About 8 a. m. on January 6, 1945, there was a sudden crackle of antiaircraft fire. Practice or real? Under the closed hatches of "No.2" in Takao harbor the prisoners could not tell. Then the bombs began to fall. The first hit the side close by the forward hold, and the ship rolled with the blow. The others -- two or perhaps three -- hit close inboard.

The first bomb not only tore at the side of the ship; it ripped holes in the partition between the two holds.

"We looked through the holes," says Theodore Lewin, a big broken-nosed soldier of fortune who had been a reporter in Lost Angeles on the Huntington Park Record and proprietor of an offshore gambling ship. "We could see bodies, there in the forward hold, all stirred up and scrambled. Almost nobody was even moving.

"In our own hold the whole place was covered with bodies. Then from the forward hold Captain Wermuth yelled up, `I’m taking charge here. Get us some stuff for the wounded, quick.’"

The wild cascade of hatch planks had felled Major Malevic of the 14^th Engineers, but he was still alive. The gallant Marine, Major Andrew J. Mathiesen of Los Angles, who had helped so many, was knocked from the upper level to the bottom by a hatch plank and later died of shock and internal injuries. Even after the mortal blow he pulled up, worked and gave orders normally, but finally collapsed.

Three army Lieutenant Colonels were lying in a row, Peter Kemp, Jack Schwartz and "Bill" Manning. The outer two were killed by head blows; Schwartz was untouched.

"We’re going to need the last clothing you have for bandages, boys," announced Lieutenant Colonel James Sullivan of San Francisco, a medico. "Tear off your pant legs and shirts. If you’re cold get a sugar sack. We’ve got to save these men."

The appearance of the wounded in the middle hold was peculiarly unbearable. From the bilges came yellowish fumes that the engineers said was ammonium picrate gas. (The ship was carrying a cargo of horse urine to be put to chemical use in Japan.) The men’s hair had turned in the pit an unearthly yellow-blond color.

"A navy doctor only a foot away from me," says Lieutenant Russell J. Hutchison of Albuquerque, who had built a tiny radio in Davao to time General MacArthur’s coming, "lost his eye right out of his head. I was eating a mess kit of rice at the time. On my left a man had the back of his head blown clean off. There were dark flecks in my rice that had not been there before. I only hesitated a moment, then I ate the rice."

In this hold amidships, from which come the only coherent accounts of what happened, there were about 40 killed and about 200 wounded. In the forward hold, which resembled a human butcher shop, over half the prisoners, more than 200, had been killed and many of the rest were gravely wounded.

The Japs were in a civilized harbor, with doctors, hospitals, barges, and all other medical services at their disposal. But the first day nothing whatever was done. The unwounded in the middle hold, where some doctors were still alive, were not even allowed to go above and descend into the chaos of the forward hold. So the first night passed, with the bodies stiffening where they lay.

The second day a small detachment of Japanese Red Cross corpsmen arrived at the ship. They did not even attempt to enter the forward hold. They handed out some medicines in the midship’s hold and went away.

By now the living men in both holds were pleading with Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada for permission to lift out their dead. The bodies were swollen and bloated; the stench was beyond breathing.

But the Japanese would not allow them to move the bodies. Still another night they spent with their mangled dead and their unrelieved wounded. On the morning of the eighth, two full days later, Toshino and Wada for the first time agreed to have the bodies removed.

Purely as physical labor, it was a task almost beyond the strength of the survivors. To move 300 living men, heavy and helpless, would have been a full job for a large hospital corps, with stretchers and slings and aide men husky and strong.

These men had lost as much as 40 pounds each; they had not had a true meal in many months; they were battle shocked; they had no apparatus, and the bodies they had to move were those of their comrades of nearly three years’ imprisonment.

And yet they had not wholly lost the American’s last resource -- his humor. As they stripped the bodies of clothing, as they tugged them and stacked them, they laughed at what had happened to a rice-and-latrine detail that had been on deck when the bombs struck.

Their guard, a Formosan named Ah Kong, hardly heard the whistle of bombs when he dropped his rifle and took to his heels. He ran into the passageway and huddled there. The Americans were scared of the bombs, but more scared of something else; that the other jittery guards, seeing them without Ah Kong, would shoot them down.

So they picked up Ah Kong’s rifle and poured pell mell after him into the passageway, where they returned their panting sentry his weapon, pointing it back as usual to themselves.

"We’ll never forget," said one member of this detail, "where Ah Kong allowed us to walk forward and look down for a moment through the twisted hatchway of the forward hold.

"We could see Wermuth standing there, looking around to get his bearings. There seemed to be at least 300 dead around him and about 100 wounded. About 50 men who were whole were still walking around, dazed." A sergeant of the 4^th Shanghai Marines named Stalely had been killed between two navy petty officers of Ah Kong’s trusties.

Beecher took charge in the hold amidships, Wermuth forward. Captain Jack Clark of the Marines, who had kept the list of the dead in the tennis court, was now dead himself, as was also Captain Lee Clark, another Marine.

Even the Japanese saw that "No.2" was so hopelessly perforated that she could never make Japan. Light peeked through all her bulkheads. The prison ships had left a long trail of American bodies committed to the sea, but a mass burial could not be carried out in Takao harbor.

TOMORROW: BURIAL PARTY ON FORMOSA