Dreams of a daring escape from Ashio were quickly abandoned by the Sculpin survivors. The camp guards made sure of that. “They told us that if any of us escaped, they’d kill his friends,” said Billie Cooper. Besides, George Rocek said, where would you hide in a place like Japan? “It would have been pretty hard for us to escape and mingle with the people. We would have stood out like a sore thumb. It wasn’t like Germany or Europe where you could mingle and look like the other people. So the guards felt pretty comfortable with the fact that we would not attempt an escape.”
It was clear the prisoners’ only hope was an Allied invasion. But as the days and months passed, many wondered if salvation would ever come. Long hours toiling in the mine sapped their strength. Lack of food took their health. Pellagra, beriberi, and other vitamin-deficiency illnesses were rampant. And the great killer, pneumonia, was a constant threat. Starvation and hard work caused most to lose a few pounds every month. Unsanitary conditions didn’t help. Lice and fleas infested the barracks. “The Americans tried always to get rid of them. But the Javanese wouldn’t bother. They saw them as pets,” said Ed Keller.
Somehow the Sculpin survivors endured. They hung together against all odds. “You got used to the long hours and the lack of food,” said Cooper. “We were thin and weak, and we lived on barley, maize and worms. But we survived.” Added Keller, “We were tough, very tough. We developed kinship in Ashio. We always tried to team up together to ease the workload. We would rehash old stories. You heard the same fifteen stories about fifteen times each from fifteen guys. About the girl they picked up in Chicago on the Loop, or the girl in San Francisco.” It was that kinship that sustained them at a time when many other POWs lost all hope.
Ashio was one of 175 camps handling thousands of Allied captives imported to Nippon. As Japanese workers went to the frontlines, POWs replaced them—in steel mills, in shipbuilding yards, on railroads, in coal, copper, lead, and nickel mines, in foundries and on farms. Quotas were demanded of the men and punishments meted out if not met. Japan, which had signed but then renounced the Geneva Convention before the war, handled the captives with brutish contempt. One out of every four of the 95,000 Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders taken prisoner perished in captivity. By the late summer of 1944, twenty Sculpin sailors—all but the boat’s only surviving officer, George Brown, who was still at Ofuna and not registered as a POW—were in Ashio. They had been mucking ore for months and now saw an opportunity for lighter duty as drillers, assisting Japanese civilians who placed explosives in the overhead to blast fresh ore from the tunnels. “I knew the man who had been doing the job was not doing much work. So I said, ‘You’re damned right! I’ll do that work,’” Rocek said of the offer made to him. Drillers used air guns fixed with five-foot drill bits to carve holes in the ceilings above the muck piles. “The object was to get about twenty-four holes into the bulkhead,” said Keller. Dynamite with gunpowder fuses was inserted into each hole and packed with clay. As the fuses were lit, the men ran from the chamber. From a distance, they listened while the honcho counted the blasts. “If we set twenty-two fuses and there were twenty blasts, the honcho would know there were live fuses up there and leave a note for engineers to check,” Keller said. “One day we came back into the mine and learned one of the engineers had been killed.”
Rock falls were a constant threat. On one occasion, a very large boulder fell to the top of a 30-foot-high muck pile. Keller was detailed to the top to blast it apart. As he stood on one edge of the rock, it suddenly split in two, hurling him down the side of the pile with a table-sized boulder following behind. “I tried to get out of the way because I knew the rock was coming after me. I tried to land on my feet, tried to roll with it. My chin knocked my teeth out when my knees hit it. The same instant the rock hit my hand. When I finally got to the bottom and looked at my hand, I thought it was mangled. It was all bloody. I cursed those Japanese up and down because I thought I had lost my hand.” But the injury looked worse than it was and Keller recovered.
In mid-August 1944, some Javanese and Dutch prisoners were transferred out of Ashio to make room for 150 American Army prisoners, survivors of the Bataan Death March who had been incarcerated in Singapore. When it appeared Southeast Asia would be lost, Japan feared the Bataan survivors and thousands of other POWs would be liberated. Thus they crammed the POWs into the holds of every available freighter in a frenzied attempt to move them to Nippon. Many died en route from thirst and heat. Nearly 5,000 others perished when American bombers and submarines unwittingly sank the unmarked “Hell Ships.”
The new arrivals were quite a sight in Ashio. “They looked better than we did,” said Keller. “And they came in with books, instruments, accordions, violins, clarinets, mouth organs, guitars, bongos. There was entertainment in the camp every night after that. We just couldn’t believe it. They came in with whole chests full of things. They all came in at once and there was a very jovial feeling. These men were used to prison camp and they set up gambling and card games. They knew how to get along.”
Since no officers were among the new POWs, the men set up their own police and provost marshal to maintain internal order and control thefts. A court presided over by the provost marshal—a “kangaroo court” to the Sculpin survivors—dispelled instant justice, putting men in solitary (the cold vestibule of the barracks) overnight or flogging them for such things as stealing a pair of socks. The tightly knit Sculpin prisoners managed to avoid such accusations.
The new POWS were put to work in the mine alongside the submariners and did not shirk from the task. Many were to suffer injuries from rock slides and other accidents, leaving a few permanently disfigured. One, Pvt. Basillio Rodriguez, was buried while standing beneath an ore chute. His skull was fractured and he later died in convulsions. The prisoners suspected murder because of bad blood between him and a prison guard who had ordered a railcar dumped into the chute. But no action was taken.
In October, malnutrition caused beriberi to flare up alarmingly. “My legs swelled up to about twice their normal size,” said Sculpin petty officer William H. Haverland. “My face would swell up, and my joints would get rather stiff. Many of the other men periodically were paralyzed from their hips on down and didn’t have control over their muscles. When my legs would swell up quite a bit, they’d let me off for two or three days and the swelling would go down. When I would go back to work, they’d swell up again and I would get off for a couple more days.”
In November the Japanese army command in Tokyo decided to step up production by putting each of the camps in competition to meet higher quotas. At Ashio, the mine company instituted more frequent toshibans—an extra production quota. “To meet this we had to work 16 hours a day, and for doing so, we got a little extra rice,” said Sculpin survivor Paul L. Murphy (MM3c).
Inevitably, beriberi and other illnesses worsened. Japanese civilian medics treated all the symptoms with a kind of acupuncture and occasional Bl vitamin shots. “We were permitted to have Bl vitamin shots only if the beriberi was in an aggravated condition,” said Bataan Death March survivor Joseph Roy LeBlanc Jr. The Japanese preferred burning small areas of the legs, stomach, and back as a cure for virtually any ailment including piles, the common cold, and pneumonia. “The treatment took the form of applying a small portion about the size of a match head of a substance which resembled spun glass,” recounted Eldon Wright (EM3c), Sculpin survivor. “This substance would then be lighted and it would burn slowly. The treatment consisted of three applications in the same spot each day for a period of 20 days, and it ultimately resulted in a festering sore.” Wright received the treatment on his back as a “cure” for a hernia. Likewise, Rocek received repeated burning treatments all over his legs as a remedy for chronic beriberi. Those with diarrhea were burned on the stomach.
Despite their woeful condition, the prisoners were forced into the mine. “If a man said he was sick and could not work and was still able to stand up or walk without the typical malnutrition limp, this Medico would remove his slippers, which were made by cutting the top out of a pair of tennis shoes and slap him several times across the face with the rubber sole of the slippers,” said Jack J. Jones, a machinist attached to the Cavite naval station prior to the Japanese conquest of the Philippines.
What the men really needed to overcome their illnesses was more food. However, rather than increase the rations to the laborers, the camp administration reduced them in mid-November. “This continued until every man in the camp had beriberi and malnutrition,” Jones said. “There were 230 men in the camp who were sick and unable to work by the approval of the [Japanese] medico. That meant that they were unable to walk or could not walk at a normal pace. Thirty of these men were unable to move at all, other than moving their hands and to roll over. These were cared for by three or four Americans assigned to do this job. I was one of the seventy men who were still working even though my left arm was paralyzed and I had malnutrition so bad I could not feel pins that were stuck in my leg by the [Japanese] medico. I could still walk and I had to work.”
Reports of a slowdown in production at Ashio resulted in a Japanese army physician being dispatched from Tokyo to check the condition of the prisoners. He ordered them to run inside the compound for 10 minutes. Those that passed out were taken for treatment at a hospital near Tokyo. The others were forced to disrobe completely and line up for examinations. “It took all morning and part of the afternoon,” recounted Jones. “He decided about every third prisoner was not sick and proceeded to slap them several times, at the same time making the remark, ‘You came to Japan to kill Japanese. You shall work in the mines until you die.’”
Soon after, however, food rations improved somewhat. Intestines and heads of sand sharks were shipped from Tokyo to supplement the diets. Also, quantities of ground grasshoppers, cabbage, and seaweed arrived. “This put most of the men back to work for a short time, which is proof that food was all we needed,” Jones said.
Secretly, some Ashio civilians helped sustain the prisoners. One of them, Kiichi Katoku, a camp interpreter and civilian medical assistant, was credited with saving many. “At a time when more than half the prisoners were unable to work owing to illness, he personally produced extra food for the beriberi patients,” said one Army POW, Maj. H.J. Kinzell. Other civilians smuggled food to the POWs in the mine. One was a man known to Keller and Cooper as “Smiling Charlie,” a disabled Japanese veteran who wished the war would end. “He would draw pictures in the dirt to explain how the war was going,” said Cooper. “He walked like Charlie Chaplin. A bag on his back and straw mat strapped on his butt. He treated me better than any [Japanese] the whole time I was a prisoner.” Smiling Charlie brought small portions of beans, Chinese spaghetti, meat, and fish to the men from his home in Ashio. “He would always say, ‘Your house very poor. My house we share with you.’ That meant he stole it from his wife. Otherwise he said his wife sent it in to me,” said Keller.
A civilian guard the men nicknamed “Pappy” was another benefactor. “While Pappy was in camp, he would put on an act and shout and rave at the POWs like all the other guards,” said one prisoner. “Just as soon as he got his unit alone, he did everything in his power to make it easy for the men. He would let the sick rest, gave them food and cigarettes if he had any, even helped them fill their quota of work.”
As November came to an end, Red Cross food and clothing began arriving, boosting morale. But the guards kept tight control on the packages, dispensing some contents before Christmas but otherwise inexplicably stockpiling them at a time when the men desperately needed them. Twice a month, the POWs in Ashio didn’t have to work. At such times, the guards would hold inspections, with the prisoners kneeling on the pallets. “If they saw your fingers on the railing, they would whack you with a gun butt. [Sculpin survivor] Herb Wyatt [GM2c] couldn’t stand it so he came out of the second tier and jumped on the guards’ backs. He convinced them he was crazy. So, from then on, they went down the barracks on the opposite side from Wyatt. Herb, in order to reinforce it, would jump out at them anyway,” said Keller.
January descended on the grim barracks with the coldest temperatures in 20 years. Readings of 18° below zero were recorded. Inside the compound, misery reigned as the guards continued to hoard the Red Cross blankets, clothing, and boots. Holes in the roofs were left unpatched. Snow filtered down, falling on the blankets of prisoners, huddled together in twos and threes to preserve body warmth. Only enough fuel was distributed to the men to keep stoves lit for two hours a day. “We stole anything which would burn,” said one POW. Often, a detail of thirty men returning from work was searched at the main gate. If any wood or coal was discovered on any of them, all would have to stand at attention in the cold for an hour. Some were clubbed by the guards. When a theft of coal was discovered from a camp supply in mid-January and no one confessed, they banned any heating for three days.
“Our big trouble in wintertime was getting enough clothes to wear to keep warm,” Ralph E. Shuping, an Army Air Force corporal, testified after the war. “They gave us Japanese uniforms which were about like burlap and about as warm as a piece of burlap would be. If you worked down in the mine about 2,000 feet where I worked for awhile, it was very hot. We had to work in the heat all day and when you came out of the mine, your clothing would be wet with perspiration and you would be hot and dirty, and you would have to come out into the cold wintry weather and wash in cold water. We had colds all winter and a lot of men had pneumonia.”
One of them was Pfc. George F. Gallion, 26, of the 803rd Engineer Battalion, who turned to cigarettes to fight off hunger, sometimes bartering bits of food for additional cigarettes, which were rationed by the guards from Red Cross supplies. Gallion suffered greatly from beriberi and was hospitalized for a time. On returning to Ashio in January, he was accused of taking a turnip-like radish from a storeroom in camp. He was confined to an unheated guardhouse for three days during which the temperature dropped to 16° below zero. Suffering from frostbite, he finally confessed and was ordered back to work. After about two weeks, he developed a 105° fever and asked to be relieved. Because he was recognized as the radish thief, Numajiri, the camp commandant, refused to allow him medical treatment and ordered him back to the mine, despite vigorous protests from American medics.
On January 29, Gallion and a crew including Keller completed a normal shift loading eight ore cars and drilling holes for dynamite. The men took a break to eat before starting a second shift of four hours. By then, Gallion was trembling from exhaustion, feverish, and unable to eat. But “Blue Coat,” one of the guards, demanded he work. He did so until he could do no more and sat down, later passing out.
Keller and the other prisoners took turns bringing him out of the mine on their backs. “All the way out, I belittled him because he had traded meals for cigarettes. He was dying of malnutrition. I carried that man on my shoulders, across my back, sometimes piggyback, sometimes laying on my shoulders. I had the compassion to carry him but I was very angry that he was dying,” recalled Keller. At 2200, Gallion was delivered to the camp medical office. “He was cold as ice and unable to talk or walk,” said Basil B. Dulin, an Army surgeon. “His chest was full of coarse bubbling rales which could be felt as well as heard.” Despite efforts to revive him, Gallion died at 0807 on January 30. Noted Dulin after the war, “Prisoners [at Ashio] were driven to the limit. There was no increase in the quality or the quantity of the rations. The final demand on Private Gallion’s energies was too much.”
On returning to camp the next day, Keller and others stood death parade as Gallion’s body passed in a rickshaw, headed for the crematorium. “I felt very bad for scolding him,” said a tearful Keller. “I thought he would get strength from it, not die.”
Through teamwork, the prisoners managed to survive the winter without further deaths. The Army medics, given some medicine delivered in the Red Cross packages, helped nurse those suffering the greatest through the winter freeze.
Meanwhile, the POWs did what they could to sabotage the Japanese. They poured carbide dust into the pneumatic guns to disable them when the guards weren’t looking. And they caused equipment in the smelter to break down.
Trains began arriving with scrap metal, cartridge cases, and millions of dollars in Chinese pennies—all to be smelted into ingots for the military. But it was all in vain. Japan steadily lost ground to Allied forces.
The United States had invaded Iwo Jima in February and was about to launch an all-out assault in April on Okinawa, the final objective before invading Japan itself. Gen. Curtis LeMay, commander of the XXI Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands, conceived employing new long-range B-29 bombers in nightly fire bombings of factory neighborhoods of Japanese cities. The initial target was Tokyo, the most heavily populated city on earth and made almost entirely of wood. On March 9, 325 B-29s took off from the Marianas for Tokyo. Wave after wave of the bombers flashed across the city, dropping nearly 2,000 tons of firebombs. The attack created a conflagration so intense that updrafts ripped violently at the planes. On the ground, city residents suffocated from lack of oxygen or were burned alive. In that one night, 83,000 people died. Nightly, the planes returned to renew the terror. By the end of the month, nearly 50 percent of the city was in ruins and millions had fled to the countryside.
In Ashio, little was known of outside developments, although Korean laborers with relatives in Tokyo told of the destruction of large parts of the city. Still the war dragged on. Occasionally, the POWs received postcards from home. And they were allowed to write. But the charred remains of their efforts were found at one point behind the guard shack.
The men constantly dreamed of sumptuous meals back home. On books of rice paper, used to wrap cigarettes, the Sculpin survivors recreated hundreds of recipes, trying as a group to remember the ingredients for each. The books were divided into categories, such as jams and jellies, pies and cakes, and main courses. Entries included “Bridge Club Salad,” “Maple Peanut Ice Cream,” “Noodles a la Genevoise,” “Baked Manicotti,” “Strawberry Chiffon Pie,” “Raspberry Surprise,” and “Veal Cutlets Curried.” The men envisioned the joy of actually tasting their creations—someday. But inevitably, they faced the reality of shark-head soup for dinner after a hard day at work. “One of the things that kept me alive,” said Keller, “were ammonia-filled shark heads. A lot of them were for sale. Some of the men couldn’t stomach them when they ended up in their soup. Not me. I ate those shark heads. It cost you one cigarette for each head.” Bones from a horse or cow sometimes were given the men, who smashed them open and ate the marrow. One prisoner ate more than he should have; a bone fragment got caught in his rectum, causing great pain. A camp medic had to go in with a fork in order to dislodge the splinter.
In March, Tokyo sent an officer—Lt. Cdr. Arthur G. McIntyre—to take command of the Americans. McIntyre, a survivor of the Grenadier, was appalled on arrival, as he later testified: “When I entered that camp, I viewed one of the most dismal sights I have ever seen. Snow was about one or two feet deep, the barracks were cold and dirty, and I was barely able to recognize men whom I had known well only a few months previously. . . . The prisoners there looked like wild men. They were not shaven, their hair was extremely long, and both their bodies and their clothes were filthy.” McIntyre spent his first night in the barracks in misery as lice feasted on the midsection of his body. With the coming of warmer weather in April, fleas added to the discomfort. “The fleas increased to an unbelievable and unbearable number,” he said. “If I walked at a normal rate from one end of the barracks to the other end inside the building my legs to a point above the knees would be covered with fleas in a concentration of about one per square inch of my skin. After walking through the barracks, I would have to stop and scrape the fleas off my legs with my hands very much as if they were beads of perspiration.”
McIntyre vigorously protested conditions. Yet nothing was done as spring turned into summer.
By June, the Allies were closing in on Japan. Victory in Europe had been declared on May 8. Preparations began in earnest to shift American troops and equipment to the Pacific for a final assault on Japan. Laying out Operation Olympic, the Allies intended to first seize Japan’s southernmost island, Kyushu. Thirteen divisions of American troops would be mobilized for the assault on November 1, 1945. This would be followed by Operation Coronet, an attack by twenty-five divisions on Tokyo in March 1946. Gen. George C. Marshall estimated the Allies would lose 500,000 men. Japan, girding for the inevitable, began hoarding more than 5,000 kamikaze bombers and hundreds of midget suicide submarines in a final effort to stave off defeat. The military trumpeted the slogan, “One Hundred Million Die Together,” and rallied the populace for one last stand, “Ketsu-Go”—Operation Decision.
In June in Ashio, none of this was known to the POWs. The biggest news was the opening of a second POW camp near the smelter. By then most of the captives weighed 100 pounds or less, “just skin and bones,” as one put it. Attempts to combat the lice and control the fleas failed. Flea powder distributed by the Japanese proved to be ineffective. The warming weather also caused an explosion of flies. “Maggots about 1½ inches long with horns overran the toilets and crawled around the yard adjacent to the toilets,” said McIntyre.
A sadistic Japanese medical sergeant put some prisoners to work producing fertilizer for his garden. According to McIntyre, he had the prisoners stack rice bags made of straw outside the camp gate. They then fetched excrement from the toilets and dumped it atop the rice bags. “He then made these prisoners pull off their shoes and tramp around on top of the rice bags tramping the waste from the toilet into the bags. [The guard] seemed to derive great joy from the operation.”
Occasionally, small portions of the Red Cross parcels were rationed to the men, who knew that the camp guards were appropriating the supplies as well. Some of the prisoners, anticipating a cutoff in food should the United States invade, hoarded some of what they were given—with grave consequences for three of them. In early June, a theft was discovered in the storeroom. The Japanese searched the barracks and found items belonging to three Army POWs. Believing they were the stolen items, the guards led the three to the prison gate where they were strung up and beaten to extract confessions. “They beat them bad,” recalled Keller. “They hung them up by their fingers, almost off the ground, and beat them with rubber shoes. They were beaten unfairly and almost to the point of unconsciousness. It was the worst beating I ever witnessed. No one was forced to watch but nobody turned their backs.”
Of the three, the guards singled out Wallace Hall, an Army sergeant, as the true thief. Taken to the brig where Gallion had been confined, he was beaten and strung up by his wrists and his ankles so his body was two feet off the ground. Despite the torture over a four-day period, he would not break and finally was released.
The real culprit, it turned out, was another POW who was accosted in the barracks by his fellow captives. “He was put in a circle of men, hands tied behind him. One of the beaten men was given the first crack. He punched him right in the face. Each time the man staggered against the circle, the man who caught him hit him back to someone else,” explained Keller. “They beat that man unconscious. It almost killed him.”
By the summer of 1945, the POWs were worried they would not survive another winter. Then, on August 7, one day after an American B-29 dropped a single bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Keller was working in the mine when Smiling Charlie approached him. “He came in and said, ‘Very soon you go home to America. The war will be over.’ I asked him why. He told me the Americans had bombed a city and he kept saying, ‘One bomb . . . one bomb!’ had destroyed the city and killed tens of thousands of people. The city was on fire. I could not understand this concept—one bomb. I kept asking him, ‘One bomb?’ He kept saying, ‘Yes!’”