Jaunty and distinguished looking, he clipped along the bustling streets of Manhattan threading among pedestrians, streetcars, and fresh fruit and flower stands setting up in the morning cool. His argyle socks were tucked neatly into polished cordovan shoes, and an open overcoat and scarf flapped in the breeze. Barton could usually be seen rounding the corner of Broad at 8:55 a.m. Ever genial, he greeted acquaintances and nodded to the Exchange doorman at 15 Broad before disappearing into the lobby. By 5:45 in the evening, he was headed back up to Midtown, usually to parties or clubs populated by New York’s young cosmopolitan set.
Barton was the gin-and-tonic fellow with a pack of Luckies in his breast pocket and always seemed to have a pretty girl at his elbow. He was treated to more than a few overnight stays in the city when it was too late to return home by train. Different girls were invited to Lilac Hedges on weekend retreats as well. His mother scrutinized each and every one—but, both to her disappointment and relief, Barton never became steady with any of them.
Despite his earnest role at the Purchasing Exchange, heightening war news was making Barton ill at ease. News stories of battlefront horrors intensified daily. The miraculous rescue of some 200,000 British troops cornered by the Germans at Dunkirk, France, had a grip on the Cross household for days. Moreover, many of Arthur’s English friends were being bombed out of their homes by the Luftwaffe’s relentless London blitz.
Then one morning in September 1940, as the family sipped their coffee and waited for breakfast to be served, Arthur returned to the dining room with the damp morning paper. Barton’s hair was in disarray, and his eyes betrayed another late night out. He barely noticed his father’s reticence after reading the front page.
Arthur handed the paper to Helen, telegraphing his concern with a certain look. She scanned the headline and article, and then heaved a deep sigh. The news was that Roosevelt had signed the military draft bill into law, calling up the first nine hundred thousand men. It had been expected, but the reality of mandatory was something different, particularly when combined with the other news of the day—that Japan had joined Germany and Italy to sign the Tripartite Pact, which formed the Axis powers. Breakfast that morning ended with plenty of leavings for the dog. Barton was now a prime candidate for the draft.
Two months later, this family of avid Republicans was further disappointed by Roosevelt’s besting of the GOP’s Wendell Willkie to win a third presidential term. The Crosses despised Roosevelt’s pervasive approach to boosting the economy, the so-called New Deal, which they viewed as aggressively antibusiness and fraught with ever-expanding government subsidies. Anglophile Arthur pointed out to whomever would listen that the real reason for the economic uptick since the Depression was not Roosevelt’s New Deal, but spiking textile and other war-materiel orders from his native Britain.
On the night of November 5, 1940, Helen wrote in her diary:
Election Day! Roosevelt, the glamour voiced lad, made the grade—elected by 24 million against 20 million for Wilkie. The Electoral College of course shows proportional representation—there one sees the fine hand of the bosses in the big cities. Let’s hope that those 20 million protesting votes will curb him to some degree. We did not sit up for returns, feeling the results in our bones.
Barton began to feel sidelined as 1940 stretched into 1941. He returned home each night to Rosemary studying for her Waves exam [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service] and his mother’s Bundles for Britain sewing circle. The women were gathered in the drawing room around the Victrola, listening to Edward R. Murrow’s nightly broadcasts from London—ablaze from German bombing raids. “This . . . is London,” Murrow would begin, as the spellbound women knitted away at scarves bound for Royal Air Force fighters battling the Luftwaffe.
Unable to escape the significance of events unfolding an ocean away, Barton began to yearn for a chance to reenter the navy. For a while, he had convinced himself that the British Purchasing Exchange was helping with the war effort, but with the mandatory draft, he knew he would be called up eventually. In the spring of 1941, Barton decided to swallow his pride and see if Bill could help.
Meanwhile, Bill had been formulating an idea of his own, one that matched the navy’s needs with Barton’s business degree and training. When the call came through from Lilac Hedges, he jumped at the chance to take responsibility for Barton’s naval future—and an opportunity for maternal recognition for his mother’s oft-overlooked middle son.
And so Barton’s prestigious appointment to the Supply Corps, the navy’s business managers, was Bill’s doing. “I had planned to have you ordered down here as one of my assistants,” Bill wrote Barton, “but I hesitate to do anything that would deprive you of a commission in the Supply Corps; it is the best opportunity offered any applicant these days. You have the right background, and the advantage of learning things that will be of great value to you in the business world, should you later leave the Navy.”
Supply Corps commissions in 1941 were a hot commodity, but Bill knew how to maneuver along the navy’s inside track to ensure that one of those coveted commissions went to Barton. After that, Bill pushed for his brother’s acceptance into the Harvard Supply Corps training program, recently incorporated into its business school. At Harvard, Barton would master the rigors of the Supply Corps with FDR’s son, young John Roosevelt. Bill followed his brother’s progress with barely concealed pride and enthusiasm.
The new ensign’s orders arrived quickly after his return from Boston that September. Congress had finally loosened its purse strings for an all-out fortification of an increasingly vulnerable American base in the Pacific: the Philippines.
It was a good opportunity, Bill assured Barton—although their mother was of a distinctly different mind. The evening his orders to the Philippines arrived, Barton joined Helen and Arthur for a glass of sherry on the porch. He tried to comfort his anxious parents and reminded them that this was the course they had long wanted for him. There was a clutch at Helen’s heart when Barton raised his glass in mock celebration and toasted, “Here’s hoping the Japs don’t get me, Mother. I’d hate to give all this up!”
9
THE PERILS OF ESCAPE—AND A LITTLE BASEBALL
THE POSSIBILITY OF ESCAPE crossed every prisoner’s mind, but during the summer of 1942, Barton abandoned the fantasy for good. Men who had tried and failed were brought back to camp and beaten, mutilated, and tortured in public view. Nothing focused the mind on the perils of escape more than the particular return of three prisoners—two army colonels and a navy lieutenant—who were each summarily stripped naked, marched across the camp to the entrance, tied up, and flogged to insensibility.
They were then kicked to their feet, led out the front gate with their hands tied behind them, and strung up to hang from cross-pieces of wood several feet above their heads. A two-by-four was placed beside them, and when any Filipinos passed by on the road, they were summoned by the Japanese guards to pick up the timber and smash each of the hanging prisoners in the face. Then the guards would follow up and lay on their whips.
The beatings, whippings, and subsequent screams could be heard everywhere in the camp. Even in the middle of the night, the cracking whip sounded in the darkness. At the end of the third day, the other prisoners watched through the barbed wire as the three men, miraculously still alive, were loaded into a covered truck and driven away. Soon, two shots were heard from the direction of the retreating truck. The prisoners later learned that the third man had been beheaded.
Barton was as traumatized, enraged, and disgusted by this savagery as the rest of the prisoners. But it wasn’t just this incident that permanently put the temptation of escape out of his mind. It was the grim story of ten men selected for execution in reprisal for another man’s attempted escape from a bridge repair detail outside Cabanatuan. While the stunned men in his outfit looked on, the captured escapee was forced to join the nine other men in his ten-person shooting squad to dig a large hole, line up at its edge,
and be shot at close range one by one. One of the unfortunate victims, Staunton Ross Betts, called out to his older brother Edwin, whom he called “Jack,” standing among the horrified captive audience. “Take it easy, Jack,” Ross said. “I’ll be all right. And take care of Mother.”
This Japanese deterrent to attempted escape—which came to be called, variously, “the ten-and-one-rule,” “the blood-brother system,” or, simply, “shooting squads”—had the desired effect, especially since none of the POWs knew who his fellow squad members were. This prevented them from conspiring to escape together. It would be one thing to escape and die trying, but quite another to bring down that kind of horror on others, Barton decided. He resolved then to survive by other means.
THOUGH MEASURABLY WEAKENED, BARTON had so far avoided contracting the serious tropical diseases that raged at Cabanatuan. Oddly, the larger and heavier men tended to fall ill and die more quickly than did those of smaller build like Barton. In fact, he was among the healthier prisoners, allowing him to continue in his quest to boost the morale of a growing group of friends, some teetering on the edge of despair. It wasn’t uncommon for those whose mental, physical, and emotional health had become so bruised and degraded to simply decide to die.
Providing succor to these depleted and fragile men in this newly confined world became Barton’s calling. Hopelessness was as fatal as any disease at Cabanatuan, and having visited its dark provinces a time or two himself in life, he knew when someone was on the brink. He might notice one friend drooping into apathy, offering little or no conversation, retreating into solitude. Another, frail as balsa wood, might be found lying in the scratchy cogon grass, eyes staring blankly ahead.
So Barton would return to the barrack and shake out his shoe on a dirty board, yielding maybe only a handful of rice, still in husks. With gusto, he and his friends would beat open the husks using the side of their canteens. Barton always drew laughs and groans with his constant refrain, “Cold Rheingold, anybody?” He’d then swill some tepid water, pretending it was a beer, and wipe his mouth with a dramatic swipe of his forearm. “Ah, that was good!”
The discovery that adversity has its upsides was one of the powerful lessons Barton had learned at Christ School. It is unknown how many frozen pine stumps and their notoriously long root systems he was forced to dig out with a pickax and shovel in the Smoky Mountain winters, but given that he held his class’s record for total accumulated demerits, it was more than a few. Stump duty was the stiffest of punishments and difficult work, but completing those excavations in the quiet winter woods always offered Barton a measure of satisfaction. Cabanatuan’s world of deprivation offered a certain sanctuary, too—and opportunities for fulfillment that had mostly eluded him in his former life.
At Annapolis, he had been drawn to the humanities, particularly the study of William Wordsworth. His favorite of Wordsworth’s poems was “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” Concerning the poet’s reflection on his younger self, it addressed the burden of self-doubt and how it sparked him to perform selfless acts:
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
Not until Cabanatuan did Barton come to personify the principles of this well-loved verse. He organized card games and informal prayer, commanded ready audiences for his jokes and wickedly good stories, and contributed his tenor voice and eclectic musical repertoire to a group of singers who strolled the camp, crooning everything from Christian hymns to Broadway show tunes. As he had at the Citadel and Annapolis, he was also a willing participant in brainstorming nicknames for their various tormentors—in this case, the prison guards: Big Stoop, Little Speedo, Clark Gable, Air Raid, Laughing Boy, Donald Duck, Many Many, Beetle Brain, Fish Eyes, Web Foot, Hammer Head, Hog Jaw, and Slime. A latent thespian too, Barton always provoked precious, restorative laughter with his inimitable renditions of various camp guards’ struts.
But he also recognized—astutely—that not all Japanese guards were cut from the same nasty cloth, and he developed something of a rapport with one of them. Lieutenant Oiagi, the camp’s quartermaster and a Christian, was a quiet sort who had played on Japan’s Davis Cup tennis team in the United States in the 1930s. He treated the American prisoners with fairness and relative restraint, particularly in contrast to his Cabanatuan colleagues. Barton’s friendly banter with Oiagi had other benefits. When his friend and barrack mate Ensign Jack Ferguson was suffering from malaria, Oiagi found some quinine.
Jack was grateful beyond measure when Barton proudly produced and administered the quinine. As they sat together, talk of their respective homes and families ensued, as was so often the case at Cabanatuan. Ferguson, who was from Pennsylvania, talked mostly about his mother: how smart she was, how pretty, what a hell of a time he and his brother had given her when they were kids. Such topics formed the core of thousands of hours of conversation among the prisoners: peeling back layers of memory through countless recollections of home and childhood. Each man came to know the others’ personal history totem—their towns, families, sweethearts, neighbors, favorite foods, best friends, and homes—inside and out.
Barton learned all about Charles Armour’s upbringing in Little Rock—an American subculture as different from that of New Jersey as could be imagined within the borders of a single country. Like Barton, Charles was his father’s namesake and the firstborn son of a second marriage. Charles, too, had chafed under outsized parental expectations; he felt in particular that he had never quite measured up in his father’s eyes.
Before Mr. Armour died, he had been a soda-pop bottler representing the popular NuGrape brand. To help advertise the business, Charles’s father had a car built in the shape of a NuGrape bottle: it was painted purple, and its exposed radiator was designed to resemble a bottle cap. Riding around town in that distinctive automobile afforded Charles a solid adolescent identity and made him feel like he was somebody—a schoolboy celebrity, to be sure. But all that vaporized with the 1929 stock market crash. Charles told the ensigns the story one evening as they crouched behind the barracks sharing a contraband cigarette.
Folks weren’t spending money on soda pop when they could barely put dinner on the table, Charles said. When things in the Armour household seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, he continued, his father had a heart attack while driving. The car slammed into a telephone pole after he slumped over the steering wheel. It wasn’t long after his father’s death that Charles joined the navy. “You know, get the hell outta the Wonder State. See the world. We see how that worked out.”
Barton learned from Charles that being four inches taller might not buy happiness after all. Charles learned from Barton that lots of money and a fancy education were no guarantee of it, either. But of their respective homes, they were unequivocal in their proud recollections. They took turns drawing sketches of their houses in the dirt: Charles, of the unique Craftsman bungalow his family built at 501 Holly Street in Little Rock; and Barton, of his beloved Lilac Hedges.
The Armours had built 501 Holly with special attention to detail throughout. It had an L-shaped porch, the longer segment facing west toward beautiful sunsets, and the shorter part wrapping around to the south side. Charles explained that his parents designed the house so it could catch a breeze from every direction, a key attribute in a town where the thermometer could top 100 degrees on an August afternoon. Its wide eaves protected it, both from torrential summer downpours and the relentless sun that beat down from the south and west. French doors throughout the first floor not only gave the interior added grace, but also allowed for air circulation from one si
de of the house to the other.
In turn, Barton proudly described Lilac Hedges’s white clapboard facade and classic Victorian gables, its green-striped awnings and painted porches, his mother’s lovingly tended flower and vegetable gardens, the sprawl of English boxwoods, and, of course, the bursting surround of lilacs. He thought about the place all the time, he told Charles, and sometimes in his sleep he could hear the creak of the porch steps and whine of the old screen door opening and closing.
In their current state of wretchedness, some of the men found it easier to black out such emotional keepsakes than to conjure them up. For Barton, this might have included the sumptuous al fresco meals on the south lawn (and William’s lemon cake); the rustle of his mother’s favorite chiffon skirts in the breeze; the rich, earthy, cherry aroma of his father’s pipe tobacco, and the lilacs, always the lilacs, glistening in the spring sun like a cache of amethysts. Their fragrance was so distinct and memorable, he might have broken down if he’d thought of it for too long.
Still, the occasional urge to share how their lives had once been, dignified and whole, was irresistible. The prisoners surely knew more about one another’s lives than friends or even spouses or girlfriends might have learned back home. This was as true of Charles and Barton as it was of any other two men who’d been together since the start of this hellish odyssey.
WHEN IT CAME TO interacting with his captors, Barton’s relatively small stature conferred a surprising natural advantage: he didn’t tower over the diminutive Japanese guards as many other prisoners did—which often infuriated them and alone brought reprisals. Barton further disarmed them with another tactic he’d learned in his adolescence: projecting a distinctly nonthreatening manner. His ambassadorial role in persuading the prison guards to allow a game of baseball was one of its rewards. Baseball was not only the great American pastime, but a game much loved by the Japanese as well.
The Jersey Brothers Page 12