First Into Nagasaki (11 page)

Chief Commissary Steward Leonard Weidel of San Diego,
age 43: “In nine months’ work in the mine, my weight—which before the war was 208—fell to 109. I was so weak I couldn’t stand, so the Japs put me to work making straw shoes.”

Curtis Polk of Biloxi, Mississippi, and Bogalusa, Louisiana:
“The coal mine here is tough, but at Nichols Field I’ve seen men drop rocks on their feet or drive picks through them in order to escape the Japs. I saw a Jap boss at Nichols, whom we called the Wolf, beat to death a New Mexican named Coco. Coco came to Nichols with the same rice-bloated 300 prisoners from Cabanatuan as myself. He was too weak to push heavy dump-cars at Nichols so the Wolf first beat him with a stick, and then at roll call with a blackjack. A former Japanese naval officer we called Cherry Blossom finished Coco off the next day when he found him recovering consciousness. Cherry Blossom kicked him around the room until Coco fell and died. The Japs also killed a man named Quattroni, who had cerebral malaria, by putting him in mud and force-feeding him water, then jumping on his body.”

Chief Petty Officer Harvey Massingill of Oakland,
taken on Corregidor: “I don’t weigh much anymore, but I’ve done better with mail than most Navy men.”

Chief Yeoman Theodore Brownell of Fort Smith, Arkansas, and San Francisco:
“The best words I’ve heard in Japanese were two officials on a telephone, saying, ‘B-29s and many, many dead.’”

Seaman Daniel Rafalovich of San Pedro,
a signalman from the U.S.S.
Houston
who was one of four Americans transferred to Admiral Doorman’s flagship
De Ruyter
for the Battle of the Java Sea: “I was picked up by a Nipponese gunboat after sixteen hours in the water with three Dutchmen. A British Navy signalman also in the water with us disappeared just as the gunboat reached us. The Japs placed us aboard the cruiser, then used us for labor in unloading near Rembang for five weeks. I saw some Texas 131st Artillerymen in the so-called ‘Bicycle Camp’ outside Batavia, and also in Singapore at Changi Prison.”

Marine Harold Peterson (Pasadena):
“I’ve worked in the Mitsui coal mine only a little, being sick from the beginning with beriberi and dysentery. Luckily I got thrown down by a cave-in the day before Christmas and got a useless hand, removing me from the mine. My life was saved by a pal, Floyd Singer of Anaheim, California, captured on Bataan. He was digging me out before the whole coal face toppled.”

Corporal Leon Cleboski of Houston
and
Alexander Katchuck of Brooklyn,
both Marines from Corregidor, told how one overseer, the Fox, used to beat up Cleboski. According to Katchuk, “The Japs used to push around Cleboski because he was moving slow and thinking slow as a result of undernourishment, having lost thirty-five pounds. The Japs liked to throw rocks at him, kick him, and hit him with a ceiling wedge.” Cleboski showed this writer patches gone from his scalp where the Fox had hit him with a pick while remarking, “Six-foot box for you.”

Chief Yeoman Winfred Mitchum (Houston):
“While working in the coal mine I took two tomatoes from the galley and they were found under my pillow. In the
aeso
[guardhouse] the Japanese gave me the electrical treatment, consisting of fixing a wire in an electric light socket and forcing me to hold on to the other end, then switching the current on and off. The mine guards did this for five nights, taking turns and laughing. I was in the guardhouse with absolutely nothing to eat at the special order of camp commandant Fukuhara, who—though I confessed that the tomatoes were from the galley—insisted they came from his private garden. The guards made the electrical shocks sharper by pouring water on me in order to increase the conductivity all over my body.”

Yeoman Daniel Ebbert of Wheeling, West Virginia,
showed the writer tropical ulcers on his legs and said, “One overseer we called the Airedale used to enjoy kicking these sores. The night that peace came I weighed 120 against my normal 170, and I was too weak to pick up a jackhammer from the tunnel floor.”

Seaman Raymond McDonough of Columbus, Ohio,
captured at Fort Hughes after being on the U.S.S.
Mindanao,
flagship of the Souchina patrol: “The Japanese seemed to ignore the fact I was deaf, and beat me repeatedly across the face and head for not understanding their orders. I could not even hear what they said.”

Seaman John Yoder (Des Moines):
“I got beaten in the mine and thrown in the guardhouse. They finally let me have a job in the zinc factory. I couldn’t keep from stealing from the Japanese galley because they had good food there, and naturally I got beaten for that, too.”

Machinist’s Mate Lucian Boehm (Honolulu):
“I broke this finger, and tried to break my whole hand, trying to evade underground work. Most of my weight was lost digging for Satahara, whom we called the Greyhound. The Greyhound began by hitting me with a rock, then with a dynamite tamping rod. I got four really serious beatings in six weeks. But the Greyhound was mild compared to the Pig, who would crack you on your bare back, while bent over, with a special flogging whip made from four expended dynamite fuses bound together.”

Sergeant Robert Gwaltmy (Newville, Pennsylvania):
“Coming up from the night shift we noticed a big white football-shaped cloud hanging over Nagasaki. Although we had no information about Hiroshima, we felt sure that something peculiar was going on.”

Sergeant Wiley Smith (Coushatta, Louisiana):
“We looked across the bay toward Nagasaki after emerging from the mine and saw black smoke starting up. The atomic bomb, falling ninety minutes before, had kindled Nagasaki. Our Japanese bosses kept pointing that way and chattering. It was better than Germany’s surrender, which we had only heard about from Korean miners.”

The camp’s
First Sergeant, Joseph Lawson (Klamath Falls, Oregon):
“When you’ve waited so long for freedom, you find yourself beyond words to say what you feel.”

Omuta, Japan–Thursday, September 13, 1945 0200 hours

Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu

“O
MUTA
F
AREWELL
”

With the arrival by train from Nagasaki of the first Army-Navy team for the evacuation of Kyushu’s largest prisoner of war camp, the final
sinkes
(Japanese for roll calls) were sounding today over the grimy buildings and meagerly-clad G.I.s. This camp, 1,700 strong—700 being Americans from Bataan and Corregidor—has been thinned already to 1,300 by impatient ex-prisoners, mostly Americans, who have hit the high road for the American airbase at Kanoya in southernmost Kyushu.

The camp commandant, dentist Major R. W. Schott of What Cheer, Iowa, found it difficult to keep discipline after the writer, arriving as the first visitor from the outside world, candidly admitted that scores of loaded transport planes were coming daily from Okinawa to Kyushu and returning empty to Okinawa. The first day only about a hundred men left. However, these glib ex-prisoners, on arriving in Kanoya, persuaded softhearted transport pilots to fly them back over Prison Camps #17 and #25. They dropped notes to friends still obeying the camps’ bugles, with revolutionary slogans like
I’ll be in Frisco in a week!
and
Don’t wait, kid; take off!

So profound is the prisoners’ hatred of Baron Mitsui’s coal mine, the Japanese military police, and the
aeso
or guardhouse where five Americans have found a violent death, that the entire camp would probably have been deserted had not the Army-Navy team arrived today. Hospitals filled with cases of malnutrition, diarrhea, beriberi, and mutilated men offer special problems.

Interviewed today as they were being broken down into groups for enshipment out of Nagasaki homeward, most prisoners commented either on the clouds formed by the two atomic bombs which some saw burst to the northeast over Hiroshima and to the southwest over Nagasaki, or on the miserable and dangerous conditions prevailing in the Mitsui mine where they labored for the equivalent of one cent daily and suffered repeated beatings.

Hardened bantam
Sergeant Jimmy Jordan,
with thirty-three years in the Marine Corps behind him, said, “Now I know what that mushroom cloud meant that we saw over Nagasaki. I don’t call it an atomic but a ‘tonic’ bomb, because it brought the Japs to their senses.”

Robert Williams (Tucson):
“The atomic bomb looked like rings of white smoke rising in columns with red tint. I’m glad the bomb didn’t hit our camp, because Crupper and I were firefighters and the Japs forced us to move the pump nearest their quarters.”

Charles Crupper (Tyro, Kansas):
“Hiroshima looked like a ring of fire under a cloud of white smoke, all suspended in the air. Nagasaki looked the same but bigger, being nearby.”

Pharmacist Roy Lynch (Waynesboro, Tennessee):
“I heard not a sound with the Nagasaki cloud, which resembled a thick white pencil rising and then turning inside out, with a reddish-orange flame. I felt the earth trembling.”

Boatswain Jesse Lee (Binger, Oklahoma):
“It was conical-shaped, something similar to a big cumulus, white and fleecy at first, then broadening until we saw red inside.”

Gunner Clifford Sweet of Chulavista, California,
captured at Fort Hughes: “I was working at our salt mill when I saw the Nagasaki cloud, which kept rolling up, turning inside out, and getting redder at the top.”

Richard Steele (Dise, Montana):
“It looked like white smoke piling up over Nagasaki.”

Pharmacist Donald Tapocott (Mason City, Iowa):
“The windows shook like a battleship gunnery and a big white cloud rose, with flashes of red.”

Clarence Perkerson (Atlanta):
“An ice cream cone in the sky.”

Howard Ekre (Tacoma, Washington):
“When the atomic cloud spread over Nagasaki, I saw enormous heat waves spreading around it.”

Floyd Walker (Port Young, Michigan):
“I felt buildings in our camp nearly forty miles away tremble.”

Sergeant Louis Goldbrum (Brooklyn):
“I surrendered after serving a year with Major Walter Cushing as a guerrilla in northern Luzon. We had ambushed and killed their Colonel Hara in a car, and after that the Japs got tough and sent up a big force to wipe us out.”

Physician Lieutenant Harold Proff of Olympia, Washington,
captured at Little Baguio, Bataan: “More food, especially more meat, would have saved one-half to three-fourths of the men we’ve lost. The Japs could have got it; they’re getting meat now for us, aren’t they?”

Navy Cook Laurel Whitworth (Bourne, Texas):
“Leaving Japan for me means not having to cook any more dogs to eat. One day I had to cook sixty-nine, another seventy-three, another fifty-five. I hate cooking dogs.”

Louis Veros (Cleveland):
“Cleaner and warmer quarters would have saved lives, because the Japs kept us often barefoot in heatless barracks and held back Red Cross clothing until the war ended.”

Raymond Haynes (Spartanburg):
“The Japs would always send us into the doubtful tunnels first, to see if the ceiling would hold.”

John Norrile (Red Lodge, Montana):
“A coal cavern fell on me when I was working in the mine and weighed 110. But I’m holding my own now.”

Gilbert Morris (Brownfield, Texas):
“I weigh 108, against my normal 200.”

Pharmacist John Istock (Pittsburgh):
“I got three lickings in eighteen weeks, mostly for not understanding Japanese. The mine people were so indifferent to our security that accidents were common, such as rock falling from overhead. Once we just touched a rotten timber in a dripping roof where we worked, and the entire tunnel settled four inches.”

Jack Hargrove (Olivehill, Tennessee):
“I got hit several times during April working in the coal mine, particularly by overmen called the Screamer, the Parrot, and the Pig.”

Richard McCaffrey (San Francisco):
“Last winter the guard we called the Pig beat me, and the camp commandant Fukuhara worked me over so thoroughly with a stove poker that I woke up in hospital.”

Ernest Robinson (Kingman, Indiana):
“In one month underground I never received a single beating.”

Raymond Carrisales (Corsicana, Texas):
“In the forty months of my imprisonment I’ve received one letter and one radiogram.”

Pharmacist Frank Maxwell (Birmingham):
“When I left Camp Bilibid in December for Japan, I weighed 172. On my arrival January 30th, I weighed 94. I now weigh 135.”

Patrick Hilton (Montgomery, West Virginia):
“I’m one of the healthiest men here because a shrapnel wound, sustained when American planes attacked our convoy, kept me outside the Mitsui mine working above ground.”

Dark-skinned
Junius Navardos (Los Angeles):
“Pressure in the mine caused me to pass out once while working. When I came around in the hospital I found myself with burned patches all over my skin. The boys told me that the burns had been made by an American-educated interpreter, Yamamuchi, whom we called Riverside because he was brought up there. Asked whether he had done the burning, the interpreter told the doctor, ‘Yes, I did this, because I thought he was feigning.’”

Pharmacist Albert Tybur (Fort Johnson, New York):
“I got beaten with a coal shovel for not saluting the soldiers on the surface. They forced me to hold two buckets of water at arm’s length, and whenever I lowered them they’d say ‘America
tsuyoi
’ which means ‘America strong,’ and crack me again.”

Pharmacist Merrill Dodson (Chariton, Iowa):
“In one month underground I escaped beating, but unfortunately caught one from an Army guard on the surface who saw me putting a cigarette stub in a can where I saved butt ends and assumed wrongly that I’d been smoking outside hours. The guard stood on a ledge in order to increase his height and reach, and made me stand with my arms locked behind me while he struck me ten times in the face with a bamboo pole.”

Chief Pharmacist John Vernon (Fresno, California):
“For crossing the street of the camp as a newcomer, not realizing it was forbidden, I got beaten along with Kusek by guards who struck us with fists and with two-by-fours.”