Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [247]
A destroyer arrived, and began to pick up survivors—but only Japanese survivors. The prisoners were left to the sea. Alf Evans paddled to a lifeboat left empty after its occupants were rescued, and climbed aboard, joining two Gordon Highlanders. They later hauled in other men, until they were thirty strong. After three days and nights afloat, they were taken aboard a Japanese submarine chaser. The captain reviewed the bedraggled figures paraded on his deck, and ordered them thrown over the side. The POWs were astonished to find that their own guard, Tanaka, a notoriously brutal character, dissuaded him. The vessel’s captain satisfied his feelings by administering savage beatings all round. Eventually the prisoners were transferred to the hold of a whaling factory ship, in which they completed their journey to Japan.
Almost naked and coated in filth, they were landed on the dockside at Moji and marched through the streets, between lines of watching Japanese women, to a cavalry barracks. There they were clothed in sacking and dispatched to work twelve-hour shifts in the furnaces of a chemical works in the town of Omuta: “Life consisted only of work and sleep.” Of the fifteen hundred men who had embarked with Alf Evans, just six hundred survived to become slave labourers.
On 13 December 1944, Captain Mel Rosen was among a detail of 1,619 American POWs marched through the streets of Manila to the docks. In earlier times, Filipinos sometimes gave V signs to prisoners, or kids called out “We’re with you, Joe!” By that last winter of the war, local people had learned the price of such gestures. Most were silent and impassive. Next day the Americans left for Japan on the freighter Oryoku Maru, a voyage that was to become one of the most notorious of the war. Water and tea were periodically lowered to the prisoners in kegs. Those closest to the ladders drank. Others did not. Some men congratulated themselves on grabbing a few mouthfuls of boiled seaweed, but later regretted these, for they became violently sick. The ship was dive-bombed several times by U.S. carrier planes. The attacks ended at dusk. The prisoners were desperate with thirst. Doctors urged them not to drink their own urine, but some did so anyway. “That night was terrible, the worst thing I can imagine,” said Rosen. “Discipline went to hell, especially among the newer arrivals. I did not myself see anyone biting a man’s throat and drinking his blood, but I’ve heard of it happening from lots of others.” Some prisoners wilfully killed others, in the demented struggle for water and food. Next day, they were again subjected to air attack. This time, they were hit.
The Japanese crew and guards abandoned ship. The prisoners forced their way on deck to find the superstructure on fire. They took to the sea, and for a few brief minutes revelled in its warm wetness: “It was such a wonderful feeling as one jumped off that ship into the water.” Those who could not swim pushed hatch covers over the side and clung to them. The prisoners found themselves only a short way offshore from Luzon, and with little choice save to make for it. On the beach, they were welcomed by armed Japanese. As survivors struggled ashore, they were herded onto a tennis court on the old American naval base. Out of 1,619 men who had boarded the ship, some thirteen hundred remained. In the blazing sun, for some days they were not fed at all, merely given a little water. On the fourth and fifth days, each man received a spoonful and a half of raw rice. When they demanded aid for the sick and injured, a truck was brought to take them away. These men were never seen again, and were assumed to have been shot.
On Christmas Eve the survivors were