Tears in the Darkness (51 page)

As oxygen levels fall below 16 percent, nerve cells in the brain and neck and heart, triggered by the buildup of carbon dioxide, signal the body to breathe faster, and it wasn't long before the holds became a mass of heaving chests and shoulders, mouths agape, men gasping for air. At 14 percent oxygen, the men in the aft and forward holds began to drop. Soon the deck in the middle of the aft hold had a floor mat of flesh, men standing on other men.
¹¹

At that point everyone had figured out that the only breathable air was directly under the open hatches, and the more those in the back of the hold tried to shove and push their way forward, the more those around the hatch started to push back. And it did not take long for all this pushing to turn to panic.

Men started screaming and yelling for air, then they began to beat
one another with their fists, canteens, mess kits. All that exertion used up even more oxygen, and in the sections of the holds where the oxygen level dropped to 10 percent or less, men stopped breathing. Three in this bay, two in that, five over there by the bulkhead, sitting naked, hugging their knees to their chests, stiff and cold to the touch.
¹²

On top of the suffocating heat and asphyxiating air was the torment of thirst. Their tongues were swollen and they felt a lump in their burning throats. They swallowed, swallowed again, but could get no relief. And that made them all the more irritable, all the more crazy.

Navy Commander Frank Bridget, a tough bantam of an officer in the aft hold, and Marine Corps colonel Curtis Beecher, senior officer in the forward hold, mounted the ladders and tried to quell the panic, quiet the men, but the bedlam belowdecks only grew louder and louder.

Beecher climbed to the top of the ladder now and shouted for Shunusuke Wada, the Japanese interpreter assigned to the detail. More water, the colonel demanded, they were desperate for more water. Wada looked down into the din of the hold. There was no water for the prisoners, he told Beecher. “And you are disturbing the Japanese women and the Japanese children. If you do not remain quiet, I will close the hatch.”
¹³

A while later, screams and yells still issuing from the dark pits forward and aft, Wada was back. He kept his word and shut the hatches. “Unless you are quiet,” he told Beecher, “I shall give the guards the order to fire down into the hold.”

(Beecher hated the “little rat” of an interpreter. Wada had a deformed spine, a “gnomelike” humpback, as Beecher saw him, who walked stooped and spoke in a “screeching, high-pitched voice.” On the pier during loading, Beecher had tried to reason with the interpreter, got a “snarly, arrogant” reply and, knowing that it was the interpreter, not the officer in charge, in this case Lieutenant Junsaburo Toshino, who determined the fate of most details, guessed that the voyage was going to be a “miserable” one.)

A few hours before daybreak on Thursday morning, December 14, the
Oryoku Maru
got under way again and moved slowly out of the mouth of Manila Bay then eventually north up the west coast of Bataan, putting herself between her escorts and the shore. In the early morning dark, the men in the holds noticed they had more wiggle room now, and a while later when the hatches were partially opened and sunlight illuminated
the dark reaches, they saw why. The bays belowdecks were littered with dead, dozens in each hold.

 

SOMETIME
after their handful of morning rice and water (only half a canteen cup per man in the forward hold, no water at all for the prisoners aft), the men heard the sound of airplane engines overhead. In the forward hold, Colonel Beecher worked himself into a position below the open hatch where he could see some sky. American fighter planes in formation above the convoy were peeling off and diving toward the water.

The first bombs must have hit nearby because the ship rocked back and forth from the concussions. Beecher wished for the worst.

“I hope we get hit,” he thought. “Better to take our chances” in the water “than continue in this hell-ship.”
¹⁴

On the next pass, a bomb landed so close it ruptured the ship's hull plates, and the metal rubbing against metal filled the black reaches of the aft hold with blue sparks, an eerie light that illuminated the faces of the men and the recumbent forms of the dead.

On their third, fourth, and fifth runs, the fighters and dive-bombers raked the convoy with 50-caliber machine gun fire. The bombing and strafing quieted the men in the holds. In the sweltering gloom, they listened as the bullets and shrapnel slammed into the deck and sliced through the superstructure, the cabins and bays where the Japanese civilians were trying to take cover.

By late afternoon December 15, many prisoners had been without water for more than twenty-four hours and they started to yell again, louder and more urgently than before. On the whole, things were “worse off than ever,” Colonel Beecher thought. More and more men were dying from dehydration, their faces a ghostly gray, blood oozing from the shriveled and cracked membranes in their mouths and noses.

In the aft hold, Commander Bridget made a desperate attempt to calm the company (he tried to show them how to fan the air with a shirt or pair of shorts), but it did no good. In the forward hold, Colonel Beecher pleaded with the men to get control of themselves, but the sweating, feverish mass, crazed with thirst, just kept screaming.
¹⁵

Sometime after dark they felt the ship getting under way, then it abruptly stopped, and the prisoners heard the sounds of hoists and winches working on deck. They guessed the
Oryoku Maru
had maneuvered
toward shore and the Japanese were taking off their wounded in advance of abandoning ship.

Beecher yelled for Wada. The interpreter told him the prisoners would be taken off as well, but hours passed and nothing happened. Nothing except the heat, the thick, toxic air, the din of hundreds of men howling.

It was now, during their second night in the dark holds of the
Oryoku Maru,
that men who had endured two and a half years of hard labor, starvation rations, deadly disease, daily beatings, and random murder reached their limit.

 

EVEN AT THE WORST
of the prison camps and work details, American POWs had managed to maintain some small sense of human kinship. Beecher had built on that base morality at Camp Cabanatuan, as had Tom Hayes and Pappy Sartin at Bilibid Prison. Now, in the desperate struggle for survival in those dark holds, some men lost the last shred of themselves, whatever humanity they had left. They became sociopaths, stealing what they wanted from the weak and settling scores with old antagonists. (One man was found strangled, another with his gut slit open with a pocket knife.) Here was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes's worst dream, “where every man is enemy to every man,” a mob of “poor, nasty, brutish” beings bent on destroying one another.
¹⁶

The holds were madhouses now. In the murky infernos, the hysterics were screaming and the sociopaths were on the prowl. Even Beecher, battle hardened at forty-seven, was unnerved by “the moaning of the crazed and dying and the shouts of men fighting and killing one another.” And then it got worse.
¹⁷

Some men, so deranged by their thirst (their shriveled neurons misfiring and going haywire), drank blood. Sometimes they slit themselves to suck the serum, and sometimes they set upon others. (The practice, which has been historically exercised on both the living and the dead, is called “hemoposia,” and is well documented in A. V Wolf's classic study on thirst. Castaways have consumed the blood of seabirds, cavalrymen of their horses. Wolf also relates the case of a prospector who, “seeing dimly a luscious-looking arm nearby . . . seized it and mumbled it with his mouth, and greedily sought to suck the blood; he had a vague sense of protest by the owner of the arm, who seemed a long way off, and
was astounded two days later to find that the wounds were inflicted on himself.”)
¹⁸

 

AS THE FIRST RAYS OP LIGHT FILTERED
through openings in the hatch cover, Beecher took stock “of the terrible carnage in the hold”—the contorted corpses, the heaps of the unconscious, the crazed, the wounded. Even those who'd survived the night “looked like demons,” filthy and drawn.
¹⁹

The colonel called for the interpreter. He knew they were abandoning ship, he told Wada. When, he asked, were the Japanese going to get the prisoners off? And just then the American dive-bombers came back, dropping their loads and firing air-to-ground rockets.

One bomb landed by the fantail. The men in the aft hold saw a flash of yellow, felt a blast of heat, and were showered with shrapnel, timbers, and slivers of wood. Scores were killed and wounded.

From all three holds now, the prisoners started shimmying up poles and ladders into the light. The ship, listing hard to port, looked like it had run aground, and some of the men recognized where they were, just off the cliffs of Olongapo Point, a former American Navy base on Subic Bay at the Bataan-Pampanga border. From the starboard side of the
Oryoku Maru,
looking east, the beaches and concrete landings of Subic Bay were roughly eight hundred yards away. The top deck was aswarm with prisoners now, scuttling around clumps of bodies, American and Japanese, piled on deck. Meanwhile, hundreds of men had gone into the water and were making for shore.

Beecher, topside now, found a piece of life preserver and stripped off his filthy rags and jumped into the bay. Water! Cool water.

Then the planes came back for another pass. How many of his men would be killed this time? Beecher wondered. Would bombs blowing up underwater kill them outright, or would they be left unconscious and drown within sight of shore?

Around him hundreds of swimmers were frantically waving their arms and shirts at the sky, and the American pilots, apparently realizing that the lily-white bodies in the bay might not be enemy, broke off their approach.

Beecher wasn't so thirsty anymore; maybe the bay water was restoring him, he thought. Meanwhile, he could see that ashore Japanese soldiers
and Naval Infantry had manned a number of gun posts along the shoreline and seawall, and now those machine guns were being trained on the prisoners paddling in the water.

One Japanese gunner was swinging the barrel of his machine gun back and forth at the swimmers, as if to warn them to swim directly to shore and not down the coast. Beecher, his feet touching bottom now, stood up in the water, directly in front of the menacing Japanese gunner, and began to direct the swimmers to the seawall steps and landing points.

Weak and exhausted from two days and nights belowdecks, some of the swimmers started to drown, but instead of letting them go to their deaths, their stronger comrades grabbed them and hauled them into shallow water. And as Beecher looked back, he also saw men near him paddling back out to the ship on bits of wreckage or in damaged lifeboats to pick up the weak, the wounded, the unconscious abandoned on deck. Their sense of society, it seemed, had been restored, even if only for the moment. Three, four times they went back to rescue their comrades. What grit, Beecher thought.
²⁰

 

JAPANESE SOLDIERS
ashore herded the prisoners up a path to a cluster of trees, where Tom Hayes and other doctors set up a temporary infirmary. The medicos had only the scant supplies they'd carried aboard ship and had managed to save swimming ashore. For bandages they tore up the rags they were wearing and went naked.

That night, with Wada the interpreter and Lieutenant Toshino back in charge (they'd somehow escaped the ship), the Japanese confined the prisoners outdoors on two side-by-side concrete tennis courts surrounded by a twelve-foot-high chicken-wire fence. Then they ordered a roll call.

Beecher climbed the referee's chair and started yelling out names. The count continued for hours. By dusk, they knew that some 250 of the 1,619 men who had boarded the
Oryoku Maru
two days earlier were dead, and at least a score of the survivors were in such bad shape they were not expected to survive.
²¹

On December 20, Japanese guards moved the detail north to San Fernando, La Union, then some days after that to Lingayen Gulf, where, on December 27, the prisoners were loaded aboard two freighters—about eleven hundred on the
Enoura Maru,
the remainder on the
Brazil Maru
—bound for Takao, Formosa.

Since there were fewer of them to jam into the holds, the space belowdecks was not as tight, but the
Enoura Maru
and
Brazil Maru
were no less hellships. Dark, smothering spaces, with scant water and rations. The wounded, the critically sick, the addled and enfeebled—all were at the end of their endurance, and every day two or three of them died.

On New Year's Eve the two ships made port at Takao, and the prisoners from the
Brazil Maru
were transferred to the
Enoura Maru.
Beecher watched as the weak men crossed the top deck to the hatches leading below. “Walking skeletons,” he thought.
²²

The harbor was crowded with ships, and the
Enoura Maru
tied up at a buoy alongside a tanker. For several days the men in the holds heard antiaircraft fire, and the prisoners who'd been allowed on deck to cook the detail's rice reported seeing high-flying planes. Beecher reckoned the crowded harbor was “an ideal target,” and he “felt sure” that if the
Enoura Maru
stayed in port much longer, the detail would be bombed. Again.

On Tuesday, January 9, at first light the guards called for the chow detail to come on deck. A while later buckets of rice, water, and soup were lowered into the hold. Beecher got his handful and sat down against a bulkhead to eat. He dipped his spoon into his mess cup, lifted the spoon to his mouth, and just then the space around him exploded.