No argument there, Kidd thought. “Okay,” he replied.
“And the third problem . . .” Here Jackson took a long pause. “We have no anesthetic.”
Had Jackson been back in England, he would have used absorbent chromic catgut sutures to close the peritoneum and muscle layers and, for abdominal incisions, deep tension sutures made from either unabsorbent black silk, silkworm gut, linen thread, or wire. For deep tissue he would have asked his nurse for an eyed, round-bodied needle, and for the skin an eyed cutting-pointed needle. But that would have been in a British hospital. At Ichioka, Jackson had no surgical equipment, no anesthesia, no pain-killer. Just a needle, some thread, and a few buttons.
Jackson tempered the needle by heating it in the galley fires to put a suitable curve into it. He pushed the needle through Kidd’s skin, working from the inside out, extracting it with a forceps. Then he looped the thread through the two eyeholes of a button. It was a painful, laborious procedure, a test of will and endurance on the part of the patient, and a triumph of resourcefulness and resolution on the part of his doctor. By the time Jackson was finished, Kidd’s abdomen was as neatly buttoned together as a custom-made vest from a Savile Row tailor.
For months afterward Kidd was known as “Buttons,” and he remained inactive for half a year. He had to learn how to walk all over again. Eventually he was flexible enough to be able to sit down on the ground outside the Ichioka stadium, find a patch of clover, and start eating clumps of it. His weight by then had dropped to eighty pounds.
Kidd was lucky. The post-op complications experienced by Nishiura’s patients were many. Western lost the use of his legs. McCloud’s feet had to be amputated. Gay suffered a burst abdomen and died within a week.
Gay was not the first POW to die in Ichioka at the hands of a Japanese doctor. In 1942 two American POWs who had tried to escape were escorted to army regional headquarters. The camp commandant and Sergeant Sawamura Masatoshi were ordered to “deal with them suitably.” “Suitably” meant killing them, which a Japanese Army doctor did by injecting them with potassium cyanide. It was the ultimate perversion of a medical doctor’s role.
The Japanese suspected Jackson of keeping detailed medical records. Moreover, he had been performing unauthorized autopsies and questioned the official cause of death listed for several POWs. They searched his gear, went through his office, and removed all papers pertaining to POW diet, caloric intake, and malnutrition. He was beaten by Nosu, then taken to Ōsaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp, where he was made to stand at attention for twenty-four hours and was cross-examined. He returned to Ichioka badly bruised. On March 24, 1944, Jackson and a Dutch medical officer named Irens were transferred to Kamioka, a lead mining camp in Osaka. The Japanese wanted no more trouble from the POW doctors.
The next day Major Okano appointed Major John Finch Akeroyd, an Australian doctor who had been interned at Taisho, an Osaka subcamp, senior medical officer of Ichioka. When Fred Berley arrived on April 8, he became the ranking American medical officer, and a new Japanese commandant was soon assigned to Ichioka: Ohashi Hyōjirō.
Akeroyd was a large, imposing, mustachioed man, with an accent so thick that Fred had difficulty understanding him. Garrulous and generous, he was built like a rugby forward and had served as regimental medical officer with the 2/22nd Battalion before being taken prisoner on Rabaul. He had a wife, Barbara, and a young daughter, Margaret, who couldn’t remember what he looked like, it had been so long since she’d seen him.
Akeroyd smoked heavily and coughed constantly. Fred slept next to him beneath the lowest part of the hospital’s roofline. He could hear Akeroyd hacking away through the night and wondered if it was something more than smoker’s cough. The ward was riddled with tuberculosis. When Murray arrived at the stadium camp in June 1944, he was greeted warmly by Fred but he was horrified by conditions at Ichioka. Only one word could describe it: hellhole. What else would you call a so-called hospital where doctors beat patients and staff alike, where the quartermaster stole food from POWs who were so hungry they rooted around in the dirt like animals, where men begged to be taken back to their old camps because they believed they were in Ichioka not to get well but to die? On onionskin paper he kept a partial record of the medical experimentation at the camp and its disastrous consequences:It is important to note that the condition these patients were suffering from was a “new condition” (“Painful Feet”)—a disease due to inadequate nutrition & starvation. Treatment for this condition was simply improving the diet. Beyond this no effective form of treatment was known.
The abdominal sympathectomies performed by Lt. Nishiura were formidable operations—require extreme caution & delicacy even by the most skillful surgeons. The value of these operations for this condition was highly questionable even on theoretical grounds. In effect Lt. Nishiura was using these patients as guinea pigs.
The operation on Gay—without consent, & over the objection of Dr. Jackson—which resulted directly in Gay’s death—constitutes even in its most favorable light manslaughter.
These were not state-sponsored medical experiments, such as the extensive sterilization and castration operations performed by Nazi doctors in Auschwitz. Nor could they be justified on military grounds, as was the wide-scale testing of typhus sera in other German concentration camps. They were ad hoc experiments motivated by ignorance, sadism, and revenge.
The beatings at Ichioka were frequent, and how a man handled them could mean the difference between life and death. The worst part, Murray felt, was not the physical pain but the humiliation of not being able to strike back. You had to suppress your rage, swallow your pride, stare straight ahead, and keep your arms at your sides. You didn’t speak. You didn’t move. You tried your damnedest not to betray a flicker of emotion. You were forced into not reacting, and by doing so, you no longer registered pain, no longer acknowledged authority. Your fate was in someone else’s hands but you controlled the situation by entering a zone where psychologically the enemy had ceased to exist. You learned not to feel.
The stories Fred told Murray were chilling. Once a week the POWs at Ichioka were supposed to be issued fish or meat. On May 8 Fred saw a delivery of fish at the camp, but little of it surfaced at mealtime. Fred asked James Kelleher, the chief cook and formerly a leading stoker for the Royal Navy, why it wasn’t on the table.
“The Japs took it,” Kelleher explained.
Katō filched about twenty fish for the guards and their families, leaving few for the prisoners.
Kelleher and Quinn, who also worked in the kitchen, protested the theft, first to Bandō and then to quartermaster Kitamura Shozo. But Kitamura, known as “The Snake,” stole food regularly from the camp. Bandō was enraged with Kelleher for going over his head, and once Kitamura left, he struck the two cooks repeatedly about the face. Then he made them stand with their hands outstretched in front of Akeroyd and Berley’s offices, haranguing and slapping them every few minutes.
Fred was furious. Akeroyd thought a protest would be of no avail.
“Well, I think the ward officer should know about it,” Fred said.
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing we can do,” Akeroyd insisted.
“If you won’t go, I will,” Fred admonished.
Akeroyd went ahead and reported the incident to Major Okano, who was seated with a Japanese medical officer on his left and Katō on his right. The medical officer promptly sent for Bandō and dressed him down. Kelleher and Quinn were released immediately. The medical officer was none other than Ohashi Hyōjirō.
Tenko was scheduled for 2000, but it was later than usual that evening. Ōhashi had gone for the night. Fred, Akeroyd, and 2nd Lieutenant Evert Manuel Gonie, a Javanese pharmacist with the Royal Dutch East Indian Army, stood before the morgue. Ambulatory patients were positioned in front of each hospital bay to report the number of bedridden men in them as Katō checked the muster. Akeroyd saluted, but Katō refused to acknowledge him. Then Bandō came around from behind and began hitti
ng Akeroyd in the face. He screamed at the top of his lungs as he went down the row of prisoners, striking each one in turn. Katō unfastened his belt and worked Akeroyd over until Bandō returned and started down the aisle of prisoners again. Now Kitamura joined the fray along with Nakayama Giichi, who struck the men with his belt, jumping on top of a table so he could whip them in the face, ten lashes per man. They slapped, punched, and kicked the POWs, using bare hands, scabbards, and rubber-soled shoes. Sometimes three Japanese ganged up on one prisoner, as they did with Gonie. Next Katō stalked the sick bays, pulling men to their feet who he thought should be upright and pounding them mercilessly. One of them, Private Wade of the Royal Scots, had a rheumatic heart; another, an American lieutenant named Dupree, suffered from gangrenous feet. Akeroyd tried to intervene, only to be thrashed again by Bandō, who shouted as he went from bay to bay, “All men die, jōtō [good]! All men die!” The beating lasted ninety minutes, at the end of which Katō hustled Fred, Akeroyd, Gonie, and the Australian medic Sergeant R. A. Wickens into his office, where they were made to stand at attention before the beating resumed.
“Now you see you speak to doctor—no good!” Katō shouted.
There would be no mention of the incident to Dr. Ōhashi; the POWs had learned their lesson. Some of them were beaten so severely, they couldn’t see. Hughieson wasn’t sure that Fred would make it. But in time, his swelling went down, his cuts healed, and his bruises paled, though the memory of “the great fish incident,” as it was called, would never fade.
Dr. Ōhashi, Fred learned, was a highly regarded surgeon in Osaka. The fact that he had listened to Akeroyd’s complaint and acted on it immediately struck Fred as exceptional. Ohashi was a protégé of Fritz Hartel, a native of Saxony who had lectured on surgery and clinical medicine in Ōsaka. He had earned his medical degree in 1928 from the prestigious Ōsaka Prefectural Medical College. His thesis, on leukocytosis, was written in German.
Ōhashi was eager to know more about Western medicine and he also wanted to improve his English. Fred, who for so long resisted speaking Japanese, spent an hour each afternoon tutoring him. And as it had been for the Nagasaki interpreters more than 300 years before, language was the bridge to cultural understanding.
Fred persuaded Ōhashi to personally examine some of the other patients at Ichioka. Ōhashi was shocked by their condition. He sat down on a chair and between clenched teeth emitted a long “Sssaaaahhh.” Within days he hosted a veritable banquet, with more food than Fred had seen since the war began. Shortly afterward he confirmed the rumor: they would be moving to the new hospital in Kōbe, and Ohashi would be its commandant.
A new POW medical staff was drawn from the doctors and corpsmen in Ichioka and the surrounding camps. In June 1944 Lieutenant Commander John Allison Page of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve arrived in Ichioka. Page had been captured at St. Teresa’s Hospital in Kowloon, imprisoned at Amagasaki Subcamp near Ōsaka, and was named surgeon and principal medical officer. “The Royal Navy blokes welcomed him as they would have the Archangel Gabriel,” said Dixie Dean. Akeroyd would be the sole Australian medical officer, while Ohashi let Fred select two other doctors and one dentist for the American contingent. It was an easy decision. John was called in from Wakayama so he could rejoin Fred, Murray, and Stan Smith. Together with Louis Indorf, a physician from Timor, the Javanese pharmacist Gonie, and twenty corpsmen and cooks, the new Kōbe POW medical staff would care for the sick among the 6,000 POWs in fourteen Osaka-area camps. Unfortunately Akeroyd himself became a patient.
On July 3, 1944, Ohashi took the unusual step of escorting Akeroyd and Fred to the Osaka Military Hospital for fluoroscopies. He also arranged for an X-ray of Akeroyd’s chest, at a time when most hospitals in Japan had no X-ray film whatsoever. Sure enough, Akeroyd had a tubercular lesion on his left lung about an inch and a half in diameter and filled with fluid. Page and Fred operated on him on a kitchen table back in their office at Ichioka. John handled his post-op care, but Akeroyd’s health remained poor. Fred figured the only reason he didn’t catch the disease himself was because of the resistance he had developed as a result of a small tubercle on his lung that dated back to his sophomore year in college. As it was, he didn’t think he would survive another three months in Ichioka.
Fortunately, Ohashi Hyōjirō proved a man of his word. In just a matter of days Fred, John, and Murray saw the last of the stadium camp. On July 10, 1944, the newly designated Hospital No. 30, otherwise known as the Kōbe POW Hospital, opened its doors to the Allied prisoners of the Japanese.
19
Bad Timing and Good Luck
KŌBE IS BEAUTIFUL. Across the bay from Osaka, it nestles against the Rokkō Mountains, whose foreshortened peaks lend it the air of a bonsai garden. Originally a fishing village, Kōbe sprang up from Hyōgo Harbor, which was opened to foreign trade in January 1867, the year the shogun tendered his resignation as the Lord Chief Executive of the feudal government and a month before the emperor Meiji acceded to the throne. In 1868 the strip of fields to the east that included Hashiudo, Futatsuchaya, and Kōbe was staked out for foreign settlement. In 1880 the area was incorporated as the City of Kōbe, and in 1892 Hyōgo and Kōbe Harbors were combined into the Port of Kōbe. The main rail line from Shimonoseki would link Kōbe to Tōkyō.
Kōbe, said a municipal guide published in 1929, was “the vestibule of the country,” boasting some thirty foreign consulates and residents from more than forty countries. Vibrant and cosmopolitan, Kōbe was the sixth-largest city in Japan, with a population that stood at 976,234 in 1940. You could hike in the hills in the morning and go for a swim in the afternoon, then shop in the elegant Moto-machi district or catch a Hollywood film in Shinkaichi. The talkies came to Japan that year, and Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, and Mary Pickford were immensely popular. Japanese girls were quick to copy their hairstyles. Japanese men wore the round, horn-rimmed roido spectacles made fashionable by the comic Harold Lloyd. Jazz was another American import that appealed to Japanese taste, thanks to Horiuchi Keizō, an MIT engineering student who joined the NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation). And then there was baseball. With its own English-language newspaper and an “American pier” where foreign ships were berthed, Kōbe was Japan’s most Westernized municipality.
But Kōbe was also a center of heavy industry, which was concentrated along the coastline in an east-west direction. Even before the war, signs were posted throughout the city in English and Japanese: NO PHOTOGRAPHING AND NO SKETCHING. Nippon Airplane and Kawanishi Aircraft, Japan’s fourth-largest producer of combat aircraft, had plants in Kōbe. The Kawasaki Shipbuilding Yards constructed the 1915 battleship Haruna and produced 2,000-ton submarines, cruisers, and the aircraft carrier Zuikaku for the Japanese Navy. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries manufactured diesel engines, ship turbines, locomotives, and merchant vessels. Kōbe Steel turned out tanks, marine engines, and finished ordnance. A major source of military production, Kōbe was Japan’s most important international port.
The hospital occupied the dormitory of a former American mission school in a quiet, hillside location in Kumouchi, Kōbe. Modest in size, three two-story wood-shingle buildings connected by covered walkways served as wards that could accommodate up to 200 patients. The ground floor of a separate administrative building housed an office, laboratory, and pharmacy, as well as dental, X-ray, and operating rooms. Upstairs were quarters for the doctors and corpsmen. Equipment was Japanese and American and included two small sterilizers and a charcoal-heated autoclave. There was ether and chloroform for anesthesia, morphine for pain, and a pharmacy stocked with medicine for a variety of ailments. From an article in the Mainichi (Daily) Shimbun the doctors learned of a new miracle drug called penicillin that refrigerated store ships were delivering to Pacific bases, though none was available to them in Kōbe. Still, the new hospital was a godsend after that hellhole Ichioka. There was a communal bath, a vegetable garden, and just beyond the fence, a creek that ran down the east side of the compound. The International
YMCA donated books, religious services were tolerated, and POWs were permitted to write home once every four months.
A hospital canteen was open for business twice weekly and sold ocha (tea). The men received two meals daily and relished the daikon that appeared in their diet or, when the large white radish was unavailable, miso-shiru. By July 1944 Tōkyō had reduced the official rice ration for POWs to 390 grams, or 610 grams for heavy labor. At the Kōbe POW Hospital, the Swiss legation erroneously claimed that prisoners were receiving 3,000 calories a day, the same quantity and quality of food as the camp guards, when in fact they were receiving far less.
The POWs who worked as stevedores for Mitsui, Takahama, and Kōbe-go were held in a former warehouse of the Butterfield-Swires Company down by the waterfront. There were British prisoners from Hong Kong, and Australians who arrived in the Kōbe-Ōsaka area in 1943, survivors of J Force. Captain C. R. Boyce was the Australian medical officer in charge, and while he considered the Australians “pampered” in terms of medical treatment, he began referring more serious cases to the Kōbe POW Hospital.
Page requested that the hospital be marked with Red Cross insignia. The Japanese refused, just as Britain had refused to identify its ships for fear of attack by German U-boats. A Red Cross would only invite bombing by the Americans, Page was told, “because they always hit them.”
Between them, Page and Fred performed nearly 100 operations at Kōbe, setting fractures, suturing lacerations, removing tumors, and draining abscesses. Patients recuperated on mattresses on the floor or on tatami-covered platforms before they were returned to work at Kōbe House and Ōsaka, Yodogawa and Sakurajima, Tsumori and Hirohata, Umeda and Tanagawa. John oversaw the tuberculosis ward, where he was assisted by corpsmen Ernie Irvin and Bud Flood, who were transferred from Ichioka and helped operate the X-ray machine. Murray worked in neurology and psychiatry.
Conduct Under Fire Page 43
