Target: Rabaul (64 page)

Had Kikuchi known of Allied plans, he probably would not have uttered the vow. Days earlier, Mitchell and the staff of Thirteenth Bomber Command had formulated a new offensive designed specifically to obliterate the town of Rabaul. The strategy, as stated in a SOPAC summary, was frighteningly simple: “The town was divided into 14 target areas, each further subdivided into two or three parts. One by one they were rubbed out.”

Officially launched on February 28, the campaign was more than just a continuation of the almost daily attacks. However, it got off to a slow start. Kimihira’s diary made no mention of a raid that day, and on February 29, he noted only that a “freight depot” suffered bomb damage. The effort made no progress on March 1, either, as Kimihira noted gratefully that “unfavorable weather” kept the bombers away “for the first time in a long while.”

The offensive escalated dramatically on the morning of March 2, when Rabaul was subjected to carpet-bombing. Sticks of heavy bombs exploded across the eastern neighborhoods, particularly the Chinatown district. Major General Kimihira noted that bomb fragments damaged the walls of his residence, and the Eighth Area Army headquarters building received a direct hit on the chief of staff’s section. But all of that was minor compared to what the Allied POWs experienced.

Because of a false alarm on March 1, the prisoners had already spent the entire night in the dugout. They had just returned to their cells for a meager breakfast when the alarms sounded again. This time the guards did not waste time with blindfolds, recalled Joe Holguin, as they herded the POWs back into the bomb shelter:

This time it was the real thing. In about 20 minutes we began to hear antiaircraft batteries going off in the distance toward the south and southwest, the sound of engines becoming louder and louder while more and more guns joined the antiaircraft barrage. We, of course could not see anything except for many of the guards running into the shelter at the very last moment. They were heavily armed. Soon, it was difficult to distinguish between the roar of engines and the roar of the guns. But there was one sound that was unmistakable: the sound of falling bombs, followed by the earth shaking and heaving all around us. One wave of bombers seemed to follow another for a time period that seemed like eternity.

One bomb fell near one of the entrances to our bunker and tore a water tank nearby, causing a lot of water to flow into the shelter. However, only
about a foot of water filled the bunker, causing some damage to the rice bags stored there. Another bomb hit the electrical generator outside, putting the bunker in total darkness. Joyfully, however, we were still alive when the all clear was sounded.

The guards led us to the surface through the one undamaged entrance, the same one where several months before, I had come to the aid of the little engineer that almost suffocated when he was trapped by a crumbling wall of dirt.

When we arrived on the surface we beheld a scene of total devastation. Buildings were toppled and there were fires everywhere. The whole town was burning and in ruins. Many Japanese soldiers were making some kind of an attempt to put out the fires, but it was a losing battle. Smoke filled the entire area and tended to obscure the sun.

When the attack came, Captain Matsuda was inspecting the caves near Tunnel Hill Road. From his vantage point, he had a spectacular view of Simpson Harbor to the east and the Bismarck Sea in the opposite direction. The hill sat astride an old tunnel, long since collapsed by earthquakes, constructed by German engineers to connect Rabaul with a village on Talili Bay. From the top of the ridge, he had a clear view of the bombing. “I was worried that my headquarters was hit and hurried back,” he later wrote. “There was fire everywhere, and the flames were a terrible sight. Everyone from Colonel Kikuchi on down was covered with soot from head to foot, and seemed surprised to be alive. Kikuchi immediately ordered me to lead the move to Tunnel Hill.”

Three trucks were commandeered. Handcuffed in pairs, the POWs were roped together with electrical cord in groups of ten or twelve, then crammed aboard the vehicles. The trucks set off, whining in low gear through the debris-strewn streets of the burning town. Holguin, attached by handcuffs to B-25 pilot Ralph Cheli, managed to slip his blindfold partly off. “I was able to see the wholesale destruction that occurred,” he remembered, “toppled buildings and fires everywhere, smoke covering the entire area, and men cursing and shouting as they tried to control the flames.”

The trucks then headed up Tunnel Hill Road and stopped near a series of gullies hidden by thick jungle vegetation. Blindfolds came off, and some prisoners, weak from malnourishment, stumbled as they climbed awkwardly from the trucks. All had been under tremendous strain for the past twenty-four sleepless hours. A fight nearly broke out when a bucket was accidentally upended, spilling the water intended for the POWs.

Each captive was fed a single rice ball, their only source of nourishment. Next, still cuffed in pairs, they were led into one of the gullies and shoved inside a manmade cave, more accurately an excavated storage site that had once held drums of fuel. The POWs (approximately fifty-five, according to most sources)
were physically crammed into the narrow, unventilated cave, the dimensions of which varied according to the prisoner making the estimate.

Joe Nason, about six feet, three inches tall, described the cave as eighteen feet deep, five feet wide, and six feet in height.

Joe Holguin, nearly a foot shorter than Nason, estimated the cave was thirty-five feet deep, nine feet wide, and seven feet high. Either way, the total floor space was only about five hundred square feet, providing barely enough room for everyone to sit. As Holguin observed, it was impossible to lie down.

After the prisoners were prodded into the cave, its entrance was closed with a barricade of coconut logs. A narrow opening was left for a “door,” which the Japanese covered with a blanket. Without ventilation, the temperature and humidity inside the cave quickly became unbearable. A single wooden bucket at the back of the cave served as the
benjo
for the entire group. Because the captives were cuffed together in pairs, right wrist to left wrist, anyone attempting to reach the bucket had to drag his partner along. Both men would have to stumble over or around other POWs; thus the men nearest the entrance to the cave didn’t even bother to try. Unfortunately, weeks of unsanitary conditions had left almost all of them with gastrointestinal disorders, including diarrhea. The bucket was soon filled, after which no one could use it.

Corsair pilot John Fitzgerald, a former cabdriver from New York City, could do a mean cockney imitation. During a lull in the coughing and groaning, he chirped that they had all landed in the “fookin’ black ‘ol o’ Calcutta.”

No one laughed. The prisoners at the back of the cave, unable to get away from the
benjo
, were too busy gagging and retching.

Holguin was one of many whose morale hit bottom. “That first night in the cave was probably the bleakest moment of our entire captivity,” he later wrote. “There was nowhere to turn for help or relief. The future was extremely uncertain and all we could expect was extinction in one way or another.”

But desperation is often the mother of invention. Holguin worked a short length of copper wire out of the electrical cord that roped the prisoners together, and bent it to form a key that unlocked his cuffs. He passed the key to the other prisoners, whose relief was immeasurable. Whenever the guards called for an inspection—a superfluous annoyance—the prisoners simply snapped the cuffs back on.

The rubbing out of Rabaul continued on March 3. While the town shook and burned, the prisoners spent the entire day inside the dark, stifling cave. Sneaking their cuffs off again, they took turns sitting or leaning against the bare earthen walls.

The following morning, several Kempeitai guards approached the cave entrance. Consulting a list written on rice paper, they called out prisoners’ names in pairs. Those who had been identified, still attached to their handcuff partner, made their way through the crowded cave to the front entrance. Outside, the guards unlocked the cuffs and separated those whose names had been called.
They were cuffed together by twos and remained outside, while the unnamed POWs were cuffed to a new partner and sent back inside the cave.

One of those called was Ralph Cheli, who shuffled out into the sunlight with Joe Holguin. After the cuffs were taken off, Holguin was reattached at the wrist with Charlie Lanphier, who went with him back into the cave. At the time, Holguin didn’t know the significance of his two handcuff partners. Cheli had earned a Medal of Honor but probably didn’t know it, as congress had approved the medal as a posthumous award in October, a mere two months after his heroic mission over Wewak. Holguin’s new partner, Lanphier, was the brother of the man who claimed he shot down Admiral Yamamoto—but Charlie kept that information secret.

After about sixteen prisoners had been identified, several guards marched them away. The remaining forty or so prisoners had slightly more elbow room inside the cave, but conditions were still horrendous. According to Jim McMurria, the rice ball doled out that first evening was the only food the prisoners received for three days.

Inadvertently, Joe Nason and his handcuffed partner provided some momentary relief from the dreadful conditions inside the cave. The prisoners had unhooked their cuffs again using Holguin’s homemade key, and were lolling about when the guards suddenly shouted in Japanese for the captives to fall in. Nason and his partner, described as “a tubercular Chinese who stood no more than 5 feet, 2 inches,” were near the entrance and had the least amount of time to react. In their haste to snap the handcuffs back on, they connected their right wrists together, as though they were shaking hands. When the two men exited the cave in this awkward position, the guards began to shout. Some of the prisoners couldn’t keep a straight face. “Joe’s explanation to the infuriated guard as to how he twisted his legs over the Chinaman’s head and back around under his left elbow to arrive at this condition was the only thing we had to laugh at for a long time,” recalled McMurria, “and we all busted our sides.”

The laughter stopped when the guards beat Nason and the Chinese man. After the blows ended, the whole episode was forgotten—and the Japanese never discovered that the prisoners could unlock their own handcuffs. This may well have saved a few lives. Several of the guards were brutal, needing only the slightest provocation or perceived infraction as an excuse to severely bash the weak, emaciated captives.

The next morning, March 5, the guards called out more names, culling another group of prisoners from cave.
^*
Tom Doyle, the bombardier in McMurria’s crew, was among those called; so were Alston Sugden, the navigator, and Ray Farnell, a gunner from the same crew. Holguin saw tears in McMurria’s eyes as his men briefly said farewell before being led away. McMurria’s crew had survived together
for almost a year since their capture in March 1943, but now he was the only one left. The list of those taken away also included six men from Unruh’s crew, five crewmen from various B-25s of the 345th Bomb Group, six RAAF fliers, and four Marine Corps aviators, including football star “Tiger” Mayberry.

McMurria asked where the prisoners were being taken. “To a safer place,” the guards said. Despite repeated inquiries, the Japanese would reveal nothing more about the departed POWs. The effect was chilling, recalled McMurria.

We continued to ask about them for several months. Our questions seemed to irritate the guards and we were told to shut up and forget about that group. They wanted no more reference to it. We strongly suspected that [the POWs] had been executed, judging from the attitude of the guards. The incident was a very hot potato and they wanted nothing to do with it.

The Japanese evidently hoped they could dodge the questions indefinitely. As the months passed, it may have seemed possible; however, when the war ended and the prisoners were still unaccounted for, numerous members of the 6th Field Kempeitai were charged with war crimes. Thereafter, they faced infuriated Allied interrogators who demanded explanations.

The story told by the Japanese, carefully rehearsed, was that the two groups of prisoners (totaling thirty-one by their count) were to be sent to Watom Island, about five miles west of Rabaul, to alleviate overcrowding at Tunnel Hill. The prisoners were taken as far as Talili Bay on March 5, where they were placed in a temporary shelter while awaiting a boat or barge to take them across to Watom. That very day, an Allied bomb scored a direct hit on the shelter, killing twenty-six of the thirty-one prisoners instantly. The other five, grievously wounded, were allegedly taken back to the Kempeitai camp, where they died of their wounds.

Or so the Japanese said.

Interrogated repeatedly after the war, Colonel Kikuchi, Major Matsuda (promoted to second-in-command of the 6th Field Kempeitai in March 1944), and various other members of the unit gave conflicting details and highly evasive answers. But they never budged from the basic story that a friendly bomb had killed the prisoners. In explaining how the guards assigned to watch the prisoners miraculously escaped without injury, the Japanese claimed that the guards were in a different shelter, fifty yards away.

Other oddities pointed strongly to a deliberate coverup, such as the claim by the Japanese that the remains of all thirty-one victims were cremated. That would have been a first. None of the other prisoners and conscripted laborers who died on New Britain by the thousands were cremated. Shinto rites were reserved for Japanese who had fallen in battle. To have rendered similar tribute to weak and sickly prisoners, who otherwise were treated as less than human, would have been considered completely inappropriate among Bushido purists.

Curiously, none of the investigators noticed a glaring flaw in the Japanese account: no Allied air attacks occurred in the area of Talili Bay on March 5. Medium bombers attacked Simpson Harbor, some New Zealand PV Venturas blasted barges sheltering in Ataliklikun Bay, nine B-24s attacked the Rabaul town area, and thirteen Liberators bombed Rapopo airdrome, fully fifteen miles from Talili. The possibility that a bomb hung up and fell somewhere other than its intended target cannot be categorically eliminated—stranger things have happened—but the statistical probability of such an event causing the alleged direct hit would be infinitesimal.