Voyage of Death Ship --- Its Ending

1600 LEFT MANILA --- 435 WERE ALIVE AT LAST MUSTER BEFORE FINAL IMPRISONMENT IN JAPAN

This is the last 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

It was not all heroism among the prisoners aboard the Japan-bound death ship. Quarreling and theft never ceased. A whole bay full of interlocked men would dispute loudly over such a matter as when to turn over and rest on the other side. All had to turn or none; there was no room for different postures. But some had worse wounds on their right side, some on the left. Not only was clothing stolen from the dying, but water from the healthy and well.

"There were fellows who taught themselves how to slip down beside you while you were asleep, open your canteen and without a sound of swallowing drink all your water,". said a survivor. "You would try hard to sleep with your fingers locked around the plug. But every morning someone would sit up in his bay and yell, `Where’s the dirty so-and-so who stole my water?’"

A Colonel’s Generosity

But there was also Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. "Polly" Humber, a football man at West Point, who shared his water with many others before diarrhea and thirst took him.

The search for water was as remorseless as if they were in the Sahara. "I remember a morning four days out of Japan when someone peeked over the ladder and saw that there was sleet and snow remaining on the deck," says Chief Yeoman Theodore R. Brownwell of Fort Smith, Ark. "I sneaked up the ladder, crept on deck and saw the most beautiful thing in the world -- a long, thick icicle. But just as I reached for it the Jap sentry saw me.

"Kudai! (Look out!) he yelled and came for me with his bayonet. I had scooped up a snowball to make sure I had something even if I missed out on the icicle. But in scrambling out of the way of the bayonet I lost even the snowball and fell back into the hold again, empty handed and thirsty as ever."

Japan at Last

They saw and smelled Japan January 30, 1945. The bays by now had much more room.

On the last night, off the entrance to Moji, there was a submarine attack, with American torpedoes blasting the night with flame as they struck the shore. But finally they were in the harbor of Moji in Northern Kyushu, and the net closed behind them.

The neat little Japanese officers came aboard and asked for the senior officer present. "They tried hard not to show it," says one officer, "but you could see that they could not help being shocked.

"When Lieut. Colonel Beecher walked out, his shirt clotted with filth, a dirty towel wound around his brow, his beard and hair hanging down, and gave them a feeble sort of salute, then leaned back against the bulkhead as though just doing that exhausted him, with slop buckets on one side of him and the morning’s dead on the other, you could see that the Moji officials were taken aback."

It was midwinter, the temperature just above freezing. The Japanese lined the prisoners up on the deck and ordered them to strip naked. They were then sprayed with disinfectant from blowguns -- hair, face, beard and then the whole shivering body. Many prisoners were in pneumonia’s first stages already.

Meantime the Japanese doctors were looking down into the pit, where some of the unmovable wounded still lay. An overpowering odor of urine and excrement arose to their nostrils. "Dysentery!" said the doctors, and ordered a general examination.

Only 435 Left Alive

A little clothing was distributed; some men got their first shirts, others their first shoes. An Army warrant officer, while changing back to his clothes after the "medical examination," collapsed and died on the deck under the eyes of the Japanese doctors.

The last muster aboard the ship was called. It showed 435 men still alive (a few survivors say 425). Many were sinking and beyond recall. But the last voyage had been ended with about one-half the men who survived the Formosan bombing, or a little more than one-fourth the men who left Bilibid prison on December 13.

The Japanese now ordered the prisoners ashore. They walked slowly about two blocks to a factory auditorium in a large warehouse. "I took a fall making a 6-inch curb,". says one officer. "Most of the men walked with sunken heads dragging their heels. I could not understand why, as soon as we reached them, people on the sidewalks would put handkerchiefs to their faces. Then I realized it was because we smelled so terrific."

The first arrivals in the auditorium, which was without seats, looked for water. "We found it, delicious and bitterly cold, in the inflow tank of a toilet. Before the Japanese could do anything, hundreds had lined up. They drove us back, but later they loosened up and allowed us to go in a few at a time."

The Japanese ordered them to take off their shoes. Few obeyed; they were beyond caring. The prisoners squatted on the concrete floor.

Hot Rice -- Put Aside

Rice was brought in, hot and tempting. But the Japanese ordered it put aside until the roll call was made again, a matter of nearly an hour. Then there was an uplift talk by a new interpreter.

"In Japan," he said, "food is very valuable. You must not waste any food. If you waste food, you will be shot." The prisoners listened apathetically, It would not have moved them if he had said they would be boiled in oil. What mattered was the rice was clean and white and even had some gingered radish in it.

Volunteers were mustered to carry the extremely ill to a hospital. The party began to break up. One group of officers able to walk were taken by streetcar to a camp near Moji where a few American enlisted men were already housed.

"Never did officers feel so grateful to enlisted men as we were to them," says one officer. "They had a little coffee, some powdered milk and sugar hoarded from a Red Cross package. They prepared some for us. I cannot tell anyone how that tasted to us. I can only say that the tears broke out of our eyes. We had come so far. We had suffered so much."

Of approximately 135 survivors, officers and men, who were carried to the Moji hospital, about 38 died in the first two days. About 85 died in all there. Of about 100, chiefly officers who went to Camp 3 near Moji about 31 died. Of 97 prisoners, mostly enlisted men, taken by train to Camp 17 near Omuta, 15 died. Of about 100 officers who went to Camp 1 near Fukuoka, about 30 died.

A Dead Man Helps

The hand of a long dead comrade intervened to protect the lives of the weak but living. An Army warrant officer, Lacey O. Jenkins, had caught diphtheria in Takao. When the Americans asked for serum to cure him, Lieutenant Toshino and Mr. Wada simply turned their backs. Jenkins, a man of 200 pounds, shrank rapidly and soon died. Now, in Moji, the case of Jenkins was resurrected.

For the home authorities it reflected little foresight on Lieutenant Toshino, officer in charge of the prisoners, and Wada. And for the prisoners diphtheria meant quarantine. Quarantine meant that they could not be sent down into the Mitsui coal mines at Omuta to labor for a cent a day, not at least for several weeks. They did go down eventually, and one man of every six died there.

A Cavite naval officer, Lieutenant Edward Little of Decatur, Ill., who was one of the "old 500" that had opened Camp 17, seeing the thin line of survivors from the cruise march in, asked the camp physician, Captain Thomas Hewlett of Crystal River, Fla., and New Albany, Ind., how many had died. "If you want to see dead men," replied Hewlett, "There they stand before you."

An officer who survived, telling his story to an American rescue party, after Japan surrendered, listened in silence as his rescuers said what they thought of the Japanese. When they had finished, he said, "Yes, the Japanese are as bad as you say. But we, the 300 or so living, we were devils, too. If we had not been devils, we could not have survived. When you speak of the good and heroic, don’t talk about us. The generous men, the brave men, the unselfish men, are the men we left behind."

END of the George Weller Series