Tears in the Darkness (49 page)

He arrived at Cabanatuan in the middle of January, a huge hot and dusty place, six-tenths of a mile long (roughly the length of eleven football fields end to end) and half a mile wide, all surrounded by three high barbed-wire fences that formed a no-man's-land, a kill zone for the guards. Same sawali shacks as O'Donnell, same rice slop as everywhere else, men in the same rags and loincloths.

He worked the farm, digging, planting, hoeing with homemade tools. Camotes, corn, eggplant. He thought he might steal something and smuggle it back to camp under his hat or waistband. Then he saw what happened to the skeletal men who got caught doing that, and so like everyone else, he picked pigweed for himself and choked it down with his rice. Sometimes, when he thought the guards weren't looking, he'd sneak a bite of a corn stalk near the base. The stalk was kind of tender down there, at the bottom, his nose in the dirt.

In July 1944, his name appeared on a draft of eleven hundred men listed for shipment to Japan. The draft was taken by train, boxcars, back down to Manila and put up overnight in the transient section of Bilibid, across from the hospital. That night, quite by accident, Ben Steele ran into Q. P. Devore, who was on his way to Cabanatuan from a work farm in Mindinao.

Ben Steele thought Q.P. looked good; he'd been treated well at the camp in the southern islands. Q.P., on the other hand, thought his friend
looked awful—his cheekbones were showing and his eyes were sunken in his head. He'd lost so much weight (he was down to 110 pounds) his skin sagged on his bones, and his knees looked like doorknobs, his ribs like a washboard. Q.P. handed him a small mirror from a Red Cross package. Ben Steele was shocked by the image in the glass.

Still, they were delighted to be together again, if only for a night passing through prison. They shared a coconut, traded tales, wondered what was ahead.

The next day Ben Steele and the rest of the draft were assembled in the prison compound. They marched out the front gate and through the streets of Manila to the docks by Manila Bay. There they were loaded aboard an old freighter, the
Canadian Inventor,
for the long trip north, a trip into the heart of the enemy's homeland.

 

 

 

 

 

July 2,1944, Pier 7, Manila Bay

B
EN STEELE
was waiting in a long line of men queued up to board the
Canadian Inventor.
Since surrender, the Japanese had been shipping boatloads of American prisoners from the Philippines to Japan and its occupied territories as slave labor. The first groups of prisoners had left Manila in 1942 in the gloom of defeat, liberation the last thing on their minds. Now, however, in the summer of 1944, America was winning the war, and the eleven hundred men lined up to board the
Inventor
felt thwarted. The Allies were gaining ground, getting close, and the men on the dock had hoped to be free in a matter of months. Today they were getting on a ship for Japan, and they knew it might be years before America could mount an invasion of the enemy's homeland to save them.

From the end of the pier, it was possible to look out on the bay, and that grand sweep of scene must have been a bitter vista to Ben Steele and his comrades. To the southwest, they could see the spit of land called Cavite—from there in December 1941, Admiral Thomas Hart's Asiatic Fleet had fled south to save itself. And looking due west across the bay through the haze hanging over the water, the prisoners could make out a dark silhouette of mountains, the ghostly promontories where they had fought for ninety-nine days, the peninsula of Bataan.

The
Inventor
was empty, riding high in the water, and every so often Ben Steele glanced up at the dark hull and grimy white superstructure. The ship looked like she'd been steaming constantly with no time to put in for refitting or repairs. A real rust bucket.

The line of men began to file slowly up the gangway to the main
deck. As Ben Steele passed a forward bulkhead, he spotted a brass plaque with the name of the ship, then passed across the deck to an open hatch and ladderway leading down to a hold. Wafting up from the hold was the scent of hay and the stale smell of horses and manure. Okay, he thought, pausing at the open hatch, if horses had survived this old tub, so could he.
¹

As he started to descend the ladder, he could see that the space below was already so crowded with anxious and perspiring prisoners, he would barely have enough room to squat or sit, even with his legs drawn up tight against his chest. The only light was from the open hatch, and back in the far reaches of the hold, it was dark, choking dark.

 

AMERICAN PRISONERS
of war were carried back to the Japanese homeland in the same spaces, the same airless holds, the Imperial Army used to transport its own troops. Japanese generals stuffed these troop ships so full of
hohei
that headquarters (in a 1941 handbook passed out prior to sailing) warned the average soldier he would be “sleeping side by side on the mess decks [with his comrades] like sardines in a tin.” By “mess decks” they meant the wooden or steel shelves that had been built into the ship's storage holds between decks, sleeping platforms to double or triple the number of troops that could be carried in the spaces belowdecks. The shelves and tiers were stacked so tightly there was barely three feet between them, just enough room to squirm in and wriggle out. “Silkworm shelves,” the
hohei
dubbed them. A level down, meanwhile, in poorly ventilated bottom decks, horses and their hostlers sweated out the journey. Life at every level belowdecks was so miserable (in tropical waters the holds reached temperatures of 130°) the Japanese troops complained bitterly among themselves, and headquarters, apparently getting wind of the grousing, tried to put the troops' predicament into perspective. In the 1941 handbook (“Read This Alone and the War Can Be Won”), the
hohei
were told, “Never forget that in the dark and steaming lowest decks of the ship, with no murmur of complaint at the unfairness of their treatment, the Army horses are suffering in patience . . . Remember that however exhausted you yourselves may feel, the horses will have reached a stage of exhaustion even more distressing.”
²

Among its many miscalculations in going to war with the West, Japan, a maritime nation, grossly underestimated the number of merchant ships it would need—ships to ferry troops and supplies to far-flung battlefields, ships to carry raw materials back to the homeland, ships to import enough food to feed Japan's people. By the end of 1942, Allied aircraft and submarines plying the southwest Pacific had sunk more than a million tons of Japanese shipping, one-fifth of its already inadequate fleet, and by the beginning of 1944 the Japanese had lost at least another fifth.
³

As these merchant losses mounted, the remaining ships were forced to carry more and more cargo, which included consignments of prisoners of war, thousands of men jammed and stuffed into the tiers, racks, platforms, and shelves belowdecks. Under normal conditions, steaming night and day, a Japanese merchant ship, turning an average of 13 knots, could make the 1,276 nautical miles between Manila and Moji, Japan's main port of arrival for POWs, in fifteen days or less. But by the middle of 1944, harassed by Allied aircraft and roving submarine packs or slowed by aging boilers and engines, Japanese cargo ships frequently had to stop and hide or put into a friendly port for repairs, and a journey of fifteen days could easily turn into a month or more belowdecks.

 

THE
CANADIAN INVENTOR
sat at the dock for a day and a half, her two holds packed with American prisoners of war, then, on the morning of July 4, the ship finally set sail. Less than twenty-four hours later, she was back at anchor with boiler trouble, and she sat in Manila Bay awaiting repairs. The air temperature was near 90°, the humidity about 75 percent. The rainy season with its cooling overcast was late that year, so a bright sun beat down on the metal hull and deck.
⁴

The ship's holds were not ventilated, and during the day the Japanese refused to remove the hatch covers, lest some of their human cargo escape. After a few hours sitting in the sun, the holds became like bake ovens.

“This is damn near unbearable,” Ben Steele thought.

The men tried to settle down, but wherever they sat, squatted, or lay in the hold, either on the side tiers or on the bare deck in the middle of the hold, they were wedged arm to arm, belly to back. The press of men was so intense they started pouring sweat. Within an hour they were beginning to dehydrate, and by the afternoon they were clammy and lightheaded, the first symptoms of men failing from thirst.

Many worried they might faint and never wake, and that sense of doom left them anxious, panting. The faster they tried to breathe, the more their hearts raced, and it wasn't long before they could feel their
pulse pounding in their heads and chests. They needed air, they needed water, they needed to get out of that damn baking box.

That night, the Japanese finally peeled back the hatches and lowered buckets of water and rice. Not enough, of course. Never enough. (What was it the war minister had said? “There is no need to pamper the POWs.”) At sea, it seemed, their short rations would be shorter—a couple of handfuls of rice and less than a canteen of water (sixteen ounces) per man per day
⁵

The first day a large number of men went without any food or drink at all. No one, no officer or senior sergeant, stepped forward to organize them, and the men standing directly under the hatch openings grabbed what they could while the sick and the weak and those crammed into the back reaches of the holds got nothing at all.

Here and there in the hold were five-gallon latrine buckets, which in the crowding and dark often got kicked over, spilling the contents on the men lying and sitting nearby. At some point after dark, the Japanese allowed groups of prisoners to come topside for a few moments of air, then it was back down into the stink and heat until the next night.

And so it went for eleven days, broiling in the airless hold, until the afternoon of July 16, when the
Canadian Inventor,
her boiler finally fixed, joined a small convoy of ships sailing out of Manila Bay.

Once under way, the Japanese removed the hatch covers, which allowed a bit of air to find its way down into the holds. The fresh air seemed to calm the men who were delirious and screaming and yelling. Someone stepped forward to organize the chow detail, and every man got a bite of food and a sip of water. Just enough to keep them starving and so thirsty they could think of little else.

Twenty-four hours out of port the seas became heavy and the ship ran into huge swells and squall-like winds, a Pacific typhoon. Still riding high in the water with a light cargo, the
Canadian Inventor
bobbed and tossed in the stormy seas, pitching and rolling so severely her yards and braces sometimes seemed to touch the surface of the water.

Ben Steele knew about bad weather, but he had never been through a storm at sea with swirling clouds, seventy-mile-an-hour winds, and torrents of rain. From his position in the forward hold just below the open hatch, he could see the tops of thirty-foot waves crashing across the deck, and when the ship pitched forward in a trough between giant
swells, he thought, “The whole damn front end is going under the water,” and he was afraid.

Men thrown off their feet went flying across the hold, bouncing off one another and tumbling and rolling from bulkhead to bulkhead. Soon the hold was a tangle of limbs and bodies sliding around in pools of vomit and excreta from the latrine buckets. In all that sliding, Air Corps Private John Crago of Huntington, Indiana, noticed that the skin on his legs, buttocks, and lower back had been scraped raw, and he tried to wedge himself in a corner of the hold and grab a beam to steady himself against the storm.

At first the Japanese left the hatches open, and the men, thirsty and filthy, welcomed the sheets of rain coming into the open holds. Then the waves started sweeping the deck, the holds took on seawater, and the Japanese slammed the hatch covers shut, leaving the prisoners rolling in the reeking dark.

When the winds finally calmed and the waves flattened, the crew discovered more boiler trouble, and the
Canadian Inventor
left her small convoy and made for Formosa. The prisoners were allowed to rotate up on deck now for a breath of air or to use one of the five
benjo
(latrine seats the Japanese also called “birdcages”) that hung over the rail on ropes. A few days later, July 23, the
Inventor
tied up at the docks at Takao.

After twenty-one days in the holds, her bearded human cargo looked begrimed and smelled worse, and the Japanese ran them all up on deck and washed them down with fire hoses, then sprayed water into the holds and pumped the vile bilge into the harbor.