Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

The night before, more than a full week after the destruction of Hiroshima, the Japanese Foreign Office had sent a telegram to the Allied powers informing them that “His Majesty the Emperor has issued an Imperial rescript regarding Japan’s acceptance to the provisions of the Potsdam declaration.” Truman received the message from Secretary Byrnes via the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Washington on the afternoon of August 14. The State Department had anxiously awaited a response from Tōkyō. After a hastily called press conference at 7:00 P.M. that sent reporters scrambling to relay the news, the president addressed the crowds gathered in front of the White House lawn.

  “This is a great day,” Truman announced, “the day we’ve been waiting for. This is the day for free governments in the world. This is the day when fascism and police government ceases in the world.”

  Half a million people swarmed through the capital to celebrate. Civilians and servicemen snaked into conga lines in Lafayette Square. Throngs of people descended on San Francisco’s Market Square. In Manhattan, when the words “OFFICIAL—TRUMAN ANNOUNCES JAPANESE SURRENDER” flashed across the electric sign on the Times Tower at 7:03 P.M., a deafening roar rose from spectators who had waited hours for the news. Cars honked, truck horns blared, and revelers tossed hats and flags into the air. Caution was thrown to the winds as servicemen swept pretty girls off their feet and kissed perfect strangers, and the strangers kissed them back. Hawkers began selling whistles and V-J (for “Victory over Japan”) buttons. Five thousand tons of streamers and confetti paper poured onto New York City streets. The garment district was draped in strips of brightly colored fabrics, buttons, and even feathers. By 10:00 P.M. the police estimated the crowd at 2 million.

  Walking down Houston Street, Murray’s sister Estelle watched neighborhood residents lean out of windows and dance on the sidewalk, yelling, cheering, “The war is over! The war is over!” As The New York Times succinctly wrote the next morning, August 15, 1945: “World War II became a page in history last night.”

  The POWs were free to come and go as they pleased, so long as they signed themselves in and out. The camp logbook became a public diary for expressing, in shorthand, feelings they had bottled up for years. They fabricated names—“URA Bastard,” or “Go T. Hell”—to let the Japanese know just what they thought of them, though direct confrontations were rare.

  Liberty was intoxicating; the taste of real food wasn’t bad either. There were no officers in charge of the British POWs down at Wakinohama. Some of them showed up at Maruyama in civilian clothing bearing mouthwatering tales of how they had broken into warehouses, loaded up on sugar and tobacco, and distributed goods to the Caucasian population of Kōbe, including the White Russians. They brought with them provisions for a veritable banquet of dried eggs, ham, and powdered milk. A feast indeed, and it quickly caused an outbreak of diarrhea. The doctors were given the keys to the food store and immediately doubled the POW rations. Guards quietly stacked their rifles.

  On August 17 Hirohito issued the Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors ordering the army and navy throughout the Asian and Pacific theaters to lay down their arms “in order to maintain our glorious national polity.” All across Japan and its occupied territories POW guards and commandants slipped away before the dawn of the American occupation. They shed their uniforms, changed names, and switched identities to evade prosecution for war crimes. They were only following orders.

  A memo from the chief of POW camps in Tōkyō authorized “personnel who mistreated prisoners of war and internees or who are held in extremely bad sentiment by them . . . to take care of it by immediately transferring or by fleeing without trace. Moreover, documents which would be unfavorable for us in the hands of the enemy are to be treated in the same way as secret documents and destroyed when finished with.”

  John and Murray were amazed at how quickly the attitudes of officers and guards changed, as if the emperor had waved a wand and said, “Let there be peace,” and so it was. One minute the Japanese were slapping you silly, punishing you, berating you, and stealing your food. The next moment they greeted you with fawning subservience, as if three and a half years of maltreatment could suddenly be forgiven. The balance was tipped in the other direction, and it was oddly disorienting. You had to practice certain behaviors all over again, recover responses that had long been in abeyance. It was like learning to walk after being physically restrained, learning to see after being confined to the darkness. Power was handed to you with no prior warning, something to be used, something to be wary of as you adjusted your vision to the bright lights of freedom.

  On August 21 Colonel Murata “crawled” into Maruyama, as Page put it. In the first of several attempts to rewrite his biography as commandant of the Osaka area camps, he thanked the lieutenant commander and the former medical staff of the Kōbe POW Hospital for their good work.

  Page would have none of it. He told Murata exactly how he thought he had mismanaged POW rations and medical supplies. He accused him of “unnecessary brutality and beatings” and of driving “sick men to work always in the face of protests from the medical officers.”

  Murata replied that the problem was a shortage of Japanese doctors. Page countered by telling him his opinion “of Jap doctors in general and my experience with several individuals in particular.”

  Murata apologized. He hoped the Americans would forgive such behavior. Page let him know that indeed it would not be forgotten.

  Murata tried another tactic. He invited Page and Fred to Wakinohama for supper, and they accepted. The camp was in disarray. During a predinner conversation, Murata explained that Lieutenant Takanaka, the commandant, was unable to maintain order. There was only W. O. Challiss, a British Army noncom in charge of all of the POWs, and the situation verged on chaos. “The sound of orders in English,” said John Lane, “was almost embarrassing.” Ex-POWs were commandeering taxis, hijacking trucks, stealing sugar and flour from godowns, and trading food for liquor. Drinking led to drunkenness, drunkenness erupted into brawls, and the brawls invited reprisals from Japanese civilians and the military. Murata stated repeatedly that he was responsible to the Allied forces for the safety of the former POWs, but he was afraid that disorder would descend into mob rule. He asked Page, the senior Allied medical officer in the Kōbe-Ōsaka area, “to write a letter absolving him of this responsibility.”

  Just then a British stevedore burst into their meeting and began cursing a blue streak at Murata until he’d used up almost every expletive known to the Royal Navy, Army, and Air Force combined, and then he left.

  To Murata’s chagrin, Page explained that he knew full well the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and that he viewed Murata’s request as nothing more than a craven attempt to obtain documentation that might absolve him of war crimes. Murata, who was technically responsible for all of the Ōsaka-area POW camps. Murata, who allowed the crazed Nosu to act as a medical officer even though he himself found his behavior “strange.” Murata, who surely knew of the sympathectomies performed on POW patients without their consent and of the fatalities that were the tragic result. Murata, whose staff included camp guards such as Bandō Bunhachi, who at Ichioka went from bay to bay beating POWs while shrieking like a madman: “All men die, jōtō [good]! All men die!” Murata, who denied prisoners adequate food, clothing, shelter, and forced sick men to work until they literally dropped dead. In separate interviews with the ICRC, Murata apologized for “regrettable occurrences” involving POWs, which were due to “differences of language” and “Japanese Army habits to enforce discipline,” he maintained. Asked if he had any information pertaining to captured American airmen, the colonel responded with “an immediate stiffening of his attitude.”

  “I saw no reason why I should accept the burden of his responsibilities on my shoulders,” said Page.

  He told Murata he could do little to curtail the activities of the men once they were outside of Wakinohama; they had a right to food stores since food wasn’t being provided by the Japanese. He reminded
Murata that ex-POWs were no longer subject to Japanese military law and that guards should be bearing arms only to protect them. Civil law was now the rule, and violators were to be apprehended by the civil police force, brought back into camp, and detained until they could be tried by the occupation authorities. Should ex-POWs start receiving food from the Japanese, Page would try to stop them from raiding the warehouses. But right now Page and his staff had their hands full with their patients at Maruyama. He suggested that Murata bring back Allied officers from the outlying camps to take charge of Wakinohama. Then he demanded the release of Private Rodaway and Private Smith from Osaka Military Prison, a request Murata granted the next day.

  The food situation began to improve at Maruyama, but the doctors were still without medical supplies. And one by one their patients were dying. Murray’s patient John Edgar Goddard had succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis on July 9. Fred’s charge, Jack Hill, had expired on July 20. A Dutch POW named Nielant died on July 23, followed by a British patient, Lydington, on July 26.

  Something had to be done quickly, or Maruyama would turn into another mortuary.

  On August 15 Truman appointed General Douglas MacArthur Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan (SCAP). MacArthur moved promptly to revise Operation Blacklist, the “blueprint” for the nonmilitary occupation of Japan and southern Korea. Per his instructions, a sixteen-man Japanese delegation, led by Lieutenant General Kawabe Torashirō, deputy chief of the Imperial Army General Staff, arrived in Manila on the evening of the nineteenth. Lieutenant General Sutherland, Major General Willoughby, Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Richard J. Marshall, and Colonel Sidney F. Mashbir of the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) attended the night-long conference. MacArthur deliberately excused himself from it.

  The purpose of the meeting was for the Japanese to review the various surrender documents so the Americans could be assured of compliance with the Allies’ demands; to assist in plans for the first phase of the American occupation by establishing a Central Liaison Office; and to provide a complete list of POW camps throughout Japan and their locations so B-29s could airdrop food, clothing, and medical supplies. The Americans demanded that the Japanese remove all troops from the Tōkyō Bay area; repair Atsugi air base, fifteen miles west of Yokohama; and remove the propellers of aircraft that remained on the field where MacArthur would land in order to preempt any kamikaze attacks. The Japanese asked the Americans to postpone their arrival until September 8 so they had time to execute their orders, rein in the armed forces, and restore calm to the capital city. Their request was denied.

  Initially, an advance American echelon from Okinawa was to arrive at Atsugi on August 23. But there was streetfighting in Tōkyō instigated by Japanese military units opposed to the surrender. Kamikaze from the 302nd Airborne based at Atsugi maintained the emperor would never surrender in spite of his proclamation. Beneath Atsugi was an underground labyrinth that contained an arsenal as well as barracks for more than 1,000 men, machine shops, and even printing presses that could roll out suicide instruction manuals. Sutherland decided to reschedule the landing for 0900, August 26. The 11th Airborne Division would start homing in from Okinawa two days later.

  Prior to the surrender, the Allies had known of only forty-three POW camps in the Far East. The Tōkyō Delegation drew up a list of 102 POW camps in Japan alone. On the basis of that information, ATIS prepared a detailed “Map Locating Prisoner-of-War Camps and Places Where Prisoners Are Employed.” But in reality there were more than 300 Japanese POW camps in the Far East, and neither on the Tōkyō delegation’s list, nor on the ATIS map, was Maruyama to be found.

  Locating the camps was one thing; evacuating them was another, and that responsibility fell to Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger’s Eighth Army. “Mercy teams” organized by the Recovered Personnel Section in Okinawa, whose headquarters would move to Yokohama, were to accompany the advance airborne echelons into Atsugi. Special urgency was attached to seizing from the most notorious inland camps documents that could be used in the prosecution of war crimes.

  The original plan in Operation Blacklist called for the evacuation of 200 to 250 POWs a day. At that rate it would take at least four months to liberate the estimated 32,000 POWs in Japan. Operation Blacklist did not prioritize those POWs who had to be evacuated first because of their health.

  Meanwhile, the Tōkyō branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross had begun to go into POW camps on its own. Dr. Marcel Junod, chief delegate of the ICRC in the Far East, arrived in Manchuria on July 28 and in Japan on August 8. Junod was disconcerted by rumors of a generals’ revolt against the emperor, by the leaflets dropped over Yokohama calling on the Japanese to fight to the bitter end, and by the violence that had broken out to the south. He wanted to get Red Cross representatives into the seven most important camps at once to ensure the safety of the POWs. Junod and seven delegates met in Tōkyō on August 17 and immediately asked the Japanese government to arrange a conference with the Foreign Office, War Ministry, Prisoner of War Information Bureau, and Railway Office to facilitate the evacuation of POWs. E. H. Brunner was the ICRC delegate, M. A. Casal was the Swiss Legation delegate, and Per Bjoerstedt was the Swedish Legation delegate assigned to the Ōsaka area.

  While the Japanese Prisoner of War Information Bureau preserved its prisoner lists, many officials, observed Junod, “seemed more occupied in burning tons of papers, propaganda sheets and compromising documents.” In Tōkyō, he said, “we saw papers being destroyed in the streets.” Records in the War Ministry offices on Ichigaya Hill, at army and navy installations throughout Japan, and at Kempeitai units were put to the torch to destroy evidence of war crimes. “You are instructed to be certain that of secret documents that required destruction,” read one Tōkyō order, “not a single sheet be left behind.”

  Junod wired MacArthur in Manila that the ICRC was ready to serve as a liaison between GHQ and Japanese authorities at every port from which POWs were to be repatriated. GHQ had already issued instructions for “PW” to be painted on camp rooftops in block letters so planes could airdrop food and supplies. B-29s from bases in China and the Marianas began searching for POW camps, scattering pamphlets that read:ALLIED PRISONERS

  The JAPANESE Government has surrendered. You will be evacuated by ALLIED NATIONS forces as soon as possible.

  Until that time your present supplies will be augmented by air-drop of U.S. food, clothing and medicines.

  Fifty-five-gallon steel drums were packed with goods. Some of them contained C-rations, hospital supplies, canned fruit, dehydrated soup, vegetable puree, bouillon, and vitamin tablets. There were instructions on feeding 100 men, and warnings: “DO NOT OVEREAT OR OVERMEDI-CATE” and “FOLLOW DIRECTIONS.” But there were no warnings as to how deadly the canisters, welded together, could be when their parachutes failed to open because the planes were flying as low as 200 feet at 250 mph.

  POWs waved their arms and T-shirts at the sight of the B-29s, whose crews could see how emaciated they were from the air. But bounty took its toll when the care packages exploded on impact, hurtled through rooftops, and careened into shower stalls, causing more than a dozen deaths. The wastage ratio of supplies dropped was “extremely high,” noted the ICRC. “They’re killing us with kindness,” the POWs said. Men who gorged on food gained up to two pounds a day; a few literally ate themselves to death.

  The rooftops of Maruyama were emblazoned with “PW” so low-flying planes could spot the camp. But none of the airdrops contained the medicines and supplies the doctors needed most. They were in a race against time.

  25

  Mission of Mercy

  THE THREE NAVY DOCTORS were tired of waiting, tired of seeing men ravaged by disease. For three and a half years they had tried their best to repair broken bodies, nurse them back to health, cure them of an array of illnesses, and relieve them of pain. Healers in a world of hurt, they were deprived of the very tools they needed most. The diseases we
re not terminal, at least most of them weren’t, but the conditions created by the Japanese made many of them so. Sometimes, John felt, frustration gnawed at him almost as much as hunger itself as he watched once-healthy men turn into effigies of human beings, straw men who rotted, decomposed, and turned literally into waste.

  Murray and Fred hatched a scheme. They would go to Tōkyō to alert MacArthur and the advance American forces of the extreme situation at Maruyama. If the tubercular patients weren’t evacuated quickly, they’d never make it home. Page thought it was “a rum idea.” John was also cool to the plan; it seemed an unnecessary risk. Besides, his ankle still hurt from the night he had rolled off the table he was sleeping on in an attempt to outflank Maruyama’s fleas. Stan Smith volunteered to accompany Murray and Fred in his place.

  To Fred their journey was “a mission of mercy.” To Murray, it was also a unique opportunity to obtain the proper medicine and equipment to treat and study patients suffering from a full menu of nutritional deficiencies. And to a man there was one thing they couldn’t wait to see: the Pacific Fleet of the U.S. Navy, which was due to arrive in Sagami Bay on August 26, 1945.

  The men were heady with excitement. It was an outlandish idea—inspired, courageous, and potentially dangerous. Three American navy doctors venturing into Tōkyō unarmed, unescorted, before U.S. occupation forces had landed. Imperial Japanese forces numbered 6,983,000, stretching from Manchuria to the Solomon Islands and the Southwest Pacific; 2,576,085 of them were stationed in the Home Islands alone.

  Haggard and homeless, the ex-POWs didn’t own so much as the clothes on their backs. Fred borrowed John’s navy hat and wore a khaki shirt with a Marine Corps insignia on it. Murray’s only pair of trousers had been sewn out of light canvas by a British patient. Smith sported a civilian cap. They had no luggage, except their razors and a few provisions from B-29 food drops.