Terror from On High:
Understanding War and Captivity
from the Perspective of B-29 Crewmen
by
Gregory Hadley and Thomas Saylor
B-29 International Research Forum
Eiko Gakuin High School
Kamakura, Japan
Saturday 20 May 2007
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Introduction
In the award-winning documentary, Fog of War, former US Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamera, who had a key role in America’s failed Vietnam War and was
also one of the strategic planners of the firebombing of Tokyo, offered eleven
lessons that were formed from his many years of experience in waging war. If
these could be distilled down into one message, it would be, to not only
understand your enemy, but also to empathize with them. Although no longer
enemies, considerable animosity remains in the cultural memory of Japanese
concerning the American B-29 bombers and the crewmen who cursed their
skies, decimated their cities and slaughtered their loved ones. Even today, the
Japanese phrase “Bī niju-ku” (B-29) still evokes echoes of horror mixed with
silent hatred, even among the very young who have taken to heart the stories of
their elderly relatives who survived the horror of America’s aerial bombardment of
Imperial Japan.
And yet, often in Japan, the viewpoint of those who piloted the B-29s is
little understood. Who were those people who piloted the ultramodern weapons
of mass destruction? Were they truly Anglo-American Demons, or were they
something else? This paper will describe the Pacific War as seen through the
eyes of B-29 crewmen, and consider the experiences of those who were
captured in Japan during the final days of the war. The case of one B-29 crew
who went down over Niigata on July 20, 1945 will be considered to provide a
typical example of what happened once these soldiers descended from their
elevated positions of safety and into the waiting arms of angry civilians. The
purpose of this paper is not intended to evoke sympathy, but instead, to promote
better understanding of a former enemy.
Both of us have spent several years studying the B-29 POW Experience.
Our research is based upon many hours of interviews with both Japanese
civilians and former B-29 crewmen, as well as our study of thousands of pages of
documents in the US National Archives. Although space will not allow a full
treatment of the experiences and stories that we could share, in this short paper,
we will discuss in brief the B-29, the typical background of a B-29 crewman, their
lives on base, typical missions as well as their attitudes towards warfare. We will
then focus on a typical “captivity narrative” from a crew that was shot down over
Niigata in 1945. Following this, we will consider how many B-29ers have coped
with their experiences of combat and captivity, and then close with a brief
discussion about how knowledge of these experiences can motivate us to focus
more fully upon the need for peace studies in today’s Japanese educational
system.
The B-29
For its era, the B-29 bomber was one of the largest and most advanced
aircraft in the skies. The development and production of the bomber cost nearly
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twice as much as was needed to create the atomic bomb, and the combined
costs for building even one B-29 was equivalent to that of a naval cruiser. It had
a wing span of 43 meters, a length of 30 meters, a flight range of over 9000
kilometers, and a service height of 9,700 meters, requiring the first use of
pressurized cabins in a bomber. The B-29 bristled with defensive guns and had
tracking systems which were guided by a rudimentary analog computer. B-29s
could carry over 7000 kilograms of bombs or naval mines. The latest military
technology of the time, such as radar and the Norden bombsight, gave crews the
potential for hitting targets with greater accuracy than ever before. The bomber
was manned by eleven crewmen, who occupied separate fore and aft cabins in
the fuselage of the bomber.
The B-29 was intended to attack European targets from America’s eastern
coast, but by 1943 Germany was losing the war and it was decided that the B29s would be used exclusively for the Pacific theatre, ostensibly because only
the B-29 had the range to reach Japanese targets from far-flung bases in China
and India. Public support was galvanized in favor of the bomber through a series
of masterful propaganda films, such as Target Tokyo (narrated by a young
Ronald Reagan), and Birth of the B-29, which linked the plane’s development
with an American sense of cultural and technological superiority. Exacting
revenge upon the Japanese for Pearl Harbor and for the Bataan Death March in
the Philippines were other reasons often used to justify using the B-29 on
Japanese targets.
The Typical B-29 Crewman
The background of the typical B-29 crewman needs to be taken into
consideration, because it is from this “worldview” that they interpreted both their
tour of duty and their experiences as POWs in Japan.
Most of the men who made up the crews of B-29s grew up in the small
towns and farms that dot rural America. In general, the B-29 crews represented a
cross section of the United States’ white working-class. Very few had more than
a high school education, and although pilots were required to have at least two
years of college education, a large number of pilots went to Junior Colleges with
express purpose of fulfilling this requirement.
Some crewmen in our interviews stated they joined the Army Air Force out
of patriotism, but the vast majority of the crewmen we spoke with who joined after
the beginning of the war admitted that they opted for the Air Force in order to
avoid being drafted into the Infantry or the Marine Corps. Going to the bloody
fronts of the Second World War as a ‘ground pounder’ seemed tantamount to a
death sentence. Another common theme among B-29 crewmen is that a large
number joined with the dream of becoming a pilot. This had great allure at the
time, since fighter pilots were glorified in Hollywood films as a symbol of roughand-ready masculinity, playful roguishness and high adventure. In their youthful
minds, one could rise above one’s peers, feel confident in his ability to attract
women, and still do one’s part for the country. Unfortunately, since the Army Air
Force very early on found themselves with a surplus of pilots, most B-29ers were
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assigned to less attractive positions, such as navigators, bombardiers or
gunners.
Early Training and Life on the Base
The crews were formed partly between an unofficial system of private
discussions between Flight Commanders (the captains of the crews) and official
placing. The crews trained on older bombers at first, and later took their B-29s
on simulated bombing missions over the larger cities of the American Midwest.
Next would be training missions to Cuba or Puerto Rico to practice traveling long
distances. Crews then flew their bombers from a staging base in Nebraska to
small islands in the South Pacific, mainly Tinian, Saipan and Guam, which had
been converted by American forces into air bases.
Most B-29 crewmen dislike talking about their time on base mostly
because these experiences do not fit with the image they want to portray – which
is one of them being generally good and decent men who were called to sacrifice
for their country. On the bases between missions the young men mostly played
around, drank heavily, and engaged in all sorts of behavior that today would
bring them considerable embarrassment.
Typical Missions and Attitudes towards War
The earliest missions by B-29 crews seem to focus more on the problems
had with the B-29 than of air combat. This was because the B-29 was knowingly
put into service before all of the technical problems could be worked out,
meaning that more crews died from mechanical failures than from enemy fire.
The first bombing missions were conducted from very high altitudes, and the B29 crews were missing most of their targets. After all of the money spent to
develop the B-29, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted more effective, (that is,
destructive), bombing missions. The commanding officer, Gen. Haywood
Hansell, was fired, and Gen. Curtis LeMay was called in. LeMay decided to strip
the B-29s of all their protective armor and other equipment he felt was
nonessential, and ordered B-29 crews to attack Japanese cities with incendiary
bombs at extremely low altitudes.
This was not the type of combat that most B-29 crewmen wanted to
engage in, and many were afraid of being shot down. LeMay is reported to have
told his troops that he could always get more men and planes from America, and
what was most important than their safety was that Japanese industrial
production centers and the supporting cottage industries were destroyed. It is
from this point in the stories told to us by B-29 crewmen that recurring images of
fear, fire, and death, both inside their plane and on the ground below, begin to
become more common.
Large numbers of B-29 crewmen participated in the firebombing of Tokyo
and other cities in Japan. At the time, because of racist wartime propaganda, the
majority of Americans were unconcerned about the staggering number of civilian
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casualties inflicted in this campaign. Since most of the crewmen had high school
educations and had come from mostly rural areas of the US, many believed what
their military leaders had said would be payback for Pearl Harbor and atrocities
committed in the Philippines. These crewmen saw themselves as administrators
of American justice on savage people who needed to be brought to reason by
superior firepower.
B-29 pilot Art Pejsa of Arpen, Wisconsin:
“They were determined fanatics. Absolutely. They’d come diving right through the
formation. . . They were absolutely fanatical. We knew that. [When I was flying
from the base on] Tinian, I encountered a couple of the terrible kamikazes. Twice
they came right at us. At the last second I dumped the stick down and he just
went over the top. . . We’d see explosions here and one over there where they
rammed our B-29s. Two different times I came close to buying it.
We just wanted them to quit so we could go home. That’s all—we just
wanted to go home. . . . If we had to kill every Japanese to go home, we might
have to do that, because they were fanatics. . . . We might have to kill every
Japanese. They were defending their Mikado, their god, to the last man. They
advertised over and over again that they will be meeting us on the beaches with
pitchforks and with scythes, and you’d have to kill every one of them if we killed
their Mikado, their king, their god. That was our perception. They meant it.”
Some of the crewmen we have interviewed, however, had come from
more educated backgrounds or who had actually met Japanese before the war
approached the task of bombing Tokyo and other cities with private feelings of
guilt and remorse. It is only sixty years later, now that America has long
distanced itself from these terrible wartime events, do B-29 crewmen speak
apologetically, explaining that they were not cold-blooded murderers, but instead,
they speak of themselves as ordinary men who had no choice but to fulfill a dirty
and difficult job for their country.
After the firebombing campaign started, hatred within Japan burned
against the Americans flying the B-29s. Japanese propagandists claimed the
moral high ground while concealing that their own military had already caused
some 300,000 deaths in China from their campaign of aerial bombardment,
which included chemical and biological weapons. Even if the Japanese public
had known more about the atrocities in China it is doubtful whether any change
in wartime attitudes would have taken place. Chinese casualties were not
Japanese casualties.
In retaliation there were numerous incidents in Southern Japan of POWs
being executed and the treatment of captured B-29 crews changed markedly.
American military archives are replete with reports of civilians wielding a vicious
assortment of kitchen and farming implements and killing crewmen who bailed
out over Japan. Ironically, and in contrast to the earlier response in Germany,
nearly all of the crewmen who lived to tell their stories were rescued by the
Japanese military. The Imperial Army believed that B-29 crewmen knew vital
information about the anticipated invasion of the home islands. Airmen were
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placed in special custody by the Japanese military police, (the Kempei-tai), since
they had interpreters recruited from the United States and Canada who could
speak English. Imprisonment in Kempei-tai facilities was especially horrible, and
B-29 crewmen suffered physical and psychological damage from their time in
these prisons.
The B-29 Captivity Narrative: A Case Study from Niigata
We will now consider one example of the POW experience of a B-29 crew
that was shot down over Niigata on the early morning of July 20, 1945. This was
a singular event in the Niigata’s history, and was unsullied by the confusion of
multiple downings such as those that took place in other parts of Japan. The
incident occurred close enough to Niigata City to be well-documented from
various viewpoints. As such, this event provides a good case study of what
typically happened to B-29 crewmen shot down over Japan during the Second
World War. Much of our primary data came from interviews with the B-29 crew
survivors and local villagers from the surrounding area who had a role in
capturing them. However, we must remember that oral histories, while based in
an empirical event, are nevertheless imperfect. People forget and memories can
be altered, skewed by one’s viewpoint or even created from repeated exposure
to films, books or the stories of other comrades. Key information can be
consciously or unconsciously censored, and some informants will lie, in order to
influence the historical record. Although space will not allow a discussion of it in
this paper, it should also be mentioned that for Americans, there has been the
long, time honored tradition of the captivity narrative, which stretches back to the
culturally-formative years of the Puritan colonies. As a genre, American stories
of becoming a POW have remarkably similar themes, and the emphasis they
place on certain events and actions is highly evocative of American
exceptionalist beliefs. 1 Therefore, our attempt to document the story of the
Jordan Crew has, whenever possible, compared oral interviews with written
documents, such as war diaries, military reports, American and Japanese
archival materials closer to the time of the incident, and a rare cache of photos
which revealed scenes of the crew’s capture.
Mission
On the late afternoon of July 19, 1945, five B-29s, one of them piloted by
Captain Gordon Jordan of Monroe, Louisiana, took off from Tinian for Japan.
Their mission was to mine the harbors of Niigata and prevent desperatelyneeded supply ships from reaching Japan.
Jordan and his crew were
1
We would add that recurrent folkloric themes exist equally in the stories of
wartime hunger and suffering told by elderly Japanese.
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participating in what was codenamed Operation Starvation, which intended to cut
Japan off from its Asian colonies and literally starve the country as a precursor to
invasion. By the time the Jordan Crew started its mission to Niigata, most of
Japan’s major harbors had already been choked with mines. Niigata was still a
large port, and it had to be closed down.
The Crisis
The Jordan Crew was on its 33rd mission. They were tired and ready to go
back to America. On a number of earlier missions, the crew had only barely
made it back to base alive.
Some of the original crew members had been
seriously wounded or had nervous breakdowns. New, inexperienced crewmen
had taken their place. No one was worried, however, because other B-29s had
been sent to Niigata’s harbors, and none had ever been hit by anti-aircraft fire.
The Jordan Crew was the lead team, and after they had dropped their
mines successfully, the navigator deviated from the mission plan by giving the
direct course back to the base in Tinian. This was a short cut in order to return
home a few hours more quickly. Unfortunately, several seasoned anti-aircraft
crews from Tokyo had recently been transferred to Niigata. They quickly locked
on Jordan’s plane and hit it. The plane burned in the air for several minutes as
cheering crowds watch the plane go down.
Inside the plane, most of the crewmen scrambled to put on their
parachutes, so confident they were of not getting hit. At least one of the
crewmen, the copilot, was so afraid of being captured that he stayed in the B-29
and rode it to the ground to a fiery death. From our research, most, if not all of
the rest of the crewmen were able to bail out of the plane.
Decent to Earth
One of the interesting aspects of this war is that none of the crewmen
were ever taught even one word in Japanese. In their training, they were told
that if they had to bail out, to try to avoid civilians and surrender to the military.
They were told that the civilians would probably try and kill them.
Again the B-29 pilot Art Pejsa of Arpen, Wisconsin:
If we were shot down . . . As a matter of fact, [during a mission] over
Sendai, [when my plane was damaged,] I knew that we just had to get out over
the water. Get out over the water and get far enough away so we can ditch. At
least we had hope that we could get picked up maybe by a [US] submarine. We
were radioing our position, and each time there were submarines out there who
did pick up a few crews. So that was our only hope. Never over land. I was never
going to go down over land. I was heading for water because we knew it was the
end [to go down over Japan]. It was the end.
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The crew had often discussed what they would do if were ever shot down.
Some said they would fight back and go out in a blaze of glory. Some said they
would try and surrender. Everyone admitted that they were terrified about the
prospect of being captured. Of the crewmen that we have spoken to, while they
were floating to the ground in their parachutes, they felt nothing, and thought
nothing. They were may have been in shock about having to bail out over enemy
territory, but in the brief interim between the plane and their capture, most were
at peace.
Beatings and Capture
Once the crewmen landed, they were faced with several choices. Most
were armed with a .45 automatic. Would they use the pistol to fend off civilians,
or would they refuse to use their weapons? We found that those crewmen who
decided not to wage their own personal war with Japan, and who showed no sign
of fear or anger when captured, had a better chance of surviving.
The crew had landed in a farming area that was mostly fields and rice
paddies. The first people to catch the crewmen were mostly air raid wardens or
local villagers armed with bamboo spears. Many of the people who captured the
crew were women who were angry about their husbands, sons and grandsons
being killed in the war, so they tried to kill the crewmen. Some of the crewmen
who hid in the dark and heard their friends being attacked said the sounds were
so terrible that they thought about killing themselves.
Bill Price (b. 1924) was a waist gunner on a B-29 Superfortress bomber. On 7
April 1945, over Nagoya, his B-29 was rammed by a Japanese plane. Bill and
two others of the crew of eleven managed to escape the crippled aircraft.
Parachuting earthward, Bill had time to look around.
. . . [W]hen I’m near the ground I was drifting to the northeast part of the city and
out in the country, and I noticed …got close to the ground…a mob of people
were coming after me. And they looked to be…I couldn’t say how many, but I’d
say a hundred and fifty, two hundred. Somewhere around there. Looked like the
whole damn city at first. . . . They saw me coming, and they were coming after
me. So when I hit the ground I spilled my chute and I got out, and they were
about three hundred yards or so away from me.
I was scared. I was scared like I’ve never been scared in my life. I hope I
never have to go through something like that again, because . . . it was the most
helpless feeling I’ve ever had in my life. I really didn’t know what was going to
happen. I thought I was going to be killed. Really. Seriously. I walked towards
them with my hands up, and the first one to get to me was a civilian with a
bamboo pole, and he hit me alongside the head with it and knocked me off my
feet. Didn’t knock me out; I more or less rolled with it. I started to get up and I
hear this yell and here’s this soldier making a bayonet charge to me. I jumped
sideways and he ran that, that bayonet went right through my flying suit, and it
tore it from the bottom to the top. I was laying on the ground. . . . So at that time
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then they just, they beat me with everything they could get. Rifle butts, bamboo
poles, kicking me. I ended up with a broken collarbone and three broken ribs,
and they took everything I had. . . .
When they got through with my beating and so forth, they took and they
tied a rope around my elbows and around the back and they handcuffed me in
front and they blindfolded me. . . . We walked to a railroad station and they set
me on a bunker, and they roped off an area of about twenty yards in diameter,
and inside that roped off area they had . . . maybe four, five, six soldiers. The
reason for that is, they kept the crowd from getting to me. Then for about an
hour or an hour and a half or whatever it was, I don’t remember, but it was a
long, long time, the crowd just threw stones at me. [F]rom the ground. And I got
cut up pretty bad there.
Most of the crewmen who survived were saved from the civilians by the
Japanese military or home guard soldiers. The crewmen, who were bleeding
heavily from cuts and stab wounds, were blindfolded, bound, and put in trucks.
Later they were taken to the local Kempei-tai offices for questioning.
Interrogations
While many Kempei-tai interrogations amounted to little more than
intimidation and beatings from uniformed thugs, the crew spoke of a common
pattern when it came to being interrogated. This happened first in Niigata, but
the experience would be repeated many times later when they were transferred
to Tokyo.
Each crewman was required to sit with his legs folded under him in
the Japanese seiza style. He was to look downward in an effort to demonstrate a
spirit of hansei, an attitude of regretful self-reflection upon one’s past crimes and
of a desire to come clean. The interrogators would ask questions to which they
already knew the answers, and use these to test the sincerity of the prisoner. All
answers were to be given in humility and complete honesty. At the end, the
prisoner should admit their guilt and bravely accept the administration of
punishment. If the prisoner had shown a deep level of sincerity then the captors
might show some small measure of mercy, though none should be expected for
confessing to one’s crimes.
B-29 crewman Bob Michelsen of Minneapolis, Minnesota was nearly lynched by
civilians after being shot down over Tokyo on the night of 25-26 May 1945.
Saved from probable death by Japanese police, he then was taken to an
interrogation center.
We were taken to a building somewhere in Tokyo. We were brought into a room
in that building, and there was quite a few people there; we weren’t the only crew
there. American air crews.
We were forced to kneel on the floor, your knees bent underneath you and
your back perfectly straight and your head bowed. If you moved your head, or
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slumped, or swayed from side to side, or did anything, you were beaten
immediately. Still blindfolded, but you could see down underneath them, and you
could sometimes see through the blindfold. Not see clearly, but you could see
shadows. So it must have been sometime early morning, [but] who knows what
time it was. We were in that room for the rest of the day, I believe, because the
sun had set.
I had no control over [the situation]; I just refused to think about it. If I
started guessing what was going to happen, I would be worse off. You accept
was happening then. I think I did occasionally think about my home and family
and mother once or twice, I’m sure I did, but the physical discomfort was such
that it was the only thing that mattered.
I didn’t think at all. No, the pain in my back was so bad—sitting in that
fashion for me was very difficult, because in the middle of the afternoon, I don’t
know how early or late, you accepted the beatings in order to bend your back,
and to get some relief from that pressure.
After some hours Bob remembers being taken for questioning.
One by one people were being taken to be interrogated, and then after that they
would—at the time I didn’t know what happened to them. It was around sunset,
or later, when I was taken in for the first interrogation. . . . You were taken by two
guards, as I recall two, into a room that was dimly lit, and again on your knees,
blindfolded, and hands behind you. My impression was that somebody was
sitting at a table, opposite me. But before the questions you had to accept the
next beating.
The questions started, and the first was, of course, “What is your name,
rank, and serial number?” I told them right away, and then the next question
started. I don’t recall what it was about, you know, where are you from, Guam,
Saipan, wherever? And I gave them my name, rank, and serial number once
more. At that then the beatings started, and I don’t know when they ended. But
it was still dark when I woke up. . . .
The experience of the Jordan Crew during these interrogations depended
upon how they unknowingly conformed to the expected norms of this ritual. The
attitudes of most were misinterpreted as openly defiant and they were beaten
until they provided answers to, what seemed at the time, mundane questions
about their outfit, current events in America, the types of mines they had
dropped, their plane’s capabilities, and so on. However, some of the crewmen
demonstrated a quiet, respectful attitude, which seemed to impress the
interrogators. After the formal interrogation had finished, these crewmen were
given a chair and allowed to sit for awhile until they could recover the feeling in
their legs. For others, a little information was given about the fate of other
crewmen – they were told that at least two were killed as they resisted capture
and one died honorably by going down with the plane.
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Hunger and Torture
After their initial interrogation in Niigata, the surviving crewmen were again
blindfolded and put on a train to Tokyo. While on the train, the guards would let
the passengers beat the crewmen as they got off the train.
The crew arrived at Tokyo Station and were escorted blindfolded to the
main headquarters of the kempei-tai. This was one of the few buildings left
standing in central Tokyo. Downed airmen were actually prisoners of the
Japanese Eastern Army. But, because of a shortage of staff who could speak
English, the airmen were transferred into the custody of the military police. The
kempei-tai had English-speaking personnel and were skilled at breaking
prisoners both physically and mentally during the process of extracting
information. Jordan and his crew stayed for only three weeks in this prison, but
the experience left a lifetime of psychological scars on each of them.
In retaliation for the fire-bombing campaign earlier that year, the status of
captured B-29 crewmen had been changed to that of a hokaku beihei,
sometimes translated into English as a ‘Special Prisoner’. The Japanese word
carries the meaning of an American soldier who has violated the expected rules
of engagement, and therefore has forfeited any rights or privileges that might
have been afforded to him as a regular POW. Each member of the Jordan Crew
was forced to sign documents stating that they had willingly confessed to crimes
against humanity for the bombing of innocent civilians. Once all of the crew had
signed these papers they were no longer considered POWs. They were now
unlawful combatants sitting on death row.
B-29 crewman Bob Michelsen was a prisoner here.
You were taken out of the cell, your hands were tied in front of you, and a rope
around your hands so they could pull you by your hands, and a blindfold on. We
went from the cell, we were in the number one cell, so we were next to the door,
so you could tell when you go from the building into the sunlight, because the
light would change. Then into another building, up about half a flight of stairs, as
I recall, and then of course into this same room where you were before.
There were two interrogators—one was Shorty (Kobayashi Yasuo), and
the other we called Junior (Yanagizawa Kennichi). Junior was, we figured, he
was learning his trade, and he was not as tough as Shorty. Shorty was a lot
different. When it was Junior, things were okay; with Shorty, not.
Shorty, I believe, (pauses three seconds), was a sadist, because he, he
just . . . everything he did was to injure, and to hurt. If you were wounded, and
you were in his interrogating room, that is where they’d put the pressure, on your
wounds. And sometimes they were very painful. We had one prisoner, his name
was Bob Ring, who was injured from his hip to his knee, a really deep, deep
wound. And Bob told us, instead of beating on him, they would just put their
sticks inside the would and twist and twist and twist.
But with either one, the first thing that happened was that they beat on you
some more. Not even a question; they just started the beating. After they let up,
then the questions. The questions started from the beginning again, from the
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very beginning. Name, rank, serial number, what island were you on, what’s
your position, etcetera, etcetera. Every question they had already asked. . . . [I
told them] anything they wanted to know. . . .
Shorty would walk down the hall in front of [our cell], and tell us that the
courts had decided that you are a murderer and that within the next few days, the
next week, you will be . . . you’re dead. You will be killed. He always carried his
sword, and he’d stick his sword in the cell. And if you sat, the closer to the bars
you sat, the more you got stuck.
The Main Headquarters of the kempei-tai had four stories. The top floor
contained the offices for all kempei-tai postings throughout the Empire.
Administrative offices for the Tokyo area were on the third floor. All of the
interrogation chambers were on the second floor. Originally there were only a few
temporary holding cells but more were created in a courtyard behind the building
and in the basement. These were insufficient for the growing number of downed
fliers that were being transferred into their custody, and the conditions were
dangerously-overcrowded and unsanitary.
The basement held the ‘pig boxes’ (buta bako) – small cells that measured
about three by one and a half meters each. The doors were thick wooden lattices
that were secured with huge antiquated padlocks that appeared as if they had
come from a Hollywood set. Nine men were crammed into each of these cells.
The inmates were a mixture of B-29 crewmen and Japanese political prisoners.
Except for one light bulb that burned twenty-four hours a day in the corridor
separating the two cellblocks, these cells were continually shrouded in gloom.
Harry Magnuson of Minneapolis (b. 1923) was a prisoner at Kempetai prison. He
was a B-29 gunner, shot down over Tokyo the same night as Bob Michelsen
(25/26 May 1945). The two men are in the same cell.
There were sixteen or eighteen [of us], something like that. That’s where we
spent the next three months, was in that cellblock. . . . All we did was just sit
there. Just sit there. Misery. . . . I just, I was just there from day to day. Just day
to day. Nothing. It just seemed like every day, every day, every day. . . You’re
head and toe, head and toe…the floor was just solid with us. You couldn’t move.
And we had the toilet, which was a box with a wood cover on it. Then
there was a trough that you could pull it out and clean it, from the outside. So
every day somebody has to go out there. They let somebody out and they go
around the building and pull that out and empty it out.
But it was so tight there, somebody had to sleep on that thing or sit on that
thing all night. So we had to take turns. I think we just all got together and
decided, that’s the way it’s going to be. So that worked out. Somebody had to
sleep on that box, the benjo. So we’d all take turns.
The stress of just sitting, Harry remembers, was punctuated by moments of
terror.
13
[There was a] little window up on top. . . . You’d have to get up on somebody’s
shoulders to look out. But I could see B-29s flying by. Going home or coming or
whatever. Off in the distance. . . . And they would come at night. And they would
come in the daytime. And they were really going at it.
The [air raid] sirens would go off, but they would never let us out [of the
cells]. . . . We just figured oh, God, here comes the sirens. Here comes the
bombs, and we’re stuck in here. We can’t get out of here. But that’s what was
going through our mind. “Hey! Let us out of here!” We were yelling at the
guards.
It’s kind of scary when you’re stuck in there and they won’t let you out and
the bombs are dropping. [But] where would we go anyway? There was no
place. There was no place to hide. The bombs would just drop on us, and that
would be it.
The Jordan Crew were split up and kept in the courtyard cells that had
been converted from horse stalls. The front of the cells faced an interior corridor
where horses had once been led outside to the enclosed courtyard. The other
end of this corridor led further inside to the first floor of the Headquarters. The
horse stall cells were raised slightly above ground. Pigs and chickens were kept
in the courtyard and the prisoners could hear the pigs rooting around below their
cells. These cells were larger than the pig boxes (2.5 x 3 x 2.5 meters) and
between sixteen to nineteen men could be incarcerated there. One small window
was at the ceiling level, which was covered with a heavy black cloth. One light
bulb hung from a wire high above. As in the basement cells, this light was never
extinguished. Horse stall cells contained mostly B-29 crewmen, though
sometimes a Japanese clergyman, Korean agitator, yakuza mobster or a political
prisoner would be put in these cells for temporary holding. These inmates were
beaten and abused just as much as the Allied POWs.
The survivors of the Jordan Crew did not want to speak of their days in
these horse stall cells. Most of what was learned came from earlier affidavits that
they provided to war crimes investigators or from their private memoirs. Their
recorded experiences were corroborated by materials collected from other POWs
who were imprisoned at the same time as Jordan and his crew. What follows is
only a sample of the horrors that they endured.
Each morning the prisoners would be awakened by the harsh voice of a
guard. They would fold their thin, grubby blankets, which were their only personal
possessions, in absolute silence. Prisoners were not allowed to speak to each
other, though some would risk whispering furtively when the guards’ backs were
turned. Depending upon the mood of the guards, prisoners would then be
blindfolded and forced to sit with their legs folded underneath them for several
hours or, in scenes reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib prison more than 60 years
later, POWs would be shackled, blindfolded and forced to stand with their arms
held outward for long periods. On the days they were allowed to sit as best as
they could on the rough, hardwood floors without being blindfolded, the prisoners
closest to the cage-like doors of the cells would be kicked constantly by the
passing guards.
14
Ray Toelle of Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin was a B-29 crew member whose
plane was shot down on 24/25 May 1945—also over Tokyo. Burned on his
hands, legs, and feet when bailing out of the aircraft, Ray received only the most
rudimentary care before being dropped off the next day at Ofuna naval
interrogation center.
When we got to Ofuna they took off the blindfold and they took off the handcuffs,
whatever they had there. And they just took me down and put me in a cell. That
was it. It was dark then already. When I went into this little cell, it was only about
six by eight is all the bigger it was. Nothing in it but two blankets. They just
closed the door, and that was it. Solitary.
I couldn’t stand up, because my legs were really bad then the next day
after that. I was in bad shape. They took me to what they call a…he was called
the doctor, but he wasn’t really a doctor. But they took me over there in the
morning. These older guys that had been there [in the camp for a while], [I found
out later] they all took a number and said well, he’s going to be number seven or
eight for the hill [graveyard]. Because they didn’t figure I was going to make it.
Ray remembers the Japanese simply left him in the cell.
I had no [contact with anyone]. Just at night, when we had to call our number off.
I was number five. And we had to call our number off, and that was it. There
was only ten of us in this barracks. Five on each side. Then there was another
barracks a little farther over. But there were fences between all these. We
were…that was our area. That was it.
Once in a while they would let you out. They would take you out for a little
while and let you sit. Outside. But you couldn’t talk to anybody. In fact, you
couldn’t sit near anybody. You went out there and you sat there and looked.
For his burns, Ray received no medical help.
There was no care. They didn’t take these bandages off until we [left Ofuna] in
the middle of July. The day we left there they came in and got me out, took me
outside. This so-called doctor came, and he had a wash basin with him with
some water in it. Then there was an officer there. . . . So my hands by that time
were really bad looking. I mean, they had bandages still on them, but they stunk
like heaven.
They took off these bandages, and my hands at that time were kind of fistlike; they were all curling up. The fingers. When they took the bandages off,
there was maggots in there. Big ones. I’ve never seen such big ones. This
officer, he had to look away even. But you know, those maggots, they cleaned
my hands up perfect.
After that they left the bandages off, because I had big scars on there.
Had scar tissue on there. About a quarter of an inch of scar over the whole
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hands. Both hands. They looked like alligator hands. Bumped and stuff. Red
color.
No prisoner was allowed to shave or take a shower. The cells were infested with
lice and other vermin and soon the sweaty, dirty bodies of the Jordan Crew were,
together with their cellmates, covered with running sores. Owing to the conditions
all the prisoners had severe cases of dysentery. They relieved themselves over a
hole in the floor, under which was a box that collected the waste. Because of the
crowded conditions, the floor was frequently covered with the feces of those who
could not reach the hole in time.
Two or three times a day a soldier would come and toss tangerine-sized
balls of rice onto the filthy floor of the cells. All would drink from the same cup,
which the guard would shove through the grating of the cell door to one prisoner
at a time. Each was allowed only one cup of water with their rice ball. If anyone
spoke or displeased the guards, all of the prisoners in that cell would receive only
one rice ball and one cup of water for that day. There was often a quiet scramble
for any rice ball that appeared slightly larger than the others.
Again we listen to Harry Magnuson and Bob Michelsen. First, Bob Michelsen.
I recall that we received one rice ball a day . . . Always, to me, one rice ball, and
one cup of water each day.
[T]hey would roll the rice balls in on the floor, through a little opening
under the bars, and that would leave a few grains on the floor. The captain [Dick
Mansfield, commander of Bob’s B-29, and ranking officer in the cell] decided that
those grains on the floor should go to whoever needs it the most, which was Bob
Ring [from our crew], who had had the biggest wounds. So the captain would
pick up each little grain, and try to pass it down to Bob Ring, who most of the
time was at the other end of the cell.
But as the starvation took hold, . . . some of that food never got to him.
Harry Magnuson remembers animal instincts of the caged men.
At first everybody for himself as far as the food goes, the water goes or anything
goes. I mean we just, we were like cannibals. But then somebody realized, we
realized, because when the rice balls came in, they come . . under the door.
Maybe there’s a big one. Maybe there’s a little one. Maybe there’s a big one.
Maybe a little, little, little, little one. Every time one came through, if it was a big
one whoever was there would grab that one.
Well, we couldn’t do that. What we had to decide to do is when those
balls came in you move it around. And whatever falls for you, that’s yours.
Otherwise we were just, we would claw at each other. We’d kill ourselves.
Because we were so hungry.
We all decided, hey, we can’t fight over these balls when they come
through, because we’re right there jumping at them. So we finally, I think we all
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decided, this doesn’t work. We’ve got to do it this way. Which everybody
agreed.
Another way to get extra food was to be chosen for the latrine detail,
called benjo sōji in Japanese. These ‘honey boxes’ were carried out to a
dumping spot in the courtyard, where the contents would then be used as
fertilizer. It was one of the few times that a prisoner could leave his cell.
Sometime in the late morning or early afternoon, a guard would come and
inspect the prisoners. Those who had been imprisoned longer knew it was time
for the latrine detail and they would whine in high-pitched voices like alley cats. In
primitive Japanese they would intone, ‘benjo sojee, benjo sojee, kino, kino,
kino…no benjo sojee.’ This was understood as ‘for several days, I haven’t been
chosen for latrine duty.’
One of the members of the Jordan Crew, Paul Trump, was frequently
chosen for this duty. He and another cellmate would be tied to a long leash and
a guard would escort them (at a respectable distance given what they were
carrying) to the collection site at the far end of the courtyard. Along the way they
would pass the pig pen, where a slop of rice husks and other unmentionable
items lay in a trough. The guard would allow Trump to stop and briefly sink his
hand deep into the slop. Trump thought of the story of the prodigal son from the
Bible. He had to lean over and would almost always end up spilling the diseased
human excrement on what he was able to take from the pigs. He would eat it
anyway, calling his special meal ‘rice with gravy’.
Some prisoners who were brought in after the Jordan Crew had serious
injuries that had been incurred during their capture. Their status as Special
Prisoners, and the lack of pharmaceuticals as a result of Operation Starvation,
meant that none received any medical treatment. Prisoners begged the passing
guards for help, but the guards would either laugh or ignore them altogether.
Returning to the Land of the Living
After a few weeks of constant interrogations and experiences of both
physical and psychological torture, the Jordan Crew and other B-29 crewmen
were told that the war was nearly over. They were transferred to the Omori POW
Camp near Tokyo Harbor . . .
In the war’s final days, the group of about 100 ‘special prisoners’ being held by
the Kempeitai were taken from their small, cramped cells and transported away.
Harry Magnuson and Bob Michelsen both were in this group.
Bob Michelsen: For some reason we are taken out of our cells and blindfolded,
led outside into the sunlight, and told to get into the back of a truck. I believe
there were three trucks. All who were in there, a hundred and some odd. Into
trucks, and there were guards in the back of the truck, of course, and how long
we were in the truck going somewhere I don’t know. But we ended up on the
shores of Tokyo Bay.
17
We were led out of the trucks, down to the shore, still blindfolded and with
our hands tied behind our backs, kneeling on the shores of Tokyo Bay. And I
thought, (speaking slowly now for emphasis) this is the end. I thought, we are
going to be decapitated here, and how am I going to survive? I thought, maybe if
they are chopping the heads off, I could try to get underneath somebody that’s
already had their head cut off, and maybe they’ll not notice me.
[After a few minutes] I turned around and looked from where we had come
on the shore, because we could hear noises back there. Three machine guns
had been set up on the shore, and Shorty was directing the machine guns. So I
thought, well, we are going to be machine gunned in the water, or as we come
out of the water. And I thought, geez, I can swim, if I can swim under water, I
might survive.
There was a terrific argument at the machine guns between Shorty and
Junior, the two interrogators. Shorty left, (pauses three seconds) . . . and the
machine guns were packed up and put in the fourth truck, and that truck drove
away, leaving us there with Junior. And Junior said, “You’re going to walk out on
a causeway”—which we could now see, I think to the left—“and on the end of
that causeway is a prisoner of war camp [Camp Omori]. That’s where you’re
going.” And he marched us out to that prisoner of war camp. Finally the gates
opened, and we went into this camp. . . . That could have gone either way. But
in retrospect, I realize now, . . . I think it was Junior that saved our lives.
At Camp Omori the prisoners waited a few more weeks. When this camp was
liberated, they were sent by boat to Okinawa, then to Tinian, and next to the
Philippines for debriefing. Then all of the crewmen were sent on very slow boats
to the United States in order to allow the crewmen to recover from their ordeal.
B-29ers Today
Not many of the men who survived this ordeal are with us today. Most
have died of old age. Many who are still alive carry the psychological scars of
their experience in the war. The screams they heard in the cells of the kempeitai still haunt their dreams. Most of the B-29ers do not talk about their
experiences at all. Those who do have often made these experiences an
important part of their identity. In telling their tales repeatedly, they often become
what we call prophets of Americanism. Their advanced age, together with the
mystique gained from suffering they endured and the sheer terror of their tales
affords them a very high status among patriotic and/or conservative Americans.
The retelling of their stories for over sixty years has elevated their accounts
sometimes to the level of myth – myth in the sense that their stories seeks to
teach deeper cultural values and important lessons for what it means to be an
American. Some of these B-29ers have sought to focus on justice, proclaiming
jeremiads against the US government for precluding them from more financial
compensation for their suffering. This compensation is less about financial gain
as it is about punishing the Japanese government for the treatment they
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endured. Many of these B-29ers are still bitter and this is reflected in their
writings as well as in their personal lives.
Other B-29ers have focused on other aspects of Americanism, such as
the cultural belief that “Americans love to forgive.” These have reached out to
people in Japan, especially those who they believe are representatives of those
who had wronged them. These have taken as their role to be model Americans
who spread goodwill to the Japanese, and in the process, encourage them to be
more open to (or at least sympathetic to) American culture and beliefs.
Conclusion: The Importance of Peace Education in Today's Japan
In February 2005, the first author attended a luncheon at the Foreign
Correspondents Club in Tokyo for Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former prime minister
known for his conservative political beliefs. Although officially in retirement, he
continues to exert considerable influence over the Liberal Democratic Party as
one of their elder statesmen. In his speech he talked of working to make Japan
strong again, of seeing to it that Japan that would be proud once more, and of
fostering reforms that would make Japan a ‘normal country.’ Normal for
Nakasone meant having an army that could participate fully in international
peacekeeping missions. He spoke of the need to change Japan’s pacifist
constitution in order to make this dream a reality.
Few of the reporters at my table believed that such changes would take
place. But in the space of two years, Japan is on the brink of doing just that. The
government has already enacted measures to consolidate the Self-Defense
Forces into a newly-created Ministry of Defense which will make overseas
missions a main part of its mandate. The remaining changes to Japan’s
constitution will soon follow.
Many of the university students the first author teaches in Niigata echo the
words of Nakasone and other conservative politicians. These students, who will
be the future leaders of Japanese society, want Japan to become a country that
is strong enough to hold its own in a world turned upside down by the events
after September 11, 2001. We find such views disturbing, since we believe that
Japan’s ability to maintain a pacifist stance during the brutality of the latter half of
the 20th century was a sign of great strength. By renouncing war, Japan was an
inspiring symbol of what a ‘normal country’ should truly be. It seems to us that
those countries which habitually abandon peaceful dialogue in favor of military
action are the aberration. These societies’ inability to break the futile cycle of
violence that has cursed humanity for millennia is a sign of their weakness, not
strength.
More and more, Japanese comic books and movies in recent years
portray Imperial Japan’s last war as a tragic, twilight struggle against a
remorseless, technologically advanced enemy. These are designed to influence
Japanese youth who, because of the silence of their grandparents and the
sanitized textbooks approved by an increasingly conservative Ministry of
Education, know little about the horror of war. Recent changes to Japan’s
educational system have now required that ‘patriotic education’ be included as a
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part of the curriculum. Students must now be taught about what it means to love
Japan, to have a public spirit and to maintain tradition. This comes at a time
when Tokyo’s governor has fired or severely punished scores of teachers for not
participating in the singing of Japan’s national anthem during special ceremonies
– an anthem which is a song of praise to the Divine Emperor. Thus it is not
surprising that some of the first author’s own college students, in moments of
inebriation, have spoken of wanting to go to North Korea in order to fight and die
for the Emperor.
We believe that a pacifist education is, in fact, the best course for “patriotic
education” within Japan. We also would like Japanese students to have more
access to the stories of B-29 crewmen and other soldiers who experienced
Japan’s Pacific War. It is important that students understand that, for every
soldier who raises a flag in triumph over battlefields, there are the thousands of
others who die alone and forlorn in the darkness, crying in pain as the life is
hacked and beaten out of them. This too is the price of victory. Since Japanese
youth have been taught to view the Pacific War in terms of suffering and
victimhood, we feel they must be taught to face the fact that the suffering was not
theirs, and that those who are on the losing side of a war are often the most
vicious. To beat enemy soldiers to death in rage, to starve and torture captives –
these too are the things that victims do, just before the end. For the sake of the
young in this country, it is necessary to go backwards, to pierce the present
shame and look full in the face of those dark war years. Since the United States
supports a more militaristic Japan, for Japanese to truly love their country, we
would like students to discard illusions of victimhood and consider the terrible
cost of war, regardless of who wins or loses. In this way, we hope that the next
generation will help Japan to become a world leader in waging peace, not war.
Biodata
Gregory Hadley is a Professor of English and American Studies at
Niigata University of International and Information Studies.
Thomas Saylor is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University,
St Paul (in Minnesota, USA)