First Into Nagasaki (31 page)

Cold and starvation erased the perpetual game grin of Lieutenant Commander Arthur Bryan.

It was not all heroism. Theft and quarreling never ceased. A whole bay full of interlocked men would dispute loudly over such a matter as when to turn over and rest on the other side. All had to turn or none; there was not room for differing postures. But some had worse wounds on their right side, some on the left.

Not only was clothing stolen from the dying, but water from the healthy and well. “There were fellows who taught themselves how to slip down beside you while you were asleep, open your canteen and without a sound of swallowing drink all your water. You would try hard to sleep with your fingers locked around the plug. But every morning someone would sit up in his bay and yell, ‘Where’s the dirty so-and-so who stole my water?’”

But there was also Lieutenant Colonel Charles “Polly” Humber, a football man at West Point, who shared his water with many others before diarrhea and thirst took him.

The search for water was as remorseless as if they were in the Sahara. “I remember a morning four days out of Japan when someone peeked over the ladder and saw there was sleet and snow remaining on the deck,” says Chief Yeoman Theodore R. Brownell of Fort Smith, Arkansas. “I sneaked up the ladder, crept on deck and saw the most beautiful thing in the world—a long, thick icicle. But just as I reached for it the Jap sentry saw me.
‘Kudai!’
(Look out!) he yelled, and came for me with his bayonet. I had scooped up a snowball to make sure I had something even if I missed out on the icicle. But in scrambling out of the way of his bayonet I lost even the snowball and fell back into the hold again, empty-handed and thirsty as ever.”

The Navy chief, slender and medium-sized, had found a comrade in a long Army beanpole, Private William Earl Surber of Colorado Springs. “We lay together like a tablespoon and a teaspoon,” says Brownell. “But I got the best of it. He was long enough to keep me warm, but I wasn’t long enough to keep him warm at the ends.” Surber, the more ill of the pair, had alternating periods of delirium and normalcy. In normalcy he talked about wanting two things: to eat one more dish of meatballs and spaghetti, and to have a regular baptism. The men talked often of the hereafter which they both expected to enter shortly, and repeatedly Surber said, “I’m worried. I want to get baptized.” Brownell, a Catholic, thought it proper that Surber, a Protestant, should be baptized by a Protestant rite. By now the prison ship was in Japanese waters and not a single chaplain still alive was sane and strong enough to approach Surber. The chaplain Brownell counted on was Lieutenant Commander H. R. Trump, an Episcopalian who was lying a few bays off, unable to move. Since Surber could not be moved to Trump, Brownell was trying to build up the chaplain’s strength enough to walk to the soldier’s bay. The chaplain would accept food but no water from the Navy chief, and he died on the 27th. “Ted, you’ve got to get me baptized,” Surber kept saying. “I’ve got to be baptized somehow today. If there aren’t any chaplains, can’t you baptize me?”

Since any lay person can baptize another, Brownell could not refuse. But he had no water, not even a tablespoonful. “I didn’t see any way out,” says Brownell. “So I did something that I guess any clergyman would think pretty awful. I baptized Earl with my own saliva. I simply put my fingers in my mouth, got enough moisture on them so he could feel it, and I said, ‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’.”

Surber’s expression became more peaceful. Before first light on the morning of January 28th, about 4 a.m., Brownell noticed that his friend’s body had grown cold.

They saw and smelled Japan on the 30th. The bays by now had much more room. In Brownell’s, for example, four out of nine had died; this proportion was about representative, though some bays were better, some worse. On the last night, off the entrance to Moji, there was a submarine attack, with American torpedoes blasting the night with flame as they struck the shore. But finally they were in the harbor of Moji in northern Kyshu, and the net closed behind them.

T
HE
neat little Japanese officers came aboard and asked for the senior officer present. “They tried hard not to show it,” says one officer, “but you could see that they could not help being shocked. When Lieutenant Colonel Beecher walked out, his shirt clotted with filth, a dirty towel wound around his brow, his beard and hair hanging down, and gave them a feeble sort of salute, then leaned back against the bulkhead as though just doing that had exhausted him, with slop buckets on one side of him and the morning’s dead piled on the other, you could see that the Moji officials were taken aback.”

It was mid-winter, the temperature just above freezing. The Japanese lined the prisoners up on the deck and ordered them to strip naked. They were then sprayed with disinfectant from blow-guns—hair, face, beard and then the whole shivering body. Many prisoners were in pneumonia’s first stages already. Meantime the Japanese doctors were looking down into the pit, where some of the unmoveable wounded still lay. An overpowering odor of urine and excrement arose to their nostrils. “Dysentery!” said the doctors, and ordered a general examination.

In Japan, where things are never done the easy way if a painful one exists, the diseases of evacuation are not checked by the stool test in use everywhere else. The Japanese use a long glass rod, which they insert up the rectum. Laying down their atomizers, the Japanese interns went for the Americans with long glass rods. The prisoners below, whose infection was unmistakable, were spared. But for reasons fathomable only to the Japanese mind, the corpses lying on the deck, about fifteen in number, had to be tested too. Every dead man underwent the same ignominy as his living comrades. The Japanese officials were also very dissatisfied that there were several among this last batch of dead whom nobody living could identify.

A little clothing was distributed; some men got their first shirts, others their first shoes. An Army warrant officer, while changing back to his clothes after the “medical examination”, collapsed and died on the deck under the eyes of the Japanese doctors.

The last muster aboard the ship was called. It showed 435 men still alive (a few survivors say 425). Many were sinking and beyond recall. But the last voyage by sea had ended with about one-half the men living who survived the Formosan bombing, or a little more than one-fourth of the 1,600 men who left Bilibid prison on December 13th.

The Japanese now ordered the prisoners ashore. They marched off the ship to the second floor of a pier, limped downstairs to the street, and then made a slow walk about two blocks to a factory auditorium in a large warehouse. “I took a fall making a six-inch curb,” says one officer. “Most of the men walked with sunken heads, dragging their heels. I could not understand why, as soon as we reached them, people on the sidewalks would put handkerchiefs to their faces. Then I realized it was because we smelled so terrific.”

The first arrivals in the auditorium, which was without seats, looked for water. “We found it, delicious and bitterly cold, in the inflow tank of a toilet. Before the Japanese could do anything, hundreds had lined up. They drove us back, but later they loosened up and allowed us to go in a few at a time.”

The Japanese ordered them to take off their shoes. Few obeyed; they were beyond caring. The prisoners squatted on the concrete floor. Rice was brought in, hot and tempting. But the Japanese ordered it put aside until the roll call was made again, a matter of nearly an hour. Then there was an uplifting talk by a new interpreter. “In Japan,” he said, “food is very valuable. You must not waste any food. If you waste food, you will be shot.”

The prisoners listened apathetically. It would not have moved them if he had said they would be boiled in oil. What mattered was that the rice was clean and white and even had some gingered radish in it.

Volunteers were mustered to carry the extremely ill to the hospital. The party began to break up. One group of officers able to walk were taken by streetcar to a camp near Moji where a few American enlisted men were housed already. “Never did officers feel so grateful to enlisted men as we were to them,” says one officer. “They had a little coffee, some powdered milk, and sugar hoarded from a Red Cross package. They prepared some for us. I cannot tell anyone how that tasted to us. I can only say that tears broke out of our eyes. We had come so far. We had suffered so much.”

Of approximately 135 survivors, officers and men, who were carried to the Moji hospital, about 38 died in the first two days. In all, about 85 died there.

Of about 100—chiefly officers—who went to Camp #3 near Moji, about 31 died.

Of 97 prisoners, mostly enlisted men, taken by train to Camp #17 near Omuta, 15 died.

Of about 100 officers who went to Camp #1 near Fukuoka, about 30 died.

Thus, of the 435 who reached Japan, about 161 died subsequently. Only about 274 of the 1,600 who started from Bilibid Prison are believed to have survived the terrible ordeal. Some others died of other causes.

The hand of a long-dead comrade intervened to protect the lives of the weak but living. An Army warrant officer, Lacey O. Jenkins, had caught diphtheria in Takau. When the Americans had asked for serum to cure him, Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada simply turned their backs. Jenkins, a man of 200 pounds, shrank rapidly and soon died. Now, in Moji, the case of Jenkins was resurrected. For the home authorities it reflected little foresight on Toshino and Wada. And for the prisoners diphtheria meant quarantine. Quarantine meant that they could not be sent down into the Mitsui coal mines to labor for a cent a day, not at least for several weeks. They did go down eventually, and one man of every six died there.

A Cavite naval officer, Edward Little, who was one of the original ‘old 500’ prisoners who had opened Camp #17, seeing the thin line of survivors from the death cruise march in, asked the camp physician, Captain Thomas Hewlett, how many had died.

“If you want to see dead men,” replied Hewlett, “there they stand before you.”

An officer who survived, telling his story to an American rescue party after Japan surrendered, listened in silence as his hearers said what they thought of the Japanese. When they had finished, he said, “Yes, the Japanese are as you say. But we, the three hundred or so living, we were the devils, too. If we had not been devils, we could not have survived. When you speak of the good and the heroic, don’t talk about us. The generous men, the brave men, the unselfish men, are the men we left behind.”

VII

The Weller Dispatches by Anthony Weller

(2005)

I

Every great war correspondent has an important story that got away—that was banned by someone in authority, censored into silence, and never appeared. Too often, such reporters die beset by a sense that their duty to history, of which they are well aware, remains unfulfilled. With my father, it was linked to one of the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. His odyssey on Kyushu, pulled together here for the first time, raises many questions not just about the atomic bomb and the prison camps, but about censorship in the United States and Japan and the larger responsibilities of a reporter. History is written by forgetfulness as well as memory; this essay will try to provide a backdrop for who he was, for what he saw, and for what he wrote.

George Anthony Weller (1907–2002) was among the most eminent American foreign correspondents of his era, recipient of a 1943 Pulitzer Prize and a 1954 George Polk Award. He first made his name as a courageous reporter during World War II, and was one of the few to cover every principal theater of war.

Having begun as a novelist during the Depression, Weller, with a more literary style than most foreign correspondents’, spent much of his life overseas, and across six decades he reported from all the continents. During the 1930s he wrote on the Balkans for the
New York Times,
and joined the
Chicago Daily News
foreign staff in late 1940. Then syndicated in over sixty papers, the paper could boast such famed reporters as Leland Stowe, Paul Ghali, Richard Mowrer, Webb Miller, and Robert J. Casey. From the mid-1950s, Weller covered principally the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union, and Africa. In 1975 he retired from the newspaper but continued to write, and was awarded the Premio Internazionale di Giornalismo of Italy. He died at his home there in December 2002.

Inevitably, this book is as much about being a war correspondent in 1945 as it is about what one man saw. The ease of modern communications can make us overlook the fact that, until recently, a reporter’s challenge lay in surmounting the problems not only of “getting in,” but of swiftly being able to get a story out. There were no instantaneous satellite links, only cable offices within reach if one were lucky, where—along with normal, excruciating delays—the tendrils of military and government censorship could be too muscular to remove.

Their equivalent nowadays is still effective: to stop a story at its source by limiting access. If you can control what is witnessed, you can mold what is reported. Since news organizations are rarely anxious to announce their shortcomings, a credulous public remains, as usual, none the wiser.

II

In Japan and the United States alike, World War II chroniclers, historians of the atomic bomb, and scholars of press censorship have long known that these dispatches
had
existed once but, never having surfaced in the intervening sixty years, they were thought erased from the past. As did my father, who went to his grave deeply frustrated by their disappearance.

Their first importance lies in their visceral immediacy. We are so accustomed to reading about the atomic bomb and its consequences, wrapped in a half century of hindsight, that it comes as a shock to walk with George Weller among the still-smoldering ruins of Nagasaki, to pass through the city’s broken wards and speak with Japanese doctors, or to hear the sagas of Allied prisoners whom he has just told the war is over. These dispatches represent a tireless attempt by one of the most battle-experienced reporters of his day, typing at speed under challenging conditions, to come to grips with scenes unlike anything he knew and to accurately, unsentimentally, convey them to the American people.

I also believe that the dispatches hold a particular relevance not just from their content, but from the official will to silence them back in 1945. In our era of the controlled, hygienic “embedding” of journalists in war zones, amid current disputes over a government’s right to keep secrets, the Weller dispatches represent a kind of rogue reporting that many militaries may have snuffed out, but which is still essential to learning the truth.

It is always problematic to inhabit the past, to enter its differences; to re-create all its assumptions, all it took for granted—for we must first try to understand it fairly, on its own terms, before we judge it on ours. (The very names
Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki,
for example, carry a charged, self-sufficient meaning now that they did not then.) Reading this book, one is constantly reminded of all Weller did
not
know that we know today, and how much he was witnessing for the first time and trying to make sense of as he sat in that borrowed house in Nagasaki, writing deep into each night and sending his dispatches off each morning with the
kempeitai,
hoping that they were getting through the Tokyo censors, to be safely cabled to his editor in Chicago and, nationwide, onto tomorrow afternoon’s front page.

They were not, of course. And I think that once the other journalists had come and gone and he realized he’d lost his best chance to leapfrog MacArthur’s censors, his shift of attention from a bombed Nagasaki to the prison camps must have carried a dose of frustration, amid a hunger to wring everything he could from the opportunity. During three weeks on Kyushu, as the first Western correspondent into the atomic site as well as the camps, he wrote over fifty thousand words, in itself a two-hundred-page book.

Weller, like all the other reporters covering the surrender in Tokyo Bay on the battleship U.S.S.
Missouri,
September 2, 1945, at that moment had no hard information about what had gone on in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was unsure what awaited him if he proved successful at getting into either, since no outsider had been in yet, not even from the U.S. military. He only knew he was forbidden to visit both places. But since Japan had signed the peace treaty and was no longer in a state of war with the Allies, he felt he had a right to go wherever he wanted. More important, the world had a right to know what the nuclear sites looked like, to learn first hand how the war had been concluded.

III

There were limited reports throughout Japan. Weller, reaching Tokyo from China via the Philippines a couple of weeks after the Japanese surrender (August 15), had filed this dispatch with his newspaper on August 31, two days before the treaty signing:

The atomic bomb holds first place over any other element as the cause of Japan’s decision to surrender, according to Japanese civilians with whom I’ve talked. At first the authorities held down newspapers from announcing the bomb’s effect on Hiroshima, but leakage began after four or five days. Now the newspaper
Asahi,
with two million circulation, is planning a book detailing the bomb’s effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japanese censorship was doubly effective because internal circulation was almost halted, and therefore refugees from Hiroshima—and therefore the truth—could not reach Tokyo masses even by gossip.

When authorities decided to inform people of what might be in store for them, [Japanese] Army members of the Censorship Board had cushioning stories released saying that people in white shirts with sleeves escaped burning, and also that those underground went unscathed. The last story was partly true since the only survivors came from dugouts.

The government was compelled to release the truth by the fact that many who escaped—as they thought—the effect of the atomic bomb with light wounds went to live with relatives in other cities and died as much as a week after.

Sadao Maruyama and Keiko Sonoi, an eminent stage actor and movie stage actress, were living in Hiroshima. Both escaped. Maruyama came to Tokyo. After three or four days he began claiming that he felt excessive warmth in his stomach. After five days, the warmth had turned to burning. At the end of a week he suddenly cried to the friend with whom I talked, “I feel as though my insides were burning out.” He rushed to the bathroom, guzzled water and stepped into a cold shower where he abruptly died. An autopsy showed his entrails eaten away.

Actress Sonoi, after Hiroshima, went to Kobe and telegraphed Tokyo, “I am happy to have been saved.” She had only a small swelling of her wrist. But the swelling spread and soon covered her whole body. Her hair fell out. In approximately a week, she too died. These seemingly healthy persons who died many miles from Hiroshima many days afterward were the actual breakers of censorship, who compelled the military to allow the truth to be told about Hiroshima. Small wonder that some Japanese have been asking correspondents: “When will we get scientific equality?”—meaning the secret of the atomic bomb.

Army censors, not yet on high radiation alert, let that story through; the manuscript is stamped
Passed By Censors.
But the newspaper never ran it.

Sneaking into a nuclear site for an entire series of articles a week later, however, defying both a travel ban and a media blackout, was not going to get past those same censors. (It’s unclear if MacArthur ever learned that Weller also impersonated an officer.) By some accounts, the general—trying to ensure his glory as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers while hiding the bomb’s lethal radiation and the fact that no medical aid, not even an observer, had been sent to the dying even weeks after the surrender—was absolutely livid at Weller’s effrontery. And because the reporter was still under MacArthur’s control in Occupied Japan, had he succeeded in getting the censored dispatches out, his newspaper could never have published them without losing its invaluable accreditation there, which was unthinkable.

Many months later, of course, their timeliness was ended; there was no more scoop; with victory, the gaze of the people had moved on.

That MacArthur successfully prevented their appearance always infuriated Weller; that the war was over only made it more outrageous. He saw it as part of a larger failing in MacArthur, and after the general’s death in April 1964, wrote an evenhanded critique which didn’t mention Nagasaki:

MacArthur perceived that publicity was the lever of American power and he used it openly.

MacArthur’s censors, by suppressing almost everything political and meaningful from the Southwest Pacific, reduced the war to a series of banal hero stories costing the American people a generation of political education in Southeast Asia.

To MacArthur ruthless censorship was a means not to deceive the Japanese enemy but to keep his material supplies increasing in an uncritical atmosphere. When I tried to cost-analyze the sending of 25 bombers to destroy a single Japanese Zero parked on a field, the story was instantly killed. To MacArthur this was the way to keep the public happy and tractable.

Like many correspondents, Weller thought the international political naiveté of Americans was almost total. In
Singapore Is Silent
(1943), written during the first year after the United States entered the war, he was blunt: “Asia is the kindergarten of American geopolitics, and the American people are the reluctant pupils who dislike the lessons they must learn, and have not yet understood that the old, simple life of play in the garden at home is gone forever.” Later in the war, in
Bases Overseas
(1944) he wrote:

The American people have been politically bewildered about their foreign policy for fifty years. In war they are alternately drugged with the promise of bloodless and easy victory, then whipped up with official warnings that peace will be expensive and is far off . . . Politically this new American is not only ignorant; he is indifferent. There is the United States, or Home. And there are all the other places . . .

The key to the political life of the American abroad is . . . he must be loved, or at least liked, or he withers. His foreign policy, therefore, represents an attempt to become popular by being benevolent, rather than to be respected by being responsible . . .

[U]nsupplied with statesmen capable of building him an enduring peace consonant with his own sacrifices, the American turns by
reductio ad absurdum
to an emotional apprehension of war. If you cannot think about the war, can you not at least feel about it? Besides the escapism away from the war there is in the United States a unique escapism into war, into atrocity stories, into magic-weapon stories, into hero stories, into sex-and-war stories, that defeats the political teacher . . .

Today the fighting man overseas is waiting for the statesman at home to do something. The statesman at home is waiting for the people to suggest for him to do something. The people are waiting for the press and radio to suggest what they should ask the statesman to do. The press and radio are waiting for their foreign correspondents and war reporters overseas to suggest to them what they should suggest to the public. And the reporters and correspondents are unable to analyze, much less suggest political action, because the fighting men (officers and censorship, that is) say that politics is the affair of the statesman back home.

IV

A big, gusty man with extraordinarily alive blue eyes and a powerful head suggesting steel-reinforced bone structure, Weller always seemed larger than a mere six feet. As someone who felt at home everywhere and went deep into what he called the secret history of each place, his reportorial gift was a mask of complete innocence that was misleading and trapped his subjects in unwitting revelations, followed by the question that went for their vitals.

He was most of all a man of the world, in an old-fashioned definition: a type of American gentleman who existed midcentury, at ease in all situations. He spoke five foreign languages fluently (albeit with a Boston accent) and was exceedingly literate, charming, and stubbornly confident about his place in the order of things. At the same time he never forgot having grown up poor—his Harvard tuition was generously paid by a man he had caddied for as a teenager—and he remained frugal all his life. A career under fire or trapped in difficult places, from the Hindu Kush to the wilds of New Guinea, stopped him from worrying about eating well or dressing stylishly.