Authors: Larry Colton
On this night, Gordy hatched a plan, particularly daring for someone so dedicated to being invisible. He was going to retrieve one of the fallen coconuts. With no guard in sight, he slowly opened the door of his small room, checking in both directions. The coconut lay on the ground, a hundred feet away. The courtyard was dimly lit, with little moonlight on this night. The guard station was at the far end. The best way, he decided, was just to make a dash for it.
Crouching low, Gordy shot across the walkway and onto the courtyard. Keeping his eyes on the coconut, he swooped low and gathered it up on the run like a defensive back picking up a fumble. Cradling it in his arm, he sprinted back across the courtyard, making it back inside the room undetected. He was able to pry up a plank from the floor and use it to crack open the coconut, sharing the unexpected feast with his roommates.
The men hid the coconut meat under the floor, enjoying it over several days.
Gordy heard noises outside his room and peeked through the shutters. Across the courtyard he saw two guards setting up a .30-caliber machine gun and aiming it toward the row of rooms housing the crew. Maybe this was how it was going to end—to be lined up outside the rooms and then just mowed down. But would that be worse than a slow death by starvation and beating? As the day wore on, he watched more and more movement by the guards.
The next morning, August 5, 1943—103 days after they had been captured—the door to his cell flew open and two armed guards herded him and his two roommates out of the room onto the grassy courtyard. Soon the rest of the enlisted men joined them, forming two lines. Since being isolated, it was the first time he’d seen his crewmates, including Bob Palmer, who’d survived his bout with dengue fever and the second interrogation.
Goldtooth Maizie ordered the men to march toward the big wooden gate they’d passed through when they first arrived at the Convent on Light Street. Shuffling in that direction, they were a pitiful lot: gaunt, dirty, dispirited.
Outside the gate, convoy trucks waited. With bayonets pointed at them, the crew struggled to climb aboard, and then the canvas flaps were closed. This time there were no blindfolds or tied hands. They were too weak to attempt an escape.
The men sat silently as the trucks rumbled down Light Street, heading toward the pier. Nobody knew where they were headed. Gordy thought nothing could be as torturous as what they’d survived the last 103 days. Surely he could endure whatever came next.
The ride was over quickly. The flaps opened, and Gordy saw that they were at the same dock where they’d landed. A small freighter, the
Hir Maru
, similar in size to the one on which they had arrived, was waiting. Hurriedly, the men formed two lines and marched up the gangway toward the forward hold.
A guard ordered them to stand at attention. The ship’s commanding officer approached the men, a long, silver sword at his side.
A
fter being reminded by the ship’s commander that they were cowards for surrendering and that the Japanese way of life would prevail, Chuck and the rest of the crew were placed in the hold of the ship. The men were crammed together with barely enough room to lie down. The air in the hold was stale and humid; the men sweated onto the wooden planks of the deck, making it slippery. Chuck and several others were bruised from a rifle beating they’d received upon boarding the ship, but Chuck would not let his captors see his pain.
For five days the
Hir Maru
rolled and pitched on the open sea, destination unknown. The men had been given two 5-gallon buckets to serve as toilets, but with the heavy sea and meals of bad rice, the buckets overflowed, the situation made even worse when the majority of the crew came down with diarrhea. In the cramped quarters, there was no privacy and no way to escape the growing mess and the stench.
Soon the entire deck of the hold was soaked in waste. There were no mops; Chuck used his shirt to try to clean some space on the floor, but it was futile. He was able to remain standing, but other men were too weak and dehydrated. Some passed out, and others simply lay down on the filthy deck.
Chuck felt the engines reverse, then stop. The men were ordered out of the hold and up on deck, then led down a gangplank and loaded onto trucks; the flaps were quickly closed to block their view. They did not know
it, but they had landed in Singapore. It was August 10, 1943, and all of the men were still together. Nobody knew the whereabouts or condition of Fitzgerald or two other officers who were missing.
Singapore had been heralded as an “impregnable fortress” and considered the strongest of all British bastions. But in February 1942 it had fallen to the Japanese after only seven days of battle, the largest surrender in British history; over 50,000 British and Australian troops were captured, as well as most of the European citizens living there.
After a twenty-minute ride, the trucks stopped and the crew climbed down and surveyed their new surroundings, a large fenced internment area encircled by barbed wire. Inside the fence stood thatched huts built on stilts; a short ladder allowed entry. The men were marched into the yard, then separated, seven or eight assigned to each hut.
For the next forty-six days, the camp would be their home. Each day they were loaded onto trucks and driven to an abandoned horse-racing track. Chuck imagined it in better times, filled with elegantly dressed patrons, magnificent thoroughbreds, and jockeys in beautiful silk colors.
The men picked weeds on their hands and knees for ten hours under the brutally hot sun, with no water or food. Chuck’s back ached relentlessly and his knuckles were scraped raw. Some days the guards ordered the crew to go back to where they’d started picking and do a better job. Each day on the other side of the track he could see Japanese troops training, the sergeants screaming and slapping the trainees with the same ferocity that the guards at the Convent at Light Street had treated the American prisoners. It was more proof, not that he needed any, that these people were savages. He took consolation in the fact that compared with the treatment the crew had received in Penang, this camp was more humane. The rice portions at night were a little bigger, the harassment and beatings from the guards not as frequent, and they weren’t constantly awakened in the middle of the night. They received cigarettes, and were allowed to shave and bathe. For the first time in months Chuck felt clean. He could survive this, he believed.
He even joined a discussion about an escape plan. The details of
the plan were vague, but the idea was to tunnel under the fence, then hollow out logs and use them as canoes to paddle to one of the many small islands bordering Singapore. The whole crew would have to be included; as they had in Penang, the guards made it clear that if anyone tried to escape, anyone left behind would be severely punished or killed.
To Chuck, it seemed impossible that such a plan could succeed. Still, if men he considered smarter and wiser than he thought it was worth risking, who was he not to go along? Besides, an escape plan gave him hope, and if there was one thing he and his crewmates needed, it was hope. In time, however, the plan was abandoned when it was concluded that even if they got away safely, they would have no place to go. “What are we gonna do … paddle to America?” said Chuck.
At night in their huts, the men shared stories of the different types of interrogation and torture they’d suffered in Penang. Everyone had a story. Bob Palmer told how a bamboo sliver had been jammed under his fingernail and set on fire, and his other fingernails had been pulled off with a pair of pliers. Chuck described how a guard had held his head while another burned off his eyebrows and lashes with the flame of a candle.
The rumor spread that the crew was to be transferred to another prison camp; maybe to China, or to Japan. On September 24, 1943, they were loaded back on trucks, taken to the dock, and marched at gunpoint onto the
Asama Maru;
it was much larger than the ship that had brought them to Singapore. Chuck had a bad feeling about what lay ahead.
I
n 1943, Americans back home knew nothing about Japanese Hell Ships. These unmarked vessels, usually freighters, were used to transport American POWs to Japan, China, Manchuria, or Korea to be used as slave labor. Because the ships were unmarked, the U.S. Navy had no way of knowing POWs were crammed into their holds; thousands of captured American soldiers and sailors, men who had already endured months of torture, malnutrition, and disease in prison camps, had already been killed by American torpedoes and bombs. Built in 1925 as a passenger ship, the
Asama Maru
, part of a convoy of Japanese ships in the South China Sea sailing north from Singapore, was such a ship.
It was hard for Bob Palmer to look at his crewmates, now so emaciated and dressed in rags. Along with other prisoners, Bob showed signs of beriberi. A disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin B
1
, it was rarely seen in America, but it was common in countries where white rice was a staple food. It could be easily cured by a change in diet or by vitamin supplements, neither of which would be forthcoming from their captors. Bob also had a tingling, burning pain in his legs, then a feeling of stiffness and heaviness, symptoms due to lack of exercise, as well as all the bending and squatting he’d been forced to do while pulling weeds on the track in Singapore.
The ship had been on the seas for eight days when a loud explosion jarred Bob from his sleep in the middle of the night. He recognized the
sound of an exploding torpedo; it sounded as if it had hit one of the nearby ships in the convoy.
In response there was a series of smaller explosions—depth charges being dropped on an American sub below. Bob knew the terror those submariners were feeling; he wondered if he’d ever been out drinking beers back in Perth with any of the guys on that sub.
The attack lasted for about an hour, and when the guards returned they were noticeably surlier. Bob figured that one of the ships in the convoy must have been sunk, and the
Grenadier
crew was now going to pay the price.
A sense of doom swept through the crew. Maybe they weren’t going to get off the ship alive. Maybe they’d be beaten to death, or torpedoed, or taken up on the deck and pushed overboard. Who would ever know? Bob closed his eyes and thought about Barbara. He imagined the two of them holding hands and sitting on a big boulder next to the rushing waters of the Rogue River, a picnic lunch, including an apple pie, spread out next to them.
After a couple of more days at sea, Bob felt the ship’s engines reverse and its forward motion stop; the engines shut down. They had arrived at a port, but where?
Bob heard a commotion and looked up to see a dozen screaming Japanese charging down the stairs, carrying rifles with bayonets fixed. They were drunk. Bob saw that they were Imperial Marines, much larger and more solidly built than the crew of the
Asama Maru
. The biggest marine, a broad-shouldered guy over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, walked over to the foot of the stairs and yanked out one of the oak handrails. It was eight feet long and five inches around.
The crew was herded out of the compartment onto the landing hatch. A guard signaled Bob to step out of the line and stand on the hatch cover, hands over his head. He did as instructed. Holding the handrail like a baseball bat, the biggest marine stepped behind him and took a vicious swing, connecting to the lower part of Bob’s back. The force of the blow lifted him off his feet and drove him across the hatch cover. He slammed headfirst
into the bulkhead five feet away, slithering to the deck, all feeling in his lower limbs gone.
Another marine kicked Bob in the side, then dragged him off to the side and deposited him in a heap.
The next man was directed to the hatch cover, and the big marine took another swing, this one even more vicious. Then the next man was ordered forward, and the next, until every man had been clubbed.
With each swing, the big marine tried to outdo himself. Some men lost consciousness. Others urinated in their pants. When the men collapsed against the bulkhead, temporarily paralyzed, they were kicked and poked, then dragged off to the side. If the first blow didn’t drive them into the bulkhead or knock them off their feet, the marine struck again.
Bob watched as Tim stepped onto the hatch cover and looked defiantly at the big marine. Putting his hands over his head, Tim took the blow across his butt, but he didn’t flinch.
The marine swung again, even harder, this blow landing on his lower back. Tim stood firm.
Infuriated, the big marine wound up again; the blow struck Tim in the small of the back. And again he didn’t go down. Finally, the marine’s fourth blow sent Tim staggering forward, his head banging against the bulkhead, his legs crumbling under him. He curled up into a ball. Standing over him, the marine kicked him in the back.
After the last man was hit, the crew staggered to their compartment, many having to crawl. The men who had lost control of their bladders were not able to clean themselves.
Bob didn’t know how long he’d been drifting in and out of consciousness when he heard the guards screaming and yelling. He was jerked to his feet and pushed toward the hatch, and then up the stairway toward the deck. The ship had landed in Japan.
T
im was one of the last to climb out of the hold onto the ship’s deck, greeted by the early morning sunlight and fifty Japanese Imperial Marines yelling and prodding him with bayonets and clubs.
Wobbling down the gangplank to the pier, he staggered through the gauntlet of marines. One connected with a rifle butt, another with a fist. He struggled to stay upright. If he fell, he’d be pummeled. His legs, bruised and stiff from ankle to hip, ached. Ahead of him, Gordy stumbled and was immediately jumped by three marines. Tim could only watch as Gordy tried to crawl forward, unable to get back up. Of all his crewmates, Gordy was the one he wanted to help the most. He seemed so vulnerable.