POW recalls bombing of Nagasaki - Andy Arends glad to be alive, helping others
Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - In the summer of 1945, at Camp 17 not far from Nagasaki, Japan, POW
Andy Arends propped his left arm up on a coal cart track. A fellow prisoner, a man named Hunt, took a swing at his arm
with a four-foot length of two-inch pipe. The pipe bounced off. He would go to almost any extent to temporarily get out of the physical pain and danger of working in a Japanese coal mine."Man, it hurt like the Dickens," Arends recalled. "I said, "Hunt, is that as hard as you can hit?' He said, "Lay it down there again.' I laid it
down and turned my head."
Arends laughs when he tells stories like this in his mobile home in San Dimas. Jo, his wife of just a few years, says it's because he's happy to be alive, to have made it home after three and a half years as a prisoner of war.
"I shouldn't laugh," he said. "But it is kind of funny." To the 85-year-old Arends, a tall man with a normally somber face, it's funny that someone as undeserving as himself evaded death time and again."I was a very wicked man. Nobody wanted to be around me. Why in the world God would spare my life so many times, I never really understood," he said. "But now I know it." By Arends' reckoning, God was giving him a second chance, and a third, and innumerable more.
In early 1942, Arends was a private manning an anti-aircraft battery at Fort Corregidor in the Philippines, defending Manila Bay. By that time, Arends says, he was unable to tell the truth, swore all the time and had several run-ins with the law. But his personal faults were the least of his concerns at the time. The fort was unprepared for the ensuing Japanese onslaught, and it wasn't long before all 6,000 to 7,000 American defenders were captured. Arends was soon on his way to his first stop, Camp Cabanatuan, in the Philippines.
There, Arends' diet consisted of rice laced with an unhealthy portion of weevils."A lot of people, they would say, "I ain't gonna eat that.' They ain't with us anymore," Arends said. "The only thing to do to live was eat it." So, it is not surprising that it wasn't long before Arends and the majority of the prisoners at Camp Cabanatuan came down with amoebic dysentery. It was almost certainly a death sentence, as the camp was nearly absent of medical personnel and facilities. Arends, standing nearly 6 feet tall, shed weight as his body shed water. He didn't know it at the time, but in his pocket Arends carried his own circuitous salvation in the form of a pair of vials he'd secreted away during the confusion at Corregidor. Having no idea what they were, he showed the vials to a
doctor performing surgeries in the prison camp. "He said they were morphine," Arends said. "I said, "Here, take it, it's yours.'"The losses to dysentery grew worse. Thirty to 40 prisoners died every night. At just 89 pounds, Arends began to think his number was up.
But then the doctor, the same one to whom Arends had given the vials of morphine, showed up with several doses of medication to cure
the dysentery. "The doc actually had in his hands the lives of a few people. Who is he going to give it to? So help me, I was one of them," Arends said, his voice tainted with equal parts gratitude and guilt. The medicine did its work, and Arends gained enough weight to earn him another leg in his painful journey. He was on his way to Camp 17 in Japan.He and 1,800 other prisoners well enough to make the journey boarded a former cavalry stable ship for what they expected to be a journey of a few weeks. The "Mate Mate Maru", a moniker the prisoners used that translates to "wait ship," would take 63 days to reach the Land of the Rising Sun.
The ship was part of a flotilla of Japanese vessels sailing home in waters patrolled by American submarines. During the first week of the voyage, the ship sailed into the path of a typhoon. Without ballast to keep it steady, the recently converted cavalry ship was ill-prepared for
he storm-induced swells. "For about four days, this horse manure is sailing past your head all the time." Arends paused for another fit of laughter. "It wasn't pretty." Then one of the ships' aging boilers blew, and the crew had to stop to patch it up while the rest of the flotilla steamed ahead. "I said, "There goes all our protection,'" Arends remembered.But it turned out to be a blessing. Days later a bedraggled group of ships returned, the flotilla having come under fire from American attack submarines. The dodgy boiler had likely saved Arends' life, and by the time the Mate Mate Maru arrived at Camp 17 near Nagasaki,
all but one of the 1,800 prisoners aboard had made it to Japan.
Camp 17 was near a coal mine, and the prisoners at the camp worked the mine to free up Japanese citizens for the war effort. Arends was prisoner No. 1221. On the first day of his imprisonment, a guard ordered him and the rest of the men to call out their numbers. Arends did his best but got it wrong, ignorant that the Japanese word for "two" changed pronunciations after single digits. The guard decided to make him an example, his teaching tool a ...Little League-sized baseball bat. "He put me out in front of the men and showed me what they could expect if they didn't know their number in Japanese," Arends said. "He massaged me up one side and down the other. I bet he beat on me for three or four minutes. He almost killed me. That was my introduction to Japan."His next introduction was to forced labor. After a minutes-long ride in a mining cart, Arends endured hours of back-breaking labor mining coal, nine days out of 10. Rest came on flea-ridden straw mats. Nourishment came from rice, seaweed, whale blubber, dog meat and the occasional piece of dry bread.
It was during the first couple of days in the mine that he was approached by a fellow American named Shipley, who
introduced Arends to a practice the prisoners devised to escape work detail.Shipley wanted Arends to break his arm, but Arends couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, Arends suggested hitting
Shipley in the back with a rock to make it seem as though he'd been injured in a minor cave-in. Shipley turned his back to Arends, who - away from the eyes of the guards - brought a rock down on his back a dozen times, rending flesh and
drawing blood. Staggering, Shipley went to display his injuries to the guards, who took him away. Unfortunately for Shipley, the Japanese didn't buy the ruse. "Shipley didn't come back," Arends said. "They probably asked him who did it, but he didn't tell them. Shipley defended me to the death." Note: Shipley did survive, passed away 4 June 1995Simulated cave-ins weren't the only threat to life and limb. At any moment, the coal caves could genuinely collapse,
either crushing the POWs outright or trapping them to face death by suffocation. Once, Arends asked his group leader, Wakayama,
if he could relieve himself. Wakayama pointed to a rickety section of the mine. Arends did as he was told, and was at his most vulnerable
when the mine started collapsing around him. Instead of running back toward his group, Arends headed the other way, where he knew of a second way out. Clear of the cave-in, Arends circled to find Wakayama and the others in his group musing solemnly about his death."I walked up behind them and I said, "Boy, that was a lot of noise,'" Arends said, unable to contain his laughter.
"They turned around, and there I stood, their eyes went wide, their mouths flew open. They thought they saw a ghost."A second cave-in, which he says he had no right to survive, gave him the first inkling that greater forces were at work. He and several men were chipping away at the coal, deep inside a spur of the labyrinthine caves, when the rocks began falling again. They made a run for it, |but the rocks caught up to them, ushering Arends to what he thought was certain doom.
"But then I woke up, and I was lying on a rock, just out of the cave-in," he said. "When I came to, the dust had just settled. The Japanese were standing there with their mouths open."It wasn't until three years into his stay at Camp 17 that Arends gave in to the lure of intentional injury to escape the mines. He enlisted Hunt, who failed in his first attempt to shatter Arends' arm. The taunt Arends delivered did the job, and by the time Hunt was finished, Arends' arm "looked something like a lightning bolt." A pair of Dutch doctors at the camp set the arm, which today bears no evidence of the injury.
Arends spent about a month away from the rocky depths recuperating and helping tend the human waste-fertilized tomato garden outside the fence around his sleeping barracks. He was inside, not long before he was due to have his plaster cast removed and return to work, when a lone American B-29 flew over nearby Nagasaki.
"He went right straight over the top, of course. We thought it was a recon plane," Arends said. Moments after the bomber banked away in its high over flight, a friend rushed into the room. "Jim comes in and said, "A powder dump blew up in the port,'" Arends said. "The guys on the outside of the fence ... they heard a muffled noise, but that's it. We never knew it was an atomic bomb."
He and the others went out and witnessed something Arends will never forget: the strange, double mushroom cloud that has come to embody the destructive reality of the nuclear age. Unlike Hiroshima, where the atomic blast was an air burst that caused far more destruction, the Nagasaki bomb floated by parachute all the way to ground level before igniting. Had it been an air burst as well, Arends and the other prisoners at the camp would have faced shock waves and line-of-sight radiation. As it was, they were safe.
Life at the camp was initially insulated from news of the blast and all its military ramifications. Arends had his cast cut away and reported back for duty. "I swore I was going to get the foot the next night," he said, laughing.
But it was not to be. One day, Arends and the rest of the work details watched one cart-load of miners disappear into the mine, only to be brought up again. The guards assembled the prisoners in the middle of the camp to watch a ritual Arends couldn't understand. Then, much to his and everyone's surprise, the guards abandoned the camp. It wasn't until days later, when a reporter from a Chicago newspaper came into into the camp and explained about the atomic bombings and that the war was over, that he understood.
Webmaster Note: The reporter was George Weller from the Chicago Sun - see book link hereIn the disarray that followed, Arends spent the next few weeks exploring the local area before finding his way to American forces. Not long after, he was on his way home to Hastings, Neb. He lived there for four years, during which he experienced the personal salvation that would make sense of his survival through the war. "It was Oct. 1, 1947," he recalled. "I got a knock on the door.
If I knew it was a preacher, I probably wouldn't have let him in." The preacher, Pugsly by name, asked Arends if he was a happy man. |
Arends answered truthfully that he was not. With Pugsly's guidance, Arends prayed to Jesus Christ, asked to take him into his life.
"I had nothing to lose, you know," Arends said. "I didn't find out till the next day that I had a life change."Arends made the trek to the Inland Valley, working in and eventually owning his own auto body shop in Ontario.
He married, was widowed and remarried, to Jo, a few years back. He retired 15 years ago, and now spends his days
at the California Institution for Men in Chino, where he tries to give inmates - men not unlike himself at Camp 17 six decades ago - the gift Pugsly gave him. It's the least he can do, God having granted him another chance at happiness, he says."From that day (in 1947) to this, I don't cuss, swear, nothing," he said. "And I've been a happy man."
NOTE: Sadly we make note that Andy passed away on 02 October 2008