Gene Edwards: What did you see when you walked into Berlin.

Cleveland Harrison: Well, I entered Berlin in the evening. It was dark because when we left uh Frankfurt, the state department cars, they had to take them in a pool, a motor pool in Berlin, and it was the only time I was transported when I was in the Army in a vehicle other than a  airplane or a you know,

Gene Edwards: In comfort.

Cleveland Harrison:  Yeah, two and a half ton truck and in the open usually with no top on it so that you could get out if you were attacked. But we arrived late in the evening and we were driven to a fenced area and our credentials were checked and we were all enlisted personnel. And beautiful apartments as far as the eye could see, modern, no destruction of any kind, assigned to a certain apartment. And when I got there, my friend and colleague from Frankfurt was already there. He had arrived ahead. And here was this nice apartment

Gene Edwards: Amazing.

Cleveland Harrison: Yes, with a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a little art studio, a stairs, upstairs where there were two bedrooms and another little parlor type place and a bathroom with a geyser. I had never seen a geyser. Here’s an Arkansas boy who had rarely been out of the state. And you know, you’re either burning up from the water or you’re freezing because it alternates. But that’s how it started. On a pedestal at the base of the stair was a cigar box full of condoms.

Gene Edwards: Provided by the

Cleveland Harrison: That’s right. And we all were hooray for those condoms, not for their usual use, but we unfolded them and tied them and used them to tie our trousers, you know above our boots.

Gene Edwards: Everybody had to be resourceful.

Cleveland Harrison: Yeah, we were all very resourceful in that.

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Gene Edwards: How, how did your dad learn about the death ship, the, the cruise with the,

Anthony Weller: Well, well

Gene Edwards: It was supposed to be a couple of days and ended up being much longer.

Anthony Weller: Well, this is one of the particularly unknown corners of the war in the pacific and indeed the Japanese entirely out of their military records and even the United States has not given it, as a subject, it’s own corner in our military archives. The Japanese, who had taken a great deal of the Pacific over the decades before and then in the early years of the war, had established a system of leasing merchant ships from companies say like Mitsubishi, which had twenty of them, filling them with prisoners, and shipping these prisoners all over the so called Japanese prosperity sphere to China, to Singapore, to the East Indies, wherever and putting these people to work. About 50,000 and Allied prisoners during the war, traveled by hell ship, as they were called familiarly, at one time or another. The 140,000 Japanese comfort women, you know, the enslaved prostitutes, all traveled this way, and the Asiatic slave labor were shipped around this way. My father in interviewing allied prisoners of war at one particular camp naturally, after he got through finding out what their imprisonment and slave labor in the coal mines had been said, “Well, how did you get here?” And he found to his horror, that this story, which was essentially unknown to the American population at the time, that these men, many of them had been shipped there in the cargo holds of these vessels. And he managed to assemble a narrative of the very last, one of the very last and one of the very worst of these death cruises which involved 1600 men, mainly American officers, being crammed, after several years of imprisonment, in the Philippines and Manila, being crammed into the hold of a ship. And it took seven weeks for them to reach Kyushu and in this time they were largely denied food and water. American forces bombarded one of the ships. In fact, there were really four hell ships in all

Gene Edwards: Right

Anthony Weller: So with the 1600, only about 200 actually made it to Japan, and it’s a horrible story of murder among the men, vampirism, meaning blood drinking, cannibalism, of desperation in the worst possible way, of death by friendly fire. Another unknown fact is that a third of the POWs in the Pacific were killed by friendly fire at sea. And but it was typical of the hell ship trips, and in any event, this story did get through because my father completed it after he’d left Japan and was now under the aegis of Admiral Nimitz, who let it through. And that’s why, that story, though, when it appeared as and eleven part series in the Chicago Daily News, it was heavily edited for some of the more horrific details which I’ve reinserted.

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Gene Edwards: What was, your, your first experience at walking onto the beach at Normandy? Because now you take tours there and you’re there a lot.

Ron Drez: Yeah, in fact and into the Pacific, which brings to mind that I had interviewed Fred O’Levy [sic], who was the copilot on Bockscar that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. On his return flight, they were sidetracked and had to land at Okinawa instead of going all the way back to Tinian. And he said, even then the story had preceded them. People said we heard of these great bombs and the war is going to be over and do you know that the bomb was only the size of a golf ball? This was the how the rumors had begun.

Ron Drez: But walking in these places, standing on Tinian with a fellow who flew on those missions, so it’s on Omaha Beach and Omaha Beach it’s a public beach today. It’s not some pristine setaside that’s not used. The kids in July are out there having a good time. Later in the winter it’s very, very cold and when you walk out there, it’s desolate. It’s just isolated and the waves are breaking and you can stand there and look up at those cliffs and put yourself into the shoes of the men who landed there on that terrible morning and wonder how on earth did they ever make it across. How did anyone live? And as you go through the defensive positions and you see how the Germans had set up the fire, great crisscrossing fire like great windshield washers, that they would just sweep the beach of anything coming and you realize that the plan, like all plans, went awry, and the success at the beach ended up in the hands of the individual NCO sergeant trooper to make a decision of how to deal with this. And they did. Instead of following the plan, which was out of the window, they made do with what they had, climbed those cliffs and defeated the German position. But it’s an awesome place and the cemetery itself, you stand there and you would be inhuman if you were not moved by what you feel there.

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