Tears in the Darkness (56 page)

The truth was, Walter had lost heart. Lying in his own filth and a swarm of flies, he gave up. Ben Steele had seen it in his rheumy eyes, the final look of sadness and submission that filled the face of almost every man who had entered Zero Ward.

 

HIS FURLOUGH
started the day after the parade. He was eager to get home for Thanksgiving to see his mother again and the Old Man and Jean and Joe and Gert and her family. He wondered how much Billings had changed in the five years he'd been away. And he longed to set eyes on the prairie again, the image that filled his mind whenever he thought of home.

He boarded the North Coast Limited in Spokane and settled down in a seat for the six-hundred-mile trip to Billings. Not long after the train crossed the border into western Montana, another passenger, a man in a suit and tie, approached him. Ben Steele had seen the man eyeing the decorations on his uniform, the three rows of red, green, white, and gold campaign ribbons below his silver Air Corps wings.

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“I'm Bud Steele,” he said. “How ya doin'?”

“Bud Steele? Really?”

He nodded.

“My God,” the man said. “The whole town's been wondering about you.”

And he offered Ben Steele a drink from a bottle of whiskey. By the time the train rolled into Billings, one drink had become five and Ben Steele walked right past his youngest sister without recognizing her.

“Hey, Bud!” she yelled. “It's me, Bud, Jean!”

The whole family was there, fifty of them, everyone hugging and kissing him and patting him on the back all watery eyed and blowing their noses. He looked around, taking it all in—the city seemed untouched by the war. Same small-town feel, anyway.

On Thanksgiving they went to Aunt Jo's in Musselshell for dinner. A real crowd, even the neighbors from the old days at Hawk Creek. It was the kind of meal he'd been imaging for years—turkey, dressing, mashed and sweet potatoes, green beans, gravy, cake, and pie. He stuffed himself, and everyone got a kick out of watching him.

 

AT HOME
a few days later, his mother pulled him aside.

She had something to give him, she said, and she slipped her engagement ring off her right hand and held it out to him.

“This is the only thing I have of any value,” she said. “And I want you to have it.”

He tried to refuse, but she kept pushing it at him.

“You're going to take it, Bud. I want you to have it.”

He could see there was no point arguing.

“Thanks, Mother,” he said and slipped the diamond carefully into his pocket.

 

A COOL NOVEMBER MORNING
and he is up early with the folks at the ranch in Broadview the Old Man is managing. His furlough has been a good one, about a week left, and this morning he's looking forward to helping the Old Man with some chores. Stock needs tending, and after breakfast he strolls out to the barn to get a horse. He takes the bay in the second stall, slips on a bridle, then a blanket and saddle. He works slowly, enjoying the creak and smell of leather, the barn dust, the protests of the bay against unfamiliar hands.

When he's done he leads the animal into the yard, puts his foot into the left stirrup, and finds his seat. His first time ahorse in years, and he sits there for a minute, taking in the ranch, the corrals, the chickens in the yard.

He'd been staring at the same scene for days, wandering out of the house every so often and lifting his nose to the wind to catch the scent of sage, studying the magpies and sparrows wintering in the hills, listening to the sound of the wind. He couldn't get enough of it, the rolling brown prairie, the cottonwoods, the winter grass, the feeling of being free.

 

 

 

 

 

N
OW CAME THE DEFEATED
, Called to accounts.

In the fourteen years between 1931 and 1945, fifty million people—soldiers and civilians, belligerents and innocents—had lost their lives to war. Much of the world was in ruin, and tens of millions were homeless and adrift. As the Allies saw it, the war had been a criminal act, an assault on civilization, and they meant to make sure that the malefactors responsible for this misery answered for their acts.

The bill of particulars against the Japanese was long and unsettling. Murder, rape, torture—Nanking, Singapore, Hong Kong. More than twenty-four million men, women, and children had died in the fighting in Asia. Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Malayans, Thais, Burmese, Indians, Japanese. Crimes against peace. Crimes against humanity.

The victors wanted vengeance, a coda to the killing, an epilogue to all the loss. On August 28, 1945, two weeks after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender, the War Crimes Office of the War Department cabled General MacArthur (now supreme commander of the Allied Powers and in effect the military governor of Japan) a list of suspected Japanese war criminals and invited him to add his own warrants. Officials in Washington and on MacArthur's staff in Tokyo envisioned thousands of prosecutions, but for the moment they were after forty of the most notorious malefactors.

Number one on the list was Japan's political panjandrum, Hideki Tojo, war minister and prime minister for most of the war. The next nine names were also familiar, right-wing politicians and militarists who had made total war state policy. Then came name number eleven, Lieutenant
General Masaharu Homma, former commander of the 14th Imperial Army, conqueror of the Philippines.
¹

Japanese diplomats were surprised to see Homma's name on the list, and so was Homma. On September 15, as he was preparing to leave Tokyo for Yokohama to surrender himself to military authorities, he paused to talk with American reporters. The general seemed genuinely ignorant of the charges against him. What was this “march of death” the reporters were talking about? And why were they referring to him in their dispatches as “the Beast of Bataan”?

From the back benches, the arrest looked like the work of Douglas MacArthur, personal revenge for the defeat MacArthur had suffered four years earlier at Homma's hands. No doubt the new supreme commander was satisfied to see his old nemesis in custody. Homma, after all, had humiliated him in battle, forced him to flee in the night and abandon his men to the enemy's tender mercies. But MacArthur was not the author of Homma's unhappy actualities. That role, in a roundabout way, belonged to a little-known fighter pilot, a tall blond Texan named Ed Dyess.
²

 

WHEN THE JAPANESE BOMBED
Clark Field in December 1941, Captain William E. Dyess of Albany, Texas, was commander of the 21st Pursuit Squadron. After surrender, Dyess made the torturous death march and rode the suffocating trains to Camp O'Donnell. In early November 1942, he was sent with a large draft of prisoners to a work camp at Davao on the southern island of Mindanao. A daring man, Dyess dreamed of escape, and one day in April 1943, he slipped into the jungle with nine confederates and began a long trek that would eventually land him, along with Lieutenant Colonel S. M. Mellnick and Navy Commander Melvyn McCoy, in Australia and then, finally, home.

Passing through Sydney, the men told their stories to MacArthur and his staff, and later in Washington they repeated the grim details of their capture and confinement for the generals and admirals at the War Department. Mellnick and McCoy had been captured on Corregidor and knew nothing of the march, but Dyess had made the sixty-six-mile trek, and he had lived for months in the doleful O'Donnell.

Officials in Washington had long suspected that American prisoners of war were being treated cruelly and with wanton neglect. Now, for the
first time, the American government had hard evidence of those atrocities, the testimony of Mellnick, McCoy, and Dyess.

During the fall and early winter of 1943, the Roosevelt administration ordered the three men to keep silent. The Swedish relief ship
Gripsholm,
a neutral vessel, was still plying the Pacific with repatriated nationals and Red Cross packages for Allied prisoners of war, and the War Department felt that any story of Japanese atrocities might provoke the enemy to refuse the ship and perhaps treat the thousands of men in Japanese hands with even more malice.

Washington, however, has always been a loquacious city, and a story about a “death march” was hard to keep under wraps. A number of newspapers and magazines pressed the Office of War Information and the Office of Censorship to let them pursue the story. Dyess, in fact, was eager to tell his countrymen about the plight of the comrades he'd left behind, and he had reached an agreement with the
Chicago Tribune
to serialize his story as soon as the press ban was lifted.

In December 1943, Ed Dyess was killed during a training flight in California. Now, spurred by Dyess's wife, Marajen, the
Tribune
fought the news embargo even harder. Finally, on January 27, 1944, the government lifted the ban, and the Army and War departments issued a long and detailed press release based on the accounts of the three former prisoners of war. Three days later, the
Tribune,
and one hundred of its affiliated newspapers, published the first part of the Dyess account.

 

“
THE STORY
I am about to tell is true,” Dyess began. And day after day, Ed Dyess gave American newspaper readers another installment.

These tales of atrocities left Americans enraged. And their anger filled bag after bag in the White House mail room: “Every Jap man, woman and child, even unto the third and forth generation, should be forthwith exterminated” . . . “Why do the stinkin Japs do such lousy things to our boys. Why?”
³

Congress was brimming with vitriol as well. Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri wanted to “hang the Mikado [the emperor] and bomb Japan out of existence,” and Senator Ernest McFarland of Arizona wanted the Japanese to be “lined up and shot and suffer the tortures of hell.”
⁴

Reporters, knowing his inclination to grandiloquence, went to MacArthur for comment, but the general kept largely silent about the
men he'd left behind. “The stories speak for themselves” was all he would say.

At a press conference on February 1, President Roosevelt was asked whether “the individual Japanese responsible for this crime would be tracked down and ultimately punished.”

“There is no question about that,” he said.

[
Masaharu Homma, Prison Diary, September 17, 1945
] The country has been defeated, and I am here in prison, lamenting my situation. The loss that I could not change.

We have plumbing, as well as two restrooms. The only thing that I dislike is the fact that there is a lock on the door, and that we are constantly being guarded. Lunch was kidney beans, stewed tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and canned peaches. We also had watery pineapple juice, bread with butter, and 1 box of Camels . . .

The American army has begun writing many things down in order to record my position on the crime I am accused of committing, the “Death March.” I will take full responsibility for my subordinates' actions, but I also intend to make my own role very clear . . .

Though the light of the moon shines, my room remains pitch-black. Thus, even the pine trees and the mountain seen from the prison window seem to all be enveloped in sadness.
⁵

 

His accusers would try to make him out a monster, but his six American military lawyers and a succession of American military jailers liked him from the start. He was large for a Japanese, six feet tall by most accounts, sturdy, and imposing among his more diminutive countrymen, but there was never any swagger in his gait, never any strut. He had the analytical mind of a strategist but the inclination of an artist, the general who wrote poetry, painted flowers, loved nothing so much as a good book. He spoke English well, liked English-language novels, listened to classical Western music. These predilections, and his cosmopolitan looks and ways, gave his political enemies a lot to talk about. In an army of Anglophobes, Homma was said to be “pro-British,” the most “Western”-leaning of the generals of the Imperial General Staff. He resented these aspersions, this insult to his loyalty. He was Japanese, every inch of him. If he thought of himself as anything, it was a royalist, a patrician without title or brief. He was devoted to the idea of the royal family and the
emperor, embodiments, as he saw them, of everything that was Japanese. He was, without question, a romantic, a modern Lancelot clinging to old-fashioned ideals of purity, honor, nobility. Now from a cell in the Yokohama city jail, three days after he had surrendered to American authorities, those ideals must have seemed somewhat shopworn, for he was being cast as a man without virtue or mercy, a low man who held life cheap.

[
Homma, Prison Diary, September 18
] Right now, I am being charged with transporting 70,000 prisoners at Bataan for a long distance in the heat and without food or drink and the subsequent deaths that resulted . . . Additional charges that I am not aware of may come up during the trial . . .

I think I will have to be especially prepared to receive a harsh punishment compared to everyone else.

 

He was born in Meiji 21 (1888) in a backwater, Sado Island, fifty miles west of Niigata in the Sea of Japan, the only child of Kankichi and Matsu Homma. In aspect and personality, the boy favored his handsome father, a prosperous gentleman farmer with a taste for the good life. For his worldview, however, he turned to his mother, a devout Buddhist who counseled harmony in all human dealings.

At eighteen he was accepted into Japan's prestigious Rikugun Shikan Gakkoō, the national army military academy at Ichigaya in Tokyo and graduated in May 1907, second in a class of 1,183 cadets, a second lieutenant of infantry assigned to a line regiment. In 1912 he won appointment to the Army General Staff College, the service's elite training school for future generals and general staff officers, and quickly developed a reputation as a ferocious scholar with a talent for language, especially English, memorizing pages at a time from an English dictionary, then, so the legend goes, ripping them out and swallowing them when he was done.
⁶