Tears in the Darkness (50 page)

One day passed, two. The ship took on a large load of salt in its lower holds, then she just sat there day after day. At the end of the month she was still waiting for repairs.
(Matte-Matte Maru,
the men nicknamed the old bucket, “the Waiting-Waiting Ship.”) At last, on August 4, twelve days after the ship had put into Takao, she sortied again, but after a few hours' steaming, she turned toward shore, this time putting in at the port of Keelung. More boiler trouble. More waiting for the
Matte-Matte Maru.

In the close and crowded spaces belowdecks, tempers were growing short. The vermin (fleas, lice, rats), the starvation rations, the filth (men with dysentery and diarrhea had trouble getting through the crowd in time to use a
benjo
topside or a latrine bucket in the hold), the thick suffocating air—all of it was wearing on everyone.

Fistfights broke out over nothing, feeble men flailing at one other. (Any man suspected of stealing food or water became a whipping boy for those around him.) Some men lost control of themselves and began to scream and yell and thrash around in the reeking gloom.

“Grab him,” his shipmates would yell. “Keep him fucking quiet.”

All the yelling and fighting filled the hold with a din. “I'm going mad,” Gene Jacobsen thought, “stark raving mad.” From his sleeping shelf, Jacobsen watched a party of goons go after a hysterical man in the bottom of the forward hold. Jacobsen couldn't see clearly, but he could hear a lot of grumbling and commotion down there, then the body of the man who had been “quieted” by his bunkmates was hauled up through the hatch cover to the top deck and tossed into the sea.

After twelve days at Keelung, the
Inventor
set sail again. For the next seventeen days, she crept north, nursing her sick boiler, heeding reports of enemy submarines, and hiding in coves and inlets along the way.

The weather was better, cooler, and the prisoners were allowed on deck more often now. Each time the ship anchored offshore, they begged the guards to let them jump in the water and wash off the muck from the holds, but the nervous sentries refused.

The last ten days of the journey were among the worst. Most of the time the prisoners just sat and stared at one another or busied themselves picking off fleas and killing bedbugs. Finally on September i, sixty-two days after boarding the ship in Manila, the American prisoners of war—beards long, hair matted, skin covered with ulcers and open sores—came stumbling down the gangway of the
Matte-Matte Maru
at Moji, Japan.

At the bottom of the gangway, a line of Japanese soldiers stood with hoses and canisters. They sprayed the prisoners down with seawater and doused them with a white powder that smelled like disinfectant, then they issued them light cotton clothing and marched them through the streets to a warehouse where the men were fed bean soup and bread, food that tasted like a feast. The detail was then separated into groups, and it was obvious to the men that they were being sent to different places.

Ben Steele was in a group of 255 men who were marched to a ferry. The ferry carried them across the narrow strait between Moji and Shimonoseki. There they boarded a train with seats. Seats! Ben Steele thought. “A real luxury.” Then he remembered where he was. And what he was.

 

“HELLSHIPS,”
the prisoners of war came to call them. Between January 1942 and July 1945, the Japanese transported 156 shiploads of Allied POWs from battlefields and camps in the southwest Pacific to slave labor sites in their territories and home islands. Although they packed the prisoners in the same spaces they used for their own troops, they stuffed those spaces as if they were shipping livestock, then, out of expediency, spite, or both, denied them adequate air, food, and water. More than 126,000 Allied prisoners of war and native laborers made these journeys, and more than 21,000 died en route or went down with the ships. The prisoners on the
Canadian Inventor
fared better than most; during their passage only a handful of bodies were hauled topside and tossed into the sea. Later voyages were much crueler, and a lot more deadly
⁶

On October 11, 1944, the freighter
Arisan Maru
left Manila for Japan with some eighteen hundred prisoners of war in her main hold. The fall of 1944 was a dangerous time for Japanese merchant ships plying the waters of the South China Sea. The United States had assembled a massive armada to invade the southern Philippine island of Leyte (about four hundred miles south of Manila), the key stepping-stone, as MacArthur
saw it, to taking the Philippine islands back from Japan. As a prelude to the Leyte invasion, the U.S. Navy positioned a task force of aircraft carriers near the islands, and carrier-based fighter planes and bombers began to attack Japanese targets on land and in the South China and East China seas. The Navy also dispatched submarine packs in those waters—“Convoy College,” the skippers called the area, because they were going to school on any Japanese ships that sailed there. In just ninety days, September through November 1944, American air and naval forces sank 347 Japanese merchantmen (an astonishing 1,382,516 tons of shipping).

Since the hellships were never marked as prisoner of war transports (they often carried war matériel as well), American pilots and submarine skippers had no way of knowing they were shooting at fellow Americans. When they looked in their sights and lined up their targets, all they saw was the enemy
⁷

Boarding the
Arisan Maru,
Sergeant Calvin R. Graef, a coast artilleryman from Silver City, New Mexico, had been pressed into service as a deckhand and ordered to help remove the tarpaulins from the largest of the
Arisan's
holds. When he pulled back the hatch cover and looked down, he guessed the hold could accommodate some 200 men. The Japanese jammed 1,805 into that space.
⁸

After two days at sea, days of boiling heat, thick noxious air, vermin, short rations, and little water, five men were dead, likely from heat stroke and heart failure. At last, heeding the prisoners' incessant pleas, the Japanese moved six hundred men from the most crowded bays belowdecks into the ship's coal bin, a large storage space reached only by rope ladders. Six hundred men sitting and sleeping on a mound of hard black rocks.

Graef, meanwhile, and a few others who'd worked as camp cooks ashore, were selected to make the twice-daily rice ration for the cargo of captives. They did their cooking on deck, and Graef was grateful for the assignment, a couple of hours of fresh air every day. Life belowdecks had become intolerable. Men were yelling and moaning and keeling over; most had developed heat blisters (to Graef, their skin looked like “raw hamburger”).

Around 5:00 p.m. on October 24, thirteen days out of port, Graef was topside cooking rice. Half the company of prisoners had been fed; the deck was rolling in a rough sea and the cooks must have had a hard
time with their steam pots. All at once Japanese guards and deckhands started running wildly toward the bow, and when Graef looked back to see what had scared them, he saw a torpedo in the water astern pass within feet of the fantail. Then the gaggle of deckhands reversed itself and dashed back toward him—another torpedo, this one across the bow.

“What gives?” yelled one of the prisoners from below.

“Submarines, school offish!” one of the cooks shouted back.

“Please, God, don't let them miss!”
⁹

Seconds later three torpedoes hit the hull. The Japanese shoved the cooks belowdecks, covered the hatches, then cut the rope ladders to the coal bin and raced for the lifeboats, leaving the prisoners trapped.

In the coal hole, a few boys managed to shimmy up a pole and reattach the ropes, and in the main holds the strongest of them mounted ladders and pushed off the hatch covers.

When Graef finally got up on deck, the Japanese were gone, and the stern of the ship was already underwater. Then the boilers exploded, the ship started to slip under, and Graef was in the water.

No one could say how many men were killed belowdecks and how many made it topside into the sea—two hundred, three hundred, more. About twenty-five men, Graef among them, started swimming toward a Japanese destroyer that had come to the
Arisan's
aid, but when they reached the destroyer's side, Japanese sailors standing along her rail grabbed grappling poles, leaned over the side, and began to push the Americans underwater.

Graef swam off and joined a group of survivors clinging to some wreckage floating nearby. At dusk he spotted two bamboo poles in the water and swam out to fetch them, but when he turned around in the gloaming to swim back, he couldn't find the wreckage and his companions. Using the poles as a makeshift raft, he drifted for what seemed like a long time, through the day and night and into the next day, when he looked up and saw a lifeboat drifting nearby.

“Hey, boat, anybody there?”

Four heads popped up. Prisoners from the ship!

The five survivors rigged a sail and decided to head west toward China, hoping to encounter friendly faces. Three days later they happened upon some Chinese junks, and with the aid of their crews, the Americans made it to the Chinese coast and, finally, into American hands.

Some eighteen hundred military and civilian prisoners of war had been belowdecks on the
Arisan Mam
when she broke in half and started to slip beneath the waves. Nine survived.

Among those who did not was Sergeant Dalton Russell, the man who had helped keep Ben Steele alive on the rocks at Tayabas Road.

 

BY THE PALL OP
1944, the Allies had retaken the Pacific island of Guam and were moving their air bases closer and closer to Japan. MacArthur was on the southern Philippine island of Leyte with 200,000 combat troops, and his force had pushed north to the island of Mindoro. The Japanese were rapidly losing ground, and they began to salvage and ship home what they could from the colonies they had left.

The
Oryoku Maru,
a passenger liner designed to haul cargo as well, was part of this anxious falling back under fire. On the day she was scheduled to leave Manila, the cabins and bays of her white superstructure were occupied by seven hundred Japanese civilians, women and children mostly, and a thousand Japanese sailors off sunken Japanese ships. In the middle and bottom decks of her deep cargo holds was loot from the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, including some 1,600 American prisoners of war, more than two-thirds of them officers, including Tom Hayes and most of the Navy doctors and corpsmen who had run the prison hospital at Bilibid.
¹⁰

Japan had recently lost 122 merchant ships in the same shipping lanes the
Oryoku
planned to ply. With such losses, and with MacArthur poised to invade the big island of Luzon, the Japanese must have known that the
Oryoku Maru
would be among the last vessels able to leave Manila. And they packed her holds tight.

The crowding belowdecks was criminal. Prisoners were stuffed into the side shelves and sleeping platforms. In the open area in the middle of the holds, men were made to stand so tightly bunched that, looking down from the hatch above, the Japanese guards could see only heads and shoulders, like the tops of pickles jammed into a jar.

During the loading of Hold 3, one of the American officers, counting some 450 men already belly to back, told the guards the space was full. The Japanese ignored him and kept pushing more and more men down the ladder on top of the others. Three hundred more.

On Wednesday, December 13, around 8:00 p.m., the ship cast off and moved down to the mouth of Manila Bay, where it stopped and waited
for its escorts. The hatch covers had been left askew, but the hatch openings on this particular ship were small, some fourteen feet square, much too small to ventilate the tightly packed forward and aft holds. Conditions in Hold 3 were particularly brutal; its hatch was between bulkheads that blocked the wind. Only the men directly under the opening were getting any air at all, and even there, the atmosphere was beginning to grow toxic.

The men in Holds 1 and 3 felt as if they'd been trapped in a crowded elevator, shut in an airless closet, locked in an automobile baking in the sun with the windows rolled tight. In that thick, superheated air, a man simply couldn't catch his breath, no matter how hard he tried.

 

THE PHYSICS OP SUFFOCATION
are simple enough: put too many men into an unventilated space and they will soon start to use up the oxygen. Survival in such a milieu is a question of percentages. Everyday air is 21 percent oxygen and .04 percent carbon dioxide; decrease the former and increase the latter and a man will slowly suffocate, choking from the lack of oxygen and at the same time strangling on his own gases (carbon dioxide). At 19.5 percent oxygen, he starts to feel fuzzy headed, flustered; at 16 percent, he loses his judgment, his sense of time and place.

All this was happening in a sweating press of men deep in the disorienting dark. No wonder so many on the
Oryoku Maru
imagined themselves drowning. (Army medic Sidney Stewart saw himself being “sucked under, sucked down,” as if he were struggling to reach the surface from the black depths of a “mossy pool.”)