Forgiveness (16 page)

It was one of the most important decisions he made during the war.

The next morning, Ralph and the others were visited by angels. He would later swear on a stack of bibles that he knew exactly what angels looked like. They came wrapped with a red cross. At perhaps the lowest point in camp morale, when a dozen men were dying every day, angels arrived from the Red Cross. The Japanese kept most of the packages, but each man received one.

Ralph knew that the parcels were from England—the Treacle syrup gave that away. Each parcel weighed fifteen pounds. His was packed with canned meat, dried fruit, condensed milk, and chocolate.

The milk reminded Ralph of the old jersey cow he had back home. He could see her chewing away with her head down, the ocean as a backdrop. The bacon—even dried—reminded him of his mother, standing erect above the old skillet early in the morning, coffee brewing on the stove, quiet so as to not wake the others. A dutiful kiss on the cheek.

The chocolate he saved. He allowed himself one half-inch piece a day. Not for the taste, but for the memories. One bite transported him to the front of the Sumarah General Store with the Uproaders and the Downroaders. Another put him at his aunt’s Christmas table, wiping his hands naughtily on her white hand-sewn doily. He saved the last piece for his first memory: skipping rocks and eating chocolate in Charlottetown, just before he and his brother crossed paths with the Chinese launderer. He relished each memory, licking his fingers clean.

Two weeks later, a paper angel came via Switzerland. He could not believe what he held: a letter from his mother. She had put her tender hands on that very paper. He could see a few dents in the strokes on the paper, the pen almost making its way through the page. He knew she had written the letter at the kitchen table without putting a book under the paper. The letter was short and to the point:

You are desperately missed. You are loved.

He smelled the paper, held it close to his face.

He was permitted to write a response. He told his mother he was fine, but his handwriting gave him away. He told her he loved her, and not to worry because he was swell, and to keep the old chin up until they met again.

It was the finest letter he ever penned.

By the summer of 1943, the war had begun to go badly for the Japanese Imperial Army. The death toll was staggering. The Japanese military machine required more able bodies to work in their nation’s foundries, shipyards, and mines. They needed steel and coal, bullets and fuel. They needed to arm their soldiers with something—anything—as the Americans inched closer to the island.

And so began the Japanese “draft.” The men who were able to walk from one side of a two-lane road to the other won the draft. From one red chalk line to another was about twenty-three steps. The prize was a one-way ticket to Japan.

Ralph was a winner. He felt a certain relief. He imagined it would be a welcome change. It was their homeland; surely there’d be more food, more provisions, cleaner conditions. How could it get any worse?

At dawn on August 15, 1943, the 276 men who had been able to walk the twenty-three steps the previous evening were marched to
the dock beyond the south gate of Shamshuipo. As the gate opened, Ralph made out the ship’s name: The SS
Morningstar.
It was an ocean liner. His heart jumped. Maybe, just maybe, things were looking up.

He had never been more wrong in his life.

Even the past two years could not have prepared Ralph for the test he was about to face. He was stepping onto a hell ship, aptly named by the men who would survive the journey.

Ralph was in the middle of the parade march along the dock and up the ship’s ramp, so he could see the men in front of him. He knew his way around a ship. As soon as he set foot on the deck, he knew exactly where the line was heading. He braced himself the only way he knew how. He took a deep breath and kept putting one foot in front of the other. Down the stairs the line went, into the guts of the ship. The man in front of him whispered something about beds in the interior cabins. Nope, Ralph thought. They made their way past the mess hall, past the engine room, down another flight of metal steps. The tall men ducked and held the rail. Several slipped on the polished metal track, their bare feet no longer accustomed to walking on metal. Ralph could hear the shouts of a Japanese guard.

“In!” A guttural growl.

He saw the barrel of a mounted machine gun well before he saw the doorway. He knew why it was needed. As it became clear to the man in front of him what was happening, his shoulders slumped and he began to convulse. Ralph realized he must be claustrophobic, and he knew that the man was hyperventilating and about to go into shock. He put a hand on his shoulder.

“Stay steady.”

They were only fifteen paces away from the machine gun. As soon as each man stepped through the doorway, he disappeared. They were walking into the void. The ship’s cargo hull. Hell.

Ralph’s eyes were on the Japanese soldier manning the machine gun. The soldier was perched on a chair, his finger on the trigger. He
was in firing position. Ralph was careful not to make eye contact. He knew the man wanted to pull the trigger. The soldier stared at each of them as they passed, daring them, begging them to give him a reason to shoot.

Ralph feared that the man in front of him would provide just that reason. He knew how bullets would spray out of the barrel now a mere ten paces away. They would kill half a dozen men on either side of the target, himself included.

He squeezed the man’s shoulder. “Steady. You’re going to be okay. Don’t panic,” he reassured him. “Stay with me.”

The man was sobbing silently as they passed the soldier with the gun. Ralph closed his eyes, unsure if he’d ever open them again.

There was no burst from the barrel.

Ralph had no time to feel relief. He opened his eyes to a darkness that went well beyond the absence of light. He could feel the man in front of him move into full hyperventilation, gasping for breath. Ralph lost him in the shuffle as each man searched in vain for a spot to claim. The cargo hull had barely enough room for thirty men to lie down. There were more than one hundred to accommodate.

They were encased in metal. There were no blankets, chairs, or beds. They were cargo. The only concessions they received were a bucket of rice—some cooked, some not—and an empty pail, both lowered down on a rope. With that, the hatch was sealed and the ship’s engines roared.

Within hours, the small pail was overflowing with human waste. Ralph’s excrement piled up in his pants until they too overflowed. He moved only when the hatch cracked open and more rice was lowered down. They were worse off than cattle. Worse than rats. Each hour, the air grew thickener with the stink of waste and human decay. Ralph would not see a ray of light for seven days.

The men tried their best to alternate between standing and lying. They tried to ensure that those who became too ill to move were granted space. They tried to allow one another to sleep. They were struggling for their sanity first and their lives second. Bouts
of panic would rip through the hull, as contagious as diphtheria. It needed to be quashed or it could overtake them all.

For three days Ralph sat with his head resting on his knees. He went inside himself, as deep as he could go. These were the darkest hours of his life.

The war was not going well for the Japanese, in large part because the Americans owned the sea. The Japanese navy had been sunk months ago during the Battle of Midway. The Japanese Merchant Fleet had also been largely relegated to the bottom of the sea. American submarines prowled the Pacific. They had no way of knowing that the SS Morningstar carried 276 Canadians.

The ship had to dock in Formosa to hide from U.S. subs. The men were permitted to leave the cargo hull for a few hours. While on deck, Ralph spotted a pail of water. He plunged his hands into the pail and splashed his face and drank three gulps from his cupped hands. He could hear boots approaching but he didn’t care. He had not had any water in over three days. If he didn’t drink, he was going to die. It was worth the beating he knew he was about to take. He felt the soldier pull him up by the back of his baggy shirt, which strained against his neck. The guard spun him around and pushed him against the ship’s metal wall. He felt a rail gouge into his lower back. The soldier yelled and hit him twice in the face. Ralph felt the wetness still inside his mouth and tried to hide his smile.

The forced stop rattled many of the men. As they descended back into the cargo hull, they were descending into their own minds. If a submarine torpedo struck, the explosion would rip into the hull. There would be no survivors. By the third day—or at least what seemed to be the third day—Ralph could hear one man praying for just that.
“Send a torpedo. Send a torpedo. Send a torpedo.”
Over and over, for hours on end. Barely audible, but it rang in everyone’s ears in the dark of that stifling hull. Finally, mercifully, someone shut the man up.

The second leg of the journey ravaged Ralph’s body. For seven days, he sat unable to move, eating only a few handfuls of rice, drinking little more than those three stolen gulps of water. Again he saw no light.

When the shipped docked in Osaka, he was unable to move. His body had withered in the dark and the cold. Feces clung to his back, his buttocks, and his legs. His hair was coarse with salt and urine. Every man was seared by the experience on the hell ship, and Ralph was no exception. Some men were completely broken. Some wept openly as they deboarded.

One thing was for sure: they had left Hong Kong as POWs and arrived in Japan as slave labourers. A contingent of soldiers waited for them at the end of the dock. The first one hundred men were loaded onto cattle cars and immediately shipped to a camp north of Kyoto. The remaining 165 men went by train to Niigata.

The train ride was hours of motion in the dark. The windows were covered with black cloth. One man managed to tear a hole in the cloth and catch a glimpse of the Japanese countryside. He was impressed with what he saw. Ralph didn’t see any of it. Too weak to sit up, he lay on the dirty floor for the duration of the trip. When they arrived at the camp, he was put on a stretcher and laid in the courtyard beside several other men.

The camp commandant addressed them, brandishing a Katana sword. The gist of his welcoming remarks was,
You will all live the rest of your days here. You are swine and I’ll cut your head off with this sword if you do not obey me or work for me.

The guards split the men into three groups. The first group went to the foundry. These men would toil next to molten steel and furnaces, spending their days sweating out all the salt they desperately tried to consume while away from the foundry.

The second group went to the dockyard. While these men had to face the cold, damp northern air, they had ample opportunity to scavenge rice and beans from the broken bags they unloaded from
the supply ships. They would tie their pant legs at the ankles and pour the rice straight down their pants. The trick was not to get too greedy and come off the dock looking like a stuffed toy.

The final group were the truly unlucky. They were assigned to the coal yard, where they would spend fourteen-hour days outside pushing around loaded coal cars with their bare hands and feet. There were no safety rails on the tracks, so if they slipped they’d fall to certain death in the water below.

Ralph had not been assigned to any work group. He was too weak to walk. Afraid that he’d be bayoneted on the spot, he tried to stand, but his legs buckled under him. He had lost half of his body mass. His bones jutted out of his skin like bamboo shoots. His face was gaunt. He was, again, very near death. He was taken away from the courtyard to the infirmary on a stretcher and left there.

A guard approached Ralph and began to take his shoes off. Ralph protested, kicking his feet about and telling him to stop. This angered the soldier. He pulled Ralph by the collar of his shirt and punched him square in the nose. Ralph’s blood gushed onto both their chests. This made the soldier more furious.

“No work—no boots!”

Another punch was levelled.

Ralph spent his first night in Japan bloodied, shoeless, and immobilized.

Those who could not work were given less food. He was not in an infirmary. He was on death row.

Ralph would have died in that room but for another angel. This one did not come with a red cross. This was a living, breathing angel. This angel was from Welland, Ontario. His name was Henry Marsolais. For the next three months, every single night Henry would come back from his work detail, stand in line for his slop, and bring Ralph anything he could get his hands on. It was mostly
rice gruel with a piece of leaf affectionately known as
green horror.
If he was lucky, he might get a thumbnail-size piece of fish. It would have had to be poison for Ralph not to eat it.

By November Ralph was able to walk again, albeit slowly. The Canadian commanding officers knew he would still not last a day on a work detail. One of them remembered Ralph had been in charge of the liquor chest in Gander, Newfoundland. They knew that the Japanese camp commandant was a heavy drinker. He and his senior officers needed someone to help with menial tasks around their quarters. Ralph could be trusted to keep his head down and not do anything stupid.