Convoy MATA-30 was moving slowly, too slowly through the swift current of the Bashi Channel. But Suzuki Shō, chief navigator of the Harukaze, knew it would be difficult to pick up the sound of enemy propellers by hydrophone if the destroyer were moving at a faster speed. The Harukaze was tasked with locating hostile submarines, luring them away from the convoy, and if possible destroying them. If for some reason the Harukaze was unable to fire, at least it could make it impossible for the enemy to strike. A submarine wouldn’t move if its captain knew it had been detected.
The convoy was an emergency configuration. The bombing of Manila had forced the Japanese to leave in such a hurry that Suzuki couldn’t remember there being the usual “convoy meeting” before embarkation. But his route up the Bashi Channel was all too familiar. American submariners knew it so well that they called the waters between Luzon and Formosa “Convoy College,” a campus where “wolf packs” took lessons in picking off their prey. It was little help that the vessels in MATA-30 operated at varying speeds.
Wolf packs of two or more boats represented a change in strategy for the U.S. submarine offensive against the Imperial Japanese Navy and merchant marine. Japanese convoys were larger, stronger, and better defended. Wolf packs carried more firepower and had greater maneuverability, and their number allowed for diversionary tactics. Their skippers received intelligence from ULTRAs, they used short-range radio sparingly, and when there was TBS (talk between ships), it was in code.
The KokuryMaru, a passenger ship, seemed the most obvious target to Suzuki. He navigated a zigzag course from the beginning. Once the ships approached the southern end of Luzon Strait, the plan was for five of them—the Kimikawa Maru, KokuryMaru, Kikusui Maru, RyōfMaru, and Shikisan Maru—to proceed at top speed, leaving the others to follow in their wake.
At 0600 on October 23 the Japanese destroyers picked up radio signals from enemy submarines. Three hours later, when MATA-30 was approximately 200 miles west of Cape Bojeador, the Harukaze intercepted more signals. South of the Tang in Formosa Strait, three American wolf packs lay in wait: the Snook and the Cobia; the Icefish, Drum, and Sawfish , known as “Banister’s Beagles”; and the Blackfish, Seadragon, and Shark II, or “Blakely’s Behemoths.” The Harukaze accelerated to seven knots.
At 1730 the Sawfish unleashed a torpedo at the port side of the Kimikawa Maru, causing a terrific explosion in the No. 7 hold. A converted seaplane tender, it sank in less than three minutes. Then just after midnight on October 24 the Snook ripped into the Shinsei Maru. The torpedo was a dud, but the hole it caused forced the passenger-cargo ship to slow down. Before the next hour was out, the KokuryMaru was nailed in her starboard side and engine room.
Convoy MATA-30 was in disarray. The ships spread out, but the attacks only gained in ferocity. At 0315 the Snook fired another dud, this time at the starboard side of the tanker Kikusui Maru, then made up for the embarrassment with a shot that exploded in her bow and a third that set the boiler room area on fire. For an encore, the Snook stopped the Tenshin Maru dead in her tracks at 0605, slamming her port side with one torpedo and tearing open the wound with another. The ship split in two forward of the bridge and disappeared below the waves in a mere two minutes.
College was going well, and there was only a day’s worth of classes before graduation. In the next eight hours the Drum sank the passenger-cargo ship Shikisan Maru in less than two minutes. The Seadragon sent the Taiten Maru up in flames and down stern first. Then she finished off the ailing Shinsei Maru. At 1405, just as the Eikō Maru was rescuing the last survivors of the Shinsei Maru, the Sealion roared back and buried the cargo ship in a paupers’ grave.
In less than twenty-four hours the U.S. Navy had sunk eight of the twelve vessels in convoy MATA-30. A total of 41,228 tons of merchant shipping had been destroyed. Now it was Commander Ed Blakely’s turn.
It was late afternoon. The South China Sea was flecked with white-caps. The wind was blowing from the west as the Arisan Maru steamed through the Bashi Channel off southern Formosa. Most of the POWs on board were unaware of the damage that American submarines had inflicted on MATA-30. But the captain was. The Arisan Maru sailed under radio silence. A few of the men on the cooking and water detail saw wreckage in the water and survivors who appeared to be Japanese, thought Calvin Graef. They tried to get a better look but were cracked on the head for doing so.
Just before 1700, the time of the evening meal, Japanese sailors and guards suddenly began sprinting for the bow. Graef glanced over the starboard side of the ship and saw the rippling wake of a torpedo as it sped toward the stern, barely missing it. Seconds later another torpedo raced toward the bow from the opposite direction, sending the Japanese scrambling back to the stern. It missed “by inches,” Graef said.
Sirens wailed. The Japanese shunted the cooking detail down into the hold. “C’mon, navy!” the men below bellowed. Some prayed to die. A chaplain gave absolution. Resolution would be such a relief. One of the 5-inch guns on deck had just begun firing when George Ferguson and the men in the No. 2 hold felt a terrific concussion. A torpedo from the Shark had slashed into the starboard side of the No. 3 hold. The Arisan Maru trembled, her engines stopped. Her aft mast crumpled, and the sternpost rudder split apart. Water flooded through the jagged holes made by the torpedo.
The Arisan Maru buckled amidship but remained afloat. The bow stayed level for roughly two and a half hours. The stern, which carried depth charges, began to go down first.
Joined in its fury by the Take, the Harukaze went after the Shark with a vengeance. The two destroyers fired multiple depth charges. The U.S. Navy Security Station in Washington, D.C., known as OP-20-G, was listening in on messages from the Harukaze, which at 1739 “attacked on sound, the submarine which torpedoed the Arisan Maru. Sinking generally confirmed.” Heavy oil, clothing, and cork floated to the surface.
“Tried to contact Shark, unable to raise her,” reported the Seadragon. “Shark cannot be contacted,” confirmed the Snook. Ed Blakely and his crew were never heard from again.
The Harukaze and the Take returned to the Arisan Maru seven or eight miles away, searching for survivors. First Lieutenant Funatsu Toshio wanted to machine-gun the POWs. That would be chaos, said the captain, Sugino Minemaru. There were only fifteen or so armed guards on board. An interpreter told the POWs to remain where they were. Then the Japanese cut the bamboo and rope ladders leading down into hold No. 1 and slammed the hatch covers over the No. 2 hold.
There was panic at first, but before long a strange calm fell over the men. The relief some had prayed for had arrived with irrevocable force.
“Remember just one thing,” said Major Paul M. Jones of the 26th Cavalry Regiment, Philippine Scouts, and a native Tennesseean: “We’re American soldiers. Let’s play it that way to the very end of the script.”
An army chaplain began to recite: “O Lord, if it be Thy will to take us now, give us the strength to be men. . . .”
They could hear the Japanese running back and forth above on the steel deck, but within an hour they had abandoned ship. The Japanese took with them the only two lifeboats on board, which had a capacity of sixty men apiece. The situation seemed hopeless, and it was this realization that finally spurred many of the POWs to action, seized by a desperate desire to live.
Men shinnied up the huge stanchions in the No. 1 hold and dropped ladders down for their buddies below. They lowered one of the long wooden hatch covers into the No. 2 hold, propping it up against a bulkhead, so others could climb out onto the deck. They even managed to evacuate the sick until no POWs remained in the holds. A few Japanese who missed the departing lifeboats remained topside. They had no means of escaping except by jumping overboard. “We took care of them,” said Graef coolly. The POWs had no lifeboats and no life rafts, but there were plenty of kapok life belts. The waves were cresting ten to fifteen feet high from a lingering typhoon. The air was cold. The wind continued to blow from due west.
At the sight of other ships in the
convoy, some immediately leaped into the sea, medical officers and chaplains among them. They clung to spars, crates, oil cans—anything they could get their hands on. Others had only one thing on their minds: food. They ransacked the galley, gorging themselves like dogs at a bowl of scraps before almost certain death. They stuffed their mouths with fists full of rice and sugar, guzzled bottles of catsup, furiously smoked two or three cigarettes at a time, only to vomit and cramp up once they hit the water.
Second Lieutenant Robert Overbeck was one of the first to swim out of the torpedo hole in the sinking ship. About forty other POWs headed toward the two Japanese destroyers in the area, shouting, waving, crying for help. The Harukaze was 500 yards away. Overbeck crawled up the iron rings on the sides of the ship and had almost made it to the deck when six Japanese beat him back down with the long bamboo poles they used to push men under water. His left arm was cut, and on approaching the Take, he met with a similar reception. Calvin Graef had a piece of his right ear nipped off in greeting, but he managed to get away. When Don Meyer saw that the Japanese were bent on rescuing only the Japanese, he and another POW threw a plank overboard and used it as a life raft. Several Japanese seaplanes surveyed the scene.
Once her boilers exploded, the Arisan Maru sank quickly at 1940. Her position was 20.00N 118.44E, southeast of the Pratas Reefs. The nearest land was Quantung Province, China, 250 miles away.
The Harukaze, meanwhile, took on board fifteen Japanese survivors but no POWs. “Am discontinuing sweep,” the captain said in a message intercepted by OP-20-G. “Have 11 patients who should be hospitalized.” At the bottom of the intercept, GI, the file and information section, noted: “Above despatch [sic] suggests HARUKAZE remained behind to pick up survivors of ARIYAMA MARU [sic] disaster and continue sweeping for enemy submarines while the convoy went on to port.”
By then “it was dark,” explained Fukuyama Tsuyoshi, the destroyer’s commanding officer, “and hard to see anyone in the water.” He had ordered his executive officer, Ueyanagi Isamu, not to rescue any prisoners of war, an order that was passed on to the assistant torpedo officer on the quarterdeck. The Take took on board another 347 Japanese survivors before steaming toward Takao. Shiga Hiroshi, the ship’s torpedo officer, could hear the POWs adrift at sea, whistling through their fingers, pleading to be rescued as the destroyer departed.
Overbeck saw a half-submerged lifeboat that had been cast off by the Japanese as they boarded one of the destroyers. The current carried it away, but Overbeck swam after it, removing his life preserver so he could swim faster. The boat was stripped of its equipment and supplies, except for one keg that was filled with salt water and another that contained a little fresh water. Overbeck, who had directed the excavation of tunnels and bomb shelters on Corregidor, stood up so that men who were calling out for help in the darkness would be able to locate him.
He was giving one POW directions when a large crate drifted into the side of the boat. He lifted the lid and saw, as if by a miracle, a sail and an anchor inside, as well as emergency rations from a Japanese lifeboat. He wrapped the canvas around himself to keep warm. Sergeant Avery Wilber was the first POW Overbeck helped on board. He had been wounded in the left arm from the explosion on the Arisan Maru and had been floating on a four-by-four for four or five hours. Overbeck shared the canvas with him. Then around midnight, as the moon was high, came Private Anton Cichy, paddling on a plank. At dawn the three men were joined by 1st Sergeant Calvin Graef and Corporal Donald Meyer, whom they spotted fifty yards away on a ramshackle bamboo raft.
All hands got to work. They bailed out the lifeboat and rigged a mast. Then at around 0900 they spotted a Japanese destroyer. They quickly took the rigging down and pretended to be dead. The destroyer circled the lifeboat like a shark. Guns were trained on the men as the vessel loomed within 100 yards, circling them again. The ship pulled away, and once it was out of sight, Overbeck raised the sail and set out northwest by west, using the sun as his guide and at night the stars. Wilber sat in the stern, steering the boat by tiller. In the meantime a keg of potable water had floated toward their lifeboat. The men hauled it aboard. They now had food, water, and the consolation of one another. During the next two days two Japanese planes flew overhead, but at an altitude high enough, Meyer hoped, to make identification impossible.
On the evening of October 26, after two days at sea, they caught sight of the East China coast. The weather was poor, and instead of trying to reach the mainland themselves, they pulled alongside a large fishing junk. Several Chinese families were on board—men, women, and children. The POWs were thrown a rope and invited on one at a time. The nine-man crew spoke no English, but the captain caught their drift. The POWs wanted to contact Chiang Kai-shek’s or American forces, if possible. “We go china to day,” the captain scribbled. But did he mean today, the POWs wondered, or in two days? Then he wrote down the words “American or British.” Wilber pointed to “American.” The captain smiled.
The Chinese made sure to destroy the lifeboat and any Japanese evidence. The captain’s wife fried some fish, boiled some rice, and prepared tea for the weathered survivors. They were even given tobacco and rolling papers. Then, once the nets were hauled in, the POWs ate again. They were treated to a bath and pampered with clean, warm clothes. They slept on deck that night, and when it began to rain, they were moved down to the crew’s quarters.
The next morning the captain took them by sampan to Kitchioh, in Kwangtung Province on the China coast. A Chinese magistrate named Mr. Lee, who spoke English, contacted Hai-feng, the site of a weather station operated by the Air and Ground Forces Resources and Technical Staff (AGFRTS) for the 14th Air Force. AGFRTS had been set up by the Office of Strategic Services to gather intelligence and disseminate propaganda in Japanese-occupied China. On the afternoon of October 28, Corporal Francis J. Baron of AGFRTS arrived in Kitchioh, and the POWs were escorted to the temporary headquarters of General Yu Yung Kee, a former aide of General Stilwell’s in Burma, who advised them to leave in the morning. They had landed on the only five-mile stretch of coast that wasn’t controlled by the Japanese. There were no roads out of Kitchioh, only footpaths. A security detail and a Chinese interpreter would assist them.
On October 29 they began a twelve-day journey in country. Disguised as natives, they were feted along the way by Chinese villagers who threw banquets for them, entertained them, and plied them with liquor. By foot, bicycle, jiaozi (sedan chair), and weapons-carrier, they traveled from Lu-feng to Hingning and Namyung. The Americans there radioed General Claire L. Chennault’s headquarters in Kunming to evacuate the POWs by plane. They left Namyung at noon on November 12 on a DC-3. When they arrived in Kunming, General Chennault, architect of the American Volunteer Group (better known as the Flying Tigers) and commander of U.S. air power in China, stood by to welcome them personally. From Kunming they flew over the Hump and on to New Delhi, where they caught sight of the Taj Mahal, then crossed Persia, North Africa, and the Atlantic, landing in New York on December 1, 1944. They reached their final destination of Washington, D.C., the very next day.
It didn’t seem possible, said Calvin Graef, that there were any other survivors of the Arisan Maru. The weather had been bitter and the seas high; the men were in poor condition; and there had been little wreckage to keep them afloat.
But while Overbeck had been one of the first men to abandon the sinking Arisan Maru on October 24, army corpsman Philip Brodsky and army doctor Corporal Russell L. Lash viewed the scene with almost surreal detachment from topside. Brodsky had broken his hand earlier down in the No. 2 hold when he punched a fellow POW in the face for stealing his rice ration. Once on deck he and Lash made sure they got their fair share of rice and sugar from the galley. Then they waited. The ship was listing from its starboard side, and Brodsky calmly waited for it to sink so the suction could pull him beneath the waves. What was the point in struggling anymore? He had suffered enough.
The aft deck of the Arisan Maru had peeled off from
port to starboard. You could peer down into the bowels of the boat, see water sloshing around, and hear the groan of steel whenever a wave rolled by. Around dusk the stern of the Arisan Maru broke off, pointing straight up, and the ship began to sink quickly. A loud explosion followed, and men dropped into the water. To Brodksy’s surprise, there was little suction. He slid off as easily as if he’d been on a raft at the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he’d enlisted in the army. Several hundred feet away in the water, Private 3rd Class Glenn Oliver saw “quite a few men still on the ship, some sitting, some standing and holding on to the rail” as she went under. Among them were dozens of men who had gathered around a chaplain and were praying.
Brodsky was an experienced swimmer, but his weight had dropped from 170 to 120 pounds, and he was hampered by a hurting hand. Lash weighed a mere 100 pounds, and within seconds Brodsky heard him calling. They found the remains of a benjo with a dozen other men clinging to it, each jostling for a better position. Then they spotted two wooden hatch covers, about ten by two feet. Brodsky found a four-foot plank, laid it down crosswise, and draped his body over it to hold the raft together. The friction tore at the skin of his arms. At night, he heard the sounds of men crying for help, and then the cries disappeared into the inky darkness. He and Lash remained together until dawn, when Lash decided that they should part company. Brodsky wanted him to stay; three hands were better than one, but he didn’t want to hinder Lash. He watched Lash swim away on his hatch cover until he lost sight of him at daylight. There were thirty or forty men in the distance and Brodsky called out to them, but he heard no one answer.
Around 1000 Brodsky saw the first sign of hope: a Japanese cruiser was heading toward him. Sailors were lined up along the deck railing. He pleaded with them in English and the little Japanese he had picked up from prison camp. The ship came within thirty feet. One of the sailors tossed an empty cigarette package at him as the cruiser passed by. He watched it disappear over the horizon. He was alone in the middle of the ocean, 250 miles from the coast of China, draped over two pieces of wood, a crucifix on the water.
Conduct Under Fire Page 49
