Belly of the Beast

by Judith L. Pearson

  Belly of the Beast

  A POW’s Inspiring True Story of Faith, Courage, and Survival Aboard the Infamous WWII Japanese Hell Ship Oryoku Maru

  Judith L. Pearson

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2001 by Judith L. Pearson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition May 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-291-8

  In memory of my brother, who gave so much of himself for his country and asked for so little in return. We miss you.

  —Ken Myers, Estel Myers’ brother

  To my father and the many young men who were will­ing to fight in the name of freedom. This war shaped the men you became. I give you my deepest gratitude and respect.

  —The author

  The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction.

  —Revelation 17:8

  Preface

  While visiting a Phoenix area antique shop, the owner, an acquaintance of mine, shared with me his most recent find: items belonging to a World War II veteran. Among the collection was a series of newspaper clippings, now browned with the passage of time. My friend was very moved by the story told in the clippings and asked if I would consider writing a tribute to this veteran, a naval corpsman and former POW, who had been so brave amid so much suffering. Thus the story of Estel Myers found me, an unusual twist for a writer who is usually the one finding stories.

  For those of us who were not there, the unspeakable horrors Myers and his comrades endured during the war are impossible to imagine. And while a great deal is known about the European Theater of Operations of World War II, very little is discussed about the Pacific Theater. Americans know that their war began and ended in the Pacific Theater, with Pearl Harbor and the atomic bombs, respectively. But the vast middle of the war in the Pacific is often overlooked. And so, too, are the innumerable acts of bravery and examples of the indomitable human spirit.

  Theories explaining the scarcity of Pacific war materials vary. The United States government was strongly allied with Great Britain, a nation threatened by Hitler’s advances in Europe. Thus the U.S. developed a “defeat Germany first” attitude. But even more to the point, the Pacific Theater consisted of more than six thousand square miles, most of it ocean, dotted with islands relatively unknown to the average American. It was foreign and uncharted territory in 1941, and to a certain extent is still considered that way today.

  I learned from Myers’ death certificate, included in my friend’s collection, that he had died in Phoenix in 1973. Detective work at the library produced his obituary and the fact that he had a brother living in the area. When I contacted Ken Myers, he had no idea that his brother’s effects had left the family’s possession and was even happier than I was to have them make their way back to where they belong. Then with Ken’s help, I embarked on this journey through history.

  Belly of the Beast is factual and historically correct. It is not, however, just Estel Myers’ story. It is the story of many men, a mosaic of remembrances gathered from interviews with more than three dozen veterans, along with Myers’ experiences as we know them to have happened. Rather than a collection of memoirs or a historical review, Belly of the Beast is a biographical narrative. There are no footnotes or annotations that might interrupt the flow of the story. The extensive bibliography at the end gives credit to all of those researchers who compiled information before me and to the veterans themselves.

  As our nation reflects back upon the twentieth century, I wrote this book in the hope of accomplishing several things. First and foremost, I want to bring to light the tremendous sacrifices made by the men and women who served in the Pacific Theater during World War II. To them, our nation is eternally grateful. Secondly, I hope this book will educate Americans of all generations about a fact that seems so obviously lacking in history books: While the United States was so resoundingly defeated on that fateful day in December 1941, the country pulled together to rally to become victorious over the enemy.

  Lastly, it is my hope that this book will serve as a warning to future generations. Evil exists throughout the world. It is like a beast: it knows no race, religion, or national origin. It exists among the peoples of all nations. Left unchecked, this evil will surely produce suffering and destruction and death. We must, therefore, never forget what history has taught us, so that it is never repeated.

  Prologue

  At 1100 hours on December 13, 1944, the temperature was already well over eighty degrees. Sixteen hundred and nineteen filthy, gaunt men were forced to march four abreast through the dirty streets of Manila on the Philippine island of Luzon. The men staggered, barely able to shuffle one foot in front of another, as they were prodded along by the bayonets of armed Japanese guards. Behind them, they left three years of life as prisoners of war, spent most recently at Bilibid Prison Camp. They left behind fellow prisoners who were too sick to travel and doomed to certain execution.

  From dingy windows and along the litter-strewn sidewalks, Filipinos, who had lost friends and relatives at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army, watched the sorry parade. Some cried openly, others surreptitiously flashed the “V for victory” sign. The Americans had originally come to help establish independence in the Philippines. The Filipinos hoped to encourage the prisoners of war without inciting the barbarous Japanese guards. This brutality was never more evident than on the faces and bodies of the brave servicemen stumbling before them.

  Every single man was emaciated to the point of resembling a walking skeleton. Rib cages were clearly defined on bare chests; arms, shoulders, and legs were completely lacking in visible musculature. Vicious, badly healed scars abounded on backs, having come from beatings with barbed wire or jabs with bayonets. Some of the men were being led by fellow prisoners, as blindness was a frequent affliction. Without proper nutrition, the body begins to shut down essential functions, including eyesight. Those who could still see stared dully straight ahead, their eyeballs sunk deeply in bony sockets.

  The vast majority of this shabby group, almost two out of every three men, were officers. The senior officer from Cabanatuan Prison Camp, Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Beecher, was among them. So were most of the other combat commanders who led the attacks on Bataan and Corregidor. A large number of them were dedicated Army and Navy doctors and corpsmen, including Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class Estel Myers.

  As the hot, midday sun bore down on Myers’ back, the rope from his pack of belongings cut into his bony shoulders. That makeshift backpack contained the sum total of his worldly possessions: a canteen, some extra rations, a mess kit, and the fork he’d made from a piece of scrap tin, all of it tied in a shoddy scrap of blanket. It only weighed a few pounds, but after three years of continual malnutrition, it might as well have weighed a hundred.

  Even in his exhaustion, Myers was conscious of how sad and desolate Manila had become. Manhole covers, iron scuppers, trolley tracks, streetlights, and anything else made of metal had been removed and sent to Japan to be melted down and made into instruments of war. He was conscious, too, of the humming truck engine occasionally grinding to a stop behind the columns of prisoners. Its purpose was to pick up the men who could not finish the forced march. Myers knew they would surely suffer the same fate as those who had remained at the prison.
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  The grueling march continued for five miles and ended around 1400 hours at the waterfront, which also lay in shambles. Pier 7, once proudly known as the Million Dollar Pier, was badly damaged from bombing runs. Myers took note of the cruel irony: nearly four years earlier, he’d left from Pier 7 off the San Francisco coast. He and the other prisoners stumbled their way through rubble to get to the dock.

  There, skulking in the dirty water, sat the Oryoku Maru, a 7,300-ton combination passenger vessel and freighter. Beyond her floated a collection of seven other vessels, including transports loaded with Japanese troops hooting loudly from the decks, a cruiser, and several destroyers. They were obviously assembled to accompany the Oryoku Maru on her impending journey.

  Already overheated, the prisoners were ordered to wait without shade while Japanese soldiers and equipment were unloaded. That completed, the ship’s other fares, about seven hundred well-dressed Japanese citizens, largely women and children evacuees, boarded to occupy the available cabin space topside. Also on board were one thousand Japanese seamen, survivors of ships sunk in Manila Harbor, a hundred crew members, and thirty Japanese guards. The ship was badly overcrowded.

  The prisoners did not talk during the wait. Escape wasn’t even considered. The feeble men wanted only to survive this new trial. Finally, at around 1700 hours, the POWs were loaded into one of the three cargo holds under the scrutiny of Japanese General Koa, in charge of all POWs held in the Philippines, and Lieutenant Nogi, Japanese director of the hospital at Bilibid.

  Nogi was small in stature and had studied medicine in Germany. He spoke little English, although he wrote it fairly well, and had even spent time in the U.S. before the war. He had been the Japanese medical officer on both Bataan and Corregidor before his stint at Bilibid. Although he was an Imperial officer, Nogi had a streak of compassion not often exhibited by the other prison personnel. He had occasionally tried to alleviate the prisoners’ conditions at Bilibid, although he was relatively unsuccessful in his attempts.

  Nogi and the American commander at Bilibid, Thomas Hayes, had an odd mutual respect born out of the understanding that both were serving their countries to the best of their abilities under difficult conditions. As the loading began, the two shook hands as a final acknowledgment of this shared regard.

  The Japanese filled the aft hold first, separating the five hundred highest-ranking American officers from the group and prodding them toward the hatch. The prisoners crept down a twelve-foot wooden ladder into the gloomy hold. Once they reached the bottom, they were met by Sergeant Dau and a band of guards. As had been the case throughout the war, the Japanese used individuals from the bottom rung of their social structure to manage the POWs: their own prison internees, the mentally dysfunctional, and those unfit to hold any other position. Dau and his group fell into this category, cruelly forcing the American officers back into the darkness by beating them with brooms.

  Around the perimeter of the hold were double-tiered stalls, each about three feet high. They resembled the berths in a Pullman train car, but were square in shape rather than long and narrow. The hold might have comfortably held two hundred men. The Japanese were intent on filling it with eight hundred.

  The sunlight outside had been harsh, and the prisoners’ eyes had not yet adjusted to the hold’s dim light. They were moving too slowly to suit the Japanese guards, so the guards shoved them roughly, filling first the upper stalls, and then the lower stalls. The three-foot-high compartments forced the men to sit, and as they were crowded in so closely, extending their cramped legs was an impossibility. Instead they sat hugging their knees or with their legs folded under them.

  Once the stalls were filled, guards drove men into the center of the hold, insisting that the new arrivals not even try to sit, but stand packed together like vertical sardines. The Japanese forcibly crowded in as many men as was physically possible, pushing those who had arrived first even farther back into the airless gloom.

  The guards beat the last men down the hold’s ladder with rifle butts. Looking through the hatch from the deck above, they saw a pit filled with eight hundred men staring back up at them with terrified eyes as they struggled to breathe. The most senior officers in the back had begun to faint almost immediately from the intense heat and the lack of air circulation created by so many bodies. The hatch was slammed shut and the men were immersed in a sea of complete and forbidding darkness.

  At the same time that the aft hold was being filled, six hundred more men were packed into the forward hold. Within minutes, the air there, too, became thin and foul. Despite senses that had been numbed from years of physical and mental abuse, these men realized that their current situation was more life threatening than anything else they had previously been through.

  The remaining 219 men were jammed into the hold amidships, the only one that was fully ventilated. Pharmacist’s Mate Estel Myers was one of the last to be shoved at bayonet point down into that hold.

  The Oryoku Maru cast off around 1900 hours. One thousand six hundred and nineteen men had been swallowed by this immense steel beast. For them, the closest thing to hell on earth had begun.

  Chapter One

  Sentimental Journey

  Spring in San Francisco is an uncertain season. Some years, the fog locks the city in for weeks, streetlights glowing yellow twenty-four hours a day. People hurry by on the sidewalks, eagerly seeking shelter from the cold, damp air. Other years, the warm spring sun rises over Oakland Bay, burning off the early morning mist and conferring the promise of another summer on the bay.

  The spring of 1941 was a little on the rainy side, but mild for the most part. In Hollywood, Mickey Rooney and Ava Gardner were engaged. Twelve-year-old Shirley Temple was earning $50,000 for her role in Kathleen, the latest picture she had just begun shooting. Bing Crosby and Helen O’Connell were topping the country’s record charts. And Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” could be heard from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate.

  But despite the sunny, lighthearted optimism, a fog heavier and bleaker than any that had ever been seen before was settling over the city. News from Europe suggested that Hitler was preparing to launch heavy military campaigns, as he had done the previous spring. If these new marches were as successful as the others had been, hundreds of thousands of Europeans would soon be under Nazi control.

  Meanwhile, Japan, Hitler’s Axis partner in the Pacific, was making it obvious that she, too, was preparing for war. A Japanese army spokesman, Major Kunio Akiyama, was widely quoted for a remark he made on the third of March. Japan, he said, had the heart of a dove, but a snake had just placed its egg in the dove’s nest. This snake, he explained, was the combined governments of the United States and Britain. And the egg consisted of three moves the Japanese perceived as offensive: the fortification of Singapore, the arrival of Australian troops in Malaya, and the impending fortification of Guam and Samoa. When a news correspondent asked Akiyama what he thought would hatch from the egg, an ominous answer was forthcoming: “Only God knows. But the dove will protest vigorously.”

  Nearly every day of Estel Browning Myers’ young life had been a struggle. The oldest child of Kentucky sharecroppers, his first home was a rustic, three-room cabin in Kentucky with no running water or electricity. In 1923, his father realized a sharecropper’s earnings were insufficient to raise a family. So he moved them by horse and wagon to the big city: Louisville. Estel was three years old at the time.

  The Myers’ five-room frame house stood two blocks from Churchill Downs racetrack, and Estel eventually became the big brother of four younger siblings. In reality, the family didn’t have much, but they never seemed to want for much, either. Their clothing was made from flour sacks, each piece handed down as soon as it was outgrown by its previous owner. Meals were simple and repetitious: biscuits and gravy for breakfast, navy beans and corn bread for lunch, soups and stews for dinner. Entertainment centered on the family’s prized possession, a piano. Mother
played by ear, church hymns mostly. The Myerses were poor, but so was everybody else they knew, and having nothing for comparison, they lived life without regret.

  In 1929, the Great Depression touched everyone, but it grabbed the lower classes by the throat. Businesses closed and factories shut down. Thousands of men and women stood in soup lines and prayed for relief from hunger. Myers’ father was let go from his job as a brakeman with the Louisville-Nashville Railroad. There were no prospects for another job in town; he had no choice but to move his family back to the country.

  Again they turned to farming. Their cash crop was tobacco, but they also raised truck crops to sell, saving enough to eat for themselves. With chickens, cows, and hogs for slaughter, the Myerses never went to bed hungry. Life rolled along smoothly until, in the fall of 1937, it took an unexpected turn.

  Kentucky was flooded by tremendous rains that year, at exactly the moment the year’s tobacco crop was to be harvested. The country was still Depression-ravaged, and the Myers’ money from the previous year’s sales was nearly all spent. Since the flooding had ruined almost all the tobacco, there would be very little left to harvest. A small harvest meant very little money, a $2.37 profit, to be exact. The next year brought the opposite problem: a life-choking drought. The Myers family never recovered from the back-to-back disasters. The bank sold the animals and the farm, and after all the creditors were taken care of, the family was left with nothing.

  This time it was Estel, now nineteen, who went to Louisville in search of a job. The United States Navy offered training, a steady paycheck, and more promise than any of his other options.