Back from the Grave

Year after year they had vanished into Japan like wanderers sucked into the mud of a fever swamp--the men of Hong Kong, of Bataan and Wake, men of the ships sunk at sea, the planes shot down in combat. Last week they were found--those who were still alive.

U.S. planes swooped over Jap prison stockades to drop food and supplies. U.S. trucks and cars wheeled into prison compounds to pick up bony, half-naked men. Aboard U.S. transports and hospital ships they were bathed, fed, clothed, given medical treatment. Then, like men awakened from nightmares, they talked.

Almost all suffered from malnutrition. Few had ever received Red Cross packages; their guards, almost to a man, had engaged in graft which cut prison fare to watery soups, half-spoiled vegetables, and chalky gruels. They had been beaten and kicked, forced to bow, to obey endless rules invented by their captors.

Inquisition. For "recalcitrant" prisoners, and airmen from whom the Japanese hoped to extract information, there was special treatment. At Ofuna, a camp for unregistered prisoners, they endured months of solitary confinement and tortures. Husky guards took pride in breaking jaws and eardrums. At a Japanese prison camp, Marine Lieut. William Harris, veteran of Corregidor was battered for half an hour with a baseball bat. He lived, but others, after similar treatment, died. There were also more refined methods: metal bits were fastened into soldiers' mouths with thread which gradually drew tighter & tighter;match slivers were thrust under men's fingernails, and jagged ends of bamboo twisted against their faces.

The fate of prisoners who fell sick was hardly better. Many a man who was sent to the dirt-floored buildings of Shinagawa, lone hospital for 8,000 prisoners near Tokyo, simply went to his death. There was no sanitation; patients slept without blankets on flea-ridden mats. The operating tables were bare boards. When the hospital's crematorium was bombed to rubble, prisoners were forced to cremate the dead on spits over an open fire.

Some Shinagawa patients were used as guinea pigs for incredible experimental injections by Captain Hisikichi Tokoda, a 29-year-old Japanese physician. Dr. Harold W. Keschner, an Army officer captured at Bataan, described Captain Tokoda's medieval brews. Into tubercular men he injected an acid mixed with infected bile. Once he squeezed a milk of ground soy beans into the jugular veins of two men. All died. Into the bloodstreams of others he injected mixtures of castor oil and sulphur, of acid, ether and blood plasma. Despite all this, Shinagawa was regarded as a "showplace" and was proudly exhibited to visiting Jap generals.

Politeness. Thanks to the Jap trick of not reporting many a prisoner, there was the cheering word that men long believed dead had survived. Three hundred men of the cruiser Houston, unreported for the three-and-a-half years since their ship was sunk in Sunda Strait, were discovered alive in Thailand. Vanished heroes came back as it were from the dead: Captain Arthur Wermuth, the "one-man army" of Bataan; Commander Richard Hetherington O'Kane, of the missing submarine Tang; Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, naval commander at Wake Island.

Also found alive was the Marine air ace, Major Gregory ("Pappy") Boyington, last seen on Jan. 3, 1944, diving into low clouds over Rabaul with Jap fighters on his tail. At the time, Pappy Boyington was listed as missing, believed dead. But he had flipped his plane, jumped out and landed in the sea, with a broken ankle and riddled with machine-gun slugs. A Jap submarine had picked him up.

The Japs knew Boyington well: he had taunted them over his radio as he roared in for kills. They gave him special treatment. Last week, after Commander Harold E. Stassen greeted him aboard a U.S. destroyer transport, he told about it: "The first ten days were the hardest. They wouldn't let anybody touch me to help me. Every day they blindfolded me and threw me in a truck to take me into town, then questioned me all day. They would make me walk on my bad leg, and shove me with a rifle butt to make sure I did. After ten days I was getting pretty ripe--I don't know how they stood the smell. Finally they let a doctor wash me.

"Then I was taken to Ofuna. Every day was the same. I got slugged in the jaw about every day, mostly for not being polite. To get to the toilet you had to ask the guard's permission politely, then thank him politely for the favor when you came back. If you were having dysentery, as most of us did at times, it meant a hell of a lot of politeness day & night."

Now, for all the prisoners, the nightmare was over. The sick got first priority on returning to the U.S. But thousands of prisoners had not survived to see the U.S. fleet in Tokyo Bay.

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