The Jersey Brothers

by Sally Mott Freeman

  Barton’s confidence ebbed as December wore on. He and his fellow navy patients listened nightly to KZRH as Don Bell somberly detailed the Manila-bound progress of tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers. Wave after wave of enemy troops had come ashore at Lingayen Gulf, 135 miles to the north. They were roaring toward the capital in trucks, on bicycles, and in marching columns, Bell reported in a tone so grave it required little interpretation.

  On Christmas Eve, General MacArthur ordered a military evacuation of Manila and declared the Philippine capital an open city, meaning that all Allied defensive efforts had been abandoned there. The open city designation was intended to trigger the 1907 Hague Convention regulating land warfare that forbade attacks on undefended localities. But the designation was ignored by Japan, a Convention signatory; they continued to bomb Manila, including the city hall and other buildings close to the hospital.

  By Christmas Day, MacArthur had completed his own retreat to the island fortress of Corregidor near the entrance of Manila Bay. The more than 70,000 American and Filipino troops had also evacuated—to either Corregidor or Luzon’s Bataan Peninsula, which bordered the bay on one side and the South China Sea on the other. The evacuation was part of War Plan Orange-3, an emergency contingency plan developed before the war in the extremely unlikely event of a successful Japanese attack. WPO-3 also called for the prepositioning of a supply of food, fuel, medicine, and arms capable of sustaining the evacuated forces for a six-month defensive stand. This latter measure was not taken by General MacArthur.

  By New Year’s Eve, KZRH had gone off the air, and the sounds of sirens and frantic traffic exiting the city had faded. But the wounded at Sternberg had yet to be relocated to any safe haven. They were the only remaining US military contingent in Manila. Then the unimaginable took place.

  Late on December 31, a brief but stunning order from MacArthur’s Corregidor headquarters was delivered to the hospital: all army wounded were to be taken down to Pier 7 immediately. They were to be loaded onto a Red Cross ship, the SS Mactan, and transported to Australia. The ship must depart as soon as possible, it said, in order to evade Japanese forces, now hard by. Confused, nurses and doctors both responded to the order with the same question: “What about the navy patients?” MacArthur’s order made no mention of the navy patients, the sentry said. Only the army patients.

  As the senior-most military officer in the Philippines, MacArthur had the authority to include them, but unaccountably had not. Barton, Charles, and thirty other navy wounded at Sternberg Hospital now had no orders to anywhere, from anyone. Could their papers have been on the way, lost in the melee of civilian and military retreat? Could orders have failed to reach them due to blocked roads, cut power and phone lines? Or had this small navy contingent simply been forgotten?

  The Filipino ambulance driver told the navy patients and skeletal Sternberg staff he would return for them if there was room aboard the Mactan. They were encouraged, despite the nagging question of whether, absent specific orders, this constituted military disobedience.

  Down at Pier 7, a total of 224 army wounded were loaded onto the Mactan—which had been hastily converted from an inter-island steamer into a hospital ship. Her dock lines were then hacked with a knife and tossed into the water. In the waning hours of 1941, amid pelting rain and high winds, the Mactan’s Red Cross–painted funnel vanished into the mist. It was the last vessel to depart Manila before the city fell to the Japanese.

  The navy patients had waited anxiously for the ambulance to return. Sternberg was darkened, and their ward was quiet as a tomb. Barton, Charles, Ken, and the others lay on their cots behind blackout curtains, listening, sifting through the noise of the pounding rain for sounds of a returning flatbed-truck-turned-ambulance.

  Charles became increasingly agitated, and the other patients tried to placate him quietly. He had already been taken from their ward once, shortly after their arrival at Sternberg; he was reassigned to a mental ward with a diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis. During his absence, Barton learned why Charles had been put off USS Louisville at Cavite. “Attempted suicide,” reported the loose-lipped corpsman. “Japs can’t do nothin’ to him he ain’t already tried to do to himself.” When a somewhat withdrawn Charles rejoined his fellow patients, they took pains not to unravel him further.

  The ward settled into an uncomfortable silence, but they knew they were trapped, and nobody slept. Over the years, Barton had developed an aptitude for getting out of tight spots—of which there had been many in his young life—but this time he came up empty-handed. As the night wore on, their sense of doom only intensified. When they heard loud banging on the hospital’s front door and then what sounded like the door crashing on the foyer floor, they froze.

  A nurse screamed. Dozens of footsteps, mingled with bursts of unintelligible Japanese, drew closer. They heard the double doors burst open and footsteps running up the first flight of stairs. Doors opened and slammed and glass shattered. Japanese soldiers chattered excitedly as they took the stairs by twos and threes.

  The men lay stock-still. The footsteps were closer now—on their floor. The ward’s wide doors finally swung open, slamming against the walls. Gripped with fear, their eyes closed, the navy patients lay helpless with fists clenched and hearts pounding, their bodies soaked with sweat.

  OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL months, the patients were moved from one makeshift prison hold to another, none with even basic medical care, under steadily worsening conditions. Those that couldn’t walk were carried. Ken, whose litter Barton and Charles had lifted through those long marches, did not survive. Every move of the prisoners began with their being paraded through the streets of Manila past a saddened citizenry. The macabre displays were intended to humiliate the captured Americans and brandish the new Japanese dominion over the Filipinos.

  Their longest holding pen was at Santa Scholastica, a women’s college seized by the Japanese to consolidate the navy wounded from Cavite that had been scattered around Manila for treatment. As the patients were being shuffled, meanwhile, the tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors on Bataan and Corregidor were putting up the fight of their lives against a Japanese onslaught. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and slowly starving on half rations, but they continued to hold out and inflict significant enemy casualties.

  The longer Bataan and Corregidor held, however, the angrier the Japanese became over those casualties and their stalled seizure of the Philippines—and the worse it got for the navy patients. It was at Santa Scholastica that the patients and their medical attendants came to understand the depth of contempt the Japanese felt toward them.

  They were viciously slapped, their food and medical supplies were confiscated, and they were forced to erect a vast stretch of barbed wire to cut them off from all but a tiny corner of the compound. Beds were removed, bathing curtailed sharply, and laundry facilities were declared off-limits. Perhaps worst of all, their precious supply of quinine, used to treat symptoms of rampant malaria—fever, chills, fatigue, vomiting—was seized.

  As an officer, Barton was summoned repeatedly for questioning by a committee of Imperial military police, the Kempeitai. They inquired about the name and location of his ship and the submarines of the Asiatic Fleet, the number and layout of mines in the bays and harbors, and other surprisingly detailed questions. Barton replied that he had been wounded and unconscious early in the attack on Cavite and didn’t know the answers.

  But the interrogations continued. The Kempeitai eyed the navy patients and their medical staff warily, wondering why this single American contingent had stayed behind in Manila while all the others had evacuated to Bataan or Corregidor. The interrogators suspected that the group had been ordered to remain to conduct espionage and that the only thing their bandages concealed was their true identity as spies.

  Barton offered little useful information because he had little, but he was also adept at appearing cooperative without being so. He was in the Supply Corps, he would tell the Kempeitai, s
uggesting a unique disinterest in warfare of any kind. The interrogations were a poignant reminder of others he had endured over time—at home, at the Citadel, and at the US Naval Academy—all of which had honed his ability to survive cross-examination without confessing much of anything. In fact Barton had built quite a reputation for his Huck Finn prowess at getting out of scrapes—and his success rate was nearly as high.

  One set of facts was a concern, however: that Barton’s two brothers were of meaningful rank, and, respectively, engaged in high-level naval combat and espionage. Would such a discovery by his interrogators make him a candidate for greater mistreatment, or worse, useful barter?

  Benny and Bill—Barton’s older brothers and lifelong protectors—were both Annapolis-minted officers. Biologically, they were half brothers, Barton being the only son of their mother Helen’s second marriage. Benny, the oldest, was antiaircraft and gunnery officer on the carrier USS Enterprise, which was—or at least had been—stationed at Pearl Harbor. Barton had just visited Benny during his stopover at Pearl en route from New Jersey to Manila. That was barely three weeks before he was wounded. He’d had no contact with Benny since.

  Bill, the middle brother, was a Naval Intelligence officer in Washington whose top secret work put him in regular contact with senior brass, not to mention with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself. Would Barton be guilty by association were the Japanese to make the connection?

  BENNY AND BILL HAD been little boys when Barton, a premature baby, made his entry into the world in 1918. Whether or not it was due to his fragile early arrival, he could not recall a time when they had not looked out for him. If history was any guide, they were making every effort to find him now. In fact, Bill had pulled every imaginable string in Washington to help Barton get his officer’s commission—no easy task, since Barton had bilged out of the Naval Academy after just two years. But Bill knew that his younger brother’s subsequent business degree was just the expertise needed by incipient Supply Corps officers. And being the navy’s business office, its mission was anything but dangerous, a winning card with their mother.

  Helen’s greatest fear had been that, without a commission, her youngest and favorite son would be drafted into the army and sent to God knows where. So she was most pleased with Bill’s efforts. But the fleeting maternal approval ended when Barton’s orders to the Philippines—over which Bill had zero influence—arrived. “Spitting distance from Japan!” lioness Helen groaned.

  “She went on and on and on,” Bill had vented to Benny. His brother simply listened, knowing a reply was not necessary. “She said, ‘There you are, Billy, at Roosevelt’s elbow. Can’t you do something?’ ” Calling Bill by his affectionate childhood nickname always had its effect. On the other hand, her loathing of all things Franklin Roosevelt was a long-standing fact, and the possibility of the president’s doing something that might please her was remote.

  But reflexively, Bill and Benny sought to safeguard Barton when his orders came through. Bill arranged his accommodations at Manila’s posh Army and Navy Club and they both contacted officer friends in Manila who promised to keep an eye on him. This had long been the family pattern: by cultivating their shared role as Barton’s elders, they were assured their mother’s sparing affection. If Benny and Bill were aware of the sad irony—that they always seemed to be seeking her attention and that Barton was always trying to break free of it—they kept it to themselves.

  ONE THING WAS CERTAIN, Barton didn’t want his brothers to pull strings and try to bail him out—not this time. He had wanted to go to the Philippines precisely for this reason: to break his family’s stubborn tether. At twenty-three years old, surely he could now manage matters himself. That’s exactly why he had asked one of the nurses at Sternberg to send a telegram to Lilac Hedges, the family keep in New Jersey, from Manila’s Army and Navy Club on Christmas Eve—not from the hospital. He didn’t want his family to know he’d been wounded and then try to pull strings and extract him like a child from the war zone.

  “Quite well,” he dictated. “Don’t worry. Happy Xmas. Much love, Barton.”

  Nothing more.

  The nurse expressed concern when Barton finished. Why wouldn’t he give real information—quite possibly his last chance to do so? “Please,” he’d said to her, “you don’t know my mother. This is best for right now.”

  There was still a chance his luck would turn—that the promised reinforcements were on their way to repel the Japanese incursion. Optimism that his captivity might still be short-lived propelled him from day to day. He would finally get a chance to live up to his family’s expectations—on his own terms and under his own power. He clung to this hope despite his mangled condition and the increasingly harsh Japanese treatment.

  By March 1942, some two hundred navy wounded from Cavite had been consolidated at Santa Scholastica, at which point they were told to prepare for another move. The place, their doctors were told, was a well-equipped convalescence hospital where they would finally receive badly needed medical care. But when their transport trucks came to a halt at a place called Pasay, fear again replaced hope. A single order was announced as they filed into an abandoned, low-slung building surrounded by tufting weeds: obey all orders or be executed. The peeling sign over the front door of their new accommodation read “Pasay School.”

  The onetime elementary school was a small, rectangular building with a tiny courtyard at its center. Fifty men were quartered in each sixteen-by-twenty-foot classroom, which teemed with rats, mosquitoes, and green-headed flies. The dwarfish compound was bordered by open latrine trenches swarming with feasting flies. The courtyard, once the school’s playground, was so small that the burgeoning prison population could not move about. Adding to the tension of perpetual restraint, the air was sickly hot and humid, and mingling latrine stench and smoke rising from burning garbage hung thick in the air. There were no beds, plumbing, or sanitation at Pasay.

  Under these conditions, and with waning optimism that the Allies were coming to their rescue, the patients weakened further and also began to yield to a growing sense of hopelessness. Not only did Pasay claim men from gangrenous wounds, disease, and starvation, but also from sheer despair.

  Though he had lost some twenty pounds from his modest frame, Barton had still not lost faith. Things were plenty grim, but so far the Japanese hadn’t ordered him to dig a massive tree stump out of frozen ground with a pickax for punishment and “an opportunity for reflection,” as he had endured many times at Christ School in Arden, North Carolina. Nor had they beaten him with a broom until he bled while balancing on billiard balls holding up heavy furniture as two Annapolis second classmen had done during his plebe indoctrination. He would weather this just as he had those and other early trials: with a persistent combination of optimism and imperturbable humor.

  Barton was less concerned about his own predicament than he was about Charles’s precarious emotional state, which was exacerbated by Pasay’s miserable confines. A dark switch seemed to have been thrown permanently. Charles had an outsized hatred toward his captors, for whom he had various names, nearly always preceded by “those goddamn,” including slopeheads, nips, yelluhs, and worse. He could often be heard saying to nobody in particular, “I’ll tell you what, those goddamn —— can just shut the fuck up. Can’t understand ’em anyway.” The slurs may have been meant for dark amusement, but there was a growing fear that Charles’s demonstrated disinterest in preserving his own life could bring harm to others.

  Even when he wasn’t cursing, his badass southern boy strut back and forth across the tiny courtyard alone seemed capable of sparking an incident. It was a dangerous game. Barton was in constant fear that Charles might do something to place them all at risk. The savage slapping of patients who neglected to bow to passing guards especially enraged Charles, and he threatened privately to retaliate. So Barton focused on helping his friend contain his rage by both cajoling him and deploying creative tactics.

  Tenko wa
s the twice-daily prisoner roll call during which guards would count off the bowing prisoners in a process called bango. While walking together to tenko one evening, Barton suggested to Charles that they take a deep breath upon the guard’s approach and exhale only after he had passed them. Refusing to breathe the same air fouled by the breath of their captors was an act of resistance and self-respect, but no slapping would result from it.

  As the guard approached, counting prisoners and awaiting bows—“Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku . . .”—Charles and Barton drew their breaths and bowed deeply. When the guard had passed, continuing his count—“hachi, kyuu, juu . . .”—they raised their heads, exhaling slowly. With this, Barton coaxed a rare satisfied smile out of Charles. Their developing partnership helped distract Charles from his self-defeating propensities and both of them from gnawing hunger and fear.

  Despite the vitiated air, they would venture into the courtyard to the “shower”: a hose fastened to a large punctured tomato can poised over a wooden grate. Since the water was turned on only at certain times, groups of twenty men would disrobe en masse and take turns stepping under the shower head. They would then step back and make way for the next group to do the same. Men given the job of manually emptying the cesspools were allowed to go first, a humane gesture but one that rendered the shower an even more dubious source of hygiene.

  AND SO THE PRISONER patients felt a glimmer of hope when told they were to be moved again, this time to Bilibid Prison back in central Manila. As with Pasay, the Japanese told the prisoners that Bilibid had a clean, well-supplied medical facility with beds, medicine, and plenty of food and water. But when they passed through the prison’s gates at nightfall, their hearts sank once again. The penitentiary, built by Spanish occupiers a century earlier, had been deemed unfit for criminals and closed by the Filipinos. The Japanese reopened the jail to use as a way station from which captured prisoners would either be dispatched to prison camps around the Philippines or shipped to Japan.