Ship of Ghosts (60 page)

The Japanese willingness to kill prisoners was exhibited any number of times, perhaps most powerfully on December 14, 1944, when 150 U.S. POWs held on Palawan in the Philippines were ushered into an air raid tunnel and burned alive. Several of the doomed
prisoners begged their captors to shoot them in the head, but the guards laughingly shot or bayoneted them in the stomach instead.

As fissures spread in the very core of Japan’s great Pacific empire, the fate of prisoner and emperor alike lay shrouded in doubt. The atomic bombings reverberated within the halls of the imperial command long after their thermo-atmospheric effects had drifted southwest and bruised the skies over Thailand. According to an observer, a mood of “impatience, frenzy and bewilderment” gripped the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War when it convened on the morning of August 9. A rumor arose that Tokyo would be the target of the next atomic strike. This rumor, it appears, was the product of the desperate imagination and audacity of an American fighter pilot shot down over Osaka on August 8. Captured and tortured by a Japanese officer who demanded details about the new U.S. weapons program, the pilot said that the United States had a hundred more such bombs and that Kyoto and Tokyo would be struck within days. The short period between the two atomic attacks already carried out suggested all too powerfully that America might indeed have been able to continue them at will.

Yet as intercepts of Japanese military traffic revealed, a stubborn faith in Nippon’s invincibility ruled the thinking of three of the six men who held the nation’s fate in their hands. Army Minister Gen. Korechika Anami, Chief of the Army General Staff Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, and Chief of the Naval General Staff Adm. Soemu Toyoda insisted that any terms of surrender carry four conditions: preservation of the sovereignty of the imperial throne, self-disarmament, Japanese control of war crimes proceedings, and no Allied occupation of the home islands. The conditions, if granted, would have given cover to Japan’s militarists, who wanted to deny that they were ever actually defeated. Cooler heads feared that the aggressive demands would be seen as defiance and lead to further atomic bombings and fire raids. What conditions should be attached to the surrender papers was the subject of a clean deadlock, with three members of the War Direction Council supporting acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration with all four conditions, and three, led by Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, favoring surrender with the sole assurance that the imperial system would be retained. The verdict breaking the impasse would be formally and finally given that night by Emperor Hirohito himself.

Japan’s diplomats had tried to divide the nascent superpowers,
confronting them by brokering a separate peace with Moscow. In the middle of July, Japan’s ambassador to Russia had been informed that since Stalin and his deputies were away at Potsdam, the answer would follow on their return. On August 8, the Soviets had delivered that answer by breaking off diplomatic relations with Japan and sending their mechanized forces into Manchuria. Shortly before midnight on August 9, Emperor Hirohito joined his advisors in the air raid shelter in the basement of the imperial library. Noting the poor state of readiness of his defensive forces and the grotesque effects of the atomic blasts, he asked, “Since this is the shape of things, how can we repel the invaders? It goes without saying that it is unbearable for me to see the brave and loyal fighting men of Japan disarmed. It is equally unbearable that others who have rendered me devoted service should now be punished as instigators of war. Nevertheless, the time has come when we must bear the unbearable.”

But as the intercepts revealed, the army remained unbroken in its defiance. On August 11, Field Marshal Terauchi, the commander of the Imperial Southern Army, which included Burma, among other regions, stated, “The plans of the Southern Army have changed in no way whatever. Each Army…will go ahead to strengthen its war preparations more and more.” That same day, the chief of the Army General Staff announced, “The Imperial Army and Navy shall by no means return the sword to the scabbard.”

On August 13, the U.S. Twentieth Air Force took the war of persuasion directly to the Japanese people when B-29s rained on Japanese cities not bombs but leaflets with transcripts of the surrender negotiations. The air in Tokyo was thick with intrigue and the latent energy of rebellion. It seemed possible that either domestic opposition or a military coup might overthrow the emperor. Fear of the latter was well grounded and immediate. Any number of high-ranking army officers had serious doubts that field commanders would comply with the terms of surrender. In the hidden depths of the Army Ministry’s air raid shelter, a plot was taking shape to ensure that the rest of Japan did not either.

The field-grade officers who led the putsch pledged their allegiance not to the faltering emperor but to “the wishes of the imperial ancestors [which] constitutes a wider and truer loyalty to the Throne.” There is evidence to suggest that their ranks included not just younger officers but at least one central figure in the army’s
planning and policy hierarchy. Like the twisted vision that seized the mind of Adolf Hitler as Soviet armies overran Berlin, the plotters saw the final immolation of the Japanese populace as a lamentable but just result of their failure in the war.

As the plotters tried to widen their circle, senior officers loyal to Hirohito unmasked their plan. On August 14 the plotters panicked and made their move. Lt. Gen. Takeshi Mori of the Imperial Guards Division was slain in a confrontation with one of the leaders of the revolt, Maj. Kenji Hatanaka. As Emperor Hirohito watched through the armored shutters of his palace quarters, the rebels occupied the Imperial Palace, winning the temporary cooperation of the Imperial Guards by presenting orders with the forged seal of General Mori. They tried to confiscate the phonograph recording that the emperor planned to broadcast that day, declaring the end of Japan’s resistance. But the timely intervention of officers loyal to the emperor brought the Imperial Guards back to the side of law and order and stilled the rebellion that could have changed the fate of the world.

It took as long as two days for Emperor Hirohito’s order to reach his commanders. As it descended upon them out of the blue, it induced disbelief, and doubtless led more than a few to contemplate mutiny by way of slaughter. Despite the horrors wrought by the U.S. bombing campaign, General Anami all along clung to a near-mystical belief that if the army summoned the will to continue fighting, “a road to success will somehow be revealed to us.”

In Washington, concerns mounted over the fate of the estimated 15,000 American prisoners of war in Japanese custody (among an Allied total of 168,500). The instability of the political crisis gripping Tokyo, revealed to the Allied leadership via their code-breaking operations, created a chilling spectrum of possibility. Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, urged that any surrender negotiations with the Japanese require that Japan “immediately forthwith and without delay” transfer all POWs to staging areas for liberation by the Allies. The Allied governments that same day declared the Japanese people “individually and collectively” responsible for any harm that might come to prisoners of war. August 1945 was suffused with wrenching uncertainty as warring nations still numb from the pain of four years of total war lurched toward a final reckoning.

W
hat would Japan do with its prisoners? The question was in the mind of every POW. It concerned the White House, and even the Imperial Army’s high command, who understood that their treatment of prisoners would affect Washington’s handling of the postwar transition, even as their Bushido convictions protested that the surrendered rabble were worthless and might even pose a threat as a reconstituted military force during an invasion.

On the brink of liberation, prisoners in Saigon noticed that the guards no longer cared whether they worked or not. The guards asked them what this new secret weapon was that took the flesh off people, burned them to cinders, and razed whole cities. Visibly frightened, one of them asked Lost Battalion member Garth Slate, “Will they drop one on Saigon?” Then came the long-awaited news, spreading throughout the POW diaspora. It struck so many prisoners as a hollow anticlimax. The war was over.

Thailand had a great deal to lose from any last burst of Japanese rage. Ruth, as the country’s regent and resistance leader, did not approve of anything that might put the tenuous truce at risk. He feared that the sudden appearance of C-47 transport planes at Tayang would be an aggravating incident that could be a prologue to tragedy. He declined to approve an exfiltration effort until
conditions settled. Finally, approval was granted and OSS headquarters radioed Major Bartlett on August 16: “
Present plan tentatively approved on highest level includes complete exfiltration all POWs in Petburi [sic] area by American C-47 aircraft. Our info indicates 1500 POWs there including 500 too weak to walk. Task is tremendous. …. POW exfiltration biggest OSS job to do and has very highest priority. Let’s do it up right. We furnish everything you help organize POWs and assist medics. Advise as soon as field ready to take sixteen sorties per day, sixteen to a plane.
”

The OSS parachuted in four more men to support Major Bartlett in the effort to retrieve the men at Tayang: Capt. Roger C. L’Hereault, Lt. W. B. Macomber,
bm2/c
Louis Pulgencio, and
phm2/c
Van W. Pressley jumped from an aircraft making a food drop on the night of August 17–18. “
Cover is to be maintained until code word Goldfish RPT Goldfish is given
,” Kandy radioed him. “At this time you will procede [
SIC
] to POW area but not before code word is wired.” Bartlett and L’Hereault received a transmission from a colleague: “
See you at the Mayflower
.”

Although Allied recovery teams for the Repatriation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (or RAPWI) were busily working under the auspices of the Southeast Asia Command, the OSS struck a secret agreement with their British clandestine counterpart, Force 136, to put Major Bartlett in charge of the Phet Buri area under the code name Operation Mainland. All Americans in Thailand west of the Bangkok River would be sent to Phet Buri for evacuation. Everyone else would go to Bangkok.

W
hen the age of atomic weapons entered its third day, Jim Gee was thirty miles from Nagasaki, in a coal-mining camp in the mountains. He didn’t notice the blast that leveled the city—by the latter half of 1945 explosions were so common around the besieged shipbuilding center that it was hard for him to tell one from another. But one day something very out of the ordinary happened. He and his fellow prisoners were called to the parade ground where just a few days before they had been exhibited to and scolded by the populace. A formal ceremony was under way. The Japanese apologized for
the hardships inflicted on the prisoners and said they and the Americans were now friends. The Japanese turned over their weapons, and the camp commander ordered his people to surrender to the nearest dumbfounded American. “As soon as we found out in this camp that the war was over,” the
Houston
’s Ens. Charles D. Smith wrote, “we kicked the Japanese out of their jobs, took their guns away from them and isolated them over in one side of the camp out of harm’s way, so that we could go and come from the camp into the town at will.”

The role reversal induced vertigo. A prisoner who had kept an American flag hidden in his effects fastened it to a flagpole and hoisted it over the camp. They set out into the countryside to forage. For every piece of food they received from locals, an item of commensurate value was given in return. They bartered their extra clothing for eggs, greens, and vegetables. They took no revenge. Within a few days the roar of Wright radial engines filled the valley, planes appeared overhead, and suddenly the skies were wondrously full of crates swinging from parachutes. Rocking to the ground came a bountiful harvest: candy bars, powdered milk, medicines, clothes. What they did not use immediately they took to the newly familiar countryside and traded for livestock, which they slaughtered on the spot.

“Hollywood couldn’t have written a better ending,” Jim Gee said.