Ship of Ghosts (33 page)

One day a
Houston
machinist’s mate named Jack Feliz was thinking how much he’d like a mirror to help him shave when his wish wheeled right into camp. A Japanese soldier drove past the gate to deliver a load of rice. He parked his truck in the middle of the American compound before going in search of a work party, or
kumi,
to unload the rice. Feliz saw the truck’s rearview mirror and
recognized an opportunity. Pack Rat McCone saw a larger windfall at hand. He said, “Hey, Jack, you’ve got a real treasure there. Wait until I get my Forty Thieves, and we can work on that thing.” McCone’s buddies set upon the vehicle like a pit crew. Well equipped with tools, ever handy, and impeccably organized, they got right to work, lifting the truck and inserting concrete blocks under each axle, removing tires (for boots), the hood (for trays and plates), and the windshield (a card table). They stripped it for every piece that had a secondary use: metal, rubber, plastic, glass. In time only its chassis was left, picked like a buffalo carcass on a Cherokee plain. When they were through stripping the vehicle, Pack Rat called “Timber!” and the men pushed the chassis off the blocks and rolled it over to where some other junked vehicles sat. They got rid of the concrete blocks, used brush and bamboo to whisk away the vehicle’s tire tracks, then hid in a nearby bamboo thicket.

When the Japanese driver returned, the sailors were rewarded first by the epithets the horrified soldier hurled at himself—translated loosely: “You dumb bastard! Where’s your truck?”—then by the reaction of his superior, a sergeant, who received the missing vehicle report. A festival of brutality ensued as first a private and then a corporal appeared. Each heard the sergeant’s story and each beat the driver in turn. When they looked around and failed to find the truck, the sergeant was forced to tell the camp commandant, Lieutenant Suzuki, who came over, lined the four of them up—driver, private, corporal, and sergeant—and hammered his doubled-up fists over the top of each head. Suzuki searched for the vehicle himself, at one point pausing and resting a hand on the bed of the very vehicle he was seeking, so thoroughly stripped as to be unrecognizable. Watching from the bamboo, Feliz, McCone, and the other Americans were “just choking ourselves to keep from laughing,” Jack Feliz said. They were relieved the officer hadn’t touched the hot radiator.

As audacious as he was, McCone was bound to get caught every now and then. Once he was collared borrowing a quart of Scotch from the docks. The guards knocked him to the ground and beat him with a bamboo stick, then made him kneel in the gravel with a thick bamboo pole wedged in the pit of his knees. He knelt in that gravel for some six hours with a sign around his neck that said: “This man stole many things.” For about three days afterward, he could
hardly walk. “He was the type of guy that could actually get you in trouble because somewhere, built in with him, Pack Rat had to steal something,” said Marvin Robinson. “And I think he honestly stole it with the intentions of getting caught.” Maybe he had something to prove. The Japanese worked on Pack Rat, then and on other occasions, but they never seemed to get to him. His resourcefulness and guile existed on a plane far removed from the one where beatings mattered.

Y
ou took your chances challenging a system as rigidly hierarchical and ruthless as the Japanese Army. Most of the Americans found the courage on occasion to try. A successful challenge, either public or covert, could inspire. A failed one often stood as a morale-crushing cautionary fable.

In their dual accountability to the Japanese on one hand and to their own men on the other, the Allied officers occasionally walked the edge of a razor blade. The Japanese officers communicated only through them, holding them responsible for discipline, for cleanliness, and for turning out the
kumi
s that labored at the docks. Their men, quite inadvertently, frequently put them in a difficult position by waging a low-level campaign of petty sabotage against their captors.

Lanson Harris, the
Houston
’s enlisted pilot, was not the type to submit meekly to the prisoner’s life. Though quiet and studious, he was unlikely to make, or to want to become, an officer because, as Red Huffman put it, he didn’t have the capacity to swallow baloney. One day the guards sent Harris and some others into Batavia to fill trenches in a city park. Four or five hours on a shovel gave him some painful blisters. When the pilot complained to a guard, he instructed
Harris to hold out his hands. Out came the scissors, off came the top of his blisters, and back to work went Harris.

“Now when you get in a situation like that,” Harris said, “you have to have something to think about. Most of the time we spent thinking about how in some small way we could get back at the guards…. Shortly after the blister-cutting episode some of us were assigned to a detail where we had to fill several fifty-gallon drums with water, build a fire underneath them, heat it, and then the guards would come in in the evening and use it for their hot bath. What they didn’t know was that as we filled them up, all six or eight of us stood around and urinated in the water. When they got in the damn tub it was really nice to stand back and watch them splash this water all over themselves. It really gave you a lift to see something like that.”

They put water into carburetors and generators, stole sugar not only to eat but to pour into oil drums or the gas tanks of vehicles. They loosened the caps on the drums and stacked them so they would leak. “If you had a chance to sabotage, this was uppermost in your mind,” said Paul Papish. “Here again was an opportunity to—what you might say—keep your self-respect.” Among the more dangerous acts of subversion were the efforts by several of the technically minded prisoners to build and operate radios. The twenty-three-year-old radio section chief in the 131st, Jess Stanbrough, had been collecting parts. Like Pack Rat McCone, he was adept at scavenging useful things, always on the lookout for copper wire down by the docks. Since copper’s principal applications included radio construction, it was dangerous contraband to handle.

During the early weeks of captivity, a GE portable AM radio about the size of a small breadbox was smuggled into camp by a Lost Battalion sergeant named Jack Karney. He gave the radio, in a small leatherette case, to Stanbrough, who was proficient with a ham radio, a field transmitter, and Morse code. Stanbrough went right to work repairing the radio, rewinding its oscillator coil for shortwave reception. Before Java capitulated, he had noticed while riding in a command car that the island had no AM reception, so he looked farther afield and at 1,200 megahertz found a signal. On KGEI San Francisco, he heard the voice of William Winters, and Dinah Shore singing. The station, established by General Electric in 1939 for the Treasure Island World’s Fair, would become the model for the Armed Forces Radio Service. It was a principal news source for U.S.
troops in the Philippines, who rebroadcast the signal throughout the region with their thousand-watt transmitter at Bataan until its fall. Before long, Stanbrough was getting BBC newscasts from India and even London.

Soon another radio turned up in camp, a small Zenith, which Stanbrough rewired and concealed in a wooden Velveeta cheese box. Though it had good reception, it was voltage-sensitive and prone to noisy static—much more than a mere annoyance under these circumstances—and so he gave it to the Navy boys. Radioman first class Jerry J. Bunch Jr. kept it running, helped by his old department chief, Harmon P. Alderman.

Stanbrough hid his radio inside the corner post of his bunk and powered it by running a wire into the electric light socket overhead. Knowing the danger the radio would pose were it discovered, he replaced the speaker with some earphones scavenged from the docks and stashed an aerial antenna in the attic of the barracks. His dispatches were given to a POW who worked inside the Japanese camp headquarters and thus had access to typewriters. He typed up the news and circulated a clandestine bulletin that was sneaked into the barracks, read aloud, and burned.

As the Japanese guards grew suspicious of the prisoners’ improved mood, Stanbrough became increasingly careful about sharing news. When the news was bad, he paid a price from his own men too. They often asked him how long he expected them to be in camp. Having heard a broadcast that disclosed the disastrous final tally of the Pearl Harbor attack, Stanbrough told them, “Oh, it looks to me at least six months. We won’t be home by Christmas.” But the result was that “some of the boys would not even speak to me with that much bad news.” Spirits rose when word came of the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Japanese had been only too happy to describe the sinking of the USS
Lexington
in that battle. But the radio brought them the rest of the story: that a Japanese carrier too had gone down in the great fight that saved New Guinea’s Port Moresby from invasion and blunted the Japanese drive to isolate Australia.

The prisoners bucked up their morale however they could. No one knew what the future held, but the structure of the here and now could be made to stand on a foundation of optimism and bracing military routine. One day a
Houston
NCO brought a bit too much gusto to these efforts, pushing things a step too far. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was a U.S. Marine: 1st Sgt. Harley H. Dupler.

Dupler was intense and robust, filling his space like a steel beam anchored in the ground. Feared and respected in equal measure, he had always taken his rank and role seriously. Yet he could relate to his men too. He would share tales about his adventures during the Nicaraguan intervention, and in such idle moments he would allow his men to call him by his first name. He was always full of encouragement. “Hang in there,” he would say. “We’ll make it.” He knew something about team play, having starred on the Marine Corps football squad in the thirties. But when he was on the parade grounds leading them in close order drill, he was only ever Sergeant Dupler. Because the officers were kept in separate barracks and lived apart from their men, his was a crucial leadership role. The two Marine officers were no longer with the men. Lieutenant Gallagher was in Japan, and Lieutenant Barrett was with the Navy officers.

One morning after
tenko,
in the dusty clearing between the barracks used by the Navy enlisted men and the one used by the Texas artillerymen of the 131st, Sergeant Dupler called his Marines to attention. He had decided to lead them in close order drill. It was a bid to buck up sagging morale at a time when the liberation he had long exhorted them to believe in was increasingly unlikely. On the dusty parade ground the
Houston
’s Marine detachment assembled, wearing a hodgepodge of U.S. Army fatigues and green Dutch army uniforms. Then Dupler began marching the men back and forth—“right
face
, forward
march
”—building a cloud of dust. “Had anyone else tried to instigate such a thing,” Howard Charles said, “we would have told him to forget it. But we were eager to please Dupler.”

The Japanese guards took immediate notice, but they were amused more than anything else. They laughed too at the 131st Field Artillery’s commander, Colonel Tharp, who was said to carry a single-shot .22-caliber gun concealed in his walking stick. “The Japanese knew he had it and laughed at the fact that he had it,” Seldon Reese said. Any of them who heard Dupler tell his Marines to stay fit and encourage them with empty promises—“Any day, now, our guys’ll hit that beach out there”—surely laughed too. But if they did, it meant only that they didn’t appreciate Dupler’s deadly seriousness about keeping the proper frame of mind.

The other prisoners—the Texas artillerymen, the Brits, the Dutch, and the Australians, each in their separate barracks—noticed
the commotion the Marines were causing. They were not amused at all. They were galvanized. They decided to follow suit.

As Howard Charles relates it, the British soldiers imprisoned on the other side of a fence were the first to line up and start their own close order drills. Then the men of the 131st Field Artillery came out, followed by the Dutch and the Australians. Confronted with a mass movement, the Japanese posture changed altogether. They feared losing control over the camp. “The guards poured out on the grounds to stop it then,” said Charles. The immediate object of their wrath was the instigator of the exercise, Harley Dupler.

Two Japanese guards ran to Dupler and brought rifle butts down on his torso and head. He reeled and faltered and kept trying to rise, but the guards bore down and worked him over. It was a beating the likes of which the prisoners hadn’t yet seen, certainly not to anyone who had survived. They beat Dupler until he couldn’t stand, and then they battered him some more. The drill-field gathering dispersed. Quiet returned to the camp.

Dupler never led close order drill again. Afterward, something seemed to go out of him. The old lesson was driven home: tempting as it was, you didn’t trifle with the guards. “There were times you’d just say, ‘Well, I don’t give a darn how it’s going to turn out, but I’m going to take one good healthy poke and then let the chips fall where they may,’” Paul Papish said. “But then I guess you think real fast, and you say, ‘There’s really no reason for doing it. You’re only going to bring nothing but grief on yourself.’ The Japanese believe very strongly in force punishment.” Most prisoners understood that their reckless pride might mean the death of a friend.

The idea that they
could
retaliate but chose not to in order to protect their friends was therapeutic in a way. “I never admitted that we were whipped,” Gus Forsman said. “I think that was one of the things, too, that helped us—not admitting to ourselves that we were beaten.”