The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [158]
Sinking lifeboats was common practice among the Japanese, as was shooting survivors in the water. After the Japanese submarine I-26 torpedoed the American Liberty ship Richard Hovey in March 1943, two days out of Bombay sailing towards the Suez Canal, it surfaced and opened up its 20mm anti-aircraft cannon into her small boats and rafts, and then rammed them. Lieutenant Harry Goudy recalled that the Japanese on deck ‘were laughing and seemed to get quite a bit of sport out of our predicament’. These criminal actions were also being filmed.60
Similar treatment was meted out to the crew of the American Liberty ship Jean Nicolet on her way to Calcutta from California in July 1944. William Musser, a seventeen-year-old mess-room steward, was hauled up on to the Japanese submarine that had sunk his ship, and was ‘immediately frogmarched towards the bows between two Japanese sailors. Suddenly, one of his captors turned and struck Musser a savage blow across his skull with a length of steel pipe. The Japanese laughed as Musser staggered about concussed and terrified. Taking careful aim with a pistol, the same Japanese pulled the trigger and blew the American boy’s brains out. Musser’s body was then kicked over the side like a bag of refuse.’61 Ordinary Seaman Richard Kean, aged nineteen, was stripped of valuables and his lifejacket and had his hands tied behind his back. Before he got to the bow of the ship a Japanese sailor bayoneted him in the stomach, as another smashed a rifle butt down on the back of his head. His body was also kicked overboard. The other prisoners then had to hear a harangue from the captain, who told them, ‘Let this be a lesson to you that Americans are weak. You must realize that Japan will rule the world,’ and so on. From then on, Americans were dragged off the deck individually down the hatch into the submarine. ‘The night air was soon rent with screams of agony and the sounds of violence,’ the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was told, ‘as the terrified survivors suffered untold mental anguish waiting to be snatched and led to an unknown fate.’ On deck, the Japanese formed two lines, whereupon the Americans were forced to run the gauntlet, being hit with metal bars, rifle butts and lengths of chain, and slashed with bayonets and knives. Anyone still alive at the end of the line faced a large sailor ‘whose job it was to lunge his bayonet deep into the bleeding and bruised Americans and heave them bodily over the side like a man heaving hay with a pitchfork’.62
Astonishingly, two men somehow survived this process. Assistant Engineer Pyle was cut with a sword but managed to fall into the sea, and Able Seaman Butler described how ‘One tried to kick me in the stomach, another hit me over the head with an iron pipe, another cut me over the eye with a sabre,’ but he too managed to release his hands and jump overboard. With thirty others tied up, the submarine’s diving klaxon then sounded and the Japanese rushed down into the bowels of the vessel, slamming the hatches shut behind them. One American sailor who had secreted a penknife managed to free several of his comrades before the submarine dived; all the rest drowned.
Yet it was the behaviour of Japan’s 17,000-strong Manila Naval Defence Force (MNDF) against innocent civilians in the capital of the Philippines in February 1945 that truly defies belief. Furious that the Americans were recapturing the islands, Vice-Admiral Denshichi Okuchi unleashed the MNDF to do anything they liked to the local population, who they (rightly) believed sympathized with the Westerners. In one incident, twenty Filipina girls were taken to an officers’ club called the Coffee Pot, and later to the nearby Bay View Hotel, where they were ‘Imprisoned in various rooms and over the next four days and nights Japanese officers and other ranks were given free access to the terrified girls,