First Into Nagasaki (6 page)

Without any medicine or instruments, both doctors tried to treat the fractured skulls of men beaten by the swords of Japanese officers standing in trucks during the death march. “It was hard to march and keep ducking these blows when you wanted to fall down anyway,” they said.

Lacking any sick bay, Anderson and Captain Louis Snyder of Portland, Oregon, began to outfit an abandoned Japanese latrine. The result was that Camp Cabanatuan’s Marine commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Freeman of Maryland, was confined for allowing the unauthorized use of Japanese property. At one time Anderson and Snyder unaided were treating twenty-five hundred men.

Anderson told how after reaching Moji he tried to persuade the Japanese to part with some hoarded diozane for those dying Americans with pneumonia. Only when two died and a third was beyond help did the Japanese commander give his consent. Oxygen was denied to another ailing man and Anderson heard the Japanese commandant say that the man was “no damned good if he needed oxygen.” He was refused digitalis for an elderly Indian with this remark by a Japanese doctor: “He cannot work; let him die.”

Both Americans agreed that some Japanese doctors were humane but said that American doctors had to submit to the lowest Japanese corpsman. Japanese peasant soldiers would go along through sick bay, ordering men to their feet to work.

Japanese officers always took a Red Cross package each and forced the prisoners to feed Japanese soldiers from theirs. During last winter’s early bitter cold, the commandant at the Moji camp had seven Red Cross blankets and all his soldiers three to four, while the American prisoners had less than enough to go round.

They told how Major John Bennett of Luresa, Texas—after being slapped repeatedly by a Japanese sergeant—attempted to see the Japanese commandant and was beaten until lacerated by the same sergeant.

Both doctors were under orders to salute all Japanese except for the capless, when they were obliged to bow deeply in Nipponese fashion. They told how new Japanese soldiers distributed Red Cross sweaters among themselves and let the Americans shiver last winter. Men with a cold or influenza were not allowed to lie down in the sick bay but forced to stand up. If otherwise unoccupied, their job was to catch bedbugs. “The goal was fifty daily, and if we caught less we were sent to the fields.”

At Moji’s camp the Japanese forced pharmacist’s mate Stanley Shipp of Hay Springs, Nebraska, to falsify the records in order to prove that there had been proper medical treatment. Nevertheless, on August 15th the Japanese removed and burned the camp records.

Nagasaki, Japan—Sunday, September 9, 1945 0100 hours

The atomic bomb’s peculiar “disease,” uncured because it is untreated and untreated because it is undiagnosed, is still snatching away lives here. Men, women and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around for three or four weeks thinking they have escaped. The doctors here have every modern medicament, but candidly confessed in talking to the writer—the first Allied observer to reach Nagasaki since the surrender—that the answer to the malady is beyond them. Their patients, though their skins are whole, are simply passing away under their eyes.

Kyushu’s leading X-ray specialist, elderly Dr. Yosisada Nakashima, who arrived today from the island’s chief city of Fukuoka, told the writer that he is convinced these people are simply suffering from the bomb’s beta, gamma, or neutron rays taking a delayed effect. “All their symptoms are similar,” said the Japanese doctor. “You have a reduction in the white corpuscles, constriction in the throat, vomiting, diarrhea and small hemorrhages just below the skin. All these things happen when an overdose of roentgen rays is given. Bombed children’s hair falls out, and some adults’. That is natural, because these rays are used often to make hair fall artificially and it sometimes takes several days before the hair becomes loose.”

Nakashima differed with general physicians who have asked the Japanese government to close off the bombed area, claiming that returned refugees have been infected from the ground by lethal rays. “I believe that any after-effect out there is negligible, though I mean to make tests soon with an electrometer,” said the X-ray specialist. The suggestion by Dutch doctor Lieutenant Jakob Vink (taken prisoner in Java and now commander of the Allied prison camp here) that the drug pentnucleosan—which increases white corpuscles—be tried brought the rejoinder from Nakashima that it would be “useless, because the grave X-ray burns are incurable.”

At Emergency Hospital #2 the commanding officer, young Lieutenant Colonel Yoshitaka Sasaki, with three rows of campaign ribbons on his breast, stated that 200 patients had died of 343 admitted, and that he expects about 50 more deaths. Most severe ordinary burns resulted in the patients’ deaths within a week after the bomb fell. But this hospital began taking patients only from one to two weeks afterward. It is therefore almost exclusively “Disease X” cases and the deaths are mostly from this.

Nakashima divides the deaths outside simple burns and fractures into two classes on the basis of symptoms observed in nine post-mortem autopsies. The first class accounts for roughly 60 percent of the deaths, the second for 40 percent.

Among exterior symptoms in the first class are: falling hair from the head, armpits and pubic zones; spotty local skin hemorrhages, looking like measles all over the body; lip sores; diarrhea but without blood discharge; swelling in the throat areas of the epiglottis and retropharynx; and a descent in the number of both white and red corpuscles. Red corpuscles fall from a normal five million to half or one-third, while the whites almost disappear, dropping from seven or eight thousand to three to five hundred. Fever rises to 104 and stays there without fluctuating.

Interior symptoms of the first class revealed in the post-mortems seem to show the intestines choked with blood, which Nakashima thinks occurs a few hours before death. The stomach is also choked with blood, and also mesenterium. Blood spots appear in the bone marrow, and subarachnoid oval blood patches appear on the brain which, however, is not affected. Upgoing parts of the intestines have little blood, but the congestion is mainly in downgoing passages. The duodenum is drained of blood, but the liver, kidney and pancreas remain the same. The spleen is hard but normal, though the urine shows increased blood. There is little blood in the colon but much in the jejunum or upper intestine.

Nakashima considers it possible that the atomic bomb’s rare rays may cause deaths in the first class, as with delayed X-ray burns. But the second class has him totally baffled. These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever. Un-fevered patients with as much as one-third of their skin area burned have been known to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, the healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse. The burns come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burn victims. Four to five days from this turn to the worse, they die. Their bloodstream has not thinned as in the first class, and their organs after death are found in a normal condition of health. But they are dead—dead of the atomic bomb—and nobody knows why.

Twenty-five Americans are due to arrive on September 11th to study the Nagasaki bombsite. The Japanese hope that they will bring a solution for Disease X.

III

Among the POWs

(September 10–20, 1945)

On September 10, the day after the U.S. military press junket came and went in mere hours, Weller left Nagasaki to explore the POW camps about forty miles north. He probably got there using a car and driver commandeered from the general.

     
None of Kyushu’s Allied camps, whose prisoners worked as slaves, had yet been “opened”; few camps were aware the war was over, although many Japanese guards and officers had fled. Some camps had received food drops from B-29s. The prisoners—mainly American, British, Australian, Dutch—were diseased, weakened, yet reluctant to risk leaving, fearful for their lives after years of indiscriminate torture and deliberate starvation.

     
The Japanese POW camps are one of the great omissions in World War II memory. Despite the large numbers involved—140,000 Allied prisoners through the war—they have not been portrayed in films, chronicled by historians, or officially documented as the Nazi camps have been, though they were seven times deadlier for a POW. The Pacific war was as much a tribal struggle of race, with all its mutual incomprehensions, as a struggle of nations.

     
Weller’s dispatches are full of prisoners talking who often had realized only that very day that they were suddenly free men, now telling how it felt to be at the receiving end of that struggle. These men were the lucky ones, the survivors. All were brought to the camps from overseas: captured on Java or
Singapore, put to work in Burma or Thailand, imprisoned as one of MacArthur’s abandoned eighty thousand from Bataan and Corregidor who endured the death march to O’Donnell and Cabanatuan and somehow survived. A third of the prisoners in any camp died.

     
Many of Weller’s POW dispatches concern Omuta #17, the largest camp of all. Weller arrived there unescorted and went directly into the commander’s office; shortly afterward an assembly was called, with American POWs on one side and rifleless guards on the other. Speaking from a platform, the Japanese commander said, “Japan has laid down its arms in favor of a great nation.”

     
Then Weller spoke, and told of the two atomic bombs, the recent surrender, and how U.S. troops for the occupation of Kyushu were arriving down in Kanoya daily, airlifted from Okinawa. “I have no authority to tell you what to do,” he said, “but why should those planes go back empty?” That day, men began to leave.

Omuta, Japan—Tuesday, September 11, 1945 1800 hours

Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu

Midwesterners now impatiently awaiting their return home saw a pillar of cloud following the atomic bomb form across Nagasaki Bay. Today they told their impressions to a
Chicago Daily News
correspondent. They are members of the 1,700-strong Allied camp which is probably the largest in Japan. Many have been working eight to ten hours daily in a low-ceilinged coal mine owned by Baron Mitsui, who is still residing unrestricted and roaming at large here.

Albert Dubois (Webster, Wisconsin):
“Smoke from that atomic bomb made Nagasaki look like a mass of blackness for six hours afterward.”

Lester Tennenberg (Chicago, Illinois):
“We saw the cloud rising up from the ground over Nagasaki and admired it, but only learned after the surrender that it was an atomic bomb.”

Sergeant Wallace Timmons (Chicago, Illinois):
“I think the Japs were seriously frightened by the incendiary bombing before the atomic bombs.”

Stanley Lukas of Chicago,
a civilian employed by U.S. Army Ordnance in Corregidor, said, “I only heard about the atomic bomb, because the Japanese had me underground in the coal mine.”

Sergeant Harold Fowler of Peoria
and
Sergeant David Garrett of Carbondale,
both mechanics with the 17th Pursuit Squadron, said, “At evening roll call after coming out from the mine, we saw a strange haze over Nagasaki. That was all we saw of the atomic bomb.”

Sergeant James Bashleben (Park Ridge, Illinois):
“About seventy-five percent of Maywood Company were living after Bataan, but I lost track of things after the long death march to Camp O’Donnell.”

Robert Johns (Pekin, Illinois):
“On Bataan, with the 200th Coast Artillery, I weighed 170. The Japs had me working in ‘meso nooky.’ That’s the water-covered portion of the mine floor. My weight went down to 115, but I’ve added some since our planes began dropping us rations.”

Stanley Kyler (Dekalb, Illinois):
“I’ve been working twenty-two months for Baron Mitsui. Four months was driving hard rock, and eighteen months was shovelling coal, twelve to fourteen hours a day. The Japanese often made us extractors work two hours extra.”

Sergeant Warren Lackie (Aitkin, Minnesota),
said: “When the Japanese brought me from Bilibid Prison in the Philippines, we were bombed off Olangapo and I got crushed in a falling hatch cover. I thought I was done for when I was carried ashore at Moji, in Japan. I’ve thrown away the crutches now and manage well on canes. I’ve gone from 82 to 135 pounds.”

Annapolis graduate
Lieutenant Edward Little (Decatur, Illinois),
captured on Corregidor: “I saw the atomic bomb over Nagasaki, when from a red ball suspended in the air it began to mushroom upward like an ice cream cone. The core stayed red for about twenty minutes. I got the impression that a fire was burning in the cloud. The Japs were very concerned, they kept pointing their swords toward Nagasaki and jabbering. They knew about the first one at Hiroshima and were as worried as we were ignorant.”

Omuta, Japan—Tuesday, September 11, 1945 2200 hours

Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu

Within view of the cloud rising up from the atomic bomb over Nagasaki, prisoners from the New Mexican 200th Coast Artillery at this, the largest Allied camp in southern Japan, are waiting eagerly for orders sending them homeward. They have worked twelve-hour days for many months in Baron Mitsui’s coal mine on their hard road from Bataan, but liberty is now at hand.

Benny Daugherty (Alamogordo):
“When I saw the atomic bomb’s smoke over Nagasaki it was one hour after it had been dropped at eleven o’clock. We were marching to work in the Mitsui coal mine and I saw the smoke turning from grey toward black. Our eyes rose up because fires were catching in the town.”

Robert Dunlap (Carlsbad):
“We discussed the smoke rising over Nagasaki and wondered whether it was bombing or a cloud, and could not make up our minds.”

Corporal Agapito Silva (Gallup):
“I missed the bomb by being in the mine. Our work was so long, so dangerous and so rough that it caused some men to deliberately get their arms broken in order to escape from being underground.”

First Sergeant Manuel Armijo (Santa Fe):
“To us, Japanese treatment meant frequent beatings and being ill-clothed and ill-fed, which caused some stealing due to hunger. We passed a very hard winter.”

Valentine Dallago (Gallup):
“I’ve seen at least a score of men whipped underground by Japanese overseers with a length of dynamite fuse, or struck by a shovel.”

Thomas Barka (Gila):
“Our main troubles were a water freshet in the mine, stooping for the low roofs, being obliged to carry heavy timbers and being continually beaten by the Japanese bosses.”

Corporal Ben Montoya (Taos):
“Cave-ins came about once a week. Seven months ago a cave-in broke my right leg, and I’ll be glad to get some American treatment.”

Corporal Jesus Silva (Santa Fe):
“It was so bad underground that your friend would ask you to go off into a dark lateral passage with him, hand you a crowbar and reach out his foot or arm, and whisper, ‘Will you, please?’ You knew that meant for you break it, which would mean thirty or forty days’ rest for him. For asking the Japanese foremen to remove the timbers preventing my crew from building a wall face, I was severely beaten by three overseers who took turns smashing their fists into my face. They wanted me to go to my knees and ask for mercy but I refused. Finally one took a club and knocked me out.”

Evangelisto Garcia (Hot Springs):
“My biggest thrill was June 18th and July 27th by night, when B-29s burned practically all this mining town. I only regretted that they failed to put the mine out of order, because it was hell. I lost track of the times I was beaten up for simply not understanding the Japanese language. They took full advantage of our being prisoners, unable to strike back.”

Sergeant Thomas Nunn of Albuquerque
was preparing a lateral passage in the Mitsui mine when he went to fill his flask at a place where water dripped from the coal ceiling. When he returned the overseer was angry, with Corporal George Craig standing helplessly by. He dragged Nunn to the superintendent’s office. The superintendent and overseer gave him a preliminary beating with fists and a small stick, then handed him over to soldiers on the surface. “The soldiers beat me with the handle of a spade, about fifty cutting blows on the buttocks, which left them bleeding. I missed my shift that night. The mine boss complained. Soldiers came and dragged me to jail. They practiced a bamboo torture, forcing me to kneel on a piece of bamboo placed on the floor. I had to keep my toes stretched out behind me, resting all my weight on my knees. I stayed that way, kneeling, for two days and two nights without rest. To weaken me they balanced a pail full of water on my bent thighs in order to increase the weight on my knees. I had to hold the pail with my hands and not let it fall off my thighs. Finally, to increase the pressure even more, they put my head through a short ladder with the long sections resting on my shoulders. They’d take turns pulling down on the ends of this ladder. Then they removed the water bucket and the ladder. The
gunze—
that’s sergeant—took a mallet like a croquet mallet and hammered me all over my head and face till one eye was completely closed and the other only barely open. Then they forced me go back to work in the mine. I worked for one day. Finally, on July 4th they let me return to my bunk.”

Fred Starnes (Silver City):
“I’d been sick and so I was not strong. That increased my beatings. If there was a big nugget and they ordered you to pick it up and you couldn’t, they’d beat you.”

Faustino Olguin of Albuquerque
bears a scar on his scalp from a sabre blow by the camp commandant, who still rides about Omuta undetained and unrebuked. Olguin needed a pencil to make out a receipt for the light worn on his mining cap, and borrowed one from the mess sergeant. Possession of pencils or paper was forbidden by the Japanese. The Japanese commandant saw him and began beating him with a sheathed sword. He was then thrown into jail by soldiers who held him foodless for two days. “They kept me kneeling on bamboo at attention all day. Because it was in March, and cold, the Japs also took me out in the wind and poured buckets of water over me, which gave them a great laugh.”

Joe Medina (Taos):
“I’m a blaster or explosive man. I’ve seen plenty of Japs killed in the mine with a cave-in. But I’ve been fortunate; they never laid hands on me.”

Omuta, Japan—Tuesday, September 11, 1945 2300 hours

To: Commanding officer, Recovered Personnel section, Yokohama

From: George Weller, Chicago Daily News correspondent, Prisoner of War Camp 17, Omuta, Kyushu

september eleven twentythree hours message begins todays drops gratefully received stop unfortunately personnel were injured and installations damaged including two kits on dispensary stop therefore aiming point for camp seventeen containing seventeen hundred persons been moved halfmile southward stop drop ground for camp twentyfive containing four hundred prisoners remains same

paragraph chinese camp containing roughly two thousand received seven drops today which was their first help since surrender stop chinese especially need general issue medicine

paragraph chinese buildings were hitherto unmarked due failure japanese inform chinese of manila agreements conditions regarding marking prisoner war buildings for air drops

paragraph as of september twelfth northward facing roof markings of all three prisoner war camps near omuta will bear under prisoner war inscriptions their respective designations seventeen twentyfive and quote china unquote message ends

Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945 0100 hours

Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu

American and Chinese prisoner coal miners emerging from underground darkness in central Kyushu are discovering for the first time that their prison camps are adjacent.

For nearly one month since the surrender the Chinese have been going foodless because their Japanese guards have departed from the camp. Their serious medical condition was discovered today by two parties headed by American doctor Captain Thomas Hewlett, of New Albany, Indiana, and Crystal River, Florida, who was captured on Corregidor, and Australian Captain Ian Duncan, of Sydney, captured in Singapore.

B-29s today dropped the Chinese their first food supplies since the surrender.

Hewlett reported that the nearest Chinese camp commander is a remnant of a party under American-trained Airman Lieutenant Colonel Chiu, which left North China two years ago, then numbering 1,236. Three hundred men died on reaching Japan. The Japanese never provided a camp physician and the Chinese have none. Thus in the Chinese camp every man regardless of condition has been considered by the Japanese fit for underground work. Fifty are seriously ill, about half of these with deficiency disease.

This Chinese camp counted 70 men killed by Japanese guards in two years, plus 120 dead of disease, with 546 still living.

The other coal miners’ camp of Chinese consists of what remains of 1,365 who left China eighteen months ago; 54 have been executed or otherwise beaten to death by the Japanese, and 60 died of mining injuries.

Many of the surviving Chinese are “as thin as skeletons,” with bandages made of rags or newspapers. The camp has one Chinese doctor who possesses neither a scalpel, forceps, thermometer nor stethoscope.