But Barton received no mail in the January 1943 shipment of ten thousand letters to Davao, nor any in the next shipment two months later. By that time, some of his colleagues’ letters numbered a half dozen or more. Did everyone think he was dead? he wondered. Had they simply given up? He tried to make light of it and joke about it, as he had with so many other adversities he’d endured over time. But this hurt Barton more than all the privations and insults in his long, dark months of incarceration, and it was obvious to his close friends.
Charles made every effort to convince him that it was the goddamn Nips’ fault. Those letters were out there for him—somewhere—his friends insisted, and they went to great lengths to take Barton’s mind off his pain just as he had done for them so many times. But whatever the cause, the inexplicable silence from home caused a sharp prick of sadness in Barton, and a tinge of resentment, too. The next precious card the guards allowed him to write went not to his mother or father but to a Chapel Hill classmate, whose postal address, remarkably, he still remembered. Let his parents hear of him from that, he thought.
ON THE EVENING OF April 3, 1943, Major Maeda arranged for movie night at Davao. That night’s feature was a Japanese propaganda film on the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Over the past few months, Maeda had grown anxious that the prisoners might become troublesome if they learned the details of steady American gains against the Japanese at sea. He was also nervous about the strengthening guerrilla presence in the jungles around the penal colony. Lightning-quick hit-and-run raids on local roads had resulted in the gruesome slaughter of a number of Japanese soldiers.
Some guerrillas had been apprehended and punished brutally, but many more had notched deadly blows against the occupiers. Maeda knew that the local guerrilla movement—with both American and Filipino elements—had grown in strength and size and that they were in contact with distant Allied commands. Weeks earlier, Japanese planes had dropped pamphlets over Mindanao, warning of mortal consequences for collusion with the guerrillas.
Central to Maeda’s concern was that Mindanao was the closest Philippine island to Australia—an obvious first step in any Allied move to retake the Philippines. In view of the looming threat, anything the major could do to dampen prisoner morale—reduce rations, impose longer and harder work details, or feature a movie on the decimation of Pearl Harbor—was a worthy countermeasure.
The men sat quietly through the pummeling of the USS Arizona, understanding well the wisdom of not provoking their captors with sneers or catcalls. Still, as they watched the guards struggle with changing the reels on the projector, Barton couldn’t resist whispering a mock dare to Charles (now widely known as “Ensign Goddamn”): “Okay, who wants to ask if we can watch the bombing of Tokyo next?”
Despite Major Maeda’s concerted efforts to the contrary, camp morale had improved. Enough war news had leaked through to boost prisoner confidence that chances for their eventual rescue were improving, if they could just keep themselves alive. The evening’s film feature had a particularly galvanizing effect on one small contingent in the audience. These men were poised for a long-planned escape—scheduled for the very next day.
THE MORNING OF APRIL 4, 1943, began as most Sundays did at Davao: stifling, dreary, and overcast. Reveille pierced the air, but since it was Sunday, only a few voluntary work details were scheduled to go out. Sometimes prisoners signed up for these out of boredom; others went hoping to score an extra piece of fruit or a few husks of rice. Beneath their mosquito nets, Barton and Charles took little notice as two of their barrack mates roused for Sunday detail. They likely gave no thought as to whether either might be a member of his shooting squad.
Ten Americans—eight officers and two enlisted men from all three services—lined up at the camp gate, initially in separate groups. They were heading out on routine details: a few to build a rain shelter; others to feed and water the animals used to haul a bull cart that carried tools and supplies around the colony. In plain view of sentries toting machine guns, the men walked calmly out the gate and down the road as though it were just another workday.
Once out of sight of the sentries, they left the road and crept noiselessly through tall cogon grass toward a prearranged rendezvous point; there they recovered hidden supplies and met their guides, two Filipino convicts who had left the prison camp on a separate work detail. The DAPECOL system of rotating guards to work details rather than assigning all-day overseers to each group was critical to the plan’s success. The expanded escape party then proceeded into the rain forest, unobserved, and began their dash to freedom.
The escape had been planned for months, each element precisely thought out. The jungle-wise and more savvy Filipino convicts were recruited to guide them through thick and dangerous forest and swampland. Supplies needed to survive outside of camp were gradually stockpiled at a secret location over a period of several weeks. The choice of a Sunday, in hopes they wouldn’t be missed until they did not return at the end of the day, would give them a full day’s lead over certain pursuers.
In fact, it was not until evening tenko that the numbers failed to add up. “Ichi, ni, san, shi . . .” At first, the Japanese thought they had miscounted and ordered the some two thousand prisoners to stand for a second, hours-long count. When it, too, came up short, but by a different number, Major Maeda flew into a rage and ordered a third, fourth, and fifth tally, each with varying results but all still short of the previous evening’s count. It was after midnight by the time the ten missing men were identified. Mr. Shusuke Wada, the perpetually angry hunchback interpreter, reminded the prisoners of the shooting squad rule with a sneer. “For every man who escape, nine die!”
Search parties were immediately dispatched with orders to shoot on sight. Fearing a mass prison break coordinated with a guerrilla attack on the compound, Maeda also placed guards in each barrack and set up a perimeter defense around the camp. The men from barracks five through eight, where the ten escapees had variously lived, were particularly fearful of the ten-for-one death-sentence trigger. Which would it be? Shot? Bayoneted? Beheaded?
Every occupant of those four barracks was taken to Japanese headquarters for questioning. While the men waited their turn, arguments over prisoner escapes were renewed. Some spat curses, while others reminded the group that they were duty-bound by military doctrine to attempt escape if captured. “Even if we’re held by fucking barbarians who ignore the Geneva Convention?” came a bitter response. “To hell with your goddamn doctrine. It’s no good to me dead.”
From that day forward, nothing was the same at Davao Penal Colony. Guards who had been friendly were reassigned. Those who remained were mistrustful, hostile, and quicker to punish with slaps, kicks, or rifle butt strikes. Rations were cut drastically. Religious services were again forbidden; any prisoner gathering had the potential for collusion.
On April 11, as the frantic search for the escapees lengthened into a second week, residents of barracks five through eight were marched to a maximum security pen at the north end of the compound. The grim enclosure was surrounded by guard towers and three concentric rings of barbed wire fencing. Inside the cramped prison within a prison, Barton spent the next day—his twenty-fifth birthday—fighting claustrophobia and a creeping fear of inevitable execution.
Between interrogations, the sequestered men were kept in wire-screened, double-decked cages resembling rabbit hutches, alive with bedbugs. Nesting rats scurried beneath them. Their rations were cut to rice only, twice daily, brought in by oxcart. They were forbidden to speak to one another and ordered to “meditate” on their wrongdoing.
Instead, they contemplated their dimming prospects for survival. What would the final punishment be? All signs pointed to a mass execution. They wrote wills and last messages and buried them in tin cans during latrine breaks—the only times, other than for interrogation, that they were let out of the cages.
The incarceration lasted for a month. In mid-May, they were marched outside the guardhouse and ordered to
line up. Trembling, they obeyed and braced for the worst.
19
FAREWELL TO THE WHITE HOUSE
SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1943 found Bill Mott busier than ever, increasingly besieged by both personal and professional concerns. His wife, Romie, had been restricted to bed rest due to complications with her second pregnancy. At the same time, Map Room personnel were providing critical support to Trident. This third strategic conference of Allied leaders was taking place in Washington, with meetings at both the White House and the Federal Reserve Building. Prime Minister Churchill was again in residence at the White House, and he and his entourage had Bill and the Map Room watch officers hopping day and night, with demands both official and unofficial.
In this same time frame, Bill was also waiting for a response to his request for release from White House duty so that he could go to sea and join the fight. Impatient, he could no longer bear standing by while the enemy held his brother, particularly in light of recent intelligence regarding Japanese treatment of POWs in the Philippines. The new information shocked the senses, even in a wartime context.
The first dispatch came from Luzon in February 1943. MacArthur had radioed the information to Washington:
A guerrilla leader on Luzon confirms reports from Filipino escapees that at Camp O’Donnell . . . deaths of American and Filipino prisoners by execution or disease, numbered 23,000 by November 1; Executions daily for such causes as disrespectful or insubordinate attitude or inability to work, deaths by disease resulting from dysentery, malaria, influenza, beriberi, pneumonia in order of importance; no medicine and two Red Cross trucks with medicine doctors and nurses from Manila refused entrance; meals consist of cold rice twice daily, sometimes with rotten camotes; no sanitation; for every prisoner that escapes, the Japs shoot five [sic] hostages; attempts by loyal Filipinos to smuggle in food, medicine punished by rough treatment and shooting; also prisoners had no blankets and only their original shoes and clothing.
Bill chafed at the “No Action” recommendation on the circulated radiogram. He knew the reason, of course. This was very bad, but not a priority to resource-strapped war leaders.
Then another, more significant dispatch came through concerning a different prison camp, this one on the island of Mindanao. The highly classified memorandum reported that a group of American officers, including at least one naval officer, had escaped from the very same camp where Bill felt sure Barton was being held prisoner. His heart had jumped at the news.
The men had escaped in early April and were now safe in the hands of Mindanao guerrillas. Thanks to Chick Parsons, arrangements to get them to Australia by navy submarine were in process. Bill was acutely disappointed to learn that Barton was not among the escapees, but apparently these men had quite a story to tell—one that would make all previous reports pale in comparison. Horrific details were trickling in via the Filipino guerrilla unit protecting the men. He would know more once the escapees arrived in Washington.
Bill was hopeful that they would bring concrete news about Barton, but another thought also nagged him—one that always crossed his mind with good news from the Pacific, as with the recent downing of Admiral Yamamoto’s plane over Bougainville, the largest of the Solomon Islands. He had a recurrent, consuming anxiety that any Allied gain—whether the elimination of a revered Japanese admiral, a victorious sea battle, or a large-scale escape from an Allied prison camp—could trigger enemy retribution against the war prisoners under their control.
Around this time, the White House had new senior naval aide: Admiral Wilson Brown—the same Wilson Brown who’d been Naval Academy superintendent the year that Barton was forced to withdraw from Annapolis. Captain McCrea had departed to command the USS Iowa, the first of the new “fast battleships” churning out of American shipyards. Bidding farewell to his important mentor and friend was difficult for Bill. But Captain McCrea had also been driven to take part in the fight—on the war front instead of from inside the secure marble confines of the White House.
This was Admiral Brown’s fourth stint as White House naval aide; the previous three had been under Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, and an earlier iteration (in the 1930s) under FDR. Despite their sizeable age difference, Bill and Admiral Brown found a quick and easy rapport. They had strong common ground in their mutual devotion to Annapolis (including its gloried football lore).
They swapped stories throughout the days and evenings as their work allowed. Brown savored one story in particular—likely with a twinkle in his eye—during an afternoon lull in the Map Room. Apparently Helen Cross’s 1938 letter dressing down the Naval Academy for its “unpedagogic methods” had left quite an impression on then superintendent Brown. Bill shook his head and held up his hands in mock surrender, as though in belated apology on the family’s behalf.
But Admiral Brown recalled Barton’s situation sympathetically. Even when Academy rules didn’t make sense, his job was to enforce them, he offered, in half apology. This was the first that Brown had heard of Barton’s post-Annapolis reentry into the navy (he thought the boy had pursued a singing career) and of his wounding and capture in the Philippines. From that point forward, he asked frequently about both Barton and Benny, touching Bill more than he ever let on.
When the timing seemed right, Bill summoned the courage to ask Admiral Brown to endorse his waiver request regarding his nearsightedness. Doing so, he explained, would greatly improve his chances to get to the Pacific front. Though Bill’s eyesight was now correctable with something called contact lenses, only a formal waiver would clear him for sea duty.
Brown worried that finding a qualified replacement to run the Map Room could be as big an obstacle as the waiver request, but Bill pointed out that the able and well-liked Lieutenant George Elsey—whom Bill had hired back at ONI and subsequently brought over to the White House—could assume his responsibilities seamlessly. Not only was Elsey familiar with Map Room operations, the president liked and trusted him. Bill had learned to spot discretion and talent, he assured the admiral, and Elsey possessed both. Brown agreed.
After conferring with the president, Wilson Brown penned an enthusiastic endorsement of Bill’s formal request to the chief of naval personnel.
Two days later, three bells sounded outside the Map Room door, the all-important signal that the president was on his way. Bill and the duty officers readied themselves quickly for the day’s briefing and question-and-answer session that always followed. When the door opened, Mott took the wheelchair handles over from the president’s valet (who was not allowed in the room) and carefully steered Roosevelt into position for the briefing.
Before it started, Roosevelt turned to Bill, now beside him, affixing his blue eyes on Bill’s own. “William,” he said, “Admiral Brown spoke to me of your request to leave us and go to sea. You must know, I was reluctant. Eleanor was most disappointed to hear it, too. We don’t want you to go.”
Bill was a combination of stunned, pleased, and embarrassed, wondering all the time that Roosevelt was speaking how to respond appropriately. When the moment came, his answer poured out.
“Thank you, Mr. President. I am deeply honored, but you know how when you first come into this room and look on the maps for your sons’ ships—even that of your Hyde Park butler? Well, sir, every day I look at the postings of the Enterprise and then the Philippines where my little brother is a prisoner of the Japanese. I feel compelled to go, to fight.”
The president nodded somberly, already having turned his gaze to the Pacific wall map, scanning for the USS Wasp on which his son John was serving. “Yes, son, I do, I do understand,” he said. By then, his mind seemed half a world away from the conversation.
Optimistic, Bill wrote Benny of the development:
You know I have been trying for some time to get some kind of sea duty, but my every way has been blocked because of my eyes . . . Admiral Brown recommended me to the course at the Naval War College at Newport, which coupled with the President’s approval
, will mean, I hope, that orders will come through soon . . . Please don’t blow me a blast about leaving my nice soft job in the White House, because it means a lot to me to become one of the fighting brothers . . .
I visited both Rockaway and Oceanport last week and found things in pretty good shape. Mother of course grieves over Barton, and as could be expected, is slightly irrational on the subject. She can’t understand why we don’t turn all our effort into the Pacific in order to avenge the heroes of Bataan. Emotionally, I agree with her, but realize the Combined Chiefs of Staff are the people to make that decision. Incidentally, we have had a very interesting guest at the White House in the last few weeks, as you probably have heard.
When Prime Minister Churchill arrived for the Trident Conference, he rejected the Queens’ Bedroom, named for the many royal White House guests it had hosted in the past. Instead, he took over the more comfortable Rose Bedroom, also on the second floor, just as he had during his June 1942 stay. Churchill also brought along his legendary traveling map room. But when its director, the tall, handsome, and very proper Captain Richard Pike Pim, saw how sophisticated the White House Map Room had become, he proposed to Bill that the British contingent move in with them. Maintaining separate maps would be inefficient and superfluous, Pim insisted.
So Pim and Churchill made full use of the Map Room—morning, noon, night, and very late night. Bill built on the convivial rapport established during the PM’s previous visits. In addition to inaugurating an afternoon tea ritual, the Map Room watch officers supplemented their regular daily map postings with incoming war cables from the Admiralty and London’s War Office.
The Jersey Brothers Page 21