Weller's War

by George Weller

  Disgust turned in Toth's stomach.

  “Two weeks' admiration, after two years' starvation,” he said with unashamed bitterness. “You know what we call that around Thirty-four? We call it ‘atomic love.’”

  They entered the red-carpeted lobby of the Satsumai clubhouse, which was high-ceilinged and western, and resembled a Brussels brothel.

  “I want you to understand this geisha thing,” said Ralston uneasily. “It's just a way of having a hot dinner on the mine's expense account. This team isn't going to pull any shady stuff with the geishas. But I understand the girls cook the dinner, right at the table.”

  “I don't really like having the baron as host,” said Toth, “either inside the camp or outside it.”

  “But the baron isn't even going to be there himself,” protested Ralston. “He's in national mourning. It's just a little party for us.”

  No host, thought Toth. A sort of butlers-and-maids ball for Americans. “I guess I'll spend the evening packing,” he said, as gently as he could.

  “Bitter against them, aren't you?”

  Toth thought a little. “I guess I don't have the same chivalric spirit as the baron,” he said.

  Toth was halfway up the stairs, at the landing with the big vase, when Ralston called up, “Hey, major, you know something?”

  “What?”

  “You've got damned good self-control.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Turning down this geisha party, I mean. Quite aside from what you feel about the baron, it must be a long time since you were—well, near a girl—”

  “I don't want to be close to a geisha,” said Toth.

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes and, furthermore, I've been lucky with letters, seven in the three years.”

  “Look,” said Ralston, as though remembering something that had been on his mind a long time, “is it true that ninety per cent of the conversation in a camp like this centers around sex?”

  “If you want to know what we actually talked about, it was food. Half the men in camp kept recipe books, full of imaginary dishes they'd made up. They were always exchanging new recipes. I know I dreamed more about food than about my wife. We were always hunting for new twists for dishes without rice in them.”

  It was the literal truth, but he could see, as he climbed the softly carpeted stairs, that Ralston was disappointed and perhaps did not believe him. What the hell, who could come from outside and see the baroness pouring tea and the Nip girl motormen stopping the streetcars to let you pass and even the kempeitai ducking their little shaven heads, and believe it ever happened? All the most feared guards had disappeared—Fishface, the Growler, Donald Duck and the Fresno Kid—with their kabokos and their whips of motor belting and their challenges of “Sabis?” (“You want a gift?”) followed by a bone-breaking blow. Gone, all gone. It was ending up in a love feast, with swords and a few ashes.

  The major had the club valet bring him up some eggs and camp buns with a package of K rations. He made a dry supper in his room. Then, after hearing Captain Ralston drive away in his jeep with Lieutenant—now Captain—Bernstein, he got out the seven letters from his wife. It was Thursday, his night for reading the letters, and he saw no reason for disturbing a routine that had been so satisfying to him.

  He opened up the photograph of his wife and placed it on his bureau. He laid out one cigarette, two matches and a canteen of water. Then he undid the first letter, dated August 3, 1942. “Darling—” He read carefully and avariciously. If you read very slowly and pulled up hard at the periods, stopped and waited there awhile, you could sometimes wring out a new, an absolutely new thought from an old letter. You could not do this if you read the letters oftener than once a week. But if you waited a week, you could almost always find a new meaning in an old sentence. And one new thought often led to another. You could make a rereading of a single letter stretch out as long as a quarter of an hour.

  This night, however, he fell asleep. When he awakened, the bedside lamp had been turned off. There was moonlight in the room, and before a cloud covered the moon he saw that Borum was in the big chair. He turned on the bed lamp. Borum did not stir. There was a faint smell of liquor in the air. Borum lay in the chair with his baldish head at an angle and his prison-crimped ears inattentive; he snored.

  Borum was surrounded by a small collection of prizes. On the carpet were a mine lantern, a pick and the white-faced dial of the clock from the timekeeper's office. Hooked in his fingers were two Japanese lieutenant's epaulets, a little muddy, as though from struggle. And between his patched knees stood a sword, a big two-handed sword with a case in violet velvet and a crusted handle. When the bed creaked as the major put his feet on the floor, he straightened up.

  “The geisha party is over, major,” he said, yawning, rubbing a dry hand over his face and wetting his lips. “The Chinese have taken over the camp. The train is in. Captain Ralston sent me back with the jeep for you.”

  “Where are the ashes?” said the major.

  “Downstairs in the jeep, with our flag over them. It looked like rain, and I had nothing to cover them but the flag I don't think those parachute colors will run.”

  The major went to the porcelain bowl, where a generation of Satsumai executives from Tokyo had washed. He splashed water on his face, dried himself and came back. He stood over the sword and looked down on it.

  “Is that Kashihami's sword?” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Borum.

  “Why did you take it?” asked the major gravely.

  Borum hesitated. “Sir, camp discipline ceased at ten-forty when the Chinese took over. Is that right?”

  “Keep building. That'll do for a foundation. Keep building.”

  “Well, we heard that the baron had arranged a big wind-up scene for the geisha party. Lieutenant Kashihami was going to present Captain Ralston with his sword.” Borum's face assumed a stubborn look. “Now, we figure Kashihami's sword belongs more to you than to Captain Ralston. If he doesn't get it, why, he'll never miss it. So, when Kashihami came out to the benjo to relieve himself, we jumped him.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No. We just sort of degraded him. He never went back to the geisha party. Without his sword, he couldn't.”

  The major looked at the sword. He considered ordering Borum to return it, but it was not long before he changed his mind. “How am I supposed to get it to Nagasaki?” he asked.

  Sergeant Borum now seemed very sober. “I tried it for the length in the coffin with the ashes, and it fits fine,” he said.

  “Thank you, then.”

  “You're welcome, major.” Borum got up and began to put his other prizes into his musette bag. Toth was careful not to see the lieutenant's epaulets. “Time we were leaving for the station,” said the sergeant. “I'll manage both the musette bags, if you want to take your sword.”

  The sword's lightness delighted Toth's hand. He followed Borum through the door. On the threshold he paused, drew the unblemished blade, and cut a small, almost dainty notch in the edge of the door. Sheathing the sword he descended the stairs, holding the scabbard carefully in front of him.

  Outside it was raining, exactly as Borum had predicted. Major Toth put his sword in the coffin with the boxes of ashes, and as Borum started the engine he drew the coarse flag tight over the whole lash-up.

  [Written on U.S. Navy hospital ship Haven, en route from Nagasaki to Okinawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Guam, September-October, 1945.]

  *Generic name invented by U.S. soldiers for (as it turned out) a number of different Tokyo Radio women broadcasting propaganda, in English, throughout the war.

  Acknowledgments

  Quite a few people took part in pulling this book together.

  If anyone deserves the most thanks, it is a fine young journalist, David Farady Undaunted by the size of the task, he flawlessly transcribed entire campaigns and called my attention to details in the original dispatches that I would othe
rwise have missed. I am also very grateful for David's astute editing advice as numerous complex problems came up, time and time again.

  Many decades after their deaths, for doing their best to keep scrapbooks of my father's clippings throughout the war, I owe an enormous debt both to my grandmother, Matilda Weller, and to “Uncle” Russell Churchill, a Boston theater director who was my father's best friend for thirty years. (He also introduced my parents.) Without those scrapbooks as a starting point, my task would have been considerably harder.

  Bob Herguth Jr. and Monifa Thomas of the Chicago Sun-Times helped me ascertain what little of my father's Japanese reporting bypassed censorship of many kinds to appear in the Chicago Daily News. At the New York Public Library, David Smith attacked the same mystery from another direction.

  For a more massive research problem, Smith also led me to Lucy Lyons at the Northwestern University Library, who in turn led me to her colleague, Dan Schuld. Despite what many think, even great newspapers vanish easily; it is no simple task to lay one's hands on, say, the CDN for 1943-1944. Without Dan's exactitude and patience, there would've been significant gaps in this chronicle, along with much guesswork. His care and energy went far beyond the bounds of professionalism.

  Kirk Williamson, a photographer with considerable experience at dealing with historical images, faced yet again—as he had with Nagasaki and the POW camps—the challenge of the many pictures my father took, as well as the task of giving life to the paper trail of relevant cables, documents, and permits.

  Thanks also to agent J. P. Pappis and his superb Polaris Images, who handle worldwide rights on my father's photos. Everyone at Polaris has been tireless.

  The following either answered difficult questions or steered me in the right direction: John Burke, David Erlanger, Barry Feldman, Hazel Hammond, Damiana Koutsomiha, Alen MacWeeney, Vicki Syroglou, Lisa Tuite, Randy Warner, and especially the all-knowing Craig Tenney of my father's longtime literary agency, Harold Ober Associates—a family relationship that has endured for seventy years.

  William H. Bartsch, a friend of my father and a military historian who specializes in the early Pacific War, generously offered his unparalleled knowledge in assisting me with “Luck to the Fighters!” and answering many other questions. His forthcoming book, Every Day a Nightmare, promises to be the work my father dreamed of: the complete story of the American Army pursuit pilots who opposed the Japanese aerial onslaught against the Netherland East Indies. (I also found much helpful background material in Bartsch's earlier books, Doomed at the Start and December 8, 1941: MacArthur's Pearl Harbor.)

  The following comrades-in-arms helped enormously with my essay: Rex Baird, Kevin Buckley, Dan Connell, Barnaby Conrad III, Jeff Donovan, David Farady, Eddie Lazarus, Kylée Smith, and Donna Wolfe. As always, I am indebted to them for close readings and asking the right questions. Geo Beach and Greg Gibson, in particular, were with me every step of the way with their customary patience, sustaining humor, and wisdom.

  At Crown, I am deeply grateful for the support of my fearless editor, Sean Desmond (I had thought editors this conscientious were extinct), his assistants, Julie Miesionczek and Stephanie Chan, and my publicist, Chastity Lovely. I also wish to thank the book's original editor, Luke Dempsey, and publisher, Steve Ross.

  I have been very fortunate to have Henry Dunow as my literary agent and close friend of twenty years; the crucial balance between those roles has been central to a bond I value enormously. At the Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner Agency's New York headquarters, Jeff Moores unknotted myriad problems.

  My father would, I know, wish me to thank the community of San Felice Circeo, Italy, for many kindnesses across five decades.

  Lastly, it is my wife, Kylée, who saw me through the intense odyssey of seeking out the diverse contents of this book. Only she can fully appreciate the irony of a single organized volume culled from the terrifying original chaos of moldy steamer trunks, crates of dusty newspapers, sheaves of utterly disorganized carbons, and scattered letters and ragged cables and meticulous expense reports adding up to another story, missing from the dispatches, at which I have tried to hint. It was she who faced my father's thousands of wartime photographs and found their hidden messages that, indeed, changed my notion of what his war had been. She was much loved by him and much saddened by how, as the years went on, the past seemed to slip from his grasp. This book, in its determination to retrieve the past, is as much her accomplishment as mine.

  Copyright © 2009 by Anthony Weller

  Photographs and images copyright © 2009 by Anthony Weller/Polaris Images

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown and the Crown colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weller, George, 1907-2002.

  Weller's war / George Weller.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Weller, George, 1907-2002. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Personal

  narratives, American. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Europe.

  4. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Asia.

  5. War correspondents—United States. I. Title.

  D811.5. W4425 2009

  940.53—dc22 2008039988

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45224-5

  v3.0