From the viciousness of his Japanese guards to the joy of receiving a Red Cross package, William Galbraith recorded his experiences as a prisoner of war in a shorthand diary disguised as ‘Dear Billy’ letters to his young son.
For 38-year-old U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander William Jackson Galbraith, 14 August 1945, the day Japan agreed to surrender, passed like any other day at Rokuroshi, a prisoner of war camp high in the mountains near Honshu’s west coast. Six feet tall but weighing just 98 pounds after three-plus years of enemy captivity (so thin he could encircle his thigh with the fingers of one hand), Galbraith awoke at 0500 to work at a three-acre sweet potato patch, virtually the sole food source for Rokuroshi’s inmates. After several more days, the POWs learned, without explanation, there would be no work. Then, finally, the camp commandant assembled the prisoners for another speech. But this time his interpreter’s translation was concise: “The commandant says now that the war is over, he hopes we will all be friends.”
A Knoxville, Tennessee, native and 1929 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Galbraith excelled in arms-only rope climbing, then both a collegiate and Olympic gymnastic event. In the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, he won Silver, climbing a 25-foot rope in 7.0 seconds. Though afterward Galbraith scarcely reflected on his stamina and strength, they undoubtedly meant much in the ordeal ahead.
When war broke out, Galbraith was air defense officer on board the USS Houston (CA-30). Commissioned in 1930, the Houston was for many years the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Fleet flagship. President Franklin D. Roosevelt rode the cruiser on four long voyages during the 1930s, earning her a reputation as the “President’s own.” By escaping the Japanese onslaught for 84 days immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, the ship earned another. After 10 December, when crewmen first heard Tokyo Rose announce the Houston’s demise, they began calling their ship the “Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast.”
In mid-January 1942, the Houston joined American, British, Dutch, and Australian (ABDA) warships defending the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia.) On 4 February, in the Flores Sea, the Houston sustained her first battle damage: an aerial bomb blast to the after turret, killing 46. Though thus robbed of beloved shipmates and considerable offensive punch, the Galloping Ghost survived the devastating 27 February Battle of the Java Sea. But her luck ended two days later when she sank during the Battle of Sunda Strait. Galbraith, along with 367 other Houston survivors (a third of her 1,168-man crew), washed ashore on Java.
Within days, these men joined a POW roster that numbered 132,000 Allied airmen, sailors, and soldiers (35,000 were Americans). Most fell into captivity early, as Japan captured Wake, Guam, Singapore, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. Tellingly, POW survival rates approximated the Houston’s. Overall, more than one in four Japanese-held Allied POWs died in captivity. Americans fared worse: 13,000 died, more than 37 percent. Thousands succumbed to death marches before ever reaching POW camps. Thousands more arrived only to die from illness and starvation or, more directly, by beating, clubbing, shooting, stabbing, beheading, burning, even ritualistic cannibalism. Some 60,000, including scores of Houston survivors, were enslaved to construct a 258-mile mountain and jungle railway link between Bangkok, Thailand, and Rangoon, Burma (present-day Myanmar).
While Galbraith avoided these particular fates, he and fellow POWs still faced arduous years of captivity. As the war progressed—and increasingly turned against Japan—many prisoners were relocated to Home Island POW facilities, mostly work camps near shipyards, manufacturing facilities, or mines.
Altogether, Galbraith survived four separate camps, documenting his experiences in a diary. While he was hardly alone in keeping—and concealing—a diary, two features stand out. First, Galbraith wrote in shorthand, a skill learned from a Navy yeoman POW, enabling him to write lengthier entries more easily hidden from captors. Second, Galbraith styled his entries as “letters” to his five-year-old son William Jr. (The entries begin 6 January 1944 and end 25 March 1945 with apparent gaps; additional entries may have been lost in 2000, during Hurricane Isabel.) Galbraith’s “Dear Billy” writings, eventually transcribed, offer a contemporaneous window into Galbraith’s captivity and his hopes for a postwar future.
The morning after the Houston’s sinking found Galbraith and about 40 other crewmen surrounded by Japanese ships unloading troops and supplies on western Java. Enemy sailors fished them out of the water. Hitched to pony carts and prodded at bayonet tip to trudge an asphalt road that ground bare feet raw, Galbraith and his companions hauled supplies and ammunition to inland depots for three days and four nights. Afterward, the exhausted men were transferred to Serang, the largest town west of Batavia (present-day Jakarta), where, for five weeks, 1,500 ABDA prisoners were packed into the town’s municipal jail and fed starvation rations as they awaited their fates. During this stay, Japanese military police, or Kempeitai, brutally interrogated Houston officers. Perhaps because Japan had declared the Galloping Ghost sunk so often, interrogators would not accept they were Houston survivors.
Finally, in early April, Galbraith and six other Houston officers, along with five Royal Australian Navy (RAN) officers, embarked on board a prison ship bound for Japan. One postwar accounting asserts that more than 20,000 POWs died on board Japanese “hell ships,” victims of starvation, disease, and drowning. During their particular voyage, however, Galbraith’s group received decent treatment. As he subsequently confided in a Dear Billy entry: “[I]t was so much better than the jail in Java that we were very satisfied.” Perhaps because Japanese captivity offered such a steady diet of maltreatment, each morsel of reprieve became gourmet fare.
On 4 May, after reaching Moji, a port at the juncture of Japan’s Kyushu and Honshu islands, the POWs, accompanied by naval guards, rode by train about 600 miles northeast to Ofuna, 30 miles southwest of Tokyo. There they entered Ofuna Navy Camp, a secret interrogation center where, as author Laura Hillenbrand described in Unbroken, “‘high-value’ captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented and tortured to divulge military secrets.”
Ofuna captives learned they were “unarmed combatants” without rights under international law. Guards immediately drove home Ofuna’s regimen of isolation and submission. Captives were forbidden to speak to anyone except guards, to put their hands in their pockets, or even make eye contact with other inmates. Strictures covered every move: bathroom visits, requests for drinking water, folding blankets, even buttoning clothes. “My most outstanding impression,” Galbraith recalled in a postwar statement, “was the viciousness of the guards.”
Ofuna became Japan’s notorious “Torture Farm,” but, according to Galbraith, “no one died while I was there.” (Eight POWs later would.) As camp inmates adjusted their behavior, days might pass without gratuitous punishment. Galbraith spent much time scratching Japanese words and English equivalents on his cell wall. For good reason: “When your jailor speaks only Japanese and shouts orders at you and if you do not respond instantly . . . he knocks you down . . . believe me, you learn the language fast!”
This relative tranquility ended one day after evening muster when prisoners again were ordered to form up. An RAN lieutenant commander named Lipscomb had “insulted” the camp commandant by smirking when the commandant falsely claimed the sinking of the USS Saratoga (CV-3). Guards took turns beating Lipscomb into unconsciousness then pummeled an Australian Navy doctor. “Ceremonial” beatings—usually at night—continued: an RAN officer for trying to explain something in English; a U.S. Navy officer for drinking hot bathwater; another American officer for not taking the nearest meal-time rice bowl. In all, Galbraith estimated, dozens of such public beatings happened during his seven-month stay.
These did not include the individual tortures conducted by what Galbraith called the “Questioners”—Tokyo Kempeitai agents. Because the barracks were within earshot of the guardhouse where interrogations were conducted, prisoners being questioned spoke loudly so other POWs could overhear and devise their own responses. As best as possible, Galbraith responded vaguely to questions concerning the Houston’s weaponry and ammunition. Captives refusing to answer were beaten into unconsciousness, revived, then beaten again.
Winter’s onset found most prisoners ill-clad. (Galbraith wore an “unlined blue coat, marine trousers and a light golf sweater”—castoffs from the U.S. embassy.) Men complaining about the cold were double-timed into exhaustion. Rations remained woefully insufficient because guards routinely stole food from the galley and warehouse. Galbraith estimated his weight dropped under 122 pounds, 35 below his prewar average.
That December, Torture Farm authorities finally shifted Galbraith to Wharf Branch Camp (Tokyo No. 1 Branch Camp). Established that November, the Kawasaki City facility supplied forced labor to Mitsui Wharf Storage Company. POWs were housed in what Galbraith called a “dark, damp, dirty, unheated ‘Go Down.’” Both enlisted and officers initially were assigned to work at Mitsui. When officers refused, citing Geneva Conventions, they were made to stand in the cold until they relented, “volunteering” instead for light manufacturing work or kitchen and dispensary chores.
Enlisted POWs received work uniforms but after daily exposure to the elements, they returned to Wharf Branch soaked and miserable. Officers received no uniforms, but in January, every POW received a lice-ridden overcoat. By his own reckoning, Galbraith arrived at Wharf Branch “a mental wreck, my memory almost gone.”
Overall conditions there were somewhat better than at Ofuna, but inadequate winter clothing and close quarters left POWs disease-prone. Stricken by pneumonia, Galbraith entered the camp’s “hospital,” a building corner partitioned by plywood. During his three-and-a-half-month confinement, Galbraith also contracted dysentery, beriberi, and chilblains. He estimated that 46 hospitalized POWs died, largely because Japanese authorities refused to distribute readily available medicines. Once his health was somewhat restored, Galbraith joined other officers operating sewing machines and fabricating men’s undergarments.
Eventually, Wharf Branch’s cold and damp gave way to unbearable summer heat worsened by mosquitos and flies breeding in overflowing latrines and sunken barges in a nearby canal. Lacking protective netting, many prisoners succumbed to dysentery while virtually all suffered diarrhea and malaria. Rations were ampler—according to Galbraith, “about three times the size of those at Ofuna” —but nutritionally deficient. POWs unable to work endured half-rations.
Wharf Branch’s punishments were less savage but no more justified or predictable. Infractions meant slaps (“hand-talking” in POW parlance), stick blows, knock-downs, even severe beatings. Galbraith believed Commandant Masao Nishizawa (a navy lieutenant commander eventually hanged as a war criminal) and Private Kamara, his interpreter, “would make regulations . . . for the expressed [sic] purpose of being able to strike prisoners.”
In Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand describes how “[e]very captive longed to be transferred to a POW camp where, it was said, men were registered with the Red Cross and could write home and enjoy vastly better living conditions. Of all POW camps, Zentsuji was rumored to be the best.” Though Ofuna interrogators spoke of Zentsuji as a “plush” reward, Hillenbrand details contrary conditions: a diet so poor that starved captives resorted to eating weeds, drinking water contaminated with human waste, widespread dysentery, appalling weight loss. While Hillenbrand’s litany of Zentsuji horrors mostly holds true, Galbraith’s Dear Billy diary entries (at least from January 1944 to March 1945) paint a more nuanced portrait.
Zentsuji (officially, Hiroshima No. 1 Branch Camp) adjoined a market town in northwest Kagawa Prefecture, close to the Inland Sea. Its first captives, arriving mid-January 1942, were U.S. personnel (military, civilian, diplomatic; male and female) captured on Guam. Commander Donald T. Giles (himself a POW diarist) described how prisoners were confined in several two-storey wooden barracks divided into rooms notionally heated by tiny charcoal-burning hibachis and furnished with wall-mounted sleeping shelves, a mess table, and two benches.
The presence of civilian personnel, Navy nurses, and even a two-month-old infant complicated matters for camp administrators, Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) reservists. Moreover, as the Home Islands’ first formally acknowledged POW camp, Zentsuji was meant to showcase Japan’s “fair treatment” of POWs. In the months ahead, however, as noncombatants departed Zentsuji for repatriation (in exchange for U.S.-interned Japanese nationals) and more military POWs arrived, conditions deteriorated. A starvation diet, initially about 1,500 daily calories, became the norm. When POWs cultivated vegetables and raised rabbits to supplement rations, the Japanese raided gardens and confiscated rabbits for their own consumption. And while letters—limited to just 25 words—were allowed, incoming and outgoing mail was routinely slowed or altogether withheld.
In May 1944, about five months after Galbraith reached Zentsuji, he described the prison to Billy as “a model Japanese camp [with] many more recreational facilities than any other, such as [a] portable Victrola and classical records, some books. . . . I am able to read two or three good books a week (what a privilege).” These “recreational facilities,” courtesy of the shuttered U.S. embassy in Tokyo, seemed to figure prominently in preserving Galbraith’s (and others’) intellect and morale. The 500-book library spurred the establishment of “Zentsuji College” in which POWs taught engineering, languages, business, law, history, psychology, horticulture, and more.
As Galbraith languished at Zentsuji, his Dear Billy entries from mid-1944 on mirror increasing hopes for U.S. victory coupled with worries that looming starvation or retribution by Japanese guards might yet put survival beyond reach. On 2 July, Galbraith’s entry optimistically suggests camp treatment “is getting better as it becomes more evident that we are going to win.”
An optimistic 16 July entry, coincident with emerging news about the U.S. invasion of Saipan, reads: “In today’s paper . . . They [Japanese editors] said that they were about to lose the war . . . due to lack of fighting-will of the people.” Just a day later, however, Galbraith shares how Allied success could exact consequences: “Yesterday all the Japs . . . became very much worse than usual. . . . We knew that something had gone wrong for them.” And those consequences invariably involved hunger. “The food now is just not enough. I am so weak that it is a great effort for me to go up steps.”
Indeed, from July into November, as U.S. forces secured the Marianas, established footholds in the Philippines, and strangled Japan’s logistics, the food situation got ever worse: “Today [12 October] we are only getting . . . about 1,250 [rice] calories plus . . . 100 calories from the greens we get.” One metric of Galbraith’s eroding well-being was weight. On 11 May, he weighed in at 134, two pounds up from Ofuna. But then he slid: 129 on 21 July, 126 on 21 August, and 121 on 17 September.
By 19 November, Galbraith weighed just 116 pounds, but hope nonetheless shone through. As he had written on 11 November, a POW sweet potato crop (“over 5400 kilos”) had come in and “we have been having very good meals lately.” Moreover, “We are . . . hoping that some Red Cross supplies will be in soon.” The welcome potato harvest and the prospect of Red Cross succor prompted reflection, forward thinking, even patriotic pride. On 5 November: “I am . . . studying . . . public speaking . . . so that I will be able to go back and say that this time here has not been wasted.” Then, on 8 November: “I think that life is like a road that we make up as we go along and which we [go] back over very often.” Finally, on 30 November: “I am writing a poem about America and how it has changed from a carefree boy who was willing to keep to himself to that of a strong man out to get what he can from the world.”
Beginning late November 1944, optimism swelled to new levels amid a cornucopia of Red Cross packages. “Last night,” Galbraith wrote on 21 November, “a 100-man working party [got] the Red Cross packages.” Then, on 23, 24, and 25 November, after receiving 950 packages: “You cannot imagine how the spirit of the camp has changed. . . . We are all like children with new toys. . . . Red Cross packages have changed . . . a group of derelicts into . . . tidy urchins.”
With packages arriving biweekly, euphoria brightened the captives’ holiday season. On 5 December: “Things have taken on a very placid atmosphere because of the Red Cross food. Everyone has enough to eat.” On 2 January 1945, the POWs even enjoyed a lavish (if somewhat odd) celebratory New Year feast: “A very good dinner made by putting pate flavored with green peppers and cream in the rice and a good whipping made of cheese and butter and cream placed over it.”
Ever more encouraging war news accompanied full stomachs. The 1 December entry: “We heard that about 70 planes had raided Tokyo.” On 2 December: “The Jap guards say that Tokyo is in bad shape.” On 15 January: “Found out . . . we have landed on Luzon.” As Galbraith wrote on 7 February, even the Japanese guards seemed to be quietly resigning themselves to the inevitable: “Instead of . . . mistreating us they have been much easier. . . . The day of the worst [B-29 bombing] raid they gave us oranges.”
Predictably, however, the “gourmet fare” characterizing Zentsuji captivity from late November 1944 through February 1945 reverted to the “standard fare of maltreatment.” On 1 March came the realization that, once the latest Red Cross packages ran out, “we will really be back as we were . . . beginning to die of starvation.” Then, on 22 March (the last Dear Billy entry), an ominous confirmation: “The Jap colonel [has] been to Tokyo and . . . there [are] no more parcels coming. . . . So, between the bad news about the Red Cross and the good news about the war we are in a strange mood.”
On 24 June, Zentsuji’s 335 U.S. POWs, separated from their ABDA cohorts, began a lengthy trip, mostly by train, northwest via Osaka and Kyoto to remote mountains inland from the Sea of Japan. A torturous, 10-kilometer uphill hike brought them to Rokuroshi, a collection of wooden shacks in a rocky clearing. Japan’s ostensible reason for moving POWs to such remote regions was to protect them from air raids but, as Hillenbrand details in Unbroken, the real motive may have been to isolate them for implementation of a “kill-all” policy—a resolve that no Allied POW survive Japan’s defeat. By several accounts, kill-all D-day was set for 22 August.
More immediately, however, lingering cold and renewed starvation endeavored to winnow the herd. Galbraith became one of many pneumonia victims “quarantined” within a simple rope enclosure. “When they put me inside those ropes,” he recalled, “I was certain I would never come out.” Remarkably, however, all victims survived to receive the Rokuroshi commandant’s proffer of friendship—mere days before the “kill-all” deadline.
Camp guards soon “took off those hard boots and put on the soft slippers,” immediately becoming, in Galbraith’s estimation, “different people.” For their part, fortified by a bounty of B-29 air-dropped food and medicine, the liberated Americans remained at Rokuroshi long enough to accept its formal surrender on 2 September. With assistance from Galbraith and Army Captain Jack D. Boyer, Marine Major Donald Spicer raised a U.S. flag over what was now Camp Mallette—named in honor of Rokuroshi’s sole POW fatality.
Galbraith, promoted to full commander (he would retire as a rear admiral), finally returned to Tennessee in late September and reunited with wife, Gracious, and son, Billy. His shorthand diary returned as well, although, after being hidden from Japanese confiscation for more than a year, it was nearly lost after a Memphis hotel maid mistakenly dropped it down a trash chute.
In his 11 March 1945 Dear Billy entry, Galbraith had written: “Today is your birthday. . . . Just think 8 years ago you were a little new baby . . . you are now a big boy and I expect great things from you.” By the time of his death at age 87 in 1994, Silver Medal Olympian William J. Galbraith could be said to have won Gold. His heroism and perseverance enabled him, over his last four-plus decades, to see his son (who died in January 2016) achieve great things as a journalist, diplomat, and officer in the Central Intelligence Agency.
Author’s phone interview with Harriet Galbraith, widow of William J. Galbraith Jr.
“Biographical Note,” Papers of William J. Galbraith, RADM, USN (Ret), Navy Department Library, Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington, DC (hereafter NHHC).
“Brief description of the Yokohama POW camp known as Tokyo, Branch 2; Period of report Dec 1942, July 1943,” handwritten, signed, undated statement by W. J. Galbraith, Galbraith papers, NHHC.
Galbraith’s postwar testimony to representatives of Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Galbraith papers, NHHC.
Donald T. Giles Jr., ed., Captive of the Rising Sun: The POW Memoirs of Rear Admiral Donald T. Giles (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994).
Shinsho Hanayama, The Way of Deliverance: Three Years with the Condemned Japanese War Criminals (Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016).
Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (New York: Random House, 2010).
Linda Goetz Holmes, Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan’s Mukden POW Camp (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010).
James Hornfischer, Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR’s Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors (New York: Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Hiroshima POW Camp, www.powresearch.jp/en/archive/powlist/camplink.html#hiroshima.
“Letters to Billy” (Galbraith POW diary entries dated between January 6, 1944 and March 25, 1944), Galbraith papers, NHHC.
“Mary Baldwin Professor Relives War Experiences,” The Mirror of Staunton, 4 February 1965.
Gregory F. Michno, Death on the Hellships (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006).
“Navy has played an important part in the life of Galbraith,” The News Leader (Staunton, Virginia), 14 May 1984.
POW Research Network Japan, www.powresearch.jp.
“Retired Navy Admiral Recalls Prisoner Days,” The News Leader (Staunton, Virginia), 15 August 1965.
“Tokyo Dispatch No. 1,” www.mansell.com/pow_resources/camplists/tokyo/tok-01D-yokohama/IMG_0015_yokohama_1D_j-staff.JPG.
Undated transcript of Galbraith postwar statement to representatives of Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, regarding captivity at Ofuna, Galbraith papers, NHHC.