Finally, on November 15, Halsey received word that the Japanese Fleet was retreating to the north. Given the rapid attrition of its ships, planes, and pilots, it appeared—at least for the time being—that the enemy had quit the scrum for Guadalcanal and Henderson Field.
There was a collective sigh of relief among a mourning Enterprise crew. Several more screening vessels had gone down protecting her this time and taken scores of good friends with them, compounding the crew’s battle distress. Every officer, pilot, and sailor aboard needed a respite from months of near-constant battle.
Admiral Halsey ordered the ship and a grateful crew back to Nouméa. Enterprise had survived multiple attacks over the past two months, and the Seabees needed to complete urgent repairs from the devastating Santa Cruz strikes. This time the ship would be there for weeks of sorely needed overhaul—and rest for her crew.
IN MID-NOVEMBER THE MAP Room teletype barely rested as it spit out obituary after obituary of sunken American ships in Savo Sound. On edge, Bill watched and waited. When confirmation came through on November 15 that the enemy was in retreat and Guadalcanal was secured, cheers went up. With this, Bill’s relentless anxiety over Benny’s safety got a temporary reprieve. He also had a cautious sense that better intelligence about Barton might be coming through soon. For the first time since the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, intercepted messages from unsurrendered individuals in the Philippines were providing concrete intelligence. Station KFS, a powerful commercial San Francisco station that also furnished relay services for the military, was now forwarding them to Washington with some regularity.
The senders were scattered Filipino guerrillas using contraband radios. Several had managed shortwave contact with MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia as well. The messages were clear: “We are resisting the Japanese. Can you hear us? Can you help us?”
Equally intriguing was the startling news about one naval reserve officer, Lieutenant Charles “Chick” Parsons, who cloaked his American naval identity after Manila fell by assuming the guise of his onetime role as Panamanian consul. After persuading the Japanese of his diplomatic status, he secured passage out of Manila.
When he showed up unannounced at Naval Intelligence in Washington, Parsons caused quite a stir. Not only had he eluded capture, he had secreted out with him high-value intelligence on everything from the state of the burgeoning guerrilla movement to the treatment, status, and location of Allied prisoners of war. Parsons’s escape, attendant story, and detailed documentation of activity behind enemy lines had jaws dropping all over Washington.
Lieutenant Parsons confirmed that the intercepts picked up in Australia and by station KFS were not Japanese feints; they were from guerrilla bands cropping up all across the islands. But he had more. From the shadows of occupied Manila, he had taken dozens of pages of detailed notes on the occupiers’ cruel crackdown. Before he and his family gained passage out of Manila on a Red Cross ship, he had fully chronicled meticulous details on the new puppet government, food supplies, enemy troop strength, torturous interrogations by Japan’s ruthless Kempeitai, guerrilla espionage potential, and the condition and movement of prisoners of war. He presented a fifty-one-page document complete with underground contact names and places and other crucial intelligence. Navy officials were stunned.
Built like a boxer, Parsons was five feet seven inches and tanned to a deep umber. He could easily pose as Filipino on one mission and a Panamanian on the next. The Tennessee native spoke English without a drawl, Spanish like a native, and numerous Tagalog dialects without a trace of an accent. And from his years of running a Manila stevedoring business and marriage into a well-respected Filipino family, he knew the islands cold.
During his Washington debriefings, Parsons volunteered to return to the Philippine war zone. His potential for high-value intelligence gathering and bolstering the developing resistance movement were considerable. Parsons ticked off a list of what he could accomplish: evaluate guerrilla assets such as leadership, armaments, and personnel; set up intelligence networks; and establish additional coast-watcher stations, which would be positioned on key islands so as to track enemy shipping and monitor war prisoners’ movements. He could also smuggle in personnel and supplies and generally advise Filipino citizens on best methods for resisting their occupiers. Parsons wasn’t offering to undertake the high-risk mission for just the navy’s or even the Allies’ sake—he had powerful personal motives as well. He had left behind an extended family, a thriving business, and his entire life savings.
But since the lieutenant was navy and the Philippines war zone was now under General MacArthur’s control, returning Parsons to Manila under US Navy auspices could be complicated. As it turned out, however, MacArthur’s attitude toward Parsons would be different, despite his usual antipathy toward anything concerning the “damn navy.” Some interservice bartering—instead of bickering, for a change—would be in order.
The navy proposed to MacArthur that Chick Parsons go to Brisbane under the tutelage of Captain Arthur “Mac” McCollum USN, the Seventh Fleet’s intelligence officer. The officials bristled at the Seventh Fleet’s new nickname, “MacArthur’s Navy,” due to its anchorage within SWPA, but with respect to Parsons, it served their purposes perfectly.
It was no secret that MacArthur craved control over the widening Pacific War, particularly with respect to the Philippines—the command he had lost under humiliating circumstances. Getting the general’s headquarters to forward their guerrilla-derived intelligence to anyone in Washington had been nearly as difficult as getting the guerrilla transmissions past the Japanese.
This was because the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the powerful, Washington-based secret intelligence agency, was operating in every Allied theater of war except SWPA. MacArthur had firmly and repeatedly declined OSS assistance; instead, he elected to use the services of Australia’s Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB), which was now under his full control. Underlying this choice was that MacArthur did not want any of his GHQ (General Headquarters) functions brought under the War Department’s or any other Washington-based agency’s purview. OSS director William “Wild Bill” Donovan expressed concerns about the depth and quality of AIB, yet his offers to send experienced field agents to MacArthur were all in vain.
But Parsons was different. He wasn’t a Washington insider or even a navy insider. A longtime expat, Parsons had married a Filipino woman, started a family, and had managed and grown a thriving Manila business for more than a decade.
In fact, Parsons’s naval career began only when he was awakened on December 8, 1941, and told that his entire Luzon Stevedoring Company—personnel, equipment, and ships—had been taken over by the US Navy. Admiral Hart swore him in the same day. Freshly minted lieutenant Charles Parsons, USNR, was as unsullied a naval officer as a navy-hating army general would ever find. MacArthur, it turned out, was interested.
In late November 1942 the navy’s proposal to send Parsons to Brisbane under the tutelage of Captain McCollum and the Seventh Fleet received an affirmative response from MacArthur. “Send Parsons,” wrote the general himself, with uncharacteristic brevity.
ENCOURAGED BY NOVEMBER’S DEVELOPMENTS, Bill took a rare Saturday off for a beloved cause: the army-navy football game. Though the Cabinet and Congress had both debated cancelling the time-honored match to conserve rubber and gasoline for the war, Bill’s navy-football-loving boss FDR ended the debate by personally ordering that the game be played.
Annapolis coach John “Billick” Whelchel and assistant coach Edgar “Rip” Miller generously credited Bill Mott with nudging the decision, but he insisted their gratitude was undeserved. While Bill had weighed in enthusiastically during the official bickering, the leader of the free world had already made up his mind. The army-navy gridiron face-off was key to morale at both academies, Roosevelt declared, and good for the country, too. Game on.
The game was relocated from Philadelphia’s traditionally neutral ground to Thompson Stadium at
Annapolis, and wartime travel restrictions would limit attendance to mostly local spectators. How Bill Mott got around the ten-mile radius restriction may never be known, but exceptions were in fact made. He might have happily volunteered to chauffeur one or more Washington-based sweethearts of fourth-year middies—all of whom were allowed to attend.
Since West Point’s Corps of Cadets, Army’s traditional cheering section, was not allowed to make the trip, another novel accommodation was made. The Academy’s third- and fourth-year midshipmen were ordered to sit behind the Army bench and cheer for the visiting team. The 1942 match grew more unique by the hour.
Newsmen in attendance wrote enthusiastically about Army’s Navy-populated cheering section. Midshipmen braying the Corps cheer was living proof of interservice comity, they reported. Even the touchdown-starved Army players expressed their gratitude to the cheerleaders, despite their 14–0 loss in a match they had been heavily favored to win. The 1942 game would be Navy’s fourth consecutive victory over West Point.
Game attendance may have been a tenth the size of the usual hundred thousand Philadelphia sellout, but President Roosevelt had correctly gauged the broad national interest in the match. An unprecedented forty million Americans tuned in to the live radio broadcast. The defiant, patriotic fervor at Thompson Stadium compensated for the reduced spectator size. From the emotional opening remarks to the extra staccato in the last stanza of the Annapolis school song, “Navy Blue and Gold,” fans wept, cheered, and sang themselves hoarse on their country’s behalf.
Bill always belted out his alma mater anthem with gusto, and always off key. It was impossible not to recall doing the same with Benny and Barton at his side in 1937, the last time all three Jersey brothers attended the match. Today, Bill surely sang it for them instead of with them.
Rip Miller wrote Bill after the game, thanking him for his “splendid work in keeping the navy football team before ‘the big head coach.’ I don’t know where we could do any better for our cause here than what you have made possible for us.”
Bill continued to refuse credit, but he was so pleased by the overall turn of events that he started advancing the idea of sending the game reels to Admiral Halsey’s men in the Pacific. As it happened, the garrulous Admiral William “Windy” Calhoun, commander of the Service Force of the Pacific Fleet, was in town to meet with officials from the White House, State Department, and War Department in the days following the game. Bill was assigned as his escort.
During their banter to and from the meetings, Bill mentioned that he had seen the army-navy game films and casually suggested sending them out to the Pacific. Calhoun’s eyes widened. “Terrific idea, Commander! Great for morale!” He clapped Bill on the shoulder and asked for copies of the reels to take back to Pearl Harbor with him. Bill savored the prospect of telling Benny he’d had a hand in dispatching the films to the war front, particularly given Navy’s shutout victory.
16
HAPPY DAYS AT THE PENAL COLONY
WHEN THE PRISONERS AWOKE to their new home at Davao Penal Colony in November 1942, there was universal agreement: the move had been an open-and-shut case of divine intervention. Housing and sanitation were a dramatic improvement over Cabanatuan, and the rations, while still spare, were double the size. They knew the purpose of the latter was to strengthen them for heavy farm labor—logging, sawmill operation, field and railroad work—but the quantity and quality of the food was measurably better than at any previous Japanese accommodation. With the addition of vegetables purloined on farmwork details, Barton, Charles, and the other ensigns began to regain weight and strength.
Still, Davao was a prison camp. Scurvy was rampant, and the men despaired at the sight of wild citrus rotting beyond their reach or being devoured by bands of plump parrots. And there were trillions of disease-carrying mosquitoes that bred in the swamps of the surrounding rain forest. Dark, whining clouds of them feasted on the prisoners as they toiled in the fields, and cases of malaria skyrocketed.
On the other hand, prisoner details were lightly guarded, a marked shift from the oppressive oversight at Cabanatuan. Major Maeda believed that heavy guarding at Davao was unnecessary because it was surrounded by impenetrable, alligator-ridden jungle, not to mention by roving bands of Moros, Mindanao’s reclusive but fierce Muslim tribe, widely feared for their head-hunting practices. Another surprising bright spot at DAPECOL was its corps of Filipino convicts. When Barton’s draft arrived, 80 percent of the camp’s existing inmates were convicted murderers serving life sentences. These men understood all aspects of the farm operations better than the guards or camp administrators, and they were ordered to train the Cabanatuan newcomers.
The cutthroats, who dubbed the new arrivals “gentlemen prisoners,” promptly got to work instructing them on the primitive sugar and sawmill operations and the dangerous business of bringing down massive mahogany trees and processing the lumber. They also taught them how to harness caribou and Brahman steer and guide them to the fields. The convicts were friendly, helpful, and seemingly pro-American. The POWs were uniformly sorry when these kindly mentors were rotated out of DAPECOL for lack of space.
BARTON, CHARLES, AND ANOTHER Cabanatuan colleague, Ken Wheeler, made several new friends at Davao—mostly young naval ensigns like themselves. They spent nearly all their time together as their Davao overseers also quartered prisoners by service and rank and usually applied the same groupings to work details.
Together these friends shared the smallest of pleasures: a contraband banana, a fistful of coffee beans, a captured lizard—executed, cooked, and cut up—or a tin of canned fish extracted at a dear price from the camp’s black market. Even seeds from a withering tobacco plant discovered on a work detail were a source of shared entertainment. They planted the seeds underneath their barracks, and the yield of bitter green leaves was “cured” on short poles. The greatly anticipated first smoke from the pathetic harvest became a deep and happy memory.
Decision-making also became unusually communal. When the prisoners learned that they would be allowed to write one postcard (of no more than fifty words), they debated at length who they would write (parents? wife/girlfriend?) and shared many a joke about the disfavor they would earn from those not selected. But despite generous advice, Barton stuck with his first choice. Even as a prisoner of war on the other side of the world, he had no appetite for the imagined rebuke; he knew he must write his mother.
“Am hoping the time draws near when we may see each other again,” he wrote, somewhat stiffly. “Think of you all constantly, and also of William’s many accomplishments in the culinary department.”
On some level, Barton knew this bit of humor would telegraph that, despite his unfortunate circumstances, he was intact mentally. He was prohibited from disclosing where he was, what had happened to him, and very nearly anything else of a personal nature. Beneath the section of the card marked “Health,” he underlined “fair” (versus “good” or “under treatment”).
This was likely due to the recurring infection of his shrapnel wound, thanks to its daily exposure to mud and muck on the rice detail. He and Ken Wheeler had also contracted vicious cases of malaria. It made them shaky and weak, but the malady was so commonplace it was not sufficient to excuse them from the fieldwork. Every hand was needed during peak rice planting season.
Each rectangular paddy measured thirty-five by forty yards. A rope with knots spaced at six-inch intervals was laid across the short end of each tract, and a planting team of twenty-eight prisoners was then distributed along the rope. Standing midhip in mud with the rope in front of them, each prisoner took six seeds from his satchel and plunged them deep into the mud, bare-handed. They then stepped back a precise eight inches and repeated the process. So when the opportunity to switch to the carpentry detail “to build a new prisoner barracks” arose, Ken and Barton—despite some uneasiness that they would instead be assigned to rumored local Japanese airfield construction—were among the first to volunteer.
&
nbsp; To qualify, they were marched to the DAPECOL carpentry shop and quizzed on the identity and use of such tools as saws, hammers, and planes. A chorus of wisecracks followed Barton’s proud performance on the carpentry exam. “Who knew I had this aptitude?” he joked. He and Ken bonded all the more on their new detail. The work was hard, but it was on dry ground, in the shade, and infinitely more interesting than planting rice. And they did indeed build a new barrack, as well as a new prisoner galley—the men took great satisfaction in the finished products. Their next work detail was even better.
An interpreter came into their barracks one evening and asked for “four navy men” to run a boat. After a hurried conference, Ken, Barton, and two more senior officers stepped forward. The four happy sailors were taken via hand-cranked cart over the prison’s narrow-gauge railroad to a place called Anebogan, on the Tuganay River. The very smell of the water excited them, and they eagerly scanned the dock area for their new vessel. When Ken spied the dangerously listing diesel tug, he quietly scaled back his dream of engineering a possible escape. The rusted, leaky hauler would not be capable of making an open-sea trip.
Still, working on a boat was infinitely better duty than toiling in the rice fields or in a wood shop. The men were first charged with repairing the tug, and then towing supply barges from Davao City upriver to the prison camp and small Japanese outposts along the way. They got right to work. Because the boat had B. P. stamped on the bow—for Bureau of Prisons—they cheerfully nicknamed their new command “Bo Peep.”
After days of patching, caulking, and engine tinkering—and prodigious use of the kind of language that gives “sailor mouth” its name—they coaxed a belch of black smoke from the tug’s engine and it sputtered to life. They then nosed Bo Peep into the Tuganay River under the careful scrutiny of four guards—one per man. The sailors divided their shipborne duties quite professionally and were pleased to find they had largely retained vital seafaring skills—including how to bail bilges, which they did frequently, even after plugging a number of newly discovered leaks with flattened tin cans.
The Jersey Brothers Page 19