by Christopher Barr
The Japanese soldiers picked me up and off the beach
during that summer in 1944. I had been shot twice the day before while I
and the Allied Forces attempted to advance upon the field. I suppose I
understand why they kept me alive as their prisoner. I know they wanted
intelligence on invasion planning. I was put on a battleship with a
number of other guys and taken to Japan to a sadistic camp 4 miles north of
Nagasaki. There, I was beaten repeatedly for information with sticks and
rifle butts. I knew little to no Japanese so when they ordered answers to
their questions, all I heard was gibberish, so they beat me more. These
solders saw all us prisoners as shameful for being captured alive in
combat. The warrior spirit of the Japanese field army code, states that
the individual if defeated must calmly face death while in battle and to those
that disobeyed orders would be killed by the Japanese sword, a symbol of wisdom
and perseverance to the Japanese people and an honour to die by.
The camp was surrounded by eight-foot high barbwire
fences. They kept most of us cramped in long wooden cells filled with
lice, fleas, parasites, bedbugs and flies. Sometimes some of us would be
put in bamboo fortified cells outside and half underwater, where those that
stayed there used the bathroom and ate right where they slept, we didn’t have
to deal with the bed-bugs there but the flies swarmed to the point that it was
impossible to not breathe them in with every breath. Because being half
underwater, sleeping became hard to do, which means most of us barely slept.
On a daily basis they’d give us scraps of rice and would later ask questions
most of us never understood, and then they would beat us. Every so often
six prisoners where brought out for all to see, bound, gagged and blindfolded,
and with many watching, their heads were cut off with samurai swords.
Their bodies were dragged to a pit by other prisoners where they were burned
and in some cases eaten by younger Japanese soldiers.
The savage beatings became a daily ritual that I
actually started getting used to, not to say they became enjoyable in anyway
but they became routine, that my body was so numb from the last beating that it
could no longer feel pain. What I didn’t get use to was when the other
men were tortured and in some cases to death. Once a young man was pulled
out of one of the housing units and four Japanese soldiers performed a
vivisection on him, right there on the dirt and with no anesthesia.
Others would be tied upside down to determine how long it would take them to
choke to death.
Operation Meetinghouse got underway as I, along with
over a hundred other guys remained prisoners of war. The firebombing by
the B-29’s leveled the city of Tokyo in the biggest air raid to ever be
executed by the will of man. Some of us were worried that if these
soldiers don’t kill us in here then the US bombs might. My left arm was
broken and the lower right side of my face was slashed with barbwire by a guard
during that time, as well as 27 guys lost their lives in a fit of rage the
Japanese held over the bombing of their homeland.
When times were quiet around the units, we’d all talk
about food, what food we’d like right then and there, what food we had in the
past and where we had it. We never really talked about the usual guy
stuff, like sports and women. Especially women, none of the guys wanted
to even think about it. Maybe that was the real torture of the place, all
the things we lost and all the people that mattered. We never really
entertained the idea of escape because the risks were too high. This
place drained the life force right out of you, leaving a shell of a man with no
past, present or future; we were just meat, and barely that. We weren’t
individuals anymore with names, hopes and dreams, we were meat for them to
beat, burn, eat or laugh at. I wasn’t from anywhere anymore, I didn’t
have a wife or children, and I didn’t have parents or brothers and sisters
because in this place…I was never born.
When the plutonium grade atomic bomb dropped on August
9th 1945, the men that
I was with in the outdoor cells all dove under water. While we forced ourselves to stay
underwater, I looked up as wind, fire and a bright white light painted the
surface above us. Once we
got up we all gasped for air, only then we could see that the prison camp we
were at was destroyed, the entire housing units for the prisoners was gone, the
guard house was gone, the cage we were in was shattered and the fencing around
the prison was broken open. This
place had been leveled as we could hear the screaming sounds of people and the
roar of sirens. Blood and
dead bodies filled most of the outdoor cages. Over a hundred of us entered this
prison during the summer of 1944 and now 16 of us are walking out. The smoke was so thick that we
couldn’t even see where we were walking or what direction we were going but we
needed to keep moving.
By the time we walked out of that prison camp, most of
us were starved and looking like walking skeletons, some had lost body parts
that were cut off. If they weren’t beat to death, stabbed with a sword or
shot, most of the men died from dysentery, pellagra, cholera and vitamin
deficiency, before the discharge of the bomb killed the rest of them. We
walked by a building that was in bits and pieces after the tornado force of the
bomb blasted through it. I pulled wood splinters out of my leg and chest
as we walked through the smoke, coughing and spitting up blood.
As we walked we could see a massive black cloud in the
sky, hovering there like a city-size flying saucer. The smell of burnt
wood and flesh filled the air as it started to rain out. The rain was
black in color and thick, so a bunch of us picked up wood from a crumbled
building to shield us from the black rain. Terrified, screaming people
ran toward us and then past us, their exposed skin was red, black and bubbling,
blood poured from their dusty bodies as they ran by ignoring us. One
horrified woman ran naked by me as the skin fell off her back splashing to the
ground next to my feet like molten lava.
I could see that this backwater city was transformed
into a momentary vision of hell. As we
walked closer to the city, all still elated from the blast, we started to see
the devastation, the horror that those of us that survived would never be able
to erase from our minds. I knew it was Thursday
and I knew judging by the position of the sun’s rays, barely forcing their way
through the clouds and smoke that it was just after noon. But what I was looking at in front of me
seemed alien in nature; they were ant-walking alligators, creatures of the
fall-out that looked to be neither human nor animal, neither living nor
dead. Any noticeable features or gender
were burnt off of them as they walked creepily nowhere. The radiation poisoning and immense heat
melted their flesh and clothing off their bodies. These creatures that were once human beings
had the misfortune to survive when the sky exploded 700 yards above Nagasaki. The great light would have filled the sky
laying waste to 80,000 people and destroying two-thirds of the city while
setting fire to the remaining structures.
These things are the survivors of the direct blast and firestorm.
They had no eyes to see out of and no will to live but
there they were, skin seared from their skulls leaving a black, shiny leathery
substance. Their mouths would open and
close without any purpose, revealing a red hole surrounded by blacken teeth
with no lips. Twenty of them staggered
on charred stumps for legs and they all gave off this horrifying murmur,
whether that’s all they could do to scream wasn’t quite clear. Hopefully whoever was still inside those
black skeletal bodies, I can only hope was unconscious and the person they were
before the blast is dead and gone, leaving what I see before me eerily
murmuring. One of them was carrying what
looked like to be a baby but it was charcoal in color and molded to the
creature as if it were part of it all along.
I have been through and have seen some horrible things
in this war, and I heard of the devastating things the Japanese were doing to
the Chinese, but no human being deserves this fate. I wanted a machine gun desperately to shoot
them all down and put them out of their horrifying misery. These things walking here were not
responsible for the war I was fighting in.
These people were farmers and fisherman trying to live their lives while
their insane government and its pride were exacting atrocities in their names.
This blackness will never leave me. What have we done to this place? How is it possible to win in such
devastation? Were American’s all
cheering victory back home the same way they’d cheer when the New York Yankee’s
win the World Series? Is that what this
is, a competition?
Some of these charred people have finally started to
lean over and die. A soldier that was
part of my group picked up a rock and stated to bash them in the skull while
hysterically crying. A couple of the
other guys pulled him away as we moved on leaving the remaining alligator
people to wander and die.
As we moved closer to the city we were all shocked at
the site of this dusty wasteland.
Buildings were gone with the exception of big concrete government structures. Most of them were severely damaged with
pieces of black stone falling off them.
I don’t know why we were walking this way, walking into hell, but there
we were at zero point on August 9th, 1945, walking in silence.
Dr. Elliot Sutherland
Department of Bio-Technology and Research
00120 Via del Pellegri
Vatican City
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