Blessed Event
My latest reprehensible and insensitive thoughts here. Reprise of prior re same, including one Nagasaki’s survivor experience, here:
Decades later, POWs recall evils of war
JULES CRITTENDEN
2 March 1997
Preston Clark doesn’t think very often about the three years he spent as a prisoner of the Japanese on the River Kwai, of the starvation, disease and labor that killed so many men there.
It was half a century ago and life goes on, Clark explains. But now and then, a haunting dream takes the old Navy commander back to the jungle camps.
“I’m in a building, and outside people are coming and going. Mostly going, and it’s looking bleak. I’m one of the last,” said Clark, 80, of Wenham.
In Hull, retired Navy chief Leo Callahan, 76, wakes up some nights in a cold sweat, panicked by the thought he is still a POW - half-starved, beaten and slaving in a Japanese coal mine.
“You think back and wonder, `How the hell did I ever do that?”‘ Callahan said recently.
Clark and Callahan’s hellish odysseys began 55 years ago yesterday. It was after midnight on March 1, 1942, when the USS Houston took three torpedo hits, rolled on its side and sank off Java.
The heavy cruiser was part of an Allied fleet defending Java that was annihilated in a month of clashes with the Japanese. The Houston and the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth were trying to escape on Feb. 28. Air reports said the coast was clear.
“When we came into the Sunda Strait, there was the entire Japanese fleet,” Callahan said. He was sleeping by his 5-inch gun when the Klaxons woke him that night.
“We were shooting at everything we could see,” said Clark. “A destroyer would come real close in and shine a searchlight on us. Their big ships would lob in shells while our guys tried to shoot out the searchlight.”
“The Jap destroyers came in so close, you could see the men on deck,” Callahan said. “It was a tremendous battle. We threw everything we had at them.”
But in the fierce, hourlong firefight, they were outgunned. The Perth sank first and then the Houston. Capt. Albert Rooks, who went down with the ship, had time to reverse course, bringing his men closer to Java for the long swim ashore.
“She took her time going down, like she was giving us a chance to get off,” Callahan said. “I just walked right down the side of the ship and dove in.”
“In the water it was nice and warm,” said Clark. “I saw the loom of a mountain ahead, and swam for that.”
He swam for nine hours. Callahan swam for 30. Of 1,064 men on board, 368 made it ashore.
From the beach, Clark’s captors made him haul a supply cart for two days without food or water. Drinking from ditches, he caught dysentery and kept it for three years. His bare feet became a mass of blisters.
Crammed into makeshift prisons, Clark and Callahan got their first taste of POW rations - moldy, maggot-filled rice.
“As the months went by, you could see your muscles waste away,” Clark said. “The Japanese had a Herculean problem. They never expected to get so many prisoners. They got 80,000 on Singapore alone. They were overwhelmed. And beside that, they didn’t give a damn.”
The POWs learned to expect frequent, irrational beatings.
“The Japanese Army was run on beatings. As near as I could tell, the only reason for advancement was to reduce the number of people over your head who were entitled to beat you,” Clark said. “POWs were at the bottom of the heap. It didn’t matter what your rank was, everyone got bashed.”
Most of the Houston crew was soon shipped north to Burma. Callahan, sick with malaria, was kept back in Java.
With 61,000 other British, Australian and Dutch POWs in Burma and Thailand, Clark led crews that moved dirt, broke rock and built bridges on the 150-mile Death Railroad.
They lived in muddy camps along the line the Japanese needed to supply their army in Burma. They died of beriberi, cholera and tropical ulcers - virulent infections that set into any scratch. With no medical supplies, POW medics used sharpened spoons to scoop out the rotten flesh while the patient was held down.
Before it was over, 15,000 POWs were dead, one in four.
“They sent men out to work who were obviously unfit,” Clark said. “Men died like flies.”
In Java, Callahan spent two years as a dockworker before he was packed on a ship to Japan.
“(American) subs were following us the whole way. We could hear the calls to action stations on the Jap destroyers around us,” he said. One night, a POW on deck asked to trade places with Callahan in the hold.
“So he went down and I went topside,” Callahan said. That night, “A Jap destroyer went up. A terrific explosion. In the water, we could see the phosphorescent trails of three torpedoes headed for us. The ship went down in minutes. No one escaped from down below.”
He swam for 20 hours before a Japanese ship picked him up.
“They marched us down the streets of Nagasaki to a Mitsubishi shipyard. These days, whenever I see that Mitsubishi symbol on a car, I want to run into it,” Callahan said.
In early 1945, after eight months in the shipyard, he was sent north to work in a mine. It saved him from the atom bomb.
“We didn’t know that. We thought, `Coal mines will kill you.”‘ Callahan said. He carried shrapnel in his face for two years after a mine explosion. But he knew the war was ending when he saw the sky fill with B-29 bombers.
“One day we woke up, and the Jap guards were gone. But nobody came for us,” he said. The POWs headed for Nagasaki.
“You never saw anything like the devastation. It was just blown away,” he said. Doctors later found radiation in his blood, and he has had several tumors removed. But he said, “If it wasn’t for the atom bomb, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have lasted another year.”
The war ended for Clark in a Bangkok warehouse. He remembers Thai women bringing roast pork to the skeletal POWs.
“We’d eat it, get sick, eat some more,” he said. “I’ll never forget the taste of that pork.”
Both men stayed in the Navy after the war and made repeated trips to Japan. Clark remembers coming ashore at Yokohama in 1950. An old man bowed to him.
“It was something that had never happened to me,” Clark said. “The Japanese were kind and respectful. It was very different than it had been for me.”
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:43 am on Tuesday, August 7, 2007
5 Responses to “Blessed Event”
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August 7th, 2007 at 9:41 am
“Today, they are just martyrs who should be honored, for the unwilling sacrifice they made that saved so many millions of lives.”
Amen. The fact that Japanese continues to play the victim card for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is nothing short of pathetic. To me, the true lesson learned from the events of August 1945 is that you have to be ruthless in order to stop a brutal enemy. And Japan, during WWII, was beyond brutal.
And, in response to a point made in your article: I had a cousin who survived the Bataan Death March. I didn’t know him very well….he wasn’t particularly friendly to anyone outside of his immediate family, but he had serious medical (and mental) issues until the day he died.
August 7th, 2007 at 11:07 am
TRJ and Jules…
Yes the Japanese, with the exception of the gentleman who is part of this topic, DO play the “victim” card. I agree completely with your words TRJ and Jules. The Japanese were the ‘jihadists’ of that period, just as vile, just as brutal, and just as indoctrinated, as the present day evil that we deal with. The only difference is that the present day evil, has yet to kill the millions and millions and millions, the Japanese did.
Despite the horror of two bombs that the Japanese brought upon themselves, and their denial of anything, BUT victimhood, what the Japanese have now, as far as power to their people AND one of the most powerful world economies, shows that ruthlessness does indeed have, positive effect(s).
Expect to see posting of the “heroics”, of the Soviets in WWII…in fact those “heroics” may be posted as I complete this.
August 7th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
“The fact that Japanese continues to play the victim card for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki …”
Can’t say that I have a whole lot of sympathy considering what the Japanese were up to in the 30’s and 40’s. They deserved it.
Same principle applies in Iraq and Aghanistan.
Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.
August 7th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
As a matter of fact, a nuclear bomb detonated over Tehran might get our “we aren’t going to tolerate any more terror attacks against our alliers, our country or our citizens” message across a whole lot better than screwing around in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Something to consider.
August 7th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
It is those who lift the event out of context that end up insuring the death of far more people. It is the same with Sherman’s march to the sea. Both events shortened horrible wars. By failing to understand the importance of ruthlessness in crushing aggressors, they make sure that aggressors will always think they can get away with initiating force to meet their ends.
My family was among the first allowed to join their fathers in Japan. My mother, who was a nurse, worked with the commission that took care of (and studied) the survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Because I spent the first part of my life there (and being the daughter of a man who spent the entire war in the Pacific), I understood a lot more and was shocked when I finally moved stateside and heard what people were saying about how the war with Japan ended. By accepting an unearned guilt, America itself has made sure that the Japanese could use to play the victim–while ignoring the unmitigated horror of their brutality all over SE Asia, and in China, and in Korea. Whatever the Japanese suffered, and they did suffer, they brought upon themselves. I feel pity for the suffering, but my sympathy and compassion is reserved for those who were actually victimized by all who allowed the brutality–and the supposed innocents in Japan allowed it; indeed, they supported it with everything they had. Such is the consequence of living the wrong philosophy.