No Ordinary Joes (36 page)

Gordy waited in the sick-call line to see the Japanese doctor. He was desperate. In mid-July he had come down with dysentery, draining what little energy he had left. He was afraid he would develop pneumonia, from which very few POWs in camp had recovered. When a POW died of pneumonia, the Japanese listed them as having “died from natural causes.” Twice, Gordy had been to see the Japanese doctor, and each time the doctor just shushed him and ordered him to go back to work.

Now Gordy could barely walk. He had a fever, intestinal cramps, and blood in his stool.

It wasn’t just Gordy’s physical condition that was slipping fast. Each new bombing raid and every new rumor raised his hopes that the end was in sight. The air raids would keep the men in the shelter all night, but in the morning there would be no visible damage around the camp or the steel mill. All that would happen was that four or five more men would die. And Gordy would get more depressed.

He hated the Japanese doctor.

Gordy was determined to get the doctor to take him seriously. This morning, he deposited his bloody stool into an old rag and brought it with him to see the doctor, holding it behind his back. Slowly, he moved forward in line, until finally it was his turn. Standing in front of the doctor, he laid the cloth down on the desk and unfolded it. Caught off guard, the doctor sprang out of his chair and yelled. Two guards appeared immediately
on either side of Gordy, bayonets pointed. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all, he thought.

Sitting nearby, Dr. Markowitz heard the commotion and came running to intervene. He quickly examined the contents of the rag and had a conversation with the Japanese doctor. A few minutes later, Dr. Markowitz checked Gordy into the camp hospital.

“Doc, you saved my life,” said Gordy.

Gordy knew that the hospital was usually considered the last stop in camp before the crematorium, although in the last couple of weeks several of the crew had spent time there and still made it back into the workforce.

Dr. Markowitz diagnosed him with amoebic dysentery, and also confirmed he had a cracked rib. “But you may be in luck,” he said. The most recent Red Cross packages included medicine for the treatment of amoebic dysentery. For the next three days, Gordy took two white pills twice daily, and by the end of the week he was well enough to be released from the hospital and return to work duty in the camp.

He continued reading Courtney’s journal.

• 7/10/45 Uncle came last night and blew hell out of area, very close. One shot down
  .
  
• 7/14/45 Chow went down today. Going down daily. Back to starvation rations. The end must be near. Four men died in four days
  .
  
• 7/22/45 The chow is low and getting cut all the time. Scuttle coming in all the time about invasion. If this thing doesn’t end soon these sons-of-bitches will starve us to death. They are all hungry now, too. Too bad
  .
  
• 8/1/45 Uncle Sam has been raising hell. Every day B-29s and Dive Bombers, still we are spared. Everyone says very soon we will be with our loved ones. There are beans on the job. For a few butts a hat full. Really been eating lately
  .
  
• 8/7/45 Uncle dropped pamphlets saying we are next. Dope coming in that it should be over damn soon
  .
  

On the morning of August 8, the air-raid sirens blared again. Gordy had heard rumors in camp that the area around Yawata and the steel mill would
be next, but he wasn’t sure how nervous to be; twenty-eight months as a POW had taught him not to believe anything until it happened. He was worried, however, that if it was true, Skeeter, Chuck, and a lot of the crew would be sitting ducks at the mill.

The prisoners in camp were hustled out the gate into the shelter. Pretty soon Gordy heard the ack-ack fire and the sound of planes overhead, but strangely, he heard no bombs exploding. He wondered what was happening.

It didn’t take long to find out. Bombs started to fall, big bombs, and far more than ever before. From the sound of it, they were hitting the steel mill.

I
n early August 1945, Bob Palmer checked himself into the little wooden shack the prisoners at Ashio called the Death Hut, the place where the sickest of the sick went to die. His weight, which had been 160 pounds at the start of the war, was now down to 80. Despite several vitamin B1 shots, as well as experimental treatments with acupuncture and burning herbs, his beriberi had worsened. He could not continue with the backbreaking work or endure the noxious fumes at the smelter. His legs were too swollen for him to walk; he could only crawl.

The relentless bombing that the B-29s had inflicted on Japan had spared the small mountain town of Ashio from any direct hits, but it had knocked out its main railroad supply line, effectively cutting off the flow of rice into town for the townspeople as well as the prisoners. The guards routinely stole the Red Cross parcels meant for the POWs. On one occasion, in a desperate attempt to add some substance to their soup, a horse bone that a POW found walking back from the smelter was added, but it only resulted in several prisoners choking and gagging on splintered bone. On another occasion, small bits of baby shark were mixed into the soup, but the smell of ammonia was so strong that Bob couldn’t eat it.

One of Bob’s last jobs before entering the Death Hut was helping to scrounge around the camp for edible plants and bulbs to add to the prisoners’ small ration of soup. It was an exercise in futility: decades of poor mining practices had poisoned the area’s soil and robbed it of any
agricultural value. Bob managed to bring back only a handful of weeds. He got diarrhea from the soup made with his gleanings; the camp doctor treated it by having him eat charcoal.

Of all the prisoners at Ashio, it was the Javanese Dutch who suffered the most. The Javanese had been imprisoned the longest, and in the spring and summer of 1945, they were, as Kevin Hardy, one of the
Grenadier
’s officers at Ashio, put it, “dying like flies.” Perhaps none of the deaths had impacted the camp as much as the passing of a Javanese man who had been an opera singer before the war. According to the other prisoners, he died in the Death Hut just after singing a beautiful aria, his voice soaring above the camp, lifting everyone’s spirits. They had no idea what language he was singing in, or what the words meant, only that the music seemed to come from heaven. Bob had no memory of it.

Bob knew his mental condition was almost as bad as his physical health. During the first two years of his imprisonment, he had kept his mind active with a variety of mental escapes: taking fishing trips in the Cascades; eating delicious desserts from recipes concocted by a fellow prisoner; rebuilding a ’36 Ford from the ground up; building a house in which to live with Barbara. Now, as death closed in, he couldn’t focus, mired in depression and hopelessness. Even thoughts about Barbara could no longer lift his spirits. All he could do was stare out the window of the Death Hut and mindlessly watch the prisoners and guards walk past.

O
n the cloudless morning of August 8, 1945, Chuck Vervalin trudged from the train to his job in the pipe shop. This morning shaped up to be like all the others, a struggle to get through the day.

Soon after the prisoners arrived at the shop, the morning calm was shattered by the warning blast of an air-raid siren. Nobody paid it much attention, including the pushers and guards. Despite the constant sounds of planes passing overhead and the rumbling of bombs exploding in the distance, there hadn’t been a daylight bombing raid over Yawata in more than a year.

Reaching his workstation, Chuck was startled by a second siren, the one the POWs called “Burping Betsy.” This was unusual.

Almost immediately, he heard a racket on the roof, like it was being hit by a million BBs. He looked through the large entrance to the building and saw hundreds of smoking white sticks falling from the sky and peppering a nearby building where many of his friends worked.

To the west he saw the most incredible sight: row after row of glistening four-engine B-29s coming in low and silently over the rim of the mountains and gliding down into the valley. They were so close that he could see their bomb-bay doors open and large black canisters the size of train cars fall from their bellies. The canisters quickly burst apart, scattering thousands of small firebombs in every direction, each stick leaving a trail of white smoke behind it.

All around him frightened men—POWs, guards, civilians, pushers—ran for cover from death pouring from the sky. For all the POWs’ talk and worry about being killed by American bombs one day, that day was now here.

Incendiary bombs fell in every corner of the factory and all over the city of Yawata to the south.

Antiaircraft fire erupted from a mountaintop to the north of the mill, but before the ack-ack could find its target, three P-51s swooped down like hawks and wiped out the emplacement. Chuck sprinted toward a shelter, but it was quickly filling to capacity. He returned to the pipe shop and took cover under a large stack of pipes piled against a wall.

Trying to catch his breath, he felt something move next to his legs. Looking down, he did a double take. Crouching next to him was a guard, a man he’d seen around the steel mill many times but whose name he didn’t know. The guard was shaking hard. It occurred to Chuck that there was really no difference between them at this moment; they were just two human beings petrified that they were about to die.

It seemed like everywhere and everything was on fire—the factory, machines, supplies, nearby houses—flames leaping across roads and railroad tracks. The sound was overpowering, like a strong wind, crackling and snapping everything in its path, great billows of black smoke rolling through the valley, choking the air, turning the sky from a beautiful blue to a dark haze.

Chuck wondered about Gordy back in camp. He knew that those wooden barracks would go up in flames like bone-dry kindling if the incendiaries hit there.

Nothing near the steel mill escaped the devastation—trees, buildings, and animals all on fire. At the water’s edge, small boats, docks, and a fishing village erupted in an inferno, impossible to extinguish. Ashes fell like snowflakes. The sun disappeared.

The ground shook as a second wave of planes unleashed more destruction, in the form of huge 500-pound bombs. Relentlessly they came, whistling to the ground like freight trains, tearing gaping craters.

After twenty-eight months in captivity, Chuck was overjoyed that these evil bastards were finally getting what they deserved—a fiery, excruciating pounding. But fear had a bigger hold on him. Cowering under the stack of pipes, pressed up against his enemy, he had never been so scared.

It was late in the afternoon when the all clear finally sounded. The prisoners were rounded up and told to head for the train to take them back to the camp. Chuck didn’t know what to expect. The guard who’d been next to him had disappeared. Maybe there would be another raid. Or maybe the soldiers, or even the civilians, would turn into an angry mob and attack them.

In the semidarkness there was an eerie stillness. Other than a couple of guards herding them to the train, the whole area was deserted. None of the Japanese pushers, workers, or civilians were in sight; they had likely fled to their homes to see if anything was left. In every direction that Chuck looked, the earth was scorched. Huge pieces of metal lay scattered on the ground. Where earlier in the day buildings had stood, now there were only piles of glowing embers. Entire sides of factories had disappeared, the equipment inside smashed to bits. Black, billowing smoke still swirled around the smoldering ruins.

Accounts of the devastation quickly spread. The death toll in Yawata was over 60,000. Entire neighborhoods had been wiped out, the tightly packed houses made of straw, bamboo, rice paper, or cheap wood shooting up in flames. Miraculously, only one POW was killed; he had taken a direct hit on the back of his head from a firebomb. Another prisoner lost an arm. But nobody from the
Grenadier
was seriously injured.

Back at camp, which had escaped damage from the attack, Chuck and the other men spent the night huddled together in the shelter. Nobody slept. For Chuck, it was a better option than sleeping in the barracks, where a new infestation of bedbugs now covered everything.

The morning of August 9 dawned bright and sunny, but soon a northeasterly wind started blowing the thick layer of smoke that had drifted out to
sea overnight back toward land, spreading a blanket of haze from Yawata to Kokura. At the same time, a B-29 named
Bock’s Car
was winging across the Pacific toward Japan, its designated target Kokura, less than three miles from the camp. In its belly it carried an atomic bomb.

The remaining 670 prisoners at Fukuoka #3 did not know that three days earlier the
Enola Gay
had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, fifty miles to the north. An estimated 45,000 people out of a population of 250,000 perished in the initial blast, and another 20,000 died within four months. Kokura, because of its stockpile of military arms and equipment, had been designated as the target for the second bomb.

Before taking off from Tinian in the Mariana Islands, the crew of
Bock’s Car
discovered a malfunctioning fuel pump on an auxiliary fuel tank. The pilot, Major Charles Sweeney, decided the extra fuel would not be essential and disconnected the auxiliary fuel tank. The plane took off, and upon reaching Yakushima, an island off the south coast of Kyushu, it was supposed to rendezvous with an instrument plane, as well as a photographic plane. But the photo plane was late, so after circling for almost an hour and using up considerable fuel, Major Sweeney proceeded toward Kokura without the photo plane. An advance weather report forecast clear skies over the target area.

Bock’s Car
was under specific orders to drop the bomb, named Fat Boy, only if the arsenal storage facility could be visually spotted, but upon reaching Kokura, Sweeney found that the target was hidden under the thick layer of smoke from the previous day’s bombing raid. The plane circled, looking for an opening, then circled again, taking a third pass over the target; still the view was obscured. With the fuel running low because they had disconnected the auxiliary fuel tank, Sweeney decided to abort the Kokura mission and change course for the secondary target of Nagasaki.