The Death Ship - - - "Who Has Stolen the Sugar?"

Two Sergeants Offer Themselves as Hostages to Save Their Buddies’ Lives -- In the End They, Too, Both Died

This is the fourteenth in a series by George Weller of the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service on the "Cruise of Death" taken by some 1600 American prisoners from Manila to Southern Japan. Approximately 300 men survived the ordeal. Their stories were gathered in prison camps, rest camps, on hospital ships and at U.S. bases in the Pacific.

By GEORGE WELLER
Chicago Daily News Foreign Service

The prisoners who survived the bombing raid in the invasion of Takao kept alive partly by trading with the Japs and partly by stealing sugar from the bottom of the midships hold. The Japs set every kind of guard, but the prisoners always managed to trick them. The sugar was a two-edged prize. "It saved a lot of men’s lives as food, but it killed more than it saved." It was coarse and brown. If eaten more than a teaspoonful a day it caused severe diarrhea and brought death. Few men had the self-control to hold down their consumption.

The sugar led to a double drama. Lieutenant Colonel (now Colonel) Curtis Beecher of Chicago had warned the men: "Don’t eat sugar under the hatch where the guard can see you. Crawl into a corner." The practice was for two men to eat alternately, one standing guard for the other. In the same way, when the sugar was stolen from below, an officer stood at the hatch; where he could signal down into the sugar hold, the Marine Lieutenant Keene frequently acting as lookout,

Two of the ablest thieves were a Lieutenant in the Geodetic Survey of the Coast Guard who teamed up with a Catholic Navy Chaplain, a Lieutenant McManus.

They stole many mess kits of sugar before they were caught. The Formosans brought them on deck. They slapped them first, then knocked them down with rifles and finally kicked them systematically. The Coast Guard Lieutenant, seeing that the chaplain was going under fast, protested that he alone was responsible. The Japanese then released McManus and concentrated on the Lieutenant.

They said they were going to shoot him. But after an hour’s beating they pushed him back through the hatch.


Volunteer Hostages

However, the sugar thefts went on. Each morning when the Japanese sentries descended, another sack of sugar would be missing. But no Formosan sentry could be found who was willing to spend the night in the hold under the prisoners. Finally Lieutenant Toshino, the Jap in charge, and Mr. Wada, his interpreter, came to the edge of the hatch and looked down into the pit.

"Who has stolen the sugar?" demanded Mr. Wada. No answer. Mr. Wada had a consultation with the spectacled Lieutenant and then made a stiff announcement. "Unless the thieves give themselves up immediately, we will cut off all rice and water from both holds."

The silver-haired Beecher called a general meeting. He said, "this isn’t a question of finding who has been taking the sugar. It’s a matter of saving the lives of men who will die unless they have rice and at least a little water."

"We’ve got to have two men who are willing to go up and offer themselves as hostages for all the others. I don’t have any idea what Toshino and Wada will order done to those two men. They may have them shot. I just don’t know."

"The only thing I can promise is this: If they survive whatever the Japs do to them, I will see to it that they are taken care of and don’t go without food the rest of the trip."

There was an English Sergeant aboard named Trapp who had not gone ashore when the 37 Britons were taken over the side to the Formosan camp. He was husky and of medium height. He had known several of the 4th Marines during his duty in China, and he had made new friends on the road from Manila.

And there was a husky medical aid man who had qualified for honors on Bataan by carrying a wounded man on his back for 13 miles, and Ohioan, Sergeant Arda M. "Max" Hanenkrat of the 31st Infantry. Trapp and Hanenkrat volunteered.

Brutal Beating

Everyone waited, penned below, listening for the sounds of such volleys as had already killed several prisoners. None came.

The Japanese psychology is peculiar. Whereas the caught thief may lightly he killed, the un-caught one confesses his crime may in some cases escape with his life.

When a medical corpsman, Patrick Hilton of Pratt, West Va., was allowed to go up to empty a benjo or slop bucket, he saw the two men, marked with blows and faint, kneeling between guards. Every time one reeled and fell over the Japanese would slap him to consciousness again. But they still lived.

Eventually the two Sergeants were pushed back into the hold. They lived to clamber aboard the boat that took them to Japan. But in the end they too, great-hearted men that they were, both died.

"No.2" ship, it was clear, could not reach Japan in her present perforated condition, and the Japanese were stubbornly persistent that to Japan the prisoners must go. The morning of the 13th, two weeks after the arrival in Takao and a week after the bombing that had cost approximately 350 American lives, Lieutenant Toshino ordered the remaining men to move to another ship that lay a few hundred yards off.

TOMORROW: ENOUGH PAIN TO MAKE MR. WADA SMILE.