Voyage Nine
SS Sturdy Beggar - Page 4
While we were in the Philippines some Army officers had come aboard and taken a couple of barrels of fog oil ashore. We were told that they experimented modifying it - adding stuff to it, to make it useful for other purposes. They found out with additives they could fuel Japanese fishing boats or even use it for heating oil as winter would be coming soon. So finally after they figured out some use for our cargo, that's how we got to leave the Philippines and go into Japan.
The Official Log-Book shows that the ship finally sailed from Manila on October 19, 1945. We had been waiting there about two months and the crew was very happy to be finally leaving. We sailed North with the Seventh Fleet. It wasn't a convoy, we were sailing with the Navy, with all kinds of warships. The only cargo we got rid of before we got to Japan were several barrels of oil that a cruiser took off us. She steamed up right along side and we transferred the oil barrels over to her deck. After a few days sailing we broke away from the Navy and pulled into Yokohama, Japan all by ourselves.
While in Yokohama we had a drunken escapade - now remember we were still kids and the oldest of us were in their early twenties. One night as several of us were coming back to the ship - I can't remember for sure who all was with me. For certain, a guy named Weiss from Houston was. He was over 300lbs and could hardly walk because he was so fat. We called him "Heavy". And he was a rich kid, his folks owned jewelry stores in Houston. He instigated this spree that could have gotten us all killed or at least in a hell of a lot of trouble. There was a little steam engine sitting on the tracks at the dock. It was a little switch engine and it looked to me like a miniature train - a toy train. It didn't look like any American train that I had ever seen and I had worked for the railroad. Maybe it was a narrow gauge engine. Anyway, Heavy Weiss suggested that we steal it. Well, borrow it - take it for a joyride. He was deck crew and he goaded the engine room guys into seeing if they could get it steamed up. He was daring them. He said if they could run a ship they ought to be able to run a dinky piece of machinery like that. We got it fired up and somebody figured out how to make it go, and off we went at midnight.
We had no idea where we were going. We drove it more than several miles, I don't how how far we went, until we came to a small town that was the end of the tracks. I remember we were in foot hills near Mt. Fuji. It was a pretty night, so we got a spectacular view of its snowy peak. After a while we decided to go back but we couldn't figure out how to turn the damn thing around - all the switches were padlocked. So we drove the train backwards all the way back to Yokohama and some how got to exactly where we had started from. We parked the engine where we had found it, shut it down and boarded the ship. The next day when when we woke up - all hung over - it dawned on us that we could have hit another train or ran through a closed switch and killed ourselves. At the least we could been arrested by the MP's or by the Japanese authorities. But it was a time of chaos and if anybody saw us maybe they figured that we were authorized to be running the train. I'm not sure the Japanese just then would have questioned a bunch of Americans. We were damn lucky that nothing bad happened.
We went all over Japan. The main island isn't that big and if you were American you could get on a train and ride free. The Japanese wouldn't question an American. Japan is a beautiful place. What I saw was beautiful - mountains, rich farm land and picturesque towns. Everything was kept very neat. We had sailed past Nagasaki and I went into Tokyo. They wouldn't let anyone around Nagasaki. But Japan wasn't bombed like the places that I saw in Europe. We didn't get island bases to bomb Japan until some months before the war ended, ( Germany was bombed regularly for over four years. ); and they had used precision bombing. Tokyo had plenty of damage. There would be many square blocks completely gone and then whole areas with no damage. Sometimes just a few square blocks gone and the houses around just fine. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were off limits and of course that devastation was complete. Some industrial towns were bombed out but many of the old towns that I passed through were not extensively damaged.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that we had to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. When we came into Yokohama, from what I saw there and around Tokyo, they had defenses made out of corrugated metal with machine guns in them. They hadn't yet disarmed the police or army and everything was still in place. I didn't see any formidable emplacements like I saw in Europe. Everywhere that I went all I saw was old people, young women and children. I don't think they had all that much left to fight with. I think that its a bunch of crap that we had to drop those bombs. I believe that we could have gotten them to surrender without dropping atomic bombs on them.