Word: takasago
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...When the Japanese hospital ship Takasago Maru was intercepted removing the sick and wounded from Wake Island "the Japs didn't have any magazines aboard and very much like to have TIME, LIFE if you have, please," reports Lieutenant Frank Huggins, Tokyo-raised language officer aboard the U.S.S. Murray. The destroyer grudgingly parted with one dog-eared copy of LIFE from the ward room and several copies of TIME'S Pony Edition printed in Honolulu. "The Japs bowed an eloquent thanks with a good deal of unnecessary, hissing...
...White climbed the ladder, the Takasago's grinning captain held out his hand to help him aboard. He wanted to cooperate fully in the search, he said; he was on 'his way to bypassed, isolated Wake Island 300 miles to the south, to evacuate 960 sick and 14 wounded Jap soldiers. He offered his visitors coffee, tea, cider, sake and whiskey-all declined by the Americans...
...searchers found the Takasago "a very second-rate ship" by U.S. standards -insanitary, inadequately staffed, poorly equipped, and with food and medicine for only about 150 of the nearly 1,000 men it was going to pick up. Only the hospital space was comparatively clean; everywhere else there were dirt and cockroaches...
...Takasago's patients were more dead than alive. A Navy doctor estimated that 15% of them had been so underfed that they would never reach Japan. Another 15% had tuberculosis. The rest were in varying stages of emaciation, suffering from pellagra, beri beri and scurvy. To treat them, the Japs had no plasma or whole blood, no penicillin, sulfa or synthetic vitamins...
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