Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side;

With patience bear thy cross of grief or pain.

Leave to thy God to order and provide;

In ev’ry change he faithful will remain.

—Katharina von Schlegel, “Be Still, My Soul”

In early 1942 there was only one POW camp in Japan proper, but by 1944 around thirty-six thousand POWs were imprisoned in approximately 320 camps in Japan. Still others were in camps in Korea, China, and Manchuria. This handful of Latter-day Saint POWs from Dapecol were scattered among camps in Japan, though Davey ultimately ended up in a camp in Korea.

The camps in Japan were located in industrialized areas, and each camp was connected to a particular industrial site. The Japanese Imperial Army ran the prison camps and was responsible for guarding and feeding the prisoners. However, the POWs worked in factories, mines, smelters, or other industrial facilities owned by civilian Japanese companies. For example, Christensen, Hamblin, Hansen, Larsen, Lloyd Parry, Patterson, Rohlfing, and Vance were all held initially in the Nagoya #5B camp on the coast near Yokkaichi, Japan.[1] POWs from that camp worked in an adjacent copper smelter owned by a large Japanese chemical and mining company. They also worked in a related sulfuric acid plant. Hamblin, Rohlfing, and Christensen appear to have been later transferred to a small foundry near the city of Toyama, Japan, further splintering this group of Latter-day Saint POWs.[2]

Ralf Wilson ended up at Nagoya Branch Camp #11.[3] It was a relatively small camp, with about 150 POWs, the majority of whom were Dutch. The rest were American and British. The camp was adjacent to a chemical factory, the Nippon Soda Company.[4] Bray and Goodliffe were put in camps near steel mills in Yokohama. After the mills were closed due to Allied bombing, they were transferred to a copper mine called Ashio in northern Japan.[5] Davey, who initially was imprisoned in a camp near Fukuoka, was shipped in late April 1945 to a light-duty POW camp in Jinsen, Korea.[6]

When the POWs arrived at the camps in Japan, they were typically stripped to their underwear, and their clothes and other possessions were put in a large pile or placed in fifty-gallon drums of boiling water. Some were issued clothing, such as a poorly made shirt, pants, and a jacket.[7] Hamblin, however, reported that the prisoners in his camp initially received no new clothes. Rather, upon arrival at the camp, the POWs were stripped to their underwear, and all their clothes and other possessions were dumped in a pile. Hamblin had a sweater he had received at Bilibid in a package from home, a very appreciated gift in the colder climate of Japan. The sweater went into the pile. The prisoners were then marched into the camp dressed only in their G-strings and shoes while holding towels.

For the next week, they were marched around as the Japanese tried to teach them to march to Japanese commands. Not knowing the drills and unable to understand the Japanese commands, they mainly marched in circles. The frustrated guards yelled at them and beat them. Finally, the drills came to an end, and the clothing previously taken was redistributed to POWs, but not necessarily back to the original owner. A Dutch POW, for example, was issued Hamblin’s sweater from home.[8] Christensen was required to toss all his belongings into a pile but was able to hide in his shorts a photo of his parents and a copy of his patriarchal blessing, two precious pieces he had managed to keep since his surrender.[9]

The quarters for the POWs were usually a large barn-like structure with a center hall running the length of the building and small partitioned rooms without doors. It resembled a barn, with rows of stalls on each side. Each room had an upper and lower bunk. In the middle of the isle was an open fire box. It was made of bricks, but without any flue. That was the only source of heat. The prisoner quarters were constructed of half-inch lumber, providing little protection from the cold.

The prisoners were given charcoal or wood each month, but it made a good fire for only a few hours. The POWs soon developed a number of ways of smuggling pieces of wood they picked up from the factories past the guards and into their barracks.[10] Also, the fires were not ventilated, so the smoke rose and hung in the air, creating a problem for the men in the upper bunks. In any event, it was simply impossible to heat the barracks; instead, the objective was merely to reduce the chill.[11]

To try to stay warm, the POWs wore their clothes both day and night. After a while, lice got into them, especially at the seams. Christensen wrote about feeling them moving around as he was trying to sleep at night.[12] The cold also made sleeping difficult. To combat the cold, the POWs snuggled together wearing every piece of clothing they had and covering themselves with all the blankets they could find. Such an arrangement sometimes helped them stay warm enough to sleep, but they were always cold that winter.[13]

Their diet consisted of inadequate amounts of rice, barley, and millet. They were always hungry. Their digestive systems had become so delicate that a small change of rice to barley could make them sick for days. When they had the chance, they sneaked out of the factory and went down to the beach to look for lettuce leaves, orange peelings, or any other food that may have washed ashore. In another camp, the POWs picked green weeds on the way to or from work to later mix in their rice.[14]

The POWs were required to perform heavy physical labor, frequently in unsafe working conditions.[15] The work directly or indirectly aided the Japanese war effort, and the POWs developed a variety of ways to sabotage their work while not getting caught. If caught in such sabotage, they likely would have been shot on the spot. Goodliffe recalled jamming steel scraps or wrenches in the cogs of a machine used to make steel plates for tanks while the machine was shut down due to frequent power outages. When the power came back on and the machines started up, the cogs broke, shutting down production. They also threw out the tar the Japanese used to lubricate the rollers, making them inoperable. There were also some Koreans working at the mill—and fortunately for Goodliffe and the other Americans, the Japanese always suspected the Koreans.[16]

Bray, who worked in a steel mill, spoke of POWs not repairing hooks on a crane properly, causing them to break and shutting down the crane. A repair took about two weeks. This had the additional benefit of giving the POWs working in front of the furnaces a break while the crane was repaired.[17] Hamblin wrote of rocks “accidentally” getting into a coal stoker, shutting it down. It would take six to eight hours to remove the rocks and start up again.[18]

Davey, who ended up at the Jinsen POW camp in Korea, was assigned to work in a garment factory making Japanese uniforms. The Japanese were always complaining that the POWs were not sewing buttons on the garments fast enough, a skill at which none of these POWs were particularly adept. However, Davey developed a means of sewing them on more quickly by simply putting more thread around the button and using only a single strand to attach the button to the shirt. The Japanese were pleased with the higher production rate, and the POWs enjoyed fantasizing about Japanese soldiers “dashing out to formation with buttons popping off, or one of them standing at attention undergoing a severe slapping for not having his blouse buttoned.”[19] While none of these acts were likely to have impeded the Japanese war effort in any significant way and the POWs would have been in great danger if caught, the sabotage was deeply satisfying to the POWs.

The most serious concern for these POWs, however, was the guards. Most of the guards, who the POWs derisively called the “stick guards,” were civilians too young to serve in the military or were former soldiers who had been wounded or partially disabled in combat. “They’d take a pick handle and whittle it down and polish it off so it ended up looking like a sword. They like to wear a sword.”[20] Although the guards were civilians, they were greatly feared by the POWs because they had disciplinary power as well as deep contempt for the POWs.[21]

The former soldiers especially seemed to have made it their purpose in life to exact vengeance on these POWs.[22] Many were disabled veterans of the Japanese occupation of China, including the infamous “Rape of Nanking.” A POW speculated, “They must have been driven a little crazy because of what they had seen or done in China because their behavior was completely unpredictable.”[23] As Goodliffe put it, “I think their main goal in life was to beat up an American every day that they could. They were bad. They would stand in the shadows, and when you walk by at night and didn’t salute, they would come out and give you a beating for not saluting them.”

Most POWs received frequent beatings from the guards, and many were tortured. Hamblin wrote of some POWs who, when returning to the camp from the factory, were caught with some salt that a civilian at the factory had given to them. “The men were stripped to their waists and beaten with a wide leather belt until their bodies were covered with welts. They were also beaten in the face. When anything like that happened, our blood would boil, but we were powerless to do anything to help them.”[24]

Patterson described a common punishment for stealing. The Japanese hung a POW by his wrists from a tripod with a basket around his neck and bricks piled nearby. On each round the sentry would put another brick in the basket. As it got heavier, it would pull the POW’s wrist from its socket, leaving the prisoner screaming in pain.[25] Hansen spoke of being made to walk with five-gallon buckets in each hand, with arms outstretched until he fainted.[26]

Goodliffe, returning from the latrine shortly after an Allied bombing raid, tiptoed up to a fence to look around and was caught by a Japanese guard. Preferring that the POWs not see the damage the bombings were wreaking on their country, the Japanese prohibited such gazing through the fence. The guard took Goodliffe to the middle of the compound and beat him with a two-by-two until he fell to the ground unconscious—all for looking through a fence. Goodliffe said that beating was “the worst beating I ever got from them, but there were many, many more.”[27]

On another occasion, two English POWs were caught by a guard stealing food, and they killed the guard. Among the methods the Japanese then used to make the POWs confess the names of the perpetrators was to place little bamboo toothpicks under toenails. Goodliffe was among the POWs questioned and tortured about the incident. About this questioning, Goodliffe wrote, “Sitting across the table from me was one of the Englishmen that had killed the guard. You could just see the pain in his face, thinking that I might break down and tell who it was, but we endured it. Most of us lost our toenails, but after they had done that for a day and a night and another day, they finally decided that there was no American that could take that kind of punishment without breaking down. So it must have been the Koreans that did it, so they went after the Koreans.”[28]

To coerce Bray into identifying someone who had been smoking during a raid, an act the Japanese prohibited, the guards made Bray hold a three-gallon wooden bucket above his head in front of the guardhouse in the freezing weather. As his arms tired, the bucket would slowly lower to his head. The guard, who watched through the guardhouse window, then came out, took the bucket, dumped the water on Bray, forced Bray to refill the bucket, and started the process over again. Bray went through about five buckets over the course of an hour and a half in freezing weather before he was allowed to return to his barrack. He went to work the next morning shivering in his still-wet clothes. He never identified the smoker to the Japanese.[29]

The POWs worked with, or were supervised by, Japanese civilians and, notwithstanding the guards, the POWs were often able to develop a friendship or working relationship with their civilian coworkers. Some of the civilians even shared food with the POWs when available.[30] For example, one day a kind civilian in the boiler room of the factory where Christensen was working gave him half a baked potato. Christensen said he “stuffed the whole thing into my mouth and tried to swallow it before the guard noticed.” But the guard did notice and beat him with a stick.[31]

For Davey at the camp at Jinsen (now Inchon), Korea, life was better. However, the compound was enclosed by a ten-foot-high wall, blocking the POWs off entirely from the outside world and, like at Bilibid, creating a sense of lonely isolation.[32] While the food was still inadequate, it was not the starvation diet of Bilibid. There was a scarcity of rice, and the Japanese began substituting soybeans as part of the rations. The soybeans were tasteless and difficult to cook, but the POWs benefited from the substitution since the soybeans contained protein, the POWs’ greatest dietary need.[33] The guards were largely Korean conscripts, who frankly hated the Japanese as much as the Americans and were looking forward to their defeat.[34]

In the prison camps in Japan, religious books were confiscated and religious meetings or activities were strictly prohibited.[35] Hansen, who at the time was unable to walk due to the effects of beriberi, spoke of crawling across the ground to save his scriptures that had been confiscated and tossed by the Japanese into a fire.[36] There were, nevertheless, some religious moments. In the camp where East was imprisoned, the POWs received permission to have a Christmas program. East was asked to speak. He was introduced as an “Elder of the Church of Jesus Christ.” He gave a talk, but soon forgot the substance of the talk, other than it was something about Christmas. A few years after the war, East received a Christmas card saying, “I remember you as the Elder of the Church of Jesus Christ. I have since joined the church and married a Mormon girl.” It took East awhile, but he finally remembered who the writer was—the “nice clean cut fellow that worked in the kitchen in Japan” who had listened to that Christmas talk.[37]

While imprisoned, the POWs also endured natural disasters, such as a typhoon that flooded camps and caused waste from the toilets to wash up through the barracks. A major earthquake struck Japan in December 1944, severely damaging the plants where the POWs were working and causing some of them to close.[38]

The prisoners also suffered through the man-made disaster of the Allied bombings of Japan. The objective of the Allied bombing campaign was to destroy the industrial, war-making capability of the Japanese, creating a danger for the POWs because the bombing targets often included the industrial facilities where the POWs were forced to work. Moreover, the facilities where the POWs were usually quartered had no markings to identify those quarters as POW camps. Nevertheless, for the POWs, the bombings were great morale boosters, evidence that the Allies were winning and that the war would soon be over.

By 1945, with the Allies enjoying almost complete control of the air, the bombing raids became more frequent and destructive, including the horrific firebombing raids. Goodliffe recalled watching a US bombing raid over Tokyo:

The first bombing raid they had in Tokyo came right over the top of our steel mill [the Osaka Zosen Steel Mill]. First, they dropped flare bombs, and then they dropped firebombs. After those firebombs get started good, they came over and dropped high explosives and just blew the flames all over. Well, Tokyo was built of lots of little shacks, and that night they burned out an area about a mile wide and 10 or 15 miles long. They had over 150,000 casualties reported by the guards in the mill that night. They used the Osaka Zosen Steel Mill as a Red Cross after that raid.[39]

Hamblin wrote that by mid-June they saw more and more friendly planes each day and could hear the bombing of distant cities. Then, on August 8, 1945, they became the target:

We were all out of the factory and inside the camp when the air raid siren sounded. The first bomb hit something near the center of the city and blew it sky high. From there the planes worked a systematic pattern until our camp was reached from the west. A barracks which looked the same as ours, but housed Korean workers, was bombed. According to the pattern, we should have been next, but they skipped us and hit the factory where no prisoners were working at the time. Then they approached from the south, systematically bombing until they came to our camp. Again, we were spared, and the buildings to the north were hit. The raid had started about 8:00 p.m., and the last bombs dropped shortly after midnight.[40]

According to Hamblin, “there was [not] a man in that camp at that time, who didn’t feel in his heart that we had been protected by ‘Divine Providence.’”[41]

The POWs’ hope for Allied victory and liberation was tempered, however; the Japanese Army intended to kill them all if the Americans invaded Japan. Patterson knew a friendly Christian guard who warned Patterson that if there were ever a siren signaling guards to move to the front, “You want to hide because the Japanese soldiers will kill you. They don’t want to leave anybody alive here when they leave this camp.”[42]

Similarly, Ralf Wilson—who was at a plant in Toyama, Japan, during the last days of the war—later recalled:

Three months before the Japanese surrendered, we were called together by the camp commander. He was a graduate of Stanford University and spoke excellent English. He said, “You should prepare to die, because the Americans, being foolish, will probably try to invade Japan. The first time an American sets his foot on shore, my orders are to kill every one of you. We will fight to the last man. So why should we die, and you live? So you will die, and then maybe we will die.” That was the most frightening news we had heard.[43]

Notes

[1] Patterson, “Interview,” 11; Rohlfing, “Carl D. Rohlfing,” 2; Center for Research, Allied POWS under Japanese, Nagoya Branch #5 Yokkaichi, American Rescue Roster, http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/Nagoya/nag_5_yokkaichi/nag_05_yanks.html. The rosters generally reflect those in the camp at the end of the war. Hansen, Larsen, Lloyd Parry, Patterson, Rohlfing, and Vance are listed on the roster for this camp, although Hamblin and Christensen are not listed. Christensen wrote that he and one hundred other POWs were transferred in May 1945 to another camp in Tayoma. Christensen, “My Life Story,” 22. Hamblin was likely transferred as well. He wrote that he was later separated from Hansen, suggesting that Hamblin was at this camp at least initially. Hamblin, “My Experience,” 24. Patterson refers to Christensen being with him at that camp. Patterson, “Interview,” 38.

[2] Patterson, “Interview,” 38.

[3] Center for Research, Allied POWS under Japanese, Nagoya 11B POW Camp American (48 men) roster, http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/Nagoya/nag_11_nihon_soda_iwase/nag_11_yanks.html (listing Wilson on the roster).

[4] Center for Research, Allied POWS under Japanese, Nagoya POW Camp No 11 (Iwase) Nihon Soda SCAP Investigation Report, 29 January 1946, http://www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/Nagoya/nag_11_nihon_soda_iwase/nag_11_scap_investigation.html.

[5] Bray, “War Memories,” 23–25; Goodliffe, “Recollections,” 11–14.

[6] Center for Research, Allied POWS under Japanese, Roster, “Korea (Chosen) POW Camp: Jinsen “Inchon,” http://mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/other/korea-main.html (showing Davey on Jinsen camp roster); Lawton, Some Survived, 223, 227–28.

[7] Heimbuch, “Lucky One,” 94; see Jacobsen, We Refused to Die, 187–89.

[8] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 22; Jacobsen, We Refused to Die, 189 (also noting POWs were required to learn Japanese drills).

[9] Christensen, “My Life Story,” 19; Christensen, “Two Pieces of Paper, That Saved Me” Ensign, February 1991.

[10] Christensen, “My Life Story,”19–20.

[11] Heimbuch, “Lucky Ones,” 93–94.

[12] Christensen, “My Life Story,” 20.

[13] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 22; East, “Army Life,” 19; Heimbuch, “Lucky Ones,” 94–95.

[14] Christensen, “My Life Story,” 20, 22.

[15] See, for example, Jacobsen, We Refused to Die, 195 (dangerous conditions in coal mine); Hamblin, “My Experience,” 22 (working with sulfuric acid); Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, chapters 5–7 (description of the dangerous conditions at various industrial facilities).

[16] Goodliffe, “Recollections,” 12.

[17] Bray, “War Memories,” 25.

[18] Hamblin, “My Experiences,” 24.

[19] Lawton, Some Survived, 229; Springgay, “Davey,” 34.

[20] Patterson,” Interview,” 11.

[21] Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 97.

[22] Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 97; Goodliffe, “Recollections,” 12; Jacobsen, We Refused to Die, 188–89.

[23] Holmes, Unjust Enrichment, 48 (quoting Harold Feiner, a POW in Japan).

[24] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 24.

[25] Patterson, “Interview,” 37.

[26] Thomas M. Fairbanks, email message to author, September 14, 2016.

[27] Goodliffe, “Recollections,” 13.

[28] Goodliffe, “Recollections,” 14. Hansen also spoke of having had bamboo driven under his fingernails. Thomas M. Fairbanks, email message to author, September 14, 2016.

[29] Bray, “War Memories,” 25–26. Jacobsen also wrote of being severely beaten and tortured by guards. Jacobsen, We Refused to Die, 199, 202–05.

[30] Heimbuch, Lucky Ones, 97; Bray, “War Memories,” 24 (friendship with female lathe operator in steel mill); Jacobsen, We Refused to Die, 195–97 (developed “respectful” relationship with civilian overseer but encountered another with a vicious temper); Patterson, “Interview,” 11 (“those that hadn’t been in the service were pretty good”).

[31] Christensen, “Two Pieces of Paper.”

[32] Lawton, Some Survived, 223.

[33] Lawton, Some Survived, 227.

[34] Lawton, Some Survived, 230.

[35] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 24; East, “Army Life,”19.

[36] Thomas M. Fairbanks, email message to author, September 14, 2016. In relating this incident, Hansen did not mention the time or place. The author includes it here because it seems most likely to have occurred at this time when Hansen was likely unable to walk due to the effects of beriberi, and because others report that at this time books were being confiscated by the Japanese. See East, “Army Life,” 19.

[37] East, “Army Life,” 20.

[38] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 23; Christensen, “My Life Story,” 20; Wilson, in Courage in a Season of War, 326.

[39] Goodliffe, “Recollections,” 12–13.

[40] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 25.

[41] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 25.

[42] Patterson, “Interview,” 9.

[43] Wilson, in Courage in a Season of War, 327.