No Ordinary Joes (24 page)

It was October 9, 1943. The
Asama Maru
had landed at Shimonoseki, population 105,000, a port city on the Sea of Japan. Located on the southwestern corner of Honshu, Japan’s largest island, and narrowly separated from the smaller inland of Kyushu, Shimonoseki was an important railroad and industrial center, with shipyards and chemical plants, as well as a primary training location for the Imperial Marines.

Tim and the other captured submariners shuffled away from the pier, heading into town. As they slowly moved through the streets, civilians poured out of their homes and shops to view the emaciated and foot-sore prisoners. For most, it was their first glimpse of an American. Some shouted and shook their fists; others hurled rocks. A small woman stepped toward Tim and spit, hitting him in the neck.

Of all the degradation he’d suffered so far, this was the most humiliating, because he was now on the enemy’s soil. It took all of his self-control not to attack the woman.

The crew was imprisoned in a single-story barracks at an old marine training base. Straw mats carpeted the concrete floor and the windows were nailed shut. Each prisoner was issued a rough woolen blanket and a crude bar of soap.

The camp commander entered, informing the crew that each morning and night they must bow toward the emperor.

Tim wanted to laugh. Back in Penang he’d been slapped and punched for not bowing correctly. Since then, he’d bowed every morning and evening as instructed, but he told himself that he was really bowing to FDR. He used the same inner strategy when bowing to or saluting a guard: in his head, he was saluting Captain Fitzgerald.

Tim was having trouble shaking the image of Fitzgerald being dragged out of the courtyard unconscious, his whole body one continuous bruise. Back in Singapore, the men had discussed Fitzgerald’s decision to pursue the ships in search of a kill. Had he been too aggressive and too concerned with building his own reputation? Would they have escaped if he’d given the order to dive more quickly instead of questioning the lookout’s word that he’d spotted the dive-bomber? And every submariner knew that a captain was not supposed to keep his sub on the surface in daylight, especially not so close to land and when the enemy knew you were in the vicinity. But not once did anyone blame the captain; the crew’s respect and admiration for his toughness, courage, and strategy were unassailable.

On the morning of October 12, three days after their arrival, the crew was mustered together just outside the door of their barracks and ordered to stand at attention.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty. For Tim, his body weakened and his legs in pain and swollen from beatings, standing at attention was one of the hardest forms of torture. To distract himself, he thought about Valma
back in Perth and how positively beautiful she’d looked when he proposed to her.

He wondered if his divorced parents knew that he’d been captured and was a POW. If they knew, were they talking to each other or dealing with it separately? Was his Uncle Ben, the successful insurance man, supporting Tim’s mom? Tim had been sending part of his pay home each month. Certainly his mom would have noticed by now that the checks had stopped. Or maybe the Navy was still sending her money?

He assumed his mom had turned to the church for support. She’d often said that it was her faith in God and the Baptist Church that helped her get through those long periods in the institution. Tim thought back to the days in Lubbock when he and his mom and dad had listened to Reverend Truitt preach the gospel and expound about the wages against sin and the certainty of a God and his promise of eternity. He’d carried a Bible with him onto the
Grenadier
, and it bothered him that he’d abandoned the ship without it. Since falling into the hands of the Japanese, he’d often tried to let the Scriptures flow through him as one way to survive this crucible. In Matthew, Jesus taught that he should “turn the other cheek,” but the truth was that the injunction from Exodus about seeking justice in “an eye for an eye” was more to Tim’s liking.

According to Tim’s interpretation of the Bible and Jesus’ teachings, he believed that there was no true authority except God, and that it was a believer’s responsibility to work and pray to change a wrong. He had no doubt that Japan was a godless and backward nation, and the guards who carried out its rules were godless too. So Tim would, as the Bible instructed him, give unto Caesar only that which was owed him: he could obey his captors with his words and actions in order to survive, but never with his heart, which would remain loyal only to his country and to God.

Standing in front of the barracks, the men remained at attention. Finally the camp commander stepped forward and started calling out names of crew members to step forward. Tim waited for his name to be called. It wasn’t. Neither was Chuck’s or Gordy’s.

But Bob Palmer’s was. Tim watched as Palmer and twenty-eight other
submariners stepped forward and then were marched away, around the corner and out of sight.

A few days later, Tim and the remaining members of the crew were marched to a nearby train yard and shoved aboard a small coach car. After a slow, uncomfortable two-day trip, the train finally stopped in front of a large steel mill. The men could see Japanese workers coming and going in the morning mist.

Assembled next to the train, the men were marched away from the mill, through a residential district and past shacks of corrugated metal. People hurried out of their houses and lined the street as they straggled by, and once again the men were yelled at, spit upon, and pelted with rocks.

Finally the prisoners reached the bottom of a steep hill. At the top, shrouded in the mist, sat a large concrete four-story building with metal-framed windows, ominous and cold.

They trudged up the hill and into the building—quickly dubbed “the Castle” by the crew—and were escorted down a long corridor, passing several rooms with large metal doors. At the end of the corridor, they were divided into two groups of twenty-two, half of the men going into one room, the other half into another; Tim, Chuck, and Gordy were in the same group. Each room had two rows of bunks with thin straw mats. Before the men had a chance to relax, they were ordered back out into the hall. There they were informed that they had joined the hundreds of other prisoners assigned to Prisoner of War Camp #3, in the Fukuoka district.

The new interpreter explained that they would all be working in a steel mill three miles away and be paid 10 sen (the equivalent of less than 2 cents) a day. They could use the money to buy cigarettes or candy from a camp store. For meals, they would receive morning rice, a
bento
(box lunch) to take to work, and rice in the evening. Everyone would be required to work except those with a serious illness, as determined by the Japanese camp doctor. Each man would be issued a thin, light green burlap jacket and pants, and a wool overcoat (taken during the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904–1905 when the Russians surrendered to the Japanese). They would also receive one pair of split-toe socks, a pair of flat-soled shoes with a V-shaped thong, and a G-string—a thin piece of cloth attached to string tied around the waist—that would serve as underwear. This was fine with Tim; he was glad to be out of the Navy-issued T-shirt and dungarees that he’d been wearing since the
Grenadier
had been torpedoed.

The POWs would also receive a razor with one blade, a toothbrush, and a bar of soap. They would be permitted to bathe after work each night, but because there was only one tub for hundreds of prisoners, those getting to bathe first would be rotated by room. The camp doctor had set aside one room for those seriously ill. Colds or the flu would not be considered an illness.

And finally, if the camp commander eventually deemed they were worthy, they would be allowed to write their families and to receive mail and Red Cross packages, and they would not be beaten. Tim, now prisoner #526, didn’t believe it. Not for a second.

G
ordy Cox, prisoner #528 at Fukuoka Camp #3, closed his eyes, trying not to think about how hungry he was.

“Hey, 528, get back to work,” ordered Dave Megeson. The engineer had been taken prisoner when the Japanese invaded Wake Island.

Gordy opened his eyes and ignored Megeson. They were standing in the pipe shop at the Yawata steel mill, where Gordy and a dozen others from the
Grenadier
, including Tim McCoy and Chuck Vervalin, had been assigned to work. Gordy despised Megeson.

In 1901 the Japanese government had built a steel mill at Yawata, convenient to Japan’s largest coalfield and iron ore from China. By World War II the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata had become the largest such complex in Japan. Yawata was known as the Pittsburgh of Japan. Gordy considered his assignment to the pipe shop in the steel mill a stroke of luck, even if he arrived at the job each day before sunrise and left after sunset. Others in the crew had been assigned outside jobs, and with winter fast approaching, the conditions were wet and miserable. Still other men had been assigned to the coal-hauling detail, where they had to breathe coal dust every day and deal with the soot and grime. The pipe shop was inside a large galvanized metal building, open on one end but sheltered from the rain and wind. Two small furnaces were usually going, which provided some heat, although keeping warm was often a struggle. Gordy’s job was to help put in the ends of the pipes before they were bent. Although
it hadn’t been discussed, Gordy believed the pipes would be used on Japanese ships. POWs were not trusted to make the bend, except for Megeson.

Behind Megeson stood two army guards, as well as a “pusher.” The pushers, or managers, were usually ex-soldiers who’d fought in China and had been discharged because either they’d gotten wounded or they were too old. Most had lost some of the fire of patriotism and were not as hard on the prisoners as the guards were. Normally, there were always a couple of pushers on duty, with one guard patrolling the shop.

Gordy glanced at Megeson, resisting the urge to tell him to get screwed. He considered Megeson a turncoat of sorts, a snitch. A large, broad-shouldered man from California, Megeson had somehow wrangled his way into a favored position with the guards and pushers. A benefit of this elevated status was that he received extra food, which meant he hadn’t lost a lot of weight; in fact, he probably outweighed Gordy by a hundred pounds.

Gordy wasn’t alone in his contempt for Megeson; none of the prisoners liked him. On several occasions, Tim had told others in the crew that he wanted to give him “an old-fashioned Texas whipping.” But Gordy had no intention of fighting him, or anyone else. Stay invisible, he reminded himself. At the Castle, he never argued or showed disrespect to the guards, and at work, he always did as he was told. He made a point of going to the bathroom with at least one other prisoner so that the guards would never catch him alone.

Megeson moved closer to Gordy. “Are you just going to stand there?” he asked.

Gordy glanced up. Megeson was hovering over him. “Get away from me,” he muttered.

Megeson took one step back and sucker-punched him right between the eyes.

Gordy crumpled to the floor, blood gushing from his nose. Dazed, he looked up and saw Megeson straddling him, motioning for him to get up and fight. The two pushers stood right behind him, grinning. Gordy considered the situation.

He didn’t try to fight back.

* * *

Back in Yakima, Nellie Cox, Gordy’s mother, did not know yet that her son’s ship had been sunk and the crew captured. She continued to write:

Slowly, painfully, Gordy trudged back up the hill in the rain to the Castle. Several days had passed since Megeson had knocked him down and broken his nose and blackened his eyes. The good news was Megeson hadn’t bothered him since.

Gordy dreaded that walk every evening after work. It was steep, and it took most of what little stamina he had just to trudge up the incline. He hated the Castle, with its concrete floors, long corridors, and cold rooms. He hated the guards. They seemed more vindictive than the previous guards they’d encountered, if that was possible. He guessed it was because they were bitter that they’d been assigned to guard POWs rather than to fight on the front line and earn glory for the empire.

In front of the Castle, he passed the guardhouse, a five-foot by five-foot hut with small windows. He heard moaning and the sound of someone being beaten. It was the same sound he heard almost every night when he and the other men returned from work. He was convinced that these nightly beatings were a way to remind the prisoners of Japanese superiority rather than for anything the prisoner might have done wrong. On this evening, the guards had the prisoner kneeling, a stick between his knees as
they beat him. It was Al Rupp, the youngest member of the crew. Rupp had gotten himself assigned to an easy work detail—carrying crates of buns to be served to the Japanese workers—after he’d purposely broken his own arm with a hammer and then faked falling off a ladder in order to get out of more-strenuous work. Faking illness had become common, though the POWs in sick bay got less food than the men working. The strategy backfired on Rupp, however, when the guards caught him stealing buns. Gordy and the rest of the crew were finding it hard to be sympathetic to his plight.

That night Gordy had to sit through yet another indoctrination lecture. Every commander and interpreter Gordy had heard had bragged about how Japan had never been defeated, going all the way back to the thirteenth century when Kublai Khan first tried to invade Japan but was stopped by a giant typhoon that smashed Kublai’s armada, a divine wind the Japanese called
kamikaze
, which gave proof that their gods had protected them, and always would.