The Jersey Brothers

by Sally Mott Freeman

  Hornet’s bow lifted and plunged violently as Jimmy Doolittle’s plane was the first to race across the carrier deck, catching the bow as it rose on a wave crest. The crew from the Enterprise cheered wildly into the howling wind. There was a split-second pause before the second plane was released from the flight deck’s trip wire. Benny watched, relieved one second and horrified the next, as the plane took off on the down-pitch of the bow. He closed his eyes as it slanted toward the sea and hung precariously low over the water for hundreds of yards, straining to become airborne before finally gaining altitude.

  When Benny reopened his eyes, the plane was still struggling to pull up; it was no more than a foot or two above the water. For more than half a mile, it hung so close to the heaving sea that it seemed certain the plane would crash. Benny and Captain Randall stood together in the tower chanting over and over, “Pull up, goddamn it! Pull up! Pull up!”

  And the next fourteen planes—“in a nicely judged bit of timing,” Benny would later regale his audience in the officers’ wardroom—“observed firsthand the advantages of taking off on the bow’s up pitch.”

  Despite the difficulty gaining altitude, all sixteen planes finally lifted skyward and disappeared single file into low, fast-moving clouds. They headed due west in the direction of mainland Japan even as Hornet’s and Enterprise’s scout bombers reported fifteen more patrol vessels, several of which they sank. With no time to waste, Task Force 16 immediately reversed course and boiled their wakes to a high froth in a breakneck twenty-five-knot race for safety.

  Benny and a gaggle of other officers gathered in the wardroom annex to relieve excited anxiety and speculate on the raid’s success. Estimating that Colonel Doolittle was nearing his target about that time, they tuned the dial to Radio Tokyo, which happened to be broadcasting an English-language propaganda program.

  A little after 1400 hours—noon Tokyo time—the announcer, in stilted, heavily accented English, laughingly read a Reuters News Agency report—strictly embargoed but inexplicably released—that Tokyo had been bombed. The broadcaster went on at length about how this was a ridiculous joke played on the Japanese people: no foreign bomb or shell had ever landed on Imperial soil. As he looked around him on that lovely spring day in Tokyo, he said he saw nothing but calm, serenity, and cherry blossoms.

  Suddenly sirens sounded in the background, and his voice gave way to frantic Japanese—then he abruptly went off the air. Benny turned and smiled at Captain Randall and slapped his knee; it was the best he’d felt in months.

  8

  BARTON, 1930–1941

  GROWING UP, BARTON HAD not approached academics or any of life’s other responsibilities the way his older brothers had. Nor had he adopted their relentless imperative for self-improvement. Instead, friends and social activities had been at the center of Barton’s early life. A happy-go-lucky boy with a seemingly endless reserve of goodwill, he took an unusually genuine interest in others. Peers and adults alike were drawn to his warmth, puckish wit, mischievous sense of humor, and amusing collection of arcane facts, sports-related and otherwise.

  Yet Barton always seemed to fall short of his father’s expectations; in academics, sports, even in his height. Helen did what she could to bring her husband’s lofty goals for Barton to fruition. She alternately prodded and upbraided him about his lessons, particularly math and science, two basic assets of any Annapolis candidate, which they were determined he would be. He actually did well in literature and poetry studies and had a perfect ear for music, but these strengths were not encouraged. Barton handled the strain by appearing not to care, and his mother’s expectations by appearing not to try.

  Things got worse after Benny and Bill departed for the Naval Academy. Only eleven when the second of the brothers left home, Barton soon found life at Lilac Hedges quiet, lonely, and uncomfortable. While he adored his young sister, Rosemary, she couldn’t replace the loss of his brothers. What had once been the epicenter of fun and boisterous camaraderie suddenly felt all wrong, and his parents’ angst over his studies only exacerbated his unhappiness. To Barton, all their gestures equaled reproof, and he became increasingly restive and brash. Disciplinary issues both at home and school spiked.

  The town movie theater offered refuge, all the better if the occasional girl was involved. The fairer sex was apparently beginning to find Barton Cross quite attractive and witty. He also developed a taste for good tobacco at a young age, and for the occasional beer. When Helen reproached him for these transgressions, he replied that it was her own liking for Benson & Hedges that sparked his interest in the first place, and she could hardly criticize him for a little beer considering his parents’ not infrequent scotches with a dash of soda. This left her stammering for the appropriate response to the little scamp, which never seemed to occur to her in time to do any good.

  Beset by business crises, Arthur was rarely available to help. The textile business, already wobbling from labor strikes, was on its knees after the stock market collapse. Mills and plants were shuttering, and ships carrying cloth sat idle at coastal docks. It was growing ever clearer that Helen could not cope with Barton’s burgeoning adolescence by herself. She hoped that at least one of the older boys might return home before the launch of their careers, but it was not to be.

  And so it went until one evening in 1932 when an exasperated Arthur had finally had enough. Barton was fourteen years old, and “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” as he sputtered to his wife, needed a paradigm shift. Arthur turned to his longtime friend David Page Harris, headmaster of Christ School for Boys in Arden, North Carolina. With its motto “The school that makes manly boys,” Christ School seemed the perfect antidote to Barton’s persistent lassitude.

  No one was more surprised than Helen by how well her coddled son took to his new environs that fall. She both feared and hoped he might return to Lilac Hedges after a disastrous first week or two. Yet daily chapel, classes, and chores—making beds, waiting tables, cutting wood, and feeding chickens—all, as it happened, delighted Barton. Even digging up tree stumps, so arduous its assignment was reserved for repeat rule breakers, gave Barton a sense of satisfaction. His droll humor and high-spirited bonhomie won him fast friends, and his quick-wittedness snagged him a spot on the Warrior, the school newspaper.

  After expecting the worst, Barton not only adapted to life at Christ School but also thrived on its structure and the constant companionship of fellow boarders. He performed surprisingly well in academics, too, even in the once-dreaded subjects of math and science.

  Barton was also intrigued by the morning services in St. Joseph’s Chapel, the spiritual center of Christ School life. At home, the Episcopal Church equaled monotone sermons followed by droning bids for contributions and coffee hours that bored him to despair. At Christ School, the daily sounding of the chapel carillon, known as the Angelus bells, called students to worship but also to hear homilies on such topics as “Failure is a chance at a new start, not a measure of self-worth” or “When we work together, we cannot fail.” The effect on Barton of these daily sermonettes—simple but profound guideposts—was like spring rain to a dormant garden. Almost subconsciously, he began applying their lessons.

  But perhaps best of all, the school’s top sport was baseball. Unlike other secondary schools where football reigned supreme, baseball had been Christ School’s athletic mainstay since its founding in 1901. Barton had never been on a real baseball team before. Likely due more to his knowledge of the game and his unmatched command of professional baseball statistics, he was given a spot on the school’s second team. He would always remember the day he became a “Greenie,” even the weather—a cool spring afternoon—when he returned to his log cabin and laid out the uniform—crisp and white, bearing Christ School’s green insignia—on the simple woolen blanket that stretched across his bunk.

  The chores at Christ School did as much to educate Barton as the homilies and classes, but so also did the presence of a different society of boys than he had known
near Lilac Hedges. While some were of the same background as he, a number of others were on scholarship. Some had no mothers, some no fathers, and still others were orphaned entirely.

  Such circumstances seemed unimaginable to Barton. These particular boys often worked the hardest to succeed—and succeed they did, academically, athletically, and socially. He pulled himself up on this developing wisdom, and it gave rise to self-confidence, a previously unfamiliar feeling. By graduation, Barton had a reputation as one of the smartest, if nearly the smallest, in his class. And while his inner prankster put him at the top of the penalty work list (and claim to the most excavated tree stumps), he finished Christ School with the second-highest GPA in the class of 1934.

  Arthur was delighted when Barton gained acceptance to his alma mater, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. The few coveted congressional appointments to the Naval Academy were taken that year and the Citadel had been Barton’s next choice. He was also quite young for a high school graduate, having finished Christ School at age sixteen; a year of maturity in a military environment ahead of the Academy was a prudent move, his parents concluded. Helen was determined that her boy would try again for the Naval Academy the following year, but he was Charleston-bound for now and determined to make the best of it.

  THE CITADEL’S STERN WHITE stucco buildings topped with medieval-style turrets accurately reflected its rigor. And while Barton may have thought his legacy status might shield him from the legendary hazing that cursed the life of a plebe cadet, or “knob,” he was not so lucky. Barely an hour after passing through the Citadel’s Lesesne Gateway that steamy August morning, he found himself at the start of Hell Week.

  Fresh off a year of being on the receiving end of such treatment, the second classmen were spiteful; it had been done to them, and by God they would now have their turn inflicting the torture: ear-splitting shouting of orders and questions; slapping; food deprivation; marching knobs down to the low-country swamp to stand at attention, waist-high in muck, while swarms of mosquitoes feasted on them.

  The first few days of this working-over broke more than a dozen of them; they simply packed up and went home. But Barton showed surprising pluck. Determined to survive the mistreatment (possibly motivated by the imagined disappointment on his father’s face had he not), he urged on his new colleagues as well. With a spirit of defiance, humor, and an ever-present helping hand, he exhorted them to stick it out. “We’re not going to let them beat us at this game!” he would say over and over.

  Barton did everything he could think of to coax his miserable fellow knobs. He also vowed to himself and others that he would never engage in these black arts toward future initiates—if he got that far. “We’ll show these bastards how officers are supposed to behave when we get the chance,” he’d say. But Barton also learned at the Citadel how to avoid drawing unwanted attention.

  Lesson One was to conceal that his father was a Citadel alumnus. Legacies, presumed to be overentitled braggarts, were traditionally given double the treatment. Lesson Two was to absolutely do what he was told, however absurd, however many times, whatever time of day. The fact that he was a legacy gave him additional fortitude in this, so anxious was he to not disappoint his father. By heeding these lessons, Barton survived knob year, if not happily.

  Barton became popular in his company, less for drill proficiency than for wicked mimicry of his superiors, well-told jokes, and hilarious attempts at the distinctive Charleston drawl with New Jersey inflections. Dormitory pranks were another source of amusement. Painting slumbering colleagues’ fingernails with pink enamel was a knob-barracks favorite, since polish remover was a scarce commodity on the Military College of South Carolina’s campus.

  Nonetheless, as the year progressed, the option of leaving Charleston for what Barton imagined to be the gentler Annapolis became a paramount goal. One year at the Citadel, he concluded, was plenty.

  And so, at long last, Barton Cross was accepted into the Naval Academy’s class of 1940. Delighted, Benny and Bill were full of counsel and stories. After all the halcyon tales from their own Annapolis days, Barton expected nothing less than a pleasant high-seas adventure. He was ordered to report to “latitude 38º58'53" N, longitude 76º29'08" W” (Annapolis) the first week of June. Barely returned from Charleston, he bade his parents farewell again, this time at the main entrance to the Naval Academy. With a mix of pride and anxiety, Helen and Arthur watched as Barton fell in line with another class of plebes to begin a fresh series of unremitting humiliations.

  AFTER PASSING THROUGH THE Academy gate, Barton was directed by uniformed guards to the administration building. Turning right past a nest of mounted naval guns from the Spanish-American War, he walked up the steps of administration and took his place in a line of other would-be naval officers waiting to be processed by the chief clerk. Following receipt of a date-and-time-stamped instruction sheet, the inductees marched awkwardly across the Yard to that most hallowed of buildings, Bancroft Hall. There they were herded and hustled—from physical exam to haircut to supply store—right up to that momentous hour: their swearing in as midshipmen of the United States Navy.

  The apprehensive assembly faced the great marble stairway leading to Memorial Hall and the Academy’s most treasured relic: a dark-blue flag bearing the phrase “Don’t Give Up the Ship.” The revered banner, quoting the dying words of Captain James Lawrence, had been hoisted by a defiant then-Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry as the US Navy battled the British at Lake Erie during the War of 1812.

  When the moment came, Barton raised a slightly trembling right hand and pledged: “I, Arthur Barton Cross Junior, of the state of New Jersey, aged eighteen years, having been appointed a midshipman of the United States Navy, do solemnly affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: so help me God.”

  Following the ceremony, the orders came fast and furious. It did not dawn on Barton until it was too late that he would have to endure another year of plebe purgatory before things had any chance of improving for him.

  As with the Citadel, it was the second classmen, or “youngsters,” who were charged with conferring a range of cruelties on the entering class: Only walk down the center of corridors. Turn square corners and walk head up, shoulders squared, chest out. Fingers along the seams of your trousers. There was a new language to learn as well. Bancroft Hall walls were “bulkheads,” floors were “decks,” stairs were “ladders.” Plebes were told when and where to form lines and how to march to and from them (double time, meaning at a run), where to sit for meals, and how to eat them. Endless instructions covered every minute of the day, from reveille to taps.

  The midday meal became its own source of dread. Barton was ordered to eat many plebe-year lunches under the dining hall table, thanks to his failure to correctly answer a firestorm of questions on an array of arcane naval facts spat out by one especially unkind youngster. These included the birth and death dates of any number of navy greats and the width and length of the deck planking on a particular class of ship. The hazing worsened over time as others in the class above him sensed Barton’s vulnerabilities. Unlike at the Citadel, he had a hard time staying below his Annapolis tormentors’ radar.

  Barton’s sole extracurricular activity at Annapolis was the Academy Chapel Choir, where his rich and well-trained tenor voice was enthusiastically welcomed in a choir replete with baritones. In fact, his solo pieces gained some acclaim—a rarity for him at Annapolis.

  As his difficult plebe year wore on, Barton began to develop a visceral dislike for the Naval Academy—for all things naval, in fact. Demerits were given for everything; by Christmas, he had more than forty, and the time and effort it took to work them off only yielded more deprivation an
d hard work. Daily room inspection required that floors (decks) be washed and waxed; blinds be dust free, at “half-mast,” and opened; shower walls be clean, dry, and unspotted; and light fixtures be white-glove spotless both inside and out—among two dozen other requirements. Even on days when Barton managed to pass inspection, he frequently failed a second unannounced “spot” check, which could occur at any time during the day. He compiled dozens of demerits for violations of this particular banality alone.

  Barton’s distress was compounded by letters from friends who had gone off to “normal” colleges, an experience he increasingly desired. The creep of self-doubt was unstoppable. He had never been much interested in fighting or hurting other men. Why, then, had he landed in these places where learning to excel at that very thing was a core requirement? It simply wasn’t his nature, any more than football’s block and tackle. If his experiences at the Citadel and now Annapolis were any clue, the military life was not a promising line of work for him.

  Sensing trouble, Helen traveled to Washington for a month to monitor Barton’s progress. She insisted it was only to hear him perform with the Academy choir in Sunday chapel—among the rare times parents were allowed on campus. It wasn’t long before she learned of Barton’s hazing. Bill’s wife, Romie, had told her of one particularly upsetting incident shared by a visiting midshipman at a Washington cocktail party. Bill would likely have taken Romie to task for leaking the tale to his mother, knowing full well how such matters tended to play out. After promising her daughter-in-law that her source would remain anonymous, Helen promptly wrote Barton inquiring if the rumor was true.

  Surprised, he emphatically denied the incident had occurred and implored his mother to drop the subject. Her pursuit of the matter could only hurt him, he insisted. But unable to subdue her anxiety, Helen penned a letter to the Naval Academy’s superintendent, David Foote Sellars: