Ghosts of Bungo Suido (33 page)

“And they tell you to fuck off and die, right?”

The major made a face at Gar’s crude language. “No, surprisingly, they don’t. One must of course observe the conventions. We bow, they don’t bow back. We don’t speak until spoken to. We never look them in the face, because, by surrendering, we have lost our faces.”

“You used the word ‘insist.’”

“Just a figure of speech, Commander. Thing is, most of the camp commandants have figured out that everything runs smoother if they pretend to recognize a military chain of command among the prisoners. With the exception of the occasional sadist, they don’t want problems. They want
production,
because in their eyes, that’s what prisoners are for—slave labor in coal mines here, copper mines in the north, railroad and bridge building in the far south. I mean, let’s face it. A Japanese army officer assigned as a POW camp commandant is not likely to be held in high regard by the generals, is he. The last thing he needs is an ‘incident,’ a rebellion, a major escape, a drastic drop in production of whatever the hell, or some other problem that causes him to lose face with his higher command, because the consequences of ‘problems’ in the Japanese army is a quiet order to go find your short sword and use it.”

“And you’re saying this gives us leverage?”

“Not at all. We have no leverage, not one iota. At any time and on any given day, they could assemble the lot of us out front and tell the guard towers to open fire. You may not be aware of this, but it is common knowledge that Imperial HQ have given orders to all the camps that all prisoners of war are to be killed at the first sign of an invasion of the Home Islands.”

“No, I did not know that,” Gar said. “Nor do I think my bosses know that.”

“Well, believe it, Commander. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn tonight that even here they’ve been drilling for the occasion. This is a small camp, from the looks of it. Probably dedicated to the one mine, so perhaps the kill-all orders haven’t reached here. Trust me, the larger camps are all firmly on notice.”

“How long have you been a POW?”

“Since the fall of Singapore, I’m afraid.”

“Jesus—that was, what, early ’42?”

“February fifteenth, to be precise, and we will never, ever live it down.”

Three years plus, Gar thought. That made his predicament seem trivial by comparison.

“What you must understand, especially if you become Senior One in this camp, is that we are all role-playing here. The Japanese officers are playing at being little gods. We are, in their eyes, vermin. They are being told that they are winning this war. We prisoners are supposedly evidence of that, and, as I mentioned before, we forfeited every scrap of our manly honor the day we put our hands in the air and our rifles on the ground.”

“They are absolutely
not
winning this war,” Gar said.

“Bravo,” the doctor said, glancing out the window at the two guards. “And we are all
dying,
literally in some cases, to hear the latest news. But do not for one moment allow that notion to surface in front of even the lowliest Jappo out there. Understood? You get stroppy, we might all die.”

Gar nodded. “Got it. I’m new to all this, and you guys obviously know how to play this game. I will do my utmost not to cause trouble, but someone’s going to have to educate me on how to act around the Japs.”

“Fear not, Commander,” the doc said, indicating the guards outside with his chin. “You will receive daily instruction.”

*   *   *

The resident POWs, some twenty men, came out of the coal mine a half hour later. They were indistinguishable from the coal they’d been working all day. The new prisoners watched as they passed through a barbed wire man-gate, where they were given a cursory search and then sent through a small fire-hose station, where a bored-looking guard hosed them down one by one. It was a small fire hose, maybe an inch in diameter, but the men were so weak they had to hold on to the wire to keep from being knocked down by the stream. Their soaking-wet clothes highlighted their skeletal frames, and about a third of them had to be helped by one of the others just to make it down the hill from the mine and into the barracks enclosure. Even after everything this new crew of Brits had endured on their long voyage from Southeast Asia, they looked to be in better shape than these poor bastards. The new prisoners moved away from the windows and clustered at the back of the barracks among the empty bunk beds.

The “residents” trooped in a silent single file up the steps between the two sneering guards and into the common room of the barracks. They went to the three tables grouped together in the middle of the room and sat down, side by side, on long wooden benches. They gave no indication that they’d seen the new people, and they looked to be so exhausted it was possible that they didn’t even know others were there. Each man sat hunched over the wooden table, his forearms on the table, hands splayed out in front, head bowed, as if in communal prayer. Even from across the room Gar thought they smelled of near-death. Then one of them, an older-looking man in the first seat next to the doors, gave a quiet order.

“You lot back there,” he said, in a fairly refined British accent. “Don’t move.”

Okay, so they did know there were new people, Gar thought. There were no lights on in the barracks, only the glow from some of the perimeter spots out along the metal fence. Then the front doors opened, and a tiny old man came into the room with a basket filled with rice balls. He set the basket on the table nearest to the door and scuttled back out. He returned carrying a galvanized 2-gallon oilcan with a long, flexible metal spout, which he also put on the table. Then he left, muttering to himself, and the guards pulled the doors shut behind him.

“Rations,” the older man said. He picked up the basket, extracted one rice ball, and passed the basket down the table. Each man took one ball of rice and began to eat it, holding it in his blackened hands and nibbling the individual grains, chewing each grain slowly as if it hurt his teeth. Once everyone had finished his rice, two men got up and between them carried the oil can down the line, allowing each prisoner to have two audible gulps of whatever was in the can—water, Gar presumed. It was almost ritualistic, what they were doing, but it was clear they could all see that the resident prisoners’ individual focus didn’t go past the next moment. Rice. Eat. Water. Drink.

“
Benjo
detail,” the older man said. Once again, two of the healthier-looking men got up and helped two very sick-looking men to the front door. The guards opened the doors and let the four of them out. The older man looked over at them. “Anyone needs the loo, now is the time,” he said. About half of the new group started forward toward the doors, but the older man put up a hand. “In ranks, single file, heads down, hands flat at your sides, wait at the doors until they tell you to come out, and then go out one at a time. Do
not
look at them.”

The new prisoners looked at each other and then formed the single line. They’d already found two piss-tubes in the back of the barracks;
benjo
detail was for more serious alimentary functions, especially for the men who were experiencing severe GI problems. The two men being helped out to the latrines were skeletal in the spotlights. Their skin was jaundiced and stretched across their cheekbones like parchment. Several of the others weren’t in much better shape. Considering what they’d been through, and for how long, Gar realized that his captivity so far, beatings and bombings included, had probably been a cakewalk.

The original group of prisoners left the tables and hobbled to their racks. Major Morris took Gar over and introduced him to the older man, who turned out to be another army major, Willingham by name, an artilleryman from a Yorkshire regiment. Gar’s rank as a navy commander was theoretically equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the army, and thus he was now the senior officer in the camp. Theoretically.

“Congratulations,” Willingham said with a weak smile. “Do you have the vaguest idea of what you’re supposed to do?”

“None whatsoever,” Gar said.

“Lovely,” he said with a sigh. “What do you think, Dr. Morris?”

“I think we should leave things just as they are,” Morris said immediately. “You are look older than the commander here, and the Jappos respect age more than some table of equivalent ranks.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” Gar said before Willingham could say anything. “I know nothing about what to do here. I could get us all killed.”

Willingham gave him a long stare. He was thin as a rail and weary beyond measure. His eyes were hollow and rheumy. There was coal dust in every seam of his face and hands. He looked to be in his seventies but was probably only a few years older than Gar was.

“Are you quite sure, Commander?” he asked. “As Senior One, you would have some protection from the more sadistic of the guards. As the lone American, well…”

“I understand, Major,” Gar said. “For a little while they thought I was going to be useful to them. I was being taken to some place called Ofuna, near Tokyo, but after the Kure bombing, I think I got lost in the shuffle.”

“Ofuna is the navy’s POW center. It has a rather harsh reputation. You won’t think so, but you’re probably better off here.”

“Even when the commandant uses us for a urinal?”

“That wasn’t the commandant. That was the political officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kai. Kempeitai bastard. Fanatical like the whole lot of them. The commandant is Colonel Kashiwabara. Southerner. Has his family in Nagasaki. Not fanatical, which is probably why Kai was assigned.”

“He looked ready to pull that sword and make all our heads roll.”

“He is always ready to do that. Has Major Morris explained to you about the order to execute all the prisoners when the invasion begins?”

“He has.”

“Do you have any idea of when an invasion might come?”

“Okinawa, any day now,” Gar said. “The Philippines are back in human hands. Guam, Tinian, too. Your guys have most of Burma back in the British fold. The Home Islands, late this year, early next year.”

“Okinawa could be considered a home territory,” Morris said. All Gar could do was shrug. Okinawa was a thousand miles from Japan proper.

Senior One asked how Gar came to be captured, and he related what had happened to him since they were surprised near Bungo Suido. As they were talking, men began returning from the
benjo
detail, and a guard started yelling into the barracks. Senior One put up his hand and told Gar and Major Morris to get the new people into bunks.

“We’ll talk more later,” he said. “Sorry about no food. There’s a water pipe in the back of the barracks. Don’t let the guards see you using it.”

“Why no food?” Gar asked.

“You haven’t earned any,” he said. “Yet.”

*   *   *

Their day began at dawn. They’d be rousted out of their unheated barracks and given one golf ball of pasty white rice and two swallows of warm mystery fluid masquerading as either tea or soup—they could never tell which, but they consumed it religiously because that was going to be it until evening. The mine was bored into a high ridge that lay between them and the northeastern environs of Hiroshima City, which was just on the other side. Unbelievably, the guards would make them do morning calisthenics, if one could call it that. They were a squadron of wobbly skeletons going through the motions of flapping their arm and leg bones in the morning twilight while the guards did the real thing, constantly mocking the prisoners as they flailed weakly, trying not to fall into each other; the really sick ones lay back against the outside walls of the barracks, leaking at both ends. This was followed by the daily bowing ceremony, where they were forced to bow to a highly stylized picture of the emperor mounted in a boxy little shrine outside the commandant’s office. Anyone not bowing “sincerely” would be hustled off to the punishment cells by two guards. They’d pass a stick between the prisoner’s legs, jerk-lift him onto it, and trot across the grounds to the steel-sided building, making sure to keep their arms nice and rigid in the process. Earlier in the war officers had been exempted from slave labor, but things were very different now.

The POWs would then be marched, sometimes through snow, to the mine entrance, where everyone was searched. They never figured out what the Japs were looking for, but they were always searched, going in and coming back out. Then they’d crawl into enclosed transporter cars hooked together in a train, where six of them would be squeezed into a tiny compartment made for four Japanese, requiring them to bend their heads onto their knees. The train was parked on a slight incline leading down into the mine, so a guard would simply release the brakes and it would start moving down into the dark and the heat, eventually to the accompaniment of squealing brakes as it gathered speed. The tunnels were wide enough for two sets of tracks but only 5 feet from floor to ceiling. Once they got to the coal face, they’d crawl out and then lift the cars of the people-carrier from one track to the one alongside so that it could be pulled back up. The next train down would bring the regular mine workers and more guards.

The day consisted of using picks and shovels to gather up the coal that had been blasted by the all-Japanese night shift, prisoners not being trusted around explosives. They’d load individual coal skips, and then four of them would push the loaded, half-ton cars back out to the main chamber, where an engine would then take eleven at a time back out to the mine entrance. To Gar’s surprise, most of the main tunnels in this mine were unsupported, which led to a lot of cave-ins, usually when they were blasting. The Japs were apparently used to that. The night shift would get trapped behind a rockfall. The prisoners and other Jap miners would clear it all out, and the night shift would come out looking none the worse for wear. It scared the hell out of the prisoners, of course.

There was little forced ventilation down there, so it was always hot and wet. During the winter, that was better than wet and cold, but by the end of July those of them who could still stand and work were on their last legs. Initially they’d been beaten for any infraction, real or imagined. As the summer wore on and the effective working numbers shrank, the Japs stopped doing that, probably because they realized why production was falling. Senior One’s prediction about Gar being the lone American turned out to be spot on, as the Brits would say. It was bad enough for the Brits and the few Dutchmen in their group, but the guards made sure Gar knew how happy they were to have a Yank in the mix. A couple of times he was beaten senseless, only to wake up down in the mine, where he was expected to immediately get back to work. There were times he couldn’t even stand up. The guards would then drag him over to the coal-skip rails at the head of the tunnel. He’d either move himself or be run over. He learned to just lie there, resting, until he felt the thrumming vibrations in the steel tracks that told him a train was coming down. Then and only then he’d crawl off the tracks. The guards would laugh, and money would change hands. The whole thing had been a bet.