All seemed lost for George Rocek, trapped in a whirlpool in a typhoon. The maelstrom left by the sinking Chuyo pulled him downward amid the shrieks of the great ship’s metal plates collapsing. Internal explosions wracked the ocean as the carrier plunged to the ocean floor. In his exhaustion, he gave in to the forces around him just as a large air pocket, rising from the ship, caught him and broke the vortex’s hold.
“All of a sudden the sea seemed to quiet all around me. Then the suction subsided. I looked up and could see a little light above me. I thought to myself, make one last try.” He flailed with his remaining strength and broke through to the surface, choking and spitting seawater. Eying a raft 20 feet away, he swam for it, where he hung on, gasping for breath. “I looked around and the carrier was completely below the surface. I wedged my hand between the opening in the binding and a log just in case I lost my grip.”
Among scores of survivors clinging to the raft were two other Sculpin prisoners—the boat’s Philippine mess cook, Maxiso Barrera (CKlc), and Ens. C. G. Smith Jr. Three other rafts bobbed in the storm, too far away to make out their passengers. High winds continued to lash the ocean, causing huge waves to crash down on the men. Occasionally, they lost their grip and were borne away. Most managed to swim back, but others disappeared.
After a short while, the destroyer Urakazi appeared out of the storm. “We could see the can,” said Rocek. “She circled our area but she wouldn’t stop. She was like a cork in that sea. You could just about see her bottom as she pitched and rolled. But she was afraid to stop and pick anybody up for fear the American submarine was in the area. If she did, she would be a sitting duck.”
For four hours, the flotsam bearing the survivors cast about until the destroyer slowed to attempt a rescue. The ship dropped a Jacob’s ladder and ten single lines over the side and made a pass close to each raft.
“When they came along our raft, I grabbed the closest line to me. As the can rolled, my body cleared the sea and all my weight was on that wet line. I couldn’t pull myself up and slid right back down into the sea. Another swell pushed me closer to that Jacob’s ladder. About the time I was about to latch onto it, a [Japanese] officer who was on the raft stood up and, in order to get to the ladder, stepped right on me, forcing me down under. I thought I was done for. But that Man up there was looking out for me. I got back to the surface and another swell pushed me back over to the Jacob’s ladder and I threw my arm through it. As bad as I wanted to crawl up, I just didn’t have the strength. I just hung there. Everybody had gone up the ladder. Then they pulled it and me up together.”
Rocek was dumped face down on deck, where he was mistaken for a Chuyo crewman until someone turned him over. “When they saw I was not [Japanese], they got excited, jabbering and hollering.” Urakazi crewmen began carrying him aft to throw him back into the ocean. “But apparently they got a change of orders and stopped. While we were there at the fantail, I saw about ten sailors with bamboo poles about 10 or 15 feet long, jabbing down and pulling up. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to keep people away or trying to help them aboard.”
Guards whisked Rocek to midships and plopped him in a small compartment off the main deck. The door was left open and he lay motionless on deck for hours as the ship headed for port. “Of course, I didn’t realize I was the only Sculpin survivor. I figured they had picked up others and kept them in various portions of the ship so we couldn’t get together.”
That night, cold winds swept the open compartment. No one came to check on the prisoner, let alone give him food, water, or blankets. He started to shake uncontrollably. “I tried to do exercises to keep warm but didn’t have the strength. At one end of the compartment, I saw a little water-filled metal tank, three to four feet long, two feet wide and four feet deep. I put my hand in and the water felt so damned warm. So I crawled in with just my head above. I felt comfortable and stayed there all night.”
Early the next morning, he climbed out of the tank and put his clothes back on. As it started to get light, a young sailor came in, gesturing that he worked in the engine rooms. “I managed to convey that I did the same thing, only in submarines. He seemed to understand. He left and came back about 15 minutes later and slipped a few hard crackers into my hand. He motioned to me with his finger over his lips to be quiet and not say anything or it would be bad for him. I was so dehydrated, I couldn’t work up any saliva to eat in a normal manner. I took a few bites at a time. I kept chewing and chewing. It took half an hour to eat those two little crackers.”
Rocek’s next visitor was a drunken petty officer. “I could smell the alcohol. He stuck his face in front of mine and he yelled and laughed and then slugged the hell out of me with both hands.” The tormentor left but returned every 30 minutes to repeat the routine.
The storm broke as the destroyer entered Uraga Bay off Yokohama later that morning. The ship proceeded along the city’s waterfront where damage to ships at anchor startled Rocek. “They had damaged top sides. Some sunk by the bow, some along the port side. Some had a port list. Some had starboard lists. All kinds of damage about the superstructure. In fact, I can’t recall one ship in there that wasn’t damaged in some way.”
After the Urakazi docked, the petty officer returned with three men carrying 40 feet of rope. They used every bit of the rope to completely hog-tie the prisoner and blindfold him. He couldn’t move for 30 minutes. Then another petty officer, very tall and husky, came in, took the blindfold off, and untied him. He then retied just his wrists, leaving a two-foot tether. He put the blindfold back on, but left it open at the bottom so Rocek could see where he stepped. Using the tether, the officer led the captive down a gangway to a small launch, which motored to a dock some distance away. Embarking from the boat, the two walked briskly through a business district, where Rocek could hear much commotion. Colorful women’s kimonos appeared around his feet as he passed. The two arrived at a commuter rail station where they waited on a bench. “We sat there for a few minutes and I could hear the chief talking to a young lady. Next thing I know, he took my blindfold off. She was a doll. She was cute as a button. Dressed State-side. Makeup on. Silk stockings and high-heel shoes. And short skirt and a white blouse. She was pretty. Apparently, she must have inquired that I was an American prisoner. She talked him into letting her look. He left the blindfold off for 10 or 15 seconds.”
A southbound passenger train squealed to a halt and the two men got on. Since it was crowded with civilians, both had to stand, hanging from overhead slings. After an hour-long ride, they disembarked in a rural area and set off at a trot down a small gravel road. “I had to stop several times. I just couldn’t run as fast. I pointed to my shoes and his. He got the message but conveyed to me that if we didn’t get to a camp on time, I would not get anything to eat. Well, we ran off and on for 20 minutes.”
Finally, they arrived at a large compound, surrounded by a 12-foot-high wooden fence set in the middle of flat farmlands with a high mountain visible to the west. At the main gate, Rocek’s blindfold was removed and he was motioned inside where two Japanese intelligence officers greeted him. Both were dressed in American business suits and spoke perfect English, claiming to have attended universities in the States. “One asked me where I was from and I told him I came off a carrier that was sunk. He got highly indignant. He asked what American ship I was off of and I told him I was off the Sculpin. He apparently knew what had happened because he didn’t say anything more and led me into a bath.”
The room contained a large, concrete tub filled with warm water. Two other men were bathing. To Rocek’s delight, both were mates off the Sculpin. But because of the presence of guards, they were unable to converse—a camp rule. “I crawled in and I almost fainted since it felt so good, so warm and so relaxing,” he said of the effect of the water on his badly injured legs. Afterwards, he put on fresh clothing and was escorted to a large barracks.
On both ends of the structure were interrogation rooms connected by a long central hallway. Thirty cells—each about four feet by eight feet—lined the sides of the corridor. Each room contained a single electric light, a bunk with a bamboo mat, and a door with a small window from which guards could look in. The prisoner was shown to his cell and locked inside, but not before he realized twenty other Sculpin survivors off the Unyo, including Lt. George Brown, the only surviving officer, were bivouacked in rooms next to him. Inside his room, Rocek discovered a plate of fish cooked in soy sauce, which he hungrily ate.
The next morning he was able to whisper the details of the Chuyo sinking to his shipmates when the guards weren’t looking.
The kindness extended Rocek on arrival was deceptive. Unknowingly, he and the other survivors had entered Ofuna, a secret prison camp that would come to be known to captured aviators and submariners later in the war as the “Torture Farm.” Built in 1942 to extract military secrets from POWs, the prison was located 29 miles southwest of Yokohama and contained three barracks enclosing a large field the size of a football gridiron. The camp was designed to hold no more than 100 POWs in individual cells. To make room for the Sculpin prisoners, nearly the entire crew of the USS Perch (SS-176), scuttled after a depth-charge attack in the Java Sea in March 1942, moved out to distant labor camps.
The Ofuna captors’ intentions became clear on the first morning after arrival. “Three interrogators came in. They had us line up in a small room,” said Ed Keller. “Two guards were holding small-caliber machine guns. Then one of the interrogators addressed us in English: ‘You have survived the sinking of a submarine. No one survives the sinking of a submarine. No one knows you’re alive. We are going to ask you questions. This man and this man are going to shoot you if you don’t answer the questions. And no one will ever know you were alive.’ I was scared. But I didn’t think it was the end of the world. We had survived Truk Island after all.”
The men were summoned individually, and faced the same questions they were asked on Truk. “We all said the same thing, that we were captured while on our first patrol run. We filled in with bullshit on our time in the Navy until the sinking. We played dumb. In a way, that’s the way they treated their own personnel. They didn’t tell them anything,” said Rocek. “The only thing we had to make sure we did was answer each question quickly. If you started stumbling around, they would feel you were trying to lie to them.”
The interrogations were repeated every two weeks, with the inquisitors comparing notes to determine if any of the men had changed their stories. “If you did,” Rocek said, “you got the hell beaten out of you.” The men were slapped, hit in the face with fists, or beaten with four-foot-long clubs swung by a guard using both hands. Punishments were frequent at Ofuna. The most severe were formal beatings for refusing to answer questions, suspicion of lying, disrespect to an interrogator, sitting on blankets, whispering to a fellow POW, or spilling a dish of food. Other forms of punishment were rendered on the spot—for speaking to a guard in English, not showing proper respect, being late to formation, not counting properly in Nipponese, or taking food without permission. Men suspected of any of these were beaten about the face with a curled fist, took two to three blows with a club, or faced physical drills and/or standing at attention for long periods.
Guards slapped the prisoners in the face incessantly. They were slapped for not asking permission to go to the head; slapped for not bowing; slapped for not saying “thank you” in Japanese; slapped for violating a new regulation unknown to the men. The prisoners often were forced to stand stationary for as long as an hour in what came to be known as the “Ofuna crouch”—heels together, toes pointed in opposite directions, knees bent, back straight and arms held high. The effort to maintain this position left the men trembling all over.
Officers by far endured the harshest treatment. Lieutenant Brown was beaten violently, put on reduced rations, and threatened with death. Yet, he disclosed only information contained in the book, Jane’s Fighting Ships, which he was allowed to consult freely. Eventually, he convinced his tormentors that as the engineering officer on the Sculpin, he knew nothing about U.S. strategic plans.
Daily, the prisoners had to get up early, muster outside, and bow in the direction of Emperor Hirohito’s palace. “The Americans, when they bowed down, would spit and say, ‘Pituee, the hell with you!’” Keller said. “And the [guards] would turn around and yell, ‘Don’t do that! It’s not right!’”
For the most part, the survivors sat on benches in the sun every day. “No talking was allowed between the prisoners. They clobbered the hell out of you if they caught you talking,” said Rocek. “When sitting on the benches, we had these signals made up. If you were sitting there soaking up the sun and feeling good and closing your eyes, the guards would draw their bayonets and put them right up to your eye. If you moved or repositioned yourself, you could poke your eye right out. So, if you felt pressure of another prisoner’s leg against yours, you knew not to move. You knew a bayonet was close to you and you just froze. The guard would finally move away. The guy next to you would cough and you knew it was okay.”
But not all guards were sadistic—just weird.
One, known to the prisoners as “Fatso,” spoke half English and would offer a cigarette, light it, and stand guard outside a prisoner’s cubicle. “When he felt you had smoked enough, he’d take it from you, snuff it, and then hit you,” said Keller. “He was just a weirdo. We had one fellow in there we called Smiling Jack. Japanese Zeros would practice simulated attacks in the sky over the camp. We could see them. They appeared to be having gun fights. Well, Smiling Jack would always walk around and be going, Arroom! . . . arroom!’ making like a plane.”
Those who had suffered injuries in the Sculpin’s gun battle with the destroyer received little medical attention. The shrapnel wounds on Rocek’s legs festered, hobbling him. The guards offered an ointment made of fish oil and one set of bandages, which had to be washed frequently by the prisoner. But the infection persisted, turning gangrenous. Rocek feared he might lose his legs. “I recalled my dad telling me when I was a kid that, if I ever was cut and couldn’t get treatment, to urinate on my wound.” He turned to Edward F. Ricketts (MoMM2c). “We were both from the black gang on the boat and were pals. When I asked him, it didn’t bother him at all because he was a hunter and fisherman himself and had heard that urine could heal wounds. He did it every day. You know, every one of the wounds healed up after that except for one on my shin bone in my left leg.”
The Sculpin survivors soon discovered that crewmen from two other U.S. subs were in camp: eight from the S-44, sunk in the Kuriles in September 1943, and nearly the entire crew of the USS Grenadier (SS-210), scuttled off the Malay Peninsula in April. They included Lt. Cdr. John L. Fitzgerald, the skipper of the Grenadier, who had been mercilessly tortured in Panang where splinters were driven under his fingernails to get him to talk.
At Ofuna, the enforced silence gradually eased. The crews got to know one another as Fitzgerald kept up spirits through the winter months. “He was a very enthusiastic man. A natural leader,” said Keller. “He would come around and talk to you. Everybody got to know him. He was very happy-go-lucky. He would come over and smile and talk with you. Being he was the skipper of a submarine, it made your day a little better.”
Part of the routine at Ofuna was enforced laps around the barracks every morning, although any prisoner could get out of doing so by feigning illness. “Forty of us would be running at a time around the compound,” said Keller. “The [guards] liked to run with us because there was a famous miler in Ofuna, a man by the name of [Louis] Zamperini. They used to like to run against him. They knew his reputation. We would let Zamperini through and block the Japanese out. And they’d be yelling, ‘Make way! Make way!’ and they would end up chasing him.” The men also engaged in baseball games to fight the boredom. The teams would consist of twenty men on a side, hitting a ball that could only go about 10 feet. The winners got two cigarettes. The losers got one. The guards, looking on, wagered on the outcome. Fitzgerald frequently organized and participated in the contests.
The International Red Cross began delivering boxes of rations, cigarettes, chocolate, cans of corned beef, coffee, and jars of jelly. Prison officials parceled out the supplies, and occasionally issued new clothing, including Red Cross-issue leather shoes, many of which were later stolen by guards.
The men ate three times a day at the entrance to their cells. Sitting on the raised floors, they could converse freely down the hallway. Often, each was allowed a second helping of soup or stew, containing fish or pork, dished out of a tub. Despite the variety of the food, most prisoners lost weight, as much as five to ten pounds over a month’s time.
Much of the meat arrived spoiled and had to be cooked thoroughly. One evening, Zamperini, a U.S. Army Air corpsman, peered into a wagon loaded with fish. “The fish were covered with maggots which were swarming all over. As I was looking at this,” he said in a deposition after the war, “[a guard] came up and intimated that I wasn’t supposed to be doing this. He beat me twelve times with his fists. Later that same night, fish was served as a meal but I lost my appetite. The guards forced me to eat it.”
Women from a nearby village entered the prison periodically to shave the prisoners’ heads to combat the camp’s serious lice problem.
In February 1944, the Japanese decided there was no point in keeping most of the enlisted men off the Sculpin, Grenadier, and S-44; they had disclosed little of value. Summoned before the camp commandant, they were made an offer. “They asked if we wanted to move up to a work camp,” explained Keller. “They said we would be registered as prisoners of war. They made it sound like we had a choice since one of the things they warned us about was it was going to be hard work.
“We knew what we had at Ofuna—leisure time, regular meals, and Red Cross supplies. But we took the chance to go because we would be officially recorded as prisoners of war and our families would be told. That meant a lot to us. We knew everybody back home thought we were dead. They had been told we were presumed lost at sea. There is nothing like ‘presumed lost at sea’ when it was a submarine. You were lost at sea.”
On the day of departure, guards called out the names of those to be transferred. The men picked up their belongings and marched from the camp a half mile to the train station, where their blindfolds were removed. When the electric train arrived, a section of one car was cleared of civilians so the prisoners and their guards could board. The train took a northerly route to Tokyo where the men remained overnight at Omari, a mammoth POW camp operated by the Japanese army. The next day, the journey continued on a steam train through rugged mountains northwest of Tokyo, an area known as the Japanese Alps. In the late afternoon, the prisoners arrived at the high mountain village of Ashio.
“It was a unique looking town. Very picturesque,” said Keller of the tiny wooden rowhouses that lined the main street. “None of us had ever seen a Japanese town. It looked like a real quiet, clean town.” The men stepped from the train, carrying their belongings loosely in their arms. The street had been cleared of all pedestrians, in accordance with the Geneva Convention that forbad parades of captives. The POWs were led to the far side of town where they crossed a footbridge over a deep river gorge. They marched another quarter mile up a hill to an internment camp at the base of a high cliff.
“When we walked in, I remember seeing a whole bunch of very thin, brown men wrapped in something like Friar Tuck would wear,” said Keller. “It was a one-piece robe over the head. Not sinister looking but desperate in appearance.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh, my God, what have we come to?’”