Tears in the Darkness (52 page)

The shock wave from the bomb hit Beecher hard. He shook his head, shook it again, trying to get his wits back. He saw holes in the hull, flames licking at the bulkheads. He looked at his legs, checked his body. No puncture wounds, no blood. Around him, however, the hold was havoc.

Dozens of men had been killed instantly, their contorted and mutilated bodies scattered across the deck and against the bulkheads. Scores more lay nearby with gaping wounds, the life bleeding out of them. Many of Beecher's friends were dead. Gunner Farrell, one of the colonel's battalion officers, was holding his head in his hands, one of his eyes blown out.

The prisoners guessed the ship had taken several hits. One bomb had fallen on the edge of the most forward hold, killing more than half the five hundred men there. When the doctors were done doing what they could, they tried to take stock: overall some three hundred men had been killed, they thought, and as many wounded.

Beecher asked for permission to remove the corpses from the holds, but for three days Wada and Toshino refused. (More punishment, the
colonel figured, for the American bombings.) Finally the Japanese lowered cargo nets, hauled the bodies up, and dropped them onto a barge to be cremated in a common grave ashore.

 

THE
ENOURA MARU
was too badly damaged to continue, and on Saturday, January 13, the surviving prisoners were transferred back to the
Brazil Maru.
That night, after the ship had gotten under way, Wada demanded a roll call. Beecher, exhausted, tried to get a count. Nine hundred and seventy-five, he reported, more than six hundred men gone from the original detail.

For the next seventeen days the
Brazil Maru
sailed slowly up the China coast, steaming by day, putting into coves and inlets at night. Not long out of port, it became clear there was something wrong with the ship's water supply and fresh-water condensers. The water tasted brackish and the prisoners were getting less and less with their rice. Now, from wounds that would not heal, from dysentery, disease, and declines of thirst and hunger that were irreversible, men died twelve to fifteen a day. Wada ordered Beecher to take daily roll calls. Sometimes a man would answer “here,” then die before the count was finished.

They arrived at Moji, Japan, on January 30. There was snow on the ground. The survivors, in Japanese cotton issue, stood shivering on deck—only 425 of them, one-quarter of the 1,619 men who had started the journey on December 13 at Pier 7.

Frank Bridget, the indefatigable leader of the aft hold on the
Oryoku Maru,
was dead. So was Tom Hayes (who had buried his secret diaries in the dirt of Bilibid Prison before he shoved off). In all, eighty-four doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and corpsmen from the prison died on the December 13 draft, including Gordon Lambert, the doctor who had saved Ben Steele's life.

In the weeks that followed, as the survivors finally came to their senses, they began to count their great good luck. For every one of them, three had died. What but luck could explain that?

There was no accounting for the sadness, of course, the emptiness that always follows the euphoria of luck. Almost every man had lost a buddy, a friend for the road. And they could not shake the feeling that their lives, their great good luck, had somehow been purchased at someone else's expense.

To a man, they also remembered a voice. When the bedlam was at its
height, when men were screaming and moaning and begging for their lives, Father William T. Cummings, the Maryknoll priest who in Bilibid had read Ben Steele the last rites, would make his way to the middle of the hold and shout to be heard.

“Listen to me,” he would yell. “You must listen to me!”

Then, in a clear but calming voice, he would recite a prayer.
²³

Our Father, who art in heaven . . .

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

As we forgive those who trespass against us . . .

He recited that same evensong every night, a prayer for the living, a prayer of thanks, a prayer for the dead.

The priest ministered to anyone who needed him, and almost everyone did. In a month he recited more last rites than most padres offer in a year of combat, then berated himself openly for not being able to hold the hand and ease the dying angst of every man in the ship who needed him.

“Father, please, pray for me,” they begged, or, “Baptize me, Father. I don't want to die without being baptized.”

He was a short, thin man, forty-one years old, in constant pain from an old back injury that had required spinal fusion. He had chronic asthma as well, and the close air in the holds must have been torture for him. Nothing, however, seemed to slow his ministrations. He played medic as well as priest, crawling over and across men to get to the worst of the wretches in the back of the holds. To some men, Cummings's soft incantations—“humming whispers,” Sidney Stewart called them—sounded like the voice of God; to others it was the voice of faith, or a friend.
²⁴

Each night he tried to take his rice with a different circle of men. One night he talked of his days in Manila before the war. He liked working with indigents, street children, he said, and if he survived, he planned to continue the same kind of missionary work in Tokyo.

“The bastards are hopeless,” one of the men said.

“Son,” Cummings came back, “no one is hopeless.”
²⁵

Bill Cummings died on a Sunday in the hold of the
Brazil Maru,
two days short of making port at Moji.

 

 

 

 

September 1, 1944, Shimonoseki, Japan

A
S THE TRAIN
carrying Ben Steele and some 250 other Americans headed east from Shimonoseki, the men sat quietly and stared out the windows at the stops along the way—Chōfu, Ozuki, Habu. At the Asagawa River, the tracks turned sharply north into the highlands, one sylvan valley after another hemmed by hillsides draped with evergreens and stands of jade bamboo.

At length they came to the city of Mine (pronounced
Min-ay
) in Yamaguchi Prefecture, some twenty-four linear miles from Shimonoseki. They disembarked and walked for what seemed a long way, all of it uphill, until they reached Mugikawa. On a flat of land across from the village was a large compound surrounded by a high wooden fence. Inside the compound were rows of two-story wood buildings connected by well-groomed walkways. This, they were told, was to be their new camp. “Omine-machi,” the guards called it, “big mountain town,” mountains that had been a rich source of anthracite coal for almost seventy years.

During his time as a prisoner of war, Ben Steele had worked as a road builder, a stevedore, a farm hand. Soon he would add coal miner to his wartime résumé.

 

THE BARRACKS
were the best the prisoners had seen, but the work they were forced to perform was grueling, especially for men so malnourished. They worked underground, twelve-hour shifts around the clock, ten days at a stretch with one day off. They were convict labor, picking and shoveling and hauling and loading in a labyrinth of damp laterals,
long diagonals, and cramped coal drifts a half mile underground. They worked sick, they worked hungry, they worked hurt.

They worked and waited. That was the worst of it, the waiting, marking time, the days since surrender (871 . . . 906 . . . 1,002). Rescue, liberation, freedom—they could think of little else. Often they'd look up and see flights of American bombers overhead, and a short time later they would hear the faint report of explosions, like far-off thunder. Surely their deliverance was at hand. Just stay alive, they told one another, and be careful. Like all the places where they had been penned, Omine-machi had its share of thugs and sadists, civilian and ex-military guards who carried a
kombō,
a short, curved, hardwood club that could break a man's bones or crack a man's skull. A prisoner might not recover from a beating like that. All this way to end as ashes.

 

THE BARRACKS
compound was a mile from the colliery and mine heads. Four men lived in a ten-by-ten room, eight rooms on each floor. The floors were covered with tatami, woven straw mats on which the men slept. The doors, windows, and sliding walls were rice paper and wood decorated with pieces of seashell. The barracks had electric lights but no heat, and winter in Mine, roughly the same latitude as Oklahoma City, was cold. (The men were issued cotton bed quilts, but these “little old comforters,” as one of the boys referred to them, were too small to cover the large
gaijin,
foreigners.) Each barracks had its own privy, but they shared a communal bath, two large concrete tubs under an outdoor pavilion.

Breakfast and supper, the beginning-of-shift and end-of-shift meals, were served in a mess hall; their midshift meal they carried to work in wooden boxes
(bentō)
tied with a piece of string. Breakfast was rice-barley gruel, often laced with weevils; lunch was cooked rice with a sprinkling of vegetables, various greens, and tubers; dinner, more rice with vegetables and perhaps fish, always stinking or spoiled. The fish was usually mackerel or tuna, but there was never enough for individual portions, and it was served as a condiment on rice or in soup. At each meal the men also got soybean buns, a wartime staple in Japan, as tough to chew as hardtack.

The overall individual ration was small, an average of twenty-two ounces of food a day. The Japanese said their own people were starving,
and the prisoners should expect to suffer along with everyone else, and by and large that was true. Cold weather had hurt the fall harvest of 1944, and by early 1945 the United States had control of the sea-lanes around Japan, in effect blockading the country and preventing vital shipments of foodstuffs from the south. Often the only place a Japanese
shufu,
housewife, could buy food was on the black market, where rice sold for seventy times the normal price. In short, the Nipponjin were hungry, but not nearly as hungry as the skeletons in prison drag who watched their Japanese overseers wolf down meals that seemed a lot more substantial and appetizing than the pathetic rations put in front of the prisoners.
¹

The first week in camp each prisoner was issued two sets of clothes (plain army uniforms), a pair of zori (sandals), cloth work boots, and a wool overcoat (captured swag) for the winter. The day the prisoners got their issue, the Japanese shaved their heads, a prophylactic against parasites, then they gave each man a prisoner number. Ben Steele was
sanbyaku gojū kyū,
359. The numbers were afixed to their uniforms, then the prisoners were told to sit on a bench and face a camera. These mug shots were pasted on individual cards, the man's number on top, his name below. 291, Private, Woodrow Smith . . . 326, Private, Gerald Greenman . . . 435, Private, Dan Pinkston. Different men with the same face—tight lips, insolent jaw, smoldering eyes—sending their captives the same message.

 

WHEN THE AMERICANS ARRIVED
in camp, they joined 180 British prisoners of war captured in the Dutch East Indies and already working there. The British, who occupied five of the eleven barracks in the compound, apparently felt that their tenure gave them certain privileges. In the mess hall, for example, they liked to cut ahead of the Americans on the chow line. The Americans, naturally, refused to step aside (they figured their ancestors had long since settled the issue of superiority with the British) and there followed what Army Private Dan Pinkston of Naples, Florida, called, some “downright knock-'em-down, drag-'emout fistfights.” It took more than “a few whippings,” Pinkston noted, to get the British “educated to the fact that the line formed in the rear.”
²

The Japanese were happy with their British prisoners. The Englishmen were neat and well mannered. Most of the time they followed orders and worked cooperatively to meet their production quotas. The
Americajin,
by contrast, were unruly malingerers, always complaining.
Those Americans! the Japanese supervisors would say,
karera ni wa takusan no ketten ga atta,
“they have many faults.” So many that there was a waiting line of Americans for the compound's
dokubō,
its solitary confinement cell. After a while the Japanese got the idea that the two groups of
gaijin
didn't get along and stopped trying to mingle them. And in time the colonials and red coats reached a rapprochement: they agreed they would never understand each other.

“You know what you've done?” a Brit told Irwin Scott. “You've gone and ruined our prison camp.”

“How the hell do you ruin a prison camp?” Scott said.
³

 

It's a long way to Tipperary,

It's a long way to go.

It's a long way to Tipperary

To the sweetest girl I know!

 

From the start, they liked the same marching song, about the only thing the two groups could agree on. The British sang it every day walking to work, and the Americans, their Anglophobia tempered, picked up on the tune and often sang it coming out of the mines.

Nobuyasu Sugiyama thought the song so catchy, he learned every word of the chorus, and many of the verses, too. Sugiyama started working at the mine in the fall of 1942, a seventeen-year-old civilian supervisor assigned to shepherd the British prisoners between the compound and the mine head. They marched, he marched; they sang, he sang, too.

 

Goodbye Piccadilly,

Farewell Leicester Square!

It's a long long way to Tipperary,

But my heart's right there.

 

The Tommies must have enjoyed this subtle subversion, their Japanese overseer marching along, pumping his arms, joining them in a song intended to boost their morale. Nobuyasu Sugiyama thought nothing of it. He liked the British. They worked hard and did what they were asked to do.