No Ordinary Joes (32 page)

Earlier in the summer, one of the interpreters had said that Ted Williams of the Red Sox and Bob Feller of the Indians had both been killed in action. Chuck doubted that it was true, but he knew that FDR had declared that major leaguers were not exempt from serving. Williams had enlisted as a Marine pilot and Feller had joined the Navy.

Usually news arrived in camp by way of recently captured prisoners, but it was always hard to tell fact from fiction. Rumors were a constant. In the past few months, Chuck had heard plenty of them: Every POW was going to get a brand-new Ford when he arrived home. The
Queen Mary
had been sunk. Bob Hope had died in a plane crash. Malnutrition caused sterility.

He and Babe continued their game of catch, each putting a little more zing on their throws. Chuck’s arm felt surprisingly good. When he was in high school and played on the town team, some of the older players liked to play burnout with him: a game of hardball chicken where two players stood fifty feet apart and threw progressively harder until they were firing as hard as they could and someone either cried uncle or got hit. He wondered if Babe knew the game. A few POWs and about a half dozen guards and pushers had gathered to watch them play.

The news the POWs most wanted to hear, of course, was about the progress of the war. By the end of the summer of 1944, a lot of positive news had reached camp, giving cause for hope: The Allies had invaded France at Normandy and the Germans were on the run; the Marines had invaded Saipan and Guam in the Marianas, and were building airstrips that would make it much easier to launch air raids on Japan. There was also word that American subs were wreaking havoc on Japanese shipping and cutting off their supply lines. The most recent rumor was that MacArthur
was getting ready to retake the Philippines. There was no way to confirm any of these rumors, but Chuck wanted to believe.

Soon, he and Babe were throwing hard. Some of Babe’s throws were starting to sting his hand; the flimsy glove offered little padding. Babe smiled. He was handling Chuck’s throws with little effort.

Chuck knew he could advance their friendly game of catch to a full-scale game of burnout, confident he had a better arm than Babe. It would be a nice little victory, a statement of American superiority. But what if he lost? Then again, if he won, Babe and the guards might be pissed and take it out on him and the other POWs, like the three Marines who had won a race against the guards.

Deciding he was in a no-win situation, he eased up on his throws, and the lunch period ended with him and Babe back to where they started, a nice game of soft-toss catch, both of them smiling.

E
xhausted, Bob stood in front of the smelter at the Ashio copper mine, about to start the three-mile trudge back down the hill to the prison camp. It was March 1944. Bob and eleven of his
Grenadier
crewmates had recently been transferred from the interrogation camp at Ofuna to the prison camp at Ashio, a small mountainous town of 2,000 located about a hundred miles northwest of Tokyo. He and the others had suffered through six brutal months at Ofuna before the Japanese decided that they couldn’t beat any more useful information out of them and that they would be more valuable as slave laborers at the copper mine. Captain Fitzgerald and his top officers were still at Ofuna.

Ashio was the site of the largest copper mine in Japan, producing 26 percent of the country’s total output and playing a significant role in the development of Japan’s economy. In the buildup to the war, the Ashio mine, by meeting increased demand needed for both foreign exchange and military purposes, was part of the foundation upon which Japan’s imperialism was being built. But even within the country, it had become hugely controversial and the site of riots and environmental challenges. In its two centuries of existence, the mine’s zealous pursuit of full production had eroded the surrounding hills, poisoned the farmland, and turned hundreds of square miles into an absolute wasteland. The once healthy forest that surrounded the refinery had been completely denuded. The sulfurous anhydrite from
the smoke produced by the mining and smelting machinery had caused intractable pollution problems. Over the years, raging floods had carried poisonous waste from the mines, devastating the area’s rich agricultural ecosystem, depositing monstrous slag piles, and causing massive fish kills in the nearby Watarase River.

But it was not ecological issues that Bob thought about as he continued slogging down the hill toward the camp; it was the angry citizens lining the road ahead, almost rabid in their hatred of America, every day a chance to spew their venom at the dirty, disheveled white men filing through their little town.

A gob of spit hit Bob on his cheek. He slowed, glancing to his left, eyeing a woman a few feet away, his instinct to grab her by the neck. He kept walking.

Sitting in her small apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco, Barbara read the certified letter from the Navy Department dated May 29, 1944, two months after she had said a tearful good-bye to Robert Kunhardt.

Barbara reread the letter. On the one hand, she was thrilled to learn that Bob had not been declared dead. But what if he was alive? She was now in love with another man, a man she was convinced could provide a better future, a man to whom she’d made love and written love letters.

Bob had beriberi. By his estimate, half of the 275 prisoners at Ashio had it, the ones who had it the worst paralyzed from the waist down. Those men were housed in the sickroom, or as the other prisoners called it, the Death Hut. Bob wasn’t ready to check himself into the Death Hut, not yet anyway, but he knew his condition was deteriorating. On this morning, instead of going to work at the smelter, he headed for the Death Hut in search of some sort of treatment.

It wasn’t his first visit. Like all the prison camps in Japan, the medical facilities and treatment at Ashio were severely lacking. Red Cross medical parcels had been received, but the supplies were limited. On a couple of occasions, Bob had received a vitamin B
₁
shot, and although the shots had not eliminated the beriberi, they had at least provided him with enough
relief that he could go back to work. He appreciated that, because no work meant less food.

The word “beriberi” derives from a Sinhalese phrase meaning “I cannot, I cannot,” which seemed fitting to him. Because of his impaired sensory perception, weakness and pain in his limbs, irregular heartbeat, and swelling in his legs, the long walk to the smelter felt like climbing Mount Fuji. Some days he just couldn’t do it. Another symptom was a weakening of his emotional state. For most of his life, even back in high school when his stepmother Cora was treating him badly or Barbara’s father had forbidden her to date him any longer, he’d somehow kept his spirits up. But lately, especially since being transferred from Ofuna, he felt a gathering sense of hopelessness and doom.

Approaching the sickroom, he hoped Dr. Dullin would be there. He wasn’t sure how Dr. Dullin had been captured, but he knew the doctor had little to work with in terms of supplies. If Dullin wasn’t there he would have to see Katoku, one of the guards, or Kato as the prisoners called him. To them, he was a bit of a comical figure, often strutting officiously around camp carrying a riding crop that he liked to beat against his shiny black riding britches. He also served as a medical practitioner and liked to experiment on prisoners with what some of the men referred to as his “voodoo medicine.” He’d treated Bob several times by shredding some sort of herbal root and rolling it into a ball, and then placing it on Bob’s leg, arm, or stomach and lighting it with a firecracker-like punk. It would smoke and stink and burn and, as far as Bob could tell, accomplish nothing except to leave a blister on his skin. Kato’s treatments seemed more humorous than anything else, especially the time Bob watched him treat a prisoner for hemorrhoids by placing one of the balls on the man’s head. After it was lit, the prisoner looked like he had smoke pouring out of his ears; he got no relief from the hemorrhoids.

Bob’s heart sank as he entered the sickroom. Kato was right there to greet him, telling him that he wasn’t going to use the burning herb treatment; today he was going to try acupuncture. Bob had never heard of it. When Kato pulled out a very long needle, Bob winced, guessing it was two
feet long. Already leery of Japanese medical treatment, he knew that Japanese doctors were using Americans for medical experiments, and he didn’t want to be part of it, but he also knew he had no choice. He recalled the time he’d held down Pappy Boyington while The Quack operated on him without any anesthesia. Certainly this couldn’t be that bad.

Kato stuck the pin in his swollen abdomen, then removed it and made two more punctures in the form of a triangle. The pin went in easily; there was no fat in the way. It wasn’t painful. Kato repeated the process in Bob’s knees and elbows; that didn’t hurt either. In fact, to Bob the procedure didn’t seem to be doing anything except annoy him.

Kato had Bob sit on the edge of a table while he stuck the needle into the back of his neck and began angling it down his spine, deeper and deeper until it was almost all the way to his tailbone. Then slowly he removed it.

Kato then felt Bob’s face. “Very swollen,” he said. “This help.”

He pressed the needle into Bob’s temple, breaking the skin and then wiggling it back and forth, pushing it deeper. Bob held his breath.

Dozens of Chinese prisoners were working in the mines at Ashio, and Bob suspected that they had taught acupuncture to Kato. However he had learned it, Bob’s condition hadn’t improved. At least the procedure had no ill effects, other than rattling his nerves.

Even though he sometimes had difficulty telling the Chinese from the Japanese, he was sympathetic to the Chinese prisoners’ fate. In some ways it seemed as if they had it even worse than the Americans. Indeed, the Japanese had adopted a practice known as “laborer hunting,” abducting Chinese from their North China farm fields at bayonet point and bringing them to Japan as slave labor. A high percentage of these laborers died in transit to the Ashio work site. Many arrived physically weak, and even though they were starving, they still had to work.

Japanese prison camp officials gave detailed instructions covering all aspects of camp life for Chinese prisoners throughout Japan. The specific directives given to control the Chinese prisoners at Ashio included the following:
“(1) Be overpowering as method of control. (2) When you capture runaways, do not let them return to the camp and work again (if they are allowed to return, other workers will be relieved to see that runaways are not killed, causing others to flee). (3) Make their living quarters as shabby as possible. (4) Make the food as poor as possible and consider it to be fodder.… They should be given mostly bran, corn, or leeks, not rice or wheat.… Feed them according to the diligence of their work.”

It was November 1944, and the snow was already falling in Ashio. Given his steadily declining physical condition and the woefully inadequate clothing for the cold, Bob worried that he wouldn’t be able to survive the winter. At night, the temperature in his barracks fell below freezing. Still, he continued to work. To determine if a POW was still fit to work, they were required to stand naked in front of a guard and do a knee-bend. Those that could, worked.

Bob’s jobs at the smelter varied. Some days he loaded the furnace; on others, he helped push the ore cars up to the blast furnace. And on the days the furnace wasn’t working properly, he helped repair it. Because of the fumes, he had to wear a respirator.

One evening Bob sat down next to Ed Keller, one of the twenty surviving men from the crew of the
Sculpin
. That sub’s captain, John Cromwell, had ordered it scuttled after it had been hit and had gone down with his ship. Keller knew why Bob was there: to drool over his latest creation. Since arriving in camp, Keller had kept a diary filled with recipes for pies, cakes, and other desserts. He called it “The POW Cookbook.” The recipes were detailed masterpieces listing every ingredient and step of the procedures. Like other prisoners, Bob liked to read the recipes; he imagined sitting down at a table with Barbara and slowly savoring every delicious, mouthwatering bite. Every week he anxiously awaited Keller’s newest pie recipe, each one providing another escape for him: almond; chocolate custard; peach; pumpkin; raisin nut; rhubarb meringue; peanut butter; eggnog; strawberry chiffon; strawberry mousse.