Authors: Larry Colton
Bob spotted a fly and quickly took off his T-shirt and swatted it out of the air. He picked it up and put it into a pencil box he’d been given to store his dead flies. Flies were everywhere in Ofuna, and the camp commander had set up a system in which prisoners were rewarded with an extra cigarette for each box of flies they collected. Bob had become an expert fly killer.
His cell door opened, and Liver Lips stood in the doorway, motioning for him to follow. The guard always carried a thick bamboo stick that he used to hit prisoners; usually, being summoned by Liver Lips meant a trip to the interrogation room or a beating. Bob took a deep breath and followed Liver Lips down the corridor.
Bob told himself that whenever the intensity of the beatings increased,
it was a sign of an Allied victory somewhere, and the POWs were paying the price. Getting accurate details on the war’s progress, of course, was not easy. Guards had told him that San Francisco had fallen and Tojo was in Washington, D.C. The most reliable source on war news came from the newest prisoners to arrive in camp, but because the prisoners weren’t permitted to speak with one another, this wasn’t always possible. Still, Bob had been able to whisper to Captain Fitzgerald about the rice ball under the bench, and Captain Fitzgerald had been able to let Bob know that he’d found it and eaten it with great appreciation.
Arriving at the medical office, Liver Lips pushed Bob inside. Bob stiffened. The medical facilities at Ofuna were woefully bad, with no doctor and only a minimum of supplies. There was a “medical technician” on site by the name of Kitamura Congochyo, a man the prisoners had nicknamed “The Quack” and considered to be one of the most sadistic men on staff. Since arriving at Ofuna, Bob had seen men with a wide array of medical problems—from scurvy and beriberi to intestinal parasites and pneumonia—denied treatment. When the men were allowed to go to the medical office, nobody seemed to come back improved. Some never came back at all. There was no shortage of horror stories: amputations performed with no anesthetic, bamboo strips used for acupuncture to the eyes. If the Red Cross was sending medical supplies, they weren’t being used on prisoners.
Upon entering the office, Bob spotted a familiar face across the room, Greg “Pappy” Boyington. Standing next to him was The Quack. Liver Lips pushed Bob in their direction. With the possible exception of Captain Fitzgerald, Bob admired Boyington as much as anyone in camp.
Boyington, an ace Marine fighter pilot from Idaho, had recently arrived in camp after being shot down in a dogfight over the island of New Britain. A notorious bad boy with a proclivity for fistfights and drinking, he had formed a flying unit of misfits called the Black Sheep Squadron. His nickname was Pappy because he was ten years older than everyone else in the squadron. The Black Sheep quickly became a lethal force, credited with ninety-four downed Japanese planes. Nineteen of those were by Boyington,
five of those in one day. After being shot down, he was pronounced missing in action and presumed dead. (In March 1944 he was awarded the Navy Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor, to be held in Washington, D.C., “until such time as he could receive it.”) Brought to Ofuna after his capture, he arrived in camp with an infected thigh wound he’d sustained when he was shot down. Since being in camp, he’d been beaten endlessly, his request for medical attention to his wound ignored until now.
The Quack ordered Boyington to lie down on a table, then signaled Bob to stand next to him. Bob glanced down at Boyington’s gaping wound, almost gagging at the look and smell of the infected leg. He quickly figured out why he’d been summoned: he was there to hold Boyington down by his shoulders.
Using a knife that looked like it had been borrowed from the kitchen, The Quack sliced open Boyington’s thigh. Keeping his hold on Boyington, Bob turned his head. If he’d had anything to eat, he was sure he would’ve thrown it up. Boyington gritted his teeth, but didn’t flinch or yell out.
After probing the wound, The Quack removed a bullet fragment, then wrapped the leg in gauze and ordered Bob to help Boyington back to his cell. Boyington declined the help and hobbled back on his own. Bob was positive he’d just spent time with the toughest guy on earth. He felt reenergized and even more determined to be strong.
W
orking in the pipe shop at the steel mill, Tim waited until there were no guards or civilian pushers hovering nearby. Now was the time to make his move. “Whistle if you see somebody coming,” he said to Gordy Cox.
Gordy nodded, although he wasn’t sure he even had the strength to whistle. In the last couple of weeks, the malnutrition and dysentery had taken their toll. It was all he could do every morning to get up for roll call and climb on the flatbed car for the thirty-minute ride to the steel mill. Still, he was one of many who thought that going to work was better than taking their chances at the camp hospital.
A Japanese worker had recently changed the blade on one of the nearby band saws. Tim eased his way toward the saw, sliding past other prisoners and Japanese workers. Nobody paid him any attention. Of all the
Grenadier
prisoners, he was the one always moving around, leaving his position, testing the limits. He was committed to doing whatever he could to make things tougher for his captors, and nothing had diminished his resolve—not standing naked in the snow or watching the dead bodies being wheeled out of camp to the crematorium.
Reaching the band saw, he glanced around. It wasn’t just the guards he was worried about. He was also leery of the civilian workers, the pushers. For them to catch a POW stealing was not only a victory for the empire but
also a way to earn personal praise or, better yet, be rewarded with extra food; their rations had also been reduced.
Confident that nobody was looking, he grabbed the blade and pulled, bending it in the middle. It didn’t break. He pulled harder, this time snapping it in two. He quickly took half the blade and stuffed it into his pocket, and then turned and headed back to his station.
Now his task was to file it down into a knife blade, and then smuggle it out of the pipe shop and sneak it past the guards and into camp.
Tim waited in line to board the flatbed car for the ten-mile train ride back to Fukuoka #3, watched by two armed guards.
He climbed up onto the flatbed car and sat down on his small, three-legged wooden stool. The POWs had talked the factory administrators into letting them make these stools in the carpentry shop so that they wouldn’t have to sit on the wet, dirty floor for the thirty-minute ride. What the Japanese didn’t know was that most of these stools had been crafted with a false bottom, and the POWs used them to smuggle things in and out of camp. The most frequently smuggled items were cigarettes and food.
Tim had successfully filed down the saw blade and slipped it into the false bottom of his stool; his plan was to deliver it to Dr. Herbert Markowitz, a Navy doctor who had been captured on Wake Island. Exactly what the doctor would use it for Tim wasn’t sure, maybe to lance the boils the prisoners had developed from malnutrition. The reason didn’t matter to Tim; all that mattered was that Dr. Markowitz had said he needed it. Like all the prisoners, Tim had great respect for Dr. Markowitz, although he knew that the doctor was limited in what he could do because of the lack of supplies and the fact that the Japanese controlled everything that went on in the hospital.
As the train slowly pulled away, Tim nervously surveyed the guards. Since the stools with the false bottoms had been built, contraband had been smuggled in and out on a semiregular basis, and nobody had yet been caught. The train entered the mile-long tunnel. A few weeks earlier
there had been a discussion among a group of POWs about jumping the guards in the dark of the tunnel and stealing their guns. That idea was quickly dismissed, the prisoners concluding that their chances of survival if they escaped would be zero.
Inside the tunnel, Tim closed his eyes and tried to relax. When the train reached the camp, he would calmly climb down and walk past the guards stationed at the main gate, just like he did every day, carrying his stool in his hand, just like all the other prisoners.
As he often did, he let his thoughts drift to Valma back in Perth. Did she know he was alive? Was she still wearing the engagement ring he had given her? He and Chuck had talked about how they’d both fallen in love during their last leave, and how fast the time had flown by in those exhilarating days. For Tim, Valma was his first real love. Back in high school in Dallas, he’d been too busy to have a steady girl, always working after school to help support his mother. The few girls he’d met since joining the Navy had been a challenge to his Texas Baptist morals—that and the copious amounts of beer he’d become fond of imbibing. But Valma was different: beautiful and smart and devoted. He’d heard a rumor before the last patrol that there was going to be some kind of legislation enacted back in America that would allow war brides to be given special consideration in moving to America. Tim and Valma had discussed taking advantage if something like that was available. She had seen photos of California and movies that made America seem beautiful and glamorous, and once they were engaged she had made it clear she was willing to follow Tim back home. In his last letter home he’d told his mother about Valma and included her address, encouraging his mom to write her. He wondered if she had.
As was usually the case, when he thought about his mother, he also thought about his father. Even as a POW, he had not been able to let go of his anger toward his father for abandoning him and his mom. It had been a long time since he’d seen his father, and he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to again; it was hard not to remember the image of his mother ironing other people’s clothes in their scorching hot Dallas apartment. But he did wonder if his dad knew what had happened to him.
The train slowed to a stop, and Tim grabbed his stool and closed ranks with the other prisoners, his heart pounding. He knew that if he was caught, he’d probably be beaten and thrown in the little cement box next to the entrance so everyone could look at him as they marched in and out of camp. It was too small to even stand up in; surely he’d go crazy in there.
A guard eyed him as he approached the prison entrance. Tim looked straight ahead, not changing his stride. In a few more strides, he was safely past the entrance and walking down the camp’s main passageway toward his barracks.
Later that evening, he delivered the blade to Dr. Markowitz. His bravado was renewed.
Tim pointed to his shoes. “Shoes,” he said.
A young Japanese boy standing next to him in the welding shop nodded and repeated the word. Tim smiled.
It was part of his daily language lesson. When he and his crewmates were first captured, they had absorbed a lot of face slaps and rifle butts to the shoulder because they didn’t understand the guards’ orders. A few of the prisoners had made no effort to learn any Japanese other than their prisoner number, which they needed to know during roll call. Their attitude was: “Let those little Nips learn to speak English, because they’re going to need to when they figure out they ain’t going to rule the world.” But Tim was doing his best to learn as many Japanese words as possible and to teach his captors English. Being able to converse with the guards and civilians, he believed, might give him some small advantage. Anything to beat the system and help him survive.
A month earlier, he had been transferred from the pipe shop to the welding shop. He missed not working side by side with his buddies Chuck and Gordy anymore, but he was really happy with his transfer; he thought he had just about the best job of anybody on the crew, even if he’d had to lie to get it. Because of a shortage of Japanese welders, the factory administrators had put out a call to the prisoners for experienced welders. Tim had never welded anything in his life, but a fellow prisoner named Ripper
Collins, who’d been a first-class welder on the USS
Houston
before it was sunk and its crew captured, told him he’d put in a good word for him to get the job. “It’s a great place to work,” Collins said. “There are no guards and they have a bunch of Jap kids to work for you.” When Tim said he didn’t know how to weld, Collins assured him, “I’ll just tell the Japs you’re rusty. They’ll never know. I guarantee I can teach you how to be a great welder in just two weeks.”
Within a week, Tim was welding flanges like he’d been doing it for years. He had also made friends with some of the Japanese boys assigned to help him. They were in their early teens, not quite ready for military service yet required to report to the factory every morning at 6:00 a.m. and work until 3:00 p.m. and then go to school until 9:00 p.m. Tim would work on his vocabulary with several of the boys who were interested in learning English, especially with one he’d nicknamed Babe because the boy liked baseball.
“Kenchi?”
he asked, offering Babe a cigarette during lunch break.
Babe smiled and accepted.
The boys liked to think they were “big guys,” so Tim offered them one or two Japanese cigarettes a day from the pack he’d get each week. He wasn’t much of a smoker himself, so he’d trade his smokes to them in exchange for their
bento
, which was usually some rice wrapped in a corn-husklike leaf with a tiny slice of either fish or pickled white radish to go with it. To make his supply of cigarettes last longer and to get more food in return, he cut the cigarettes in half. In the two months he’d been working as a welder, he’d put on several pounds and gained back some of his strength. He’d even developed a taste for the pickled white radishes. He was, however, cautious in these cigarettes-for-food trades, aware that the guards would punish him if they found out. But so far he hadn’t been caught.
After finishing Babe’s
bento
, Tim relaxed, waiting for the factory whistle to end the lunch period. Instead, the quiet was interrupted by the loud, shrill wailing of an air-raid siren. With everyone else, he hurried to a reinforced area of the plant.