Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  The Allies had crushing air and naval superiority, but in defense of the homeland, Willoughby estimated in March 1945, the Japanese could muster a ground force of 937,000. That same month Japan’s cabinet adopted the Decisive Battle Educational Measures Guidelines. With the exception of grades one through six, classes were suspended so schoolchildren could engage in preparations for the final battle. Soon Japan enacted the People’s Volunteer Corps Law, which enabled the government to draft or organize into militias all men between fifteen and sixty and all women from seventeen to sixty years of age. Instilled with the “Spirit of Three Million Spears,” women were trained to defend themselves with bamboo staves against an American invasion. In one remote prefecture, high school girls were taught to protect their honor with carpenter’s awls. “You must aim at the enemy’s abdomen,” a teacher warned. “Understand? If you don’t kill at least one enemy soldier, you don’t deserve to die!”

  It was total war.

  A slew of patients were admitted to the Kōbe POW Hospital in May. Among Murray’s cases were Henry Severian Hardt, a civilian worker from Wake who suffered from such severe retinitis, he couldn’t see his own fingers within ten inches of his face; William Henry Lidington, a telegraphist with the Royal Navy, whose acute glomerulonephritis turned his urine a sickly reddish-brown and accounted for his grotesque edema and hypertension; Fate O’Brien Bolgiano, another Wake Islander who was physically fit but displayed a host of neurotic symptoms, which gradually disappeared once he was put to work at the hospital; John Roger Hill, an Australian ill with pulmonary tuberculosis; James Frank Lupton, a U.S. Navy Seaman 2nd Class; and Corporal John Edgar Goddard, a 60th Coast Artillery man from Imperial, Nebraska, who also suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis.

  One of the more unusual cases was a young POW from Kōbe House who had injured his toe while working as a stevedore. The Japanese neglected to give him a tetanus injection. He was John’s patient, but the guards wouldn’t let him stay in the hospital. Two days later they brought him back with a terrific infection—the early stages of tetanus. The slightest vibration triggered a spasm so violent that his back arched until his feet nearly touched his head. Ōhashi was able to obtain some tetanus serum from another hospital, but John had to sedate him first so Ōhashi could administer it. After a few weeks the patient began to recover. Rabies at Bilibid, now tetanus at Kōbe: the three navy doctors had never seen such diseases before.

  Hunger drove men to extremes. Pharmacist’s Mate 3rd Class Russell D. Chamberlin had a psychiatric patient in his charge and was supposed to make sure he was bathed, clothed, and fed. Word got around that Chamberlin was simply feeding himself. What if other corpsmen got the same idea? The worst thing that could happen would be for the men to start turning on one another, Fred thought; he’d make an example of Chamberlin. He took the corpsman downstairs into the cellar and began beating the daylights out of him.

  Murray ran after them. “Fred,” he admonished, “you can’t do that!”

  Fred was beside himself. Stealing food from a sick POW? How low could you go? And a corpsman to boot? The son of a bitch. Rage cast reason aside. Discipline collapsed at the sight of its own weakness. Page and John Bookman couldn’t believe the scene unfolding before their eyes.

  “I can’t?” Fred challenged Murray.

  “No, you can’t,” Murray shot back.

  “Well, who’s going to stop me?” goaded the Golden Gloves champion.

  “I am,” countered Murray, who was a good half-foot taller, “because I’m a helluva lot bigger than you are.”

  Fred backed down, abashed at his own behavior. Afterward the doctors drafted a court-martial for Chamberlin and replaced him with Pharmacist’s Mate 1st Class Richard L. Bolster.

  On another occasion a British POW was accused of stealing Spam but refused to admit it; Fred decided to find out for himself the truth of the matter. He forced a stomach pump down the man’s throat and tendered up the incriminating evidence. Stealing food was forbidden, trading food was forbidden, and swapping tobacco—which assuages the appetite but has no nutritional value—was forbidden, but none of the acts excused, Fred felt more keenly than anyone, his own lapse in judgment.

  Chamberlin’s counterpart was a Japanese orderly named Saki, who kept track of parcels received and distributed to POWs. Private Allen Beauchamp, who had served with the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, worked in Saki’s office and saw for himself the packages that had been pilfered. But theft was hardly confined to Japanese enlisted men.

  Over in Nishinomiya, the Miyazakis were reduced to living on beans, millet, pumpkin, and sweet potatoes. They purchased what was available on the black market and supplemented their diet with fruit and vegetables from the Ōhashi family farm in Wakayama. Shunya remembered Ōhashi bringing back items he had lifted from Red Cross parcels at the hospital: Spam, crackers, grape jelly, Jell-O, Camel cigarettes, even toilet paper. Surely it was wrong, but what else could you do if your family was hungry? The army generals, Dr. Ōhashi told Shunya, were bringing Japan to the brink of catastrophe.

  POW corpsmen stealing from their patients. POW doctors beating their orderlies. Japanese guards stealing from their prisoners. Japanese officers stealing what their guards stole. Breaches of discipline on the part of the medical staff at the Kōbe POW Hospital were exceedingly rare, but they showed how thin the moral fabric of camp life was wearing.

  Japan was resolved on fighting to the bitter end, the Mainichi Shimbun reported after V-E Day. “The Japanese people must be turned into war power,” declared Admiral Ōnishi, “and if the enemy should land, they should take up arms and defeat him even if they suffer losses of three and five million. This is not impossible.”

  Ōhashi saw it differently. “Soon you will be going home,” he confided to Fred. The B-29 precision attack on the Kawanishi aircraft plant that spilled over into eastern Kōbe on May 11 reinforced his point: America’s technological advantage was incontestable.

  But what was home for a man who had been away from it for three and a half years? What was home for someone whose family and friends were not relatives or acquaintances but fellow prisoners? What remained of the life that you had loved and left behind?

  It had been a long time since Murray had heard from Laura Reade. When he received a letter from her at the Kōbe POW Hospital in May 1945, he opened it with anticipation, silently read it, and kept the contents to himself. She had met someone.

  She had been singing up at an Adirondack resort, and one summer afternoon a fellow in the audience had heard her perform “Là ci darem la mano” (Give me your hand) from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He was smitten.

  When he ran into her at the front desk where she handled the incoming mail, he had asked, “Is there anything for me?”

  “What’s your name?” Laura inquired.

  “Blank,” he said.

  She laughed and asked: “But what’s your real name?”

  “Gerald Blank,” he replied.

  Gerald didn’t think he stood a chance with Laura—she was wild for the camp athletic director. But she agreed to go on a few dates with him back in New York City. They didn’t have much money, but they had enough for the movies and cheap seats at the opera. And they got along wonderfully well. She told Gerald she had been dating Murray, and when she referred to a restaurant she and Murray had once gone to, Gerald felt a twinge of envy; he couldn’t afford to take her there. She mentioned to Gerald that Murray had gone overseas to the Philippines and was now a POW. Poor guy, Gerald thought, and thought no more about him. He proposed to Laura casually before leaving for basic training down at Camp Jackson near Columbia, South Carolina.

  “Do we have any kind of understanding?” he asked her in a taxi.

  She replied just as casually, “Oh well, okay.”

  They were married in May.

  Murray could hardly believe the words on the page. He’d been waiting for years, waiting for something. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Waiting for nothing. Out of sight, o
ut of mind. It was over, over before he’d even had a fair shot at a beginning. Was that why it had been so long since he had heard from her? It was humbling to recall the thoughts he had had about Laura during his years of captivity, humbling to imagine what she had been thinking about him—if she thought about him at all. He had no way of knowing, of course, that she had remained in contact with the Navy Department, anxiously awaiting word of his whereabouts and well-being. He had never thought she would find someone else to love as he felt she had loved him. She still signed her letters, “Love, Laura,” but it was a different Laura, wasn’t it? And he was a different person, too, because someone else had claimed his place. She never told him the actual date of the wedding. It was May 28, 1942.

  In May 1945 the XXI Bomber Command began dropping tons of propaganda pamphlets over Japanese cities warning civilians of the B-29 raids to come. The leaflets had been prepared in Washington, D.C., and on Guam, written in Japanese, loaded into the bomb bays of weather planes, and released from a high altitude, to be dispersed over as wide an area as possible. Some showed a photograph of Truman; others pictured B-29s littering Nagoya with bombs. One of the most disturbing images was a graphic color illustration of a man being consumed by flames. Another featured a mother dressed in a kimono, weeping before the corpses on the ground. A leaflet entitled “The Living Hell After a Bombardment” read:Japanese Citizens!

  From the safety of their splendid air-raid shelters, the military clique boldly urges you to resist. However, your air-raid shelters are nothing but the entryway to death. If you continue your resistance, every day will only bring greater fear into your lives. Bombs will open great craters in your cities, bombs that are dropped on factory districts will destroy your homes while you run around frantically in search of nonexistent shelter, and incendiary bombs will cause great fires that will envelop you in flames and burn you to ashes. All of the bombers will leave terror in their wake.

  You can absolutely not escape. There is no place you can hide, and resistance only means terrifying death.

  Demand the cessation of this hopeless resistance, that is the only path to saving your country.

  Allied POWs in Japan had little if any information about impending bombings, unless they gleaned it from the Japanese. Once, when hospital guards saw a squadron of USAAF planes in the distance, they exclaimed: “No! No bombs for Kōbe! Bomb for Yokohoma.”

  Nor were American airmen briefed in much detail on how to comport themselves in the event of their capture. “Now, if you are taken prisoner—never—repeat never call a Jap a Jap,” they were warned before the March 9 Tōkyō raid. “It is always a Japanese, and say it with respect. Give him some lip or call him a Jap and he’ll take your head right off.” They were instructed to avoid the emperor’s palace and historic Kyōto, the ancient city that housed 253 Shintō shrines and 1,600 Buddhist temples. But they were told nothing about POW camps in their target areas. “And it was a good thing we didn’t know,” said 1st Lieutenant Leslie E. Hodson, an airplane commander with the 499th Bomb Group of the 73rd Bomb Wing. “We would have tried to avoid them, even though there was little chance of it.”

  On June 1, 1945, the men at the Kōbe POW Hospital watched 458 B-29s pummel the port facilities and petroleum installations of Ōsaka. They watched with fascination and detachment, thrilled that it was “them” and not “us,” while acutely aware that Kōbe was bound to be targeted again. The bombers were armed with incendiaries as well as T4E4 frag clusters, which were dropped first to deter any attempts at firefighting. An escort of P-51 fighters accompanied them. A total of 2,788 tons of bombs fell over Ōsaka from 18,000 to 28,500 feet. A relatively small area—only 3.15 square miles—was burned out, but the damage was massive.

  The POWs in Kōbe could not see the buildings that collapsed like sand castles, the houses that ignited as quickly as tatami mats and shōji screens, the mangled, carbon-coated bodies of men, women, and children burned to death as they tried to escape a conflagration that devoured block after city block, neighborhood after neighborhood. In the spectacle of the moment, they watched with as little feeling for the human lives lost as if they were witnessing a forest fire across the bay, in awe of the deadly Superforts, engines of their vengeance, portents of their freedom. The curtain of smoke drawn over the city obscured the cruel reality of 136,107 homes and 4,222 factories destroyed, 3,960 people killed or missing, 218,682 souls left homeless.

  Ōsaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp was located in a military zone, bordering the city’s industrial district. The camp was equipped with air raid shelters and blackout curtains; the prisoners were drilled in fire prevention. Japanese civilians sought refuge there, believing it would be safe from attack. According to Sawamura Masatoshi, a Red Cross flag was raised atop a bamboo pole. Sawamura acted as a lookout in a guard tower for the B-29s, sounding the alarm when planes approached and signaling the all-clear after they departed. But as Chief Medical Officer David Hochman put it in his diary: “It was very obvious that the area we were in had to be levelled, and so it was.” Two incendiaries and one demolition bomb hit the camp, setting off fires that “spread at an amazing speed with terrific heat and intensity,” said Hochman. Sawamura found himself surrounded by flames and had to be rescued by Japanese Navy and camp personnel. Within thirty minutes Colonel Murata’s headquarters was burned to the ground. Stray chickens and rabbits were roasted alive. POWs suffered injuries but no fatalities. Most of the men were out on work details unloading military equipment, iron ore, bauxite, salt, and foodstuffs from ships in the bay, or they had been evacuated to the Sumitomo pier. The camp galley staff, led by the English Quartermaster Dix, managed to salvage hundreds of sacks of rice, beans, sugar—which was fortunate, Murata let it be known, because no more food was forthcoming from government stores.

  The colonel’s daughter, Kiyoko, was in Ōsaka at the time of the raid. The force of a concussion threw her on her back, cracking a vertebra. Her hair caught on fire. A dozen women near her lay dead. Corpses floated in the moat around Ōsaka Castle. She remembered fighter planes shooting at anything that moved—women, children, horses, trains, even laundry set out to dry. Kiyoko was taken home to Kyōto, and Dr. Ōhashi paid her a visit, but he had nothing with which to treat her burns except a poultice and vinegar.

  The next day Archbishop Marella visited Ōsaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp to survey the damage. An Italian who resided in Tōkyō, Marella was an apostolic delegate. The Vatican was technically neutral during the war, but Italy had been an Axis power until the Fascist Party was dissolved and the armistice was proclaimed on September 8, 1943. Murata had let Marella bring priests into camp for Catholic services. Marella, in turn, commended Murata and Sawamura for their efforts on the prisoners’ behalf. But the fate of the POWs under Murata hung by a slender thread.

  In the pouring rain, the POWs from Ōsaka No. 1 Headquarters Camp were moved to Tsumori Subcamp No. 13-B. Some 500 men were squeezed into a two-story building that could barely accommodate 150 people. Camp conditions were abysmal, yet Murata threatened to withhold food from the prisoners unless they increased their productivity. The colonel confided to David Hochman that he had received orders from Tōkyō that no prisoners were to be repatriated by their own forces. So that was the plan, thought Hochman. Kill the POWs. He had wondered what might happen to them should Japan be invaded, but he preferred not to dwell on it.

  In fact, Tōkyō had issued guidelines concerning the “final disposition” of POWs nearly a year earlier. On August 1, 1944, the chief of staff of the Taihoku Headquarters Camp on Formosa was advised:Under the present situation if there were a near explosion or fire; shelter for the time being could be had in nearby buildings such as the school, a warehouse, or the like. However, at such time POW’s [sic] will be concentrated and confined in their present location and under heavy guard the preparation for the final disposition will be made.

  The time and method of the disposition are as follows:1. The Time.Although the basic aim is to act under superior ord
ers, individual disposition may be made in the following circumstances:

  a. When an uprising of large numbers cannot be suppressed without the use of firearms.

  b. When escape from the camp may turn into a hostile fighting force.

  2. The Methods.(a) Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates.

  The order was not without precedent. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese 66th Battalion in Nanking was directed to execute “all POWs.”

  In December 1944 the Japanese carried out those plans on the southern Philippine island of Palawan in the Sulu Sea. Fearing an American landing, General Terada Seichi, commander of the Second Air Division, instructed Captain Kojima to dispose of the 150 American POWs at Puerto Princesa Prison Camp. For nearly three years the prisoners there had slaved over building an airfield. To the delight of the POWs, American B-24 Liberators quickly destroyed it on October 28, 1944. The Japanese responded by cutting their rations and forcing them to fill in the bomb craters and dig their own shelters. On the morning of December 14, Kojima heard from headquarters that an American convoy was bound for Palawan. He recalled the men from work, let them have their noonday meal, and then told them that they were about to die. At the sound of an air raid bell, Lieutenant Satō urged the POWs to take cover. But the Americans could see only two P-38s, and they were flying away from the island. Minutes later a second air raid alarm went off, though only one American bomber was in the distance. The prisoners were herded into log-covered shelters, which were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and armed guards. Then the guards poured in gasoline and torched them. The explosions were nearly instantaneous. Fires raced along the line of liquid, turning the shelters into raging ovens. Black smoke billowed from the earth. POWs ran screaming outside, their hair, clothes, and flesh in flames, only to be machine-gunned or bayoneted to death. Eleven POWs survived the massacre by crawling beneath the fence on the southeast side and scrambling down a sixty-foot cliff to the beach below.