They were herded onto a dock and began waiting. A group of prisoners from another camp arrived and spread the gossip that the Red Cross had negotiated a prisoner exchange and that they were headed to Australia, and freedom. By that time, though, Pete and the men from O’Donnell believed nothing. As they waited, Pete stared at the freighter, an ancient, rusting vessel with no markings whatsoever. No name, no registration, no nationality.
Finally, they queued up in a long line and began to slowly climb the gangway. On board, they passed the forward bulkhead and came to an open hatch with a ladder down to the hold. Guards were nervous and barking commands. As Pete began to step down into the hold, he was hit with a vile odor from below. As he descended farther, he saw the sweaty faces of hundreds of prisoners already on board. As he would learn, about twelve hundred men had been loaded from a prison north of Manila. And they had been informed by the guards that they were headed to Japan to work in the coal mines.
As more prisoners were stuffed into the hold, the men began to suffocate. They were shoulder to shoulder, body to body, with no room to sit, lie, or even move about. They began shouting and cursing and all order broke down. The guards kept stuffing more men below, beating the reluctant ones with rifle butts. The temperature rose to a hundred degrees and men began fainting, but there was no room to fall. Soon, they were dying.
The emperor Hirohito refused to ratify the Geneva Convention, and from the beginning of its war in Asia his imperial army treated its captured prisoners as slaves. With a severe shortage of labor at home, the Japanese devised a grand scheme to ship American POWs to the coal mines on their mainland. To do so, they used every available cargo vessel, regardless of age and seaworthiness. All ships were commissioned and stuffed with soldiers bound for the Philippines and then restuffed with sick and dying American boys bound for the labor camps.
Throughout the war, 125,000 Allied prisoners were shipped to Japan, with 21,000 dying on board or going down with the ships. On August 6, 1945, four hundred American POWs were underground digging for coal in a mine near Omine, only fifty miles from Hiroshima. When the first atomic bomb landed, the ground rolled and shook and they knew it was something far beyond the usual daily bombings. They fervently prayed it was the beginning of the end.
Among their many great miscalculations in the war, the Japanese failed to build enough boats to haul troops and supplies. Added to this was their failure to eliminate the U.S. submarine fleet at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere during the early days of the war. By the summer of 1942, U.S. subs were roaming like lone wolves in the South Pacific and feasting on Japanese merchant ships. To overcompensate, the Japanese simply crammed more of their soldiers onto their ships to go fight, and more of their POWs to bring home to work. Their freighters were perpetually overloaded, slow, outdated, easily stalked, and unmarked.
They were known as hellships. Between January of 1942 and July of 1945, the Japanese hauled 156 loads of war prisoners to the mainland to work in labor camps, and the voyages were worse than any abuse the Americans had yet to encounter. Locked below deck with no food, water, lights, toilets, or breathable air, the men succumbed to fainting, madness, and death.
And torpedoes. Because the Japanese did not mark their troop carriers, they were fair game for Allied submarines. An estimated five thousand American POWs crammed into the holds of Japanese freighters were killed by American torpedoes.
Pete’s ship left Manila Bay six hours after he boarded, and men around him were already suffocating and screaming. The guards mercifully opened the portholes and a whiff of air spread through the hold. A colonel managed to convince a guard that men were dying, and what good was a slave if he arrived dead? The hatches were opened and the prisoners were allowed to climb to the deck, where they could at least breathe and see the moon. Fresh air was plentiful. Food and water were not mentioned. Guards stood gun to gun, waiting to shoot any poor prisoner who tried to vault into the sea. Though suicide was a constant thought, no one had the energy.
Pete and Clay spent the night on the deck with hundreds of others, under a brilliant sky that back home would have been admired. Now, though, it was just another reminder of how far they were from freedom.
Evidently, the guards had been instructed to kill only when necessary. Slave labor was now deemed valuable, and the fact that men were dying below was unacceptable. At dawn, dead bodies were lifted from the hold and shoved up the ladder and buried unceremoniously at sea. Pete watched them hit the water, then float for a moment before disappearing, and with each one he thought of the mother and father and young wife back home in Oregon or Minnesota or Florida who were at that moment saying their prayers and waiting for a letter. How long would it be before a man in a uniform knocked on the door and shattered their world?
The sun was up and there was no shade on the deck. No shade, no food, no water, and the prisoners complained to the guards more and more with each passing hour. The guards kept their fingers on their triggers and returned the curses in their language. As the day wore on, so did the nerves and tension. Finally, a prisoner ran for the railing, took a flying leap, and dove for the ocean, eighty feet below. He landed with a splash and in a hail of gunfire. The Japs, while proficient with swords and bayonets, were notoriously bad shots, and it was not possible to know if the prisoner was hit. However, the prolonged volley that followed him down was enough to discourage more diving.
Hours passed as the men baked in the sun. To escape it, they went below for brief respites, but the stench was so overwhelming they could not last. Most were still suffering from dysentery, and the guards allowed them to hang by ropes off the stern and bow to discharge their bloody diarrhea. Anything to keep it off board.
Mercifully, some clouds arrived late in the afternoon of the second day and blocked the sun. The prisoners were ordered below and were promised that food would be served before long. They loitered in long lines to avoid the descent into hell, and the guards seemed somewhat sympathetic and didn’t push them. Darkness came, with no hint of food. Suddenly there was a panic among the guards. Some were running from the bow, yakking in extreme agitation for no apparent reason.
The first torpedo hit in the rear by the engine room. The second hit perfectly in the middle. Both explosions rocked the ship. Its steel frame echoed and vibrated. It was an old boat that wouldn’t last long, and even Pete, a cavalry guy who’d grown up landlocked, knew they would sink fast. He and Clay squatted on the deck and watched as the panicked guards slammed the hatches, sealing over eighteen hundred Americans below. About a hundred remained on deck, and the guards were suddenly unconcerned with them. The ship was going down. It was every man for himself.
A prisoner, one braver than the others, ran forward and attempted to open a hatch. A guard shot him in the back of the head and kicked his body aside. So much for heroism.
A third torpedo knocked the men off their feet and total chaos ensued. The guards frantically unhitched rubber rafts and tossed life vests into the sea. Prisoners vaulted over the sides and into a black ocean with no idea where they might land. As Pete and Clay scurried to a railing, they passed a guard who had laid down his rifle while he struggled with a raft. Pete instinctively grabbed it, shot the son of a bitch in the face, tossed the rifle over the side, then jumped and followed it to the water, laughing as he fell.
The landing was hard but the water was warm. Clay fell nearby and they began dog-paddling and looking for something to hold on to. The sea was pitch-black and everywhere men were crying for help, both in English and in Japanese. The ship began exploding and Pete could hear the anguished cries of those trapped. He swam away from it as fast as his fatigued and depleted limbs could take him. For a second, he lost Clay, and he called for him.