The Jersey Brothers

by Sally Mott Freeman

  “Well, sir, the Japs have my brother in a prison camp, as you know. I really feel I must go.”

  Their eyes met, and the president nodded.

  After a few minutes of small talk, Bill finally said, “Well, Mr. President, I hate to leave, but you may be sure I’ll be back for the peace conference.” Roosevelt’s ice-blue, half-hooded eyes again met Bill’s gaze. Then he looked away. The dark circles beneath them had deepened in recent months, and he had clearly lost weight. And though it was June, he still had a wool cape draped over his shoulders.

  “Well, son,” the president said, “I’m not sure there will ever be one.”

  20

  A TALE OF ATROCITIES

  THE FIRST THREE OF the escaped Davao prisoners to be rotated out of Mindanao by submarine were William Dyess (army air corps), Melvin McCoy (navy), and Steven Mellnik (army). When they arrived in Perth, Australia, two could barely walk, and the third emerged through the sub hatch on a stretcher. Within hours, all three received a stern summons from MacArthur’s Brisbane headquarters: proceed to GHQ for debriefing as soon as physically able. They were also ordered, in no uncertain terms, to otherwise keep their mouths shut:

  Do Not, Repeat, Do Not, Discuss Experiences with Anyone. Imperative You Arrive in Brisbane Soon as Possible. Have Notified Your Family of Safe Arrival.

  MacArthur

  The ex-prisoners got a warm reception in Brisbane, however—especially Steve Mellnik, who had served on General MacArthur’s prewar staff in Manila. They were particularly surprised when the general pinned Distinguished Service Awards on their very new uniforms. While accepted graciously, all three men commented to the assembled brass that the real heroes—both dead and alive—were those they had left behind.

  After the awards, the gathered officers and their note takers listened, mostly in silence, alternately horrified and entranced as the escapees told the tale of their capture, the grisly methods used to exterminate thousands of prisoners of war, and the particulars of their escape. Except for their repeated expressions of gratitude and respect for the Mindanao guerrillas who had rescued and delivered them, the details were relentlessly grim. The AIB’s Colonel Allison Ind paused the proceedings every twenty minutes or so, as much for the weakened officers as for the weeping stenographers.

  Dyess, Mellnik, and McCoy chronicled the marches that killed tens of thousands, the beatings and bayonetings, the burying of men alive, the starvation and gruesome torture—all carried out with bland and unemotional Japanese efficiency. This was the very first report to the outside world of the Bataan Death March and the savage abuses of daily prison camp life that followed. The men spoke haltingly at first, and then with more energy and animation, likely motivated by reawakened outrage.

  There was particular interest in their method of escape, which had been months in the planning. Key to their success, they explained, was the Japanese practice of sending out unchaperoned details on Sundays; they stressed that DAPECOL was lightly guarded compared with Bilibid, O’Donnell, and Cabanatuan—the prison camps on Luzon.

  The lax oversight gave the incipient escapees the opportunity to preassemble food and essential equipment, including a compass, precious canned goods from their Red Cross packages, a sextant, quinine tablets, and maps of Mindanao and sea routes to Australia. They gradually removed the vital supplies from the camp on a bull cart used for hauling and hid them near the jungle perimeter until Sunday, April 4.

  The Brisbane audience was also intrigued by the critical assistance provided by two longtime Filipino convicts, both in for murder. In fact, among the escapees’ first requests was that MacArthur arrange for President-in-exile Manuel Quezon to formally pardon these criminals. This had been the bargain the American prisoners had gladly struck with the convicts early in the planning.

  The two men, Benigno de la Cruz and Victorio Jumarong, had risked their lives—or worse, recapture and torture by the Japanese—to aid the Americans in a life-threatening, weeks-long ordeal, during which the escapees had hiked, half starved, across more than sixty miles of dark jungle, treacherous swamps, and rugged mountain ranges—nearly always within whispering distance of enraged Japanese search parties. Only with the convicts’ help had the men miraculously made good on the escape.

  Even with the convicts’ knowledge of the jungle, they encountered difficulty from the start. After initially losing their way, they had unwittingly doubled back toward the prison camp, potentially squandering their all-important head start. With Japanese troops in hot pursuit, they narrowly avoided recapture.

  Weakened by days on the run, wading chest deep through snake- and alligator-infested swamps, their rations running short, and the Japanese close on their heels, the escape party was finally picked up by Mindanao guerrillas, who promptly led them to safety. The guerrillas fed and clothed them, and treated their malaria, skin ulcers, and other raging ailments. Guerrilla-protected villagers even threw fiestas to celebrate the Americans’ newfound freedom. These events, in further display of Filipino loyalty to the American cause, featured platters of food, flowing tuba, an alcoholic beverage coaxed from jungle vines, and music and dancing.

  There had been one significant exception to the escapees’ positive guerrilla experience, however: “Colonel” Wendell Fertig, an unsurrendered American mining engineer who had muscled his way to leadership of the various Mindanao guerrilla bands. Fertig had treated them with suspicion and arrogance and initially resisted their request that he radio authorities in Australia and notify them of their escape. Only when McCoy, Mellnik, and Dyess confronted Fertig and displayed a gun they had acquired did he relent and allow the encrypted message to be sent to GHQ receiving stations in Brisbane.

  After this part of the story was told, General Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, launched into an explanation. “Colonel Fertig was with the Corps of Engineers working to construct airfields on Mindanao when hostilities broke out,” Willoughby began. “He fled to the hills and later came down, gradually assuming control of local guerrilla units, which were struggling to oversee food distribution to the local villages and generally maintain civil control. Fertig then established radio contact with us here in Brisbane, and when those units understood he was in contact with us and had accorded him rank, they gradually allowed him to organize and oversee all the guerrilla bands on Mindanao. We understand his drawbacks, but he’s done a decent job distributing supplies and providing intelligence. He’s set up a number of radio ‘stations’ on the island—including the one from which your dispatch was relayed—as well as formalized a coastwatcher network that monitors enemy shipping.

  “His personality has grated on more than just you; I’m not sure the guerrilla leaders on the island fully trust Fertig. After all, he assumed control over indigenous units that they had organized. But they ceded control because of his power to distribute supplies, not his leadership ability. The local leaders probably pay him lip service in proportion to what Fertig can furnish them.

  “That said, it’s our impression he didn’t quite know what to do with you initially—I believe he meant no harm. Fertig desperately needs skilled men to help him, and he probably saw you as potential recruits! We are aware that he is egotistical and difficult, but he has been helpful to us in many ways, including resolving power skirmishes between the guerrilla bands. They are no good to us if they are fighting with each other. That is why we granted him the temporary senior rank of colonel—so he can assert Allied authority. We need Fertig to organize those bands into a cohesive military operation on Mindanao for when we return.”

  General Willoughby emphasized the final word, echoing MacArthur’s famous pledge.

  WILLOUGHBY WAS PLEASED TO have the opportunity to demonstrate his command of Mindanao’s state of affairs before such an attentive audience. He was senior in rank and experience to Courtney Whitney, who had recently arrived in Brisbane and become his chief rival for MacArthur’s attention. Willoughby had been in charge of Philippine affairs until
MacArthur appointed Whitney to head GHQ’s new and semiautonomous Philippine Regional Section (PRS). PRS now oversaw all Philippine operations for MacArthur, including guerrilla operations. To Willoughby’s further chagrin, Whitney was now also the GHQ liaison to the navy’s Seventh Fleet—and thus in control of Chick Parsons’s covert submarine supply operation as well.

  The clever Courtney Whitney had risen in stature at GHQ thanks to a steady stream of glowing, ingratiating praise of General MacArthur. It is said that a fool flatters himself but a wise man flatters the fool, and from the moment of his arrival at GHQ, Whitney had proven himself a master among masters at manipulating his new boss. It began with comments he had made on MacArthur’s draft press statement to be broadcast on the anniversary of the fall of Bataan.

  “This is superb,” Whitney wrote to MacArthur. “It has the classical quality of imperishable statements. I predict that someday it will be carved in stone on monuments in the Philippines. I predict a tremendous emotional effect. American history is shot through with the power of such words and slogans. Like ‘Remember the Alamo’ . . . it has the dignity of distinguished literature.”

  Whitney’s stature at GHQ soared following this early and memorable exchange, and his meteoric rise was vexing in the extreme to General Willoughby—especially because he’d lost command of Philippine affairs. Now it was the ambitious Whitney who controlled the guerrilla leader Wendell Fertig and who was charged with bringing MacArthur’s iconic “I Shall Return” pledge to fruition. Whitney would control the vain Fertig with similar tactics—by implying that his own place in history would be secured by following Whitney’s lead.

  Willoughby was furious that the potential of Mindanao’s twenty-two-thousand-strong guerrilla movement was now being undermined by Whitney’s politically motivated tolerance of Fertig’s limited leadership skills and poor people skills. Even Fertig’s principal aides, American captains Ernest McLish and Clyde Childress, regarded him as paranoid and consumed with personal ambition. They did not like or trust him.

  Willoughby had continued to push for trained military personnel and intelligence officers to be sent to Mindanao to take over operations from the one-time mining engineer, but Courtney Whitney had blocked him at every turn, preferring his tight control over the vain, inexperienced Fertig. Whitney liked the arrangement just as it was.

  STEVE MELLNIK LISTENED AND nodded quietly during Willoughby’s explanation, while also watching the body language—including that of the inscrutable Whitney—of all present. The experience brought back pre-capture memories of all the petty rivalries that had animated MacArthur’s Manila headquarters before the war. It was one of the very few things, he realized, that he had not missed during captivity.

  The conversation moved quickly beyond the escapees’ interactions with Wendell Fertig. The men continued in their high praise of the other Mindanao guerrilla leaders, whose operations they’d had plenty of time to observe in the nearly two-months hiatus between their escape and submarine rendezvous with Chick Parsons. One leader stood out: Captain Claro Lauretta, head of the Davao region guerrillas and the first with whom the escapees had come in contact. Lauretta’s operational ingenuity and sophisticated level of organization, particularly given his primitive surrounds, had especially impressed them.

  The GHQ audience showed intensified interest. They were hungry for well-sourced details on how the guerrilla units functioned, their living conditions in the jungle, their morale, their ability to gather enemy intelligence, and the extent and nature of their interactions with the Japanese. The escapees filled in the many blanks with hard facts.

  Numbering several thousand, the Mindanao guerrillas were tough and smart. They knew the terrain like the backs of their hands, enjoyed widespread Filipino loyalty and support, and dealt ruthlessly with the Japanese, who increasingly feared and avoided them. The Japanese garrison on Mindanao persistently underestimated their strength and cunning. Not only had the guerrillas inflicted hundreds of Japanese casualties, but their very presence tied down thousands of other Japanese troops who could have otherwise been deployed elsewhere. Whenever the Japanese tried to attack them, the guerrillas melted expertly into the jungles and mountains, taking their food, supplies, and radios with them.

  When the stenographers’ work was finally done, MacArthur sent the word-for-word transcript to the White House by special air dispatch, on orders of President Roosevelt.

  After the debriefing, General Willoughby said, “I’m convinced the guerrillas will play a major role during the liberation. Their potential for intelligence and sabotage is enormous. We need someone familiar with their operations to help us develop that potential.” Looking at Steve Mellnik, whom he remembered well from prewar Manila, Willoughby then announced to the group, “Steve will need to take off for several weeks’ debriefing in Washington, but when he’s through, I’d like him to return and join our staff.” Only after General MacArthur nodded in agreement did Courtney Whitney concur quietly.

  Mellnik could not have been more pleased. Though he didn’t say it at the time, he was already envisioning another role for the Mindanao guerrillas, one in which he might now play a critical part: as facilitators of a mass rescue of the two thousand remaining prisoners at the Davao Penal Colony.

  21

  AUGUST 1943: ALLIED WAR SUMMIT, QUEBEC, CANADA

  WHEN IT WAS DECIDED that a fourth major Allied war summit was to be held in August 1943, Washington’s stifling summer heat was rejected in favor of Winston Churchill’s suggestion that they meet in cooler climes: Her Majesty’s Quebec, Canada. That he might have the honor of hosting the president at the British Empire’s largest North American fortress, the Citadel—proudly overlooking the site where the British defeated the French in 1760 to claim the spoils of all of Canada—was reason alone for the prime minister to favor the location.

  But in addition to the historic Citadel and Canada’s infinitely superior summer weather, Quebec also boasted a large, comfortable, and secure château-hotel where the Allied leaders’ sizable military and civilian staffs could hold their “pick-and-shovel” sessions, the detailed meetings that converted the war leaders’ big decisions into workable plans. So on August 1, 1943, some three thousand reservations at the famed Le Château Frontenac, the magnificent Gothic Revival edifice perched high above the rushing Saint Lawrence River, were abruptly cancelled. Preparations for the war conference began immediately. Secrecy shrouded the arrangements, and rumors regarding the unexplained cancellations abounded. The two most remarkable were that Pope Pius XII was leaving war-torn Italy to set up temporary Vatican headquarters there, and that the storied hotel was to be converted to a military hospital.

  In two weeks’ time—with the addition of several miles of barbed wire, portable antiaircraft batteries, and armed sentries—the site’s conversion to a first-rate world war summit location was complete. Hundreds of American, British, and Canadian officials began descending on Frontenac: from senior staffs, to secret service agents, to military intelligence officers, to Signal Corps communications specialists. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill took up official residence within the Citadel’s elegant residential quarters, an ideal environment for informal and confidential discussions, as well as for high-level meetings.

  The priority at Quadrant was to refine the timing and strategy for Operation Overlord, the seminal cross-Channel Allied landing in France that would launch the all-out assault on “the Axis in Europe.” Still to be addressed were the sticky details of “combined” commands over American and British land, air, and sea forces, as well as other turf-related Overlord logistics.

  Also vying for attention at Quadrant was the simmering intra-Allied battle over strategic next steps in the Pacific. Whenever the discussion turned to that topic, the British delegation appeared more focused on approaches favoring its lost imperial colonies—Hong Kong and Singapore in particular—than on prioritizing men and ships for an attack on Japan’s home islands.

  Fro
m Day One at Quadrant, the Anglophobic Admiral King pressed relentlessly for more aggressive action against Japan—and sooner rather than later—with George Marshall voicing his strongest support yet for King’s position. Building on his Casablanca and Trident fulminations, King turned up the heat at Quebec, all but alleging that Britain lacked serious commitment to defeating the Japanese once Europe was liberated from the Nazis. The meeting room quieted at the accusation.

  British representatives grew red with irritation whenever Admiral King opened his mouth. King was brilliant, but even on his best days, his personality was like a blowtorch. It wasn’t that he was singling out the British for especially harsh treatment—he treated just about everyone that way. General Dwight Eisenhower, in charge of the US Army’s European operations, once confided to his diary: “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King. He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person . . . [and] a mental bully.”

  But popularity seemed utterly unimportant to Ernest King. In fact, by all accounts, he held dear his tough, lionlike defense of the United States Navy. When he was tapped to replace Admiral Harold Stark as CNO in the post–Pearl Harbor shake-up, he said famously, “You see, when things get tough, they call in the sons of bitches.”

  To Admiral King, the Pacific War—in which America and her navy had the greatest stake of all the Allies—had always come first. He pressed inexorably for the American Navy’s needs and priorities, no matter the venue. At Quebec, he reminded the august assembly of the US Navy’s string of Pacific victories, earned despite a paucity of men, ships, and materiel—a paucity not only compared with enemy assets but also compared with those being allocated to the European front.

  King’s clear implication was that the navy’s heavy casualties in the early battles were greater than they should have been and a direct result of misplaced priorities of higher-ups. This was particularly true of sailors of the surface fleet, among whom the Guadalcanal toll alone was more than 5,000 young lives—a stratospheric number even when compared with the much-publicized losses by the US Army and Marine Corps during the protracted struggle ashore. That casualty estimate stood at 1,592.