy ones, so the commandants in the Ōsaka work camps could boast a better percentage of POWs toiling on the emperor’s behalf. Sergeant Major Okano Kihichirō, by contrast, treated the POWs kindly, even if, as Jackson said, he “would not put himself to any great inconvenience to ensure justice.”
Jackson was utterly unafraid of the Japanese and intervened regularly on his patients’ behalf. The sick received one-third of the rations allotted to working POWs, which were “inadequate to maintain life,” he alleged in October 1943. First Lieutenant Matsuyama Susumu, who succeeded Nishiura, asked the patients in one of the mess halls if anyone was hungry. Some of them were so weak they could barely make it from their beds to the table. They all raised their hands. At which point Matsuyama demanded that the men fall in, and the guards—Katō Masayoshi and Nayakayama Tarōkichi—began to thrash them, Jackson included, with belts, bamboo poles, and clogs. The Americans were singled out for especially harsh treatment. Tech Sergeant Sam Chasinov of the Coast Artillery Corps was beaten unconscious. Jackson revived him with an injection of vita-camphor, and when he came to, he was beaten again. The Japanese then ordered two English patients to finish eating all of the food. The men became violently ill; one went into a seizure. The rampage lasted two hours, after which the patients were drilled for another hour in Japanese Army commands. Within three weeks “four of the victims had died of their illnesses, which were undoubtedly aggravated by the experience,” Jackson stated.
The guards—among them Bandō Bunhachi, a gunzoku, or civilian attached to the Japanese Army, and Katō Masayoshi, nicknamed “North and South” for his wandering eyes—were easily provoked. Katō drilled the men relentlessly to call them to attention (Ki o tsuke!) or to get them to bow (keirei), or just to drill into them that he was the “big man.” He made the POWs do tenko numerous times, sometimes during the night, and often to the accompaniment of slapping and kicking.
The beatin
gs were most severe after the guards’ monthly ration of sake. One night not just one guard but all of them came for tenko, wooden clogs in their hands or leather belts wrapped around their fists. The belts were the worst because of the lashing you’d get from the metal tongue. They also tried to kick the men in the testicles, which meant your shins and knees took the brunt of the blows in self-defense. The last thing you could do was go down; otherwise they’d be on you like a pack of dogs. As much as there was talk of striking back, “you took a bashing if you wanted to get home,” as simple as that, said Roland “Dixie” Dean, a frontline artillery man in the Australian army who became a “piss tin and bedpan orderly,” as he put it, by default.
In April 1944 the guards set up a race for the lascars and Chinese POWs. One of them, nicknamed “Lofty,” filled a large bowl to overflowing with rice while the seventeen smaller ones were allotted just a few grains. Katō escorted the men to the far end of the hall and explained the rules. The first man to the table won the entire bowl of rice; the rest would go hungry. The POWs immediately began to jostle for position, fights broke out, and the guards restored order by whacking them with bamboo poles. Lofty blew his whistle, and the race began. The men surged down a narrow corridor, sick POWs were trampled underfoot; others were knocked into the concrete columns that supported the roof. When the winner claimed his trophy, he was thrown to the ground, the rice scattered onto the floor, and the men scurried for the remains—to the delight of the two guards.
The heat under the stadium’s grandstand was unbearable during the summers. POWs quickly became dehydrated. Living conditions were no better for the Japanese, but at least they could cool off outdoors in the shade. The guards seized upon an idea to reduce the temperature inside. They gave buckets and bedpans to a group of fifty POWs, who stacked them by the faucets at the center of the stadium track. Then they formed the men into a chain that extended to the top of the bleachers. The Japanese carefully delineated their roofline from that of the prisoners. The buckets and bedpans were filled with water, the POWs passed them from man to man, dumped them on the concrete steps above the Japanese quarters, and then threw them back down to a “catcher” in the field, where they were refilled and the process began all over again.
One empty bucket fell short of its “catcher” and splintered on the concrete steps. The guards were furious and systematically beat every man in line. Work continued into the late afternoon. Finally a guard known as “Slap Happy Larry” ordered the POWs to “quick-march” out the main gate. A crowd of Japanese women and children gathered from the neighborhood to watch the barefoot prisoners in their fundoshi. Slap Happy Larry decided to put on a show for his audience and began beating the men so violently with a bamboo pole that some lost control of their bowels. He berated the POWs for carelessly breaking one of the emperor’s wooden tubs. John Quinn of the Royal Marines remembered hearing applause from the spectators. For nights to come, the prisoners slept on their stomachs—their backs and shoulders raw from their wounds.
One day Lofty lined up six lascars in a corridor opposite six Chinese POWs and ordered them to hit one another in the face. The men reluctantly exchanged punches until Lofty gave a more vigorous lesson in how the sport should be played. Soon, a melee broke out, which the Japanese ended after twenty minutes. The game was called taiko binta, and it was foisted upon Japanese recruits in basic training.
Time now for round two. Six Americans stood opposite six British POWs. The Allies had already decided that they wouldn’t indulge the Japanese. They remained perfectly still, arms at their sides. Lofty was furious. Katō returned with two loaded rifles and threatened to shoot the POWs.
“Fuck the bastards,” one of the Americans said. “We’d just as well be dead as put up with this bullshit. Fuck them.”
“There we stood,” said Quinn, “twelve pathetic, emaciated humans, ravaged and two and a half years into our period of starvation and degradation, and a sorry sight we must have looked. But twelve glorious and valiant people.”
Occasionally the POWs engaged in more than passive resistance. Vengeance sometimes won out over suffering. When Japanese guards asked the Australian corpsmen for injections to treat their syphilis, “we always made sure the needle was dipped into the sputum tin of one of the TB patients before it was used,” confessed Dixie Dean. Jackson would have nothing to do with the practice.
Nosu was known as the “Mad Butcher” of Ichioka, and his behavior struck the navy doctors as nothing short of bizarre. To cure diarrhea and dysentery he placed punks on the abdomens of patients, who were held down until the embers burned out, leaving scars the size of smallpox vaccination marks. He encouraged POWs experiencing “painful feet” to soak them in buckets of ice water or even snow, which often resulted in frostbite and required amputation. But there was another experimental procedure the Japanese performed that had even more serious repercussions.
It was May 9, 1943. The weather had warmed up, and a group of patients was sitting outside in the sun picking lice off of their undergarments. Second Lieutenant Nishiura Kazuhiko, the Japanese medical officer, strode by in high, black polished boots with a “cheese knife”—his samurai sword—swinging at his side. Four guards accompanied him. He told Jackson of his plans. The “painful feet” patients, he determined after reading a German medical text, were suffering from primary erythromelalgia, an unusual vasodilation disorder characterized by burning feet or hands. But the cause of primary erythromelalgia is unknown. Nishiura decided to treat it surgically. In an attempt to decrease or eliminate the pain caused by the syndrome, he would divide the sympathetic nerves in the abdomen. The procedure, called a sympathectomy, was a difficult and potentially dangerous operation.
Jackson was vehemently opposed to the idea—and was beaten unconscious for airing his opinion. Nishiura proceeded to select eight men, among them Simon S. McCloud, Staff Sergeant Carl E. Western of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, H. Gay of the Royal Navy, and John Kidd, the feisty yeoman who had been knocked down by MacArthur as the general dashed into Malinta Tunnel during an air raid on Corregidor. Kidd was so bloated from wet beriberi that he could barely sit. His legs had swollen to twice their normal size. His abdomen was distended from edema, and his feet and toes were excruciatingly sensitive.
The patients were loaded into the rear of a dump truck and driven half an hour away to the Osaka Military Hospital. The first to be operated on was McCloud. After nearly an hour and forty-five minutes, it was Kidd’s turn. He entered the OR, where he saw McCloud lying on the floor, surrounded by bloody gauze. The steel operating table was filthy. The doctor wore soiled cotton gloves. He injected Kidd with a spinal anesthetic—and hit a nerve that gave him a jolt like an electric shock and caused his legs to shoot straight out in front of him. An assistant held Kidd’s feet while the doctor continued with the injection, then made the first incision in Kidd’s abdomen. A geyser of fluid shot out of Kidd’s saturated tissue where ordinarily there would be fat. Kidd was turned on his back, and the doctor made a seven-inch incision. After thirty minutes Kidd began to regain consciousness. He tried to get up and was punched over the left eye and slammed back down onto the operating table. Then he was given an intramuscular injection and a sheet was tied across his chest so he couldn’t move. Kidd drifted in and out of a twilight state. He heard voices speaking quickly and then felt searing pain as the skin around the wound was grabbed roughly and closed. When the operation was over, Kidd was hoisted into the dump truck and hauled back to Ichioka, where he lay on the straw-covered floor.
There was no medication for postoperative pain or infection, and soon Kidd spiked a fever. At the end of the first week Jackson began removing Kidd’s stitches. When he reached the next-to-last suture, the incision burst open. Blood and pus streamed out of Kidd’s body and onto the mat beneath him. The stench was horrific. There was a gaping hole in his belly. Corpsmen irrigated the site with ordinary tap water and each day drained nearly a Klim container full of discharge. But the wound would
not heal. Kidd’s peritoneum was in danger of being torn from the walls of the abdomen.
Jackson was so concerned about the buildup of fluids that he inserted a six-inch probe into Kidd’s right side. The probe disappeared. “The stitches have rotted, and the muscle is like a rubber band being cut and retracted,” he told Kidd. “The infection has reached all the way around to the center of your back, where the fluid is being gathered.” Jackson retrieved the probe with a dental forceps and applied a butterfly bandage, but the incision refused to close.
Sixteen days after the operation, Jackson came to a decision. “Kid-die,” he began in his clipped English accent, “we’re going to have to sew you up. Otherwise, you’re going to die.”
“Well, okay,” Kidd replied in a flat Texas drawl.
“So we have three problems,” Jackson continued.
“What’s that?” Kidd said, more of a challenge than a question.
“One, we don’t have anything to do it with, except the kind of needle you sew your clothes with. We have some cotton thread. We have some shirt buttons. We’ll use those to suture you up.”
Kidd nodded, waiting.
“The second problem,” Jackson said, and paused, “is that you’re going to have to help.”
“What can I do?” Kidd asked.
“You’re going to have to suck in your stomach so the needle doesn’t perforate the stomach wall and spread the infection inside your abdomen. Otherwise you will die.”
Conduct Under Fire Page 42