First Into Nagasaki (39 page)

As a result, statistics about the hellships are notoriously unreliable, and no two sources agree. It seems likely that between January 1942 and July 1945 over fifty thousand prisoners traveled by at least one hellship. About twenty-one thousand died, a rate of over 40 percent. The Death Cruise was among the most brutal in terms of suffering, and among the deadliest, both proportionally and in total losses. Only one man in six survived.

The hellships were, by themselves, the most deadly aspect of the war in the Pacific. A mathematical argument can be made that it was even more dangerous to be a passenger with the Japanese than to be in combat against them. Yet this is somewhat misleading, for as horrific as the hellships were—and there is no scarcity of quotes from men who experienced all the nightmares the war had to offer and still pronounced their weeks in a hellship’s hold as the worst—the majority of deaths on board were a result of so-called friendly fire. Over 90 percent of Allied prisoner deaths at sea were the result of attacks on hellships by their own (usually American) planes and submarines, as with the
Oryoku Maru.
Death by friendly fire is one of the knottiest tragedies of war; once a conflict is over, it is discussed as vaguely and infrequently as possible. The sad fact is that fully one out of every three of
all
the Allied POWs killed in the entire war with the Japanese were killed by friendly fire at sea.

In terms of the
Oryoku Maru,
by autumn 1944 the movements of POWs out of the Philippines were accurately known to MacArthur’s broad intelligence network. And yet American forces continued to sink Japanese transport ships that were carrying POWs. Of course, they were also carrying Japanese troops and military supplies, civilian passengers, and cargo. Weller does not provide a final tally, but out of the roughly 1,300 men who died as a result of the Death Cruise, at least five hundred died through U.S. attacks.

Weller’s was the earliest serious extensive reportage on any hellship, and also the first to reach the American public. (There’d been earlier minimal reports in the United States on the
Shinyo Maru
and
Arisan Maru,
and about rescues of POWs in the water from a couple of other torpedoed vessels.) It remains the most in-depth contemporaneous eyewitness coverage of a hellship. Every other narrative of the Death Cruise has drawn substantially from it, almost invariably without giving credit.

Nearly all the men on board were Americans, and, unusually, two-thirds were officers. Though British, Australian, and Dutch prisoners suffered equivalent hells on their own hellships many times, it would appear that only American prisoners at sea ever committed acts of murder, vampirism, and even cannibalism to survive. Why, stretched to such extremes, did Americans behave differently?

It has been argued that each nationality was protected by its character against such a breakdown; that the Australians were better at mucking in together, or that the rigid class system enabled British officers to keep order and resist an every-man-for-himself mentality that American prisoners, for whatever reason, were unable to fend off. Cited along with these theories is the fact that in the POW camps only Americans seemed to re-create a harsh capitalistic system that resulted in food trading. Another possible answer is that the claim may not be accurate—that, instead, only Americans have had the self-possession to own up to such behavior.

The careful reader will have noticed that certain names recur a few times in these pages. Some men within the space of eight months survived the Death Cruise, the harsh conditions in the mines and the camps, and then watched both atomic bombs explode.

Throughout the war Weller often wrote longer articles that ran as series in the
Chicago Daily News
and its syndicate newspapers. “The Death Cruise” was the longest. Although most of Weller’s research was done in the prison camps, it was supplemented with interviews en route from Nagasaki to Guam via Okinawa and Saipan. Evidently he wrote most of the twenty-five-thousand-word piece aboard ship, and mailed it to the
Chicago Daily News
on October 20. A letter from Guam on November 1 to his editor, Hal O’Flaherty—who had recently taken over from Carroll Binder—states:

Ten days ago I sent you a set of rough drawings to go with this death cruise story, asking for an acknowledgment when you received them. No cable has come yet, but I am hoping you will have had them by the time this manuscript arrives . . . .

     I have felt enough faith in the subject to have worked on it every moment I could since I first heard of it at Omuta on September 10th. None of the survivors kept notes—they were not allowed to—and the army was way behind me on this topic at the time. So I have made over 70 pages of notes alone, plus many lists and cross-lists of names.

     I realize that it is confronting you with a new struggle for space to give you this just before Christmas. But I should have felt remiss in the correspondent’s duty toward history if I failed to record this before liberation had sicklied over the sharp memories these prisoners possessed . . . .

     The orthopods are going to tell me this weekend whether they will let me go to China. Will you please acknowledge this MS and the October 20th sketches as they come in? A cable would relieve my mind very much.

As it turned out, the
Chicago Daily News
moved with speed once the story arrived. It ran in eleven parts, starting November 9. The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ran it in fifteen parts beginning on November 11, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
ran it in nineteen parts beginning on November 18. In all cases the story was cut, often very heavily, and differently from city to city. Perhaps editors felt that, after the war, the time for detailing such gruesome suffering had passed; references to murder among the POWs, much less to blood drinking, were minimized or eliminated.

The typescript also contains several partial lists of the dead at different stages of the journey. Weller included them with misgivings, aware that their numerous inaccuracies would not be resolved for months. Though the lists appear in some newspaper serializations, it seemed irresponsible to repeat them here. (I have corrected a few spelling errors in names in the text itself.)

Two years later, in 1947, following trials brought as a result of their conduct on the Death Cruise, Shusuke Wada received a sentence of life imprisonment and Lieutenant Junsabura Toshino the death sentence. Toshino was hanged; but Wada, who many of the men thought even more deserving of a noose, was let out of prison after serving only eight years.

X

From Guam Weller proceeded to Shanghai, then Chungking, China’s wartime capital, and spent part of the winter in Beijing. He covered the hasty Soviet withdrawal from Changchun that deftly handed Manchuria over to the Communist Chinese, who imprisoned him for three weeks. Throughout those months Weller wouldn’t let Nagasaki go, determined to pull some substance out of an experience still fresh in his memory. From Tsingtao, China, on May 19, 1946, no doubt as a result of a chance encounter, he filed this story.

Some Japanese died at Nagasaki long after the blast from “atomic skin,” the co-builder of Nagasaki’s new “atomic airstrip” said today.

     Lieutenant Commander Paul O’Donnell of Peekskill, New York, said Navy doctors have concluded that small particles of radium-impregnated dust entered below the surface of bodies of some Japanese who died weeks later. The bomb’s terrific blast lodged deadly particles under their skin, Navy doctors now believe, reversing the theory held earlier that irradiation entered directly in the form of the ray and had a permanent effect.

     All doctors are agreed that the bomb’s main effect is killing platelets in the bloodstream: small elements which give the blood its capacity to clot.

From Chungking there was also that magazine article published in October 1946 as “Atom-Bomb Myth Exploded,” and quoted from earlier:

The atomic bomb which laid waste Nagasaki never struck that city. An atomic bomb does not strike its target; it murders the earth, but it bursts in the air far above it . . . The great rainbow shimmering cloud of gases builds into a tall, ghost-like figure of a genii, with the ghastly head of a foetus. It seems to throw man in its shadow . . . .

     What the small, drab people of Nagasaki saw around them a half hour after the cloud built its mighty, spectre-like column in their midst, was this: a great, flattened area of industrial slum. It was a sea of rubble, timbers at all angles, cries coming out from under them. The heavy or concrete buildings still stood, though an air-push of death had moved through their windows.

     Then smoke began to arise over the tossed sea of smashed buildings. The city had not caught fire immediately; it was crushed first . . . But these smokes multiplied. Some began to turn red, then yellow. Smokes began to appear in other places.

     The little fire engines ran here and there, unrolling hoses. But there were too many fires. They broke out all around the firemen, who were cut off. Soon Nagasaki, which at first had been merely smashed, then smoking, was burning. Slowly the eczema of fire turned into a great inflammation. There was a joining of the great scattered group of blobs of fire. And finally it was all one fire . . . Hence the revolting cost in lives.

He goes on to point out the bomb’s military limitations.

It is not greater than its means of delivery, and is wholly dependent on it . . . Moreover, the atomic bomb does not penetrate. Look at the air views of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and you will see waste, but it is flat waste. It is desolation without craters. What this little desert says to man is simple:
Get underground, worm, if you want to live . . .
The earth is the protecting mother still. Get under her blanket and you are safe . . . .

     The mystic atmosphere of the bomb is more than anything else due to the fact that the bomb did conclude the war. But it did not
win
the war. Japan was dead when the bomb “landed” on Hiroshima, dead, but she wouldn’t lie down. The bomb poked her . . . and over she went.

In another article written at about the same time (I think) and never published (I think), entitled “Seapower and the Shattered Atom,” he writes:

By being at the edge of the sea, Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly became the objects of a quite different kind of attack . . . Under consideration was an underwater explosion, a deathly pillar of water projecting itself upward gigantically . . . a tidal wave greater than any nature has made. The bomb would be laid and detonated by a submarine which would take the place of the twin bombers which appeared over each Japanese city. A great roll of water, perhaps a hundred feet high, would sweep over the city and simply drown it . . . The effect of an atomic bomb detonated underwater might conceivably be much greater on a coastal metropolis than a bomb dropped from overhead. There is no defense against the all-pervasiveness, the merciless seeking quality of water. A tidal wave searches out all.

And he cannot help remembering:

I walked along the waterfront of Nagasaki, not long ago, looking at the upended ferryboat driven by the blast into the shallows . . . I turned down the far side of the great, bottle-shaped inlet, and crossed over to the other side, opposite the city. Here I was nearly two miles from where the bomb burst over the main serpentine of Mitsubishi plants. Here were the Mitsubishi shipyards, with scores of rusted baby submarines that would never touch water. Over them the blue sky showed through the lattice of steel where the roof had been ripped off.

     I stood here, just inside the neck of the inlet, and imagined the atomic bomb burst underwater by an American submarine just outside the entrance to Nagasaki. Through the neck of the bottle I could see a scattering of islands. There was the answer. Unless the submarine could actually get inside the harbor—unlikely—the islands would break up and subdue the incoming mesa of water.

But he also cannot help imagining:

The same would be true, in my own country, of Boston Harbor, which is full of miscellaneous islands. But it would not be true of Chicago, were a bomb detonated underwater a short way offshore in Lake Michigan. And in San Francisco an atomic wave created just outside the Golden Gate would sweep through the narrows with concentrated, funnel-strengthened power, with nothing but Alcatraz Island in the center of the harbor to interfere with its fury. Los Angeles or San Diego, of course, would be pushovers, as would be Miami or New Orleans . . .

     It is important always to keep in mind the limitations of the atomic bomb, as so few writers on the subject do today.

XI

To increase the frustration of the Nagasaki censorship, as the decades crept on, was the tragedy of Weller’s carbons vanishing, by then the only copies extant. To him it was as if posterity—which has its own hunger—were determined to complete MacArthur’s crime. For the rest of my father’s long life he felt immensely troubled that he had betrayed a commitment to see that the truth got out, and that the American people deserved no less. Somehow his invaluable dispatches from September 1945 had gotten permanently lost in the aftermath of war, the tumult of a globe-girdling life. All he’d uniquely seen, as he wrote it at the time, would never see the light of history. He died at ninety-five, haunted by the certainty that they were gone forever.

I have now determined that they eventually made their way to Kyrenia, on Cyprus (where he was based on and off in the 1950s), to several houses he rented. They ended up stored for over a decade, along with many other World War II papers, in the crumbling stone garden shed of a house he’d bought. After a civil war they got moved inside to a cupboard beneath a staircase. At age seventy (1977) he went back and happened on them under the Kyrenia stairs, shipped them rather trustingly across the Mediterranean and home to Italy—then promptly lost them again. He also eventually forgot he’d ever located them, since whenever the subject came up they were described as having gone astray “soon after the war.” This story will not seem incredible to anyone who is friends with a foreign correspondent.