POW recalls Bataan death march, Nagasaki
By TRAVIS DUNN/Staff Writer
BARSTOW -- Fat Man killed about 45,000 people at Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Kai Martin, a Marine Prisoner of War, was one of the few Americans in the city when it disappeared in a mushroom cloud, and he was one of the few Americans, if not the only one, to crawl out of the nuclear crater alive.
Martin's three years of penal servitude for the Japanese ended that day. His captors, and most of the other prisoners, were vaporized by the blast.
Martin, now 88 and living in retirement in Victorville, doesn't often talk about his war experiences.
"I don't understand why anyone would find this interesting," he said. "I don't think I'm a hero. I just did these things because they had to be done."
This is coming from a man who earned almost every military medal conceivable -- three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, the Distinguished Service Cross and three Brown Stars -- and who tells of his escape not only from Nagasaki, but from the Bataan death march.
At 88 he still able to get around on his own, although he now walks with a cane, and his mind is far more lucid than most people 60 or 70 years his junior. In Martin's battle against old age, old age appears to be losing.
Martin was one of the 13 POWs honored Friday at a luncheon held at the Marine Corps Logistics Base, Barstow. The brief synopsis of Martin's military career provided at the luncheon barely gave a glimpse of the years of horror and violence Martin experienced during World War II, and no mention was made of how Martin finally escaped from captivity in the radioactive fires of Nagasaki.
That's probably because Martin never talks about these things. He wrote a small booklet, "That There Will Be War No More," about 15 years ago. But he only self-published 150 copies, and he still has about 30 of them.
Martin returned to the United States in 1945 weighing 88 pounds, and he is certain that another winter with the Japanese would have killed him. Thanks to his bad behavior as a prisoner, Martin was sent as a slave laborer to Nagasaki -- an assignment that probably saved his life.
First he worked for Mitsubishi, then on underground bomb shelters. He and another prisoner, a Chinese man named Kim, were working in the shelter when Fat Man vaporized the city.
"We were protected," Martin said. "Not that we had the slightest idea what it was. We had never heard of an atom bomb."
The two prisoners initially thought there had been an earthquake. But when they rushed to the surface, they found that the guards "were just evaporated. There wasn't anything left." The factory, which once stood above the shelter, was gone.
The two men walked to the only place they knew -- the prison camp where they spent their nights. Along the way they encountered the living dead -- Japanese fried by radiation, some of them missing limbs, all of them stumbling around like zombies.
Kim may have survived the blast, but he died after stepping on an unexploded bomb, three days before the Japanese surrender. Martin went on alone, living on rice and dried fish that were probably radioactive.
"I don't know. I ate it, and I'm still here," Martin said.
Rescued after a few days by the U.S. Navy, Martin was taken to Okinawa, then to San Francisco. He would settle eventually in Los Angeles, where he worked 30 years in the insurance business and volunteered for a suicide prevention hotline on his spare time. He accumulated doctorates in psychology and philosophy. He married and had three children, and today is a great-grandfather.
But in the spring of 1942, the likelihood of Martin achieving any of these things was almost zero. Martin had originally been drafted into the Army and stationed in Bataan, where the Army surrendered after a brutal Japanese assault. The survivors were then subjected to one of worst war crimes in history.
Martin not only survived the death march, where he saw others prisoners bayoneted and decapitated on the road, but he managed to escape. While his guards were busy with another POW, Martin slid off the road over a ledge. He lay still in the bushes, playing dead, and the death march marched right past him. He escaped to Corregidor in a canoe.
Martin's escape and military experience so impressed a Marine colonel that Martin was immediately transfered from the Army to the Marines as a master gunnery sergeant. Such a transfer was rare back then, Martin said, but possible under the extreme circumstances.
He was stationed at Monkey Point in Corregidor. Again Martin soon found himself in an unlucky position -- the Japanese took Corregidor a month after Bataan fell. Again Martin managed to survive -- he is the only survivor of a unit of 138 men -- only to suffer through more than three years of prison, torture and slave labor.
Martin returned home from Nagasaki filled with an absolute disgust for war, which he calls "the ultimate human stupidity." He is by no means a pacifist; he believes that the U.S. involvement in World War II was a necessary fight against evil regimes. But most of the wars since then strike him as senseless.
"We're still in Korea, we should never have gone to Vietnam, and I don't know why we're in Iraq," he said.
Today Martin, who drives himself around without assistance, works to comfort those scarred by war. He regularly visits, throughout the High Desert, eight families of men killed in Iraq.
And he's still a Marine.
"In the other services you get discharged," said Martin, "but in the Marines, you're a Marine for life."
Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4123 or travis_dunn@link.freedom.com
© 2005 Desert Dispatch. A Freedom Communications Newspaper