spread the gossip that the Red Cross had negotiated a prisoner exchange and that they were headed to Australia, and freedom. By that time, though, Pete and the men from O’Donnell believed nothing. As they waited, Pete stared at the freighter, an ancient, rusting vessel with no markings whatsoever. No name, no registration, no nationality.
Finally, they queued up in a long line and began to slowly climb the gangway. On board, they passed the forward bulkhead and came to an open hatch with a ladder down to the hold. Guards were nervous and barking commands. As Pete began to step down into the hold, he was hit with a vile odor from below. As he descended farther, he saw the sweaty faces of hundreds of prisoners already on board. As he would learn, about twelve hundred men had been loaded from a prison north of Manila. And they had been informed by the guards that they were headed to Japan to work in the coal mines.
As more prisoners were stuffed into the hold, the men began to suffocate. They were shoulder to shoulder, body to body, with no room to sit, lie, or even move about. They began shouting and cursing and all order broke down. The guards kept stuffing more men below, beating the reluctant ones with rifle butts. The temperature rose to a hundred degrees and men began fainting, but there was no room to fall. Soon, they were dying.
* * *
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The emperor Hirohito refused to ratify the Geneva Convention, and from the beginning of its war in Asia his imperial army treated its captured prisoners as slaves. With a severe shortage of labor at home, the Japanese devised a grand scheme to ship American POWs to the coal mines on their mainland. To do so, they used every available cargo vessel, regardless of age and seaworthiness. All ships were commissioned and stuffed with soldiers bound for the Philippines and then restuffed with sick and dying American boys bound for the labor camps.
Throughout the war, 125,000 Allied prisoners were shipped to Japan, with 21,000 dying on board or going down with the ships. On August 6, 1945, four hundred American POWs were underground digging for coal in a mine near Omine, only fifty miles from Hiroshima. When the first atomic bomb landed, the ground rolled and shook and they knew it was something far beyond the usual daily bombings. They fervently prayed it was the beginning of the end.
Among their many great miscalculations in the war, the Japanese failed to build enough boats to haul troops and supplies. Added to this was their failure to eliminate the U.S. submarine fleet at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere during the early days of the war. By the summer of 1942, U.S. subs were roaming like lone wolves in the South Pacific and feasting on Japanese merchant ships. To overcompensate, the Japanese simply crammed more of their soldiers onto their ships to go fight, and more of their POWs to bring home to work. Their freighters were perpetually overloaded, slow, outdated, easily stalked, and unmarked.
They were known as hellships. Between January of 1942 and July of 1945, the Japanese hauled 156 loads of war prisoners to the mainland to work in labor camps, and the voyages were worse than any abuse the Americans had yet to encounter. Locked below deck with no food, water, lights, toilets, or breathable air, the men succumbed to fainting, madness, and death.
And torpedoes. Because the Japanese did not mark their troop carriers, they were fair game for Allied submarines. An estimated five thousand American POWs crammed into the holds of Japanese freighters were killed by American torpedoes.
Pete’s ship left Manila Bay six hours after he boarded, and men around him were already suffocating and screaming. The guards mercifully opened the portholes and a whiff of air spread through the hold. A colonel managed to convince a guard that men were dying, and what good was a slave if he arrived dead? The hatches were opened and the prisoners were allowed to climb to the deck, where they could at least breathe and see the moon. Fresh air was plentiful. Food and water were not mentioned. Guards stood gun to gun, waiting to shoot any poor prisoner who tried to vault into the sea. Though suicide was a constant thought, no one had the energy.
Pete and Clay spent the night on the deck with hundreds of others, under a brilliant sky that back home would have