Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [116]
CHAPTER 34
The Japanese aroused suspicions when they sent around a questionnaire asking the prisoners about their technical backgrounds. Leery of disclosing anything their enemy might find useful, some of the Americans professed to be students or farmers or certified “peach-fuzz inspectors.” Those who did disclose actual technical or mechanical aptitude were called to the Changi commandant’s office and told how fortunate they were. They were going to be taken to Japan.
Most of the men in the Houston’s engineering department, as well as technically minded Lost Battalioners such as Jess Stanbrough, joined this “technical party” on the same miserable ship that had brought them to Singapore. On October 27 the Dai Nichi Maru got under way north. Stopping over in Formosa, the ship arrived at Moji in northern Kyushu on November 25. A few days later, on November 28, another group left Singapore for Japan. This party included Frank Fujita, the Japanese American whose mother had written with such pride of his service in the 131st.
Fujita had plenty to lose in his dealings with the Japanese. His father’s countrymen, his captors, had no idea of his true heritage. Fujita didn’t quite know why. He assumed they took him for a Filipino or a Mexican. Though his name was as Japanese as could be, no one paid him much attention. But his buddies did. “Hell, they are going to kill you,” they would tell him. “Change your name. For God’s sake, don’t tell them you’re half Japanese.” Fujita was scared. He had no doubt they were right. Yet he could not quite pull the trigger on adopting a racial disguise. “If I change my name to Joe Martinez or something, well, when they kill me anyhow they might have me listed as Joe Martinez, and then my folks will never know what happened to me. So I figured hell, I was born with this name, and I might as well die with it.”
On November 28 he found himself jammed with 2,200 other men aboard the Kamakura Maru, a 17,500-ton Japanese passenger ship. Each man had a single canteen to last him the ten-day voyage. The ship left Singapore and stopped at Formosa, where some POWs debarked. Continuing north, the ship reached Japan on December 7, 1942, and docked at Nagasaki, the home Fujita’s father had left in 1914. The northern winds were cold on his face.
The POW camp known as Fukuoka #2 was situated about a mile from the port city’s great Mitsubishi shipyard. The inland dry dock there was massive enough to hold four ten-thousand-ton ships simultaneously. The Japanese workforce was far less impressive. Whereas American shipbuilders at Newport News, Mare Island, Puget Sound, Seattle-Tacoma, Quincy Fore River, and elsewhere relied on professionals, the Japanese at Nagasaki employed children, the mentally ill, and starving and sick prisoners for its labor. Spread among the various yard crews, the Americans worked alongside Japanese civilian riveters, welders, and stage builders. Fujita’s job was to build scaffoldings on the angle-iron frameworks that cradled the infant hulls of new ships. The yard’s noise level was monstrous. The clangor of its overdriven riveters made speech communication impossible. Yard foremen used colored chalk to mark hull plates for different types of processes, such as bracketing, riveting, or cutting with a blowtorch. Fujita’s work took him all over the yard. He soon understood that if he was discreet enough, he could get away with murder as a saboteur. He carried a piece of chalk tied to a long stick. Whenever he felt he could get away with it, he would furtively change the foreman’s markings on randomly chosen plates and beams. “We carried on our own little war there,” he said.
They were in this war whether they wanted it or not. An average of six prisoners a day died on the job in the Nagasaki shipyard, a dangerous gauntlet of high-voltage wires, high-pressure hoses, and toxic industrial substances. Heavy steel