In fact, Pacific naval commands had been appallingly underfed in the past two years compared with commands in Europe, arguably because of the time it took to convert US industrial capacity to a dedicated output of war goods. But here it was August 1943, King argued, and still only 15 percent of the supplies pouring out of converted American plants and factories were designated for the Pacific War. Moreover, the number of troops deployed to battle the Nazis was double that sent to the Pacific, which occupied a larger and more complicated theater of war.
In what one British representative deemed “very undiplomatic language,” Admiral King demanded an agreement at Quadrant that more ships and personnel be sent to the Pacific front. King had already assigned the shrewd and equally irascible Admiral Kelly Turner as commander of Pacific amphibious forces. Recalling that Guadalcanal had been nicknamed Operation Shoestring, what Turner needed now, King exhorted, were the men, ships, and equipment to win the decisive next rounds of amphibious assaults as they closed in on Japan’s home islands. With proper resources, Admiral Turner would get the job done.
At Quadrant, King’s and Marshall’s exhortations for stepped-up aggression against Japan seemed to have a greater urgency than at previous summits. The reason was that both men—as well as President Roosevelt—had very recently read the sworn statements of the escaped Davao prisoners. In addition to being outraged, they wanted an accelerated action plan agreed to by Allied war leaders at Quebec ahead of the inevitable release of these atrocity reports to the American public.
ON THE NEXT-TO-LAST DAY of the conference, as a final punctuation to their position throughout the week, King and Marshall won President Roosevelt’s approval to have one of the escaped POWs’ sworn statements read aloud to the combined military chiefs.
And so on August 23, with Major William Dyess’s affidavit in hand, General Marshall rose from his seat in Le Château Frontenac’s elegant Salon Rose Room, a circular space with rose-colored walls and floor-to-ceiling windows affording sweeping views of the Saint Lawrence River. Just outside the meeting room, lunch was waiting to be served. Perspiring pitchers of ice water and lemonade were perched next to a grand silver service of steaming coffee and tea. Beside the beverage table was a brimming buffet of fresh fruits, salads, breads, and platters of chicken, beef, and Canada’s fine smoked salmon.
General Marshall began:
At daylight, 10 April, 1942, we started marching on the National Road off Bataan . . . This march is referred to by American prisoners of war as the Death March of Bataan. Had the Americans or Filipinos known the fate in store for them, though beaten, hungry, and tired from months of hardships, never would they have surrendered to our dishonorable foe . . . It was a terrifically hot day as we marched along the road without food, cover, or water.
We frequently passed men lying on the side of the road. Many had been run over by Japanese trucks and flattened. The next day, still with no food or water, we were marched twenty-one hours continuously. Men started falling out frequently, but the guards did not allow us to aid them. We could hear gunshots behind us. The Japanese had clean-up squads marching behind us, killing those who had fallen out . . .
At three a.m. we were placed in a barbed-wire bullpen that might have ordinarily housed two hundred men. In this pen were at least two thousand men. Human filth and maggots were everywhere . . . Three Filipinos and three Americans were buried alive, and one of the guards went so far as to make one of our own American sergeants hit one of the men in the head with a shovel when he tried to get out of the grave. Many of the men went crazy, and several of the delirious were dragged out and shot.
The secretary of the army cleared his throat as he read the statement, so replete with gruesome bayonetings, beheadings, and descriptions of mass starvation, brutality, and disease that some of the meeting attendees seemed to be fighting nausea. Still, General Marshall read the document in its entirety, pausing periodically so that the full impact of the narrative could be absorbed by even the most ardent Pacific Second advocates in the room. Dyess’s closing statement, however, seemed to draw the greatest attention:
“In my opinion, it is not only advisable, but absolutely necessary, that all civilized people of the world know the conditions of the Japanese prison camps and the atrocities against American prisoners of war.”
When the meeting broke, the sumptuous buffet lunch outside Salon Rose was hardly touched. Admiral Ernest King had suddenly become the least of the meeting attendees’ concerns.
At the conclusion of the weeklong Quadrant, a weary President Roosevelt was wheeled into his temporary office next to the Citadel residence’s drawing room, a bright, windowed space with river views on three sides. Roosevelt settled in for a day of reading and responding to accumulated correspondence that had been dispatched from Washington.
The president’s secretary, Grace Tully, had developed a fine sense over the years of what was urgent, what could wait, and what could be responded to adequately by someone else. With four thousand letters a day pouring into the White House since the beginning of the war, Tully culled to a fraction the mail that actually reached the president. In further efficiency, she always attached a brief note summarizing each piece of correspondence. Letters of a personal nature were decorated with a red tag.
So marked was a letter atop that morning’s tidy pile, written on powder-blue stationery. In a long, sweeping hand, the linen envelope carried a return address of Lilac Hedges, Oceanport, New Jersey. In the cover note attached to the letter, Tully had written:
Letter from Mrs. A. Barton Cross. Her son was an officer in the White House (Lt. Com. Mott), has another son, Chief Gunnery Officer on aircraft carrier, a daughter—an officer in the WAVES, and third son is a Japanese prisoner. Is grieved over her youngest son in the Philippines. Was John’s [Roosevelt] classmate at Harvard. Asks the President if these prisoners are forgotten as he never mentions them in his [speeches] etc. . . . Since Mrs. Roosevelt is away and this is addressed to both the President and Mrs. Roosevelt and is from Commander Mott’s mother, perhaps you would care to answer.
Roosevelt read Grace’s note and the letter itself, which he was told Eleanor had already seen and urged be sent on to him. No doubt the president paused before penning his reply. The escapee depositions sent him by MacArthur had stunned him. Their sworn statements stressed the dire circumstances these men had escaped, but perhaps the most haunting assertion was William Dyess’s: “If any American could sit down and conjure the most diabolical of nightmares, he might come close to . . . the tortures and horrors that these men are going through.” Roosevelt was surely also mindful of the personal note he received from MacArthur just prior to his departure for Quebec:
[O]ur quiescent policy with respect to the Philippines . . . is in no small degree responsible for the unfolding of a drama the stark tragedy of which has no counterpart in American history. Our prisoners of war are being subjected to slow and deliberate extermination through disease, starvation and summary execution. So have many thousands already perished, and few, if any, will survive unless we arouse ourselves into a more dynamic military aid policy.
Roosevelt recalled the many conversations he’d had with his former naval aide, William Mott, and his ill-concealed anxiety about his brother Barton, one of those very prisoners in the Philippines. The president had always extended words of sympathy and encouragement to Mott; at the time, it was all he could do.
But now, God help him, with the burden of this new and terrible information on the treatment of these men, here was a letter from Mott’s mother! What could he possibly say to comfort her, given what he now knew? Helen Cross’s maternal tenacity was not so different from that of Roosevelt’s own late mother, Sara—legendary for her fierce protectiveness and involvement in all matters relating to Franklin.
When the president was deep in thought ahead of dictation, he would pause and tap his fingers on the arms of his wheelchair. His secretary knew that dictation would usually begin when he stretched out h
is arms and placed his hands flat on the top of his desk. He would then push back his chair a bit, grab hold of a trouser leg at the knee, swing the leg over the other knee, and fold his hands. This was the familiar series of gestures he repeated before dictating the following:
The Citadel
Quebec
August 24, 1943.
My dear Mrs. Cross,
Mrs. Roosevelt and I have read your letter of August 10th and we want to assure you that the subject of American prisoner of war, their treatment and the distress and anxiety of their relatives, is among our many grave concerns. Having in mind the character of our enemies, it seems improbable that repeated declarations of that anxiety or concern would help the prisoners or improve their condition.
The most effective step at this time appears to be through the good offices of the Red Cross with the help of the benevolent neutrals.
Every effort is being strained to end the war at the earliest possible date and one of the most urgent reasons for that haste is the desire to release our prisoners. I know that your sons understand how anxiously all our country look forward to their day of release.
At the White House we miss your son, William, and I am sure you must feel equal satisfaction for the fine work of your other sons and your daughter in the Service.
With all good wishes,
Sincerely yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
When the freshly typed letter was handed back to him, he read it through. He then slowly unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen. First, he scrawled an s after “prisoner” in the opening paragraph, correcting it to reflect the grim plural that it was. Plural in the tens of thousands, he knew too well. Then, pressing hard on his fountain pen nib, he scratched his signature.
He had answered a mother’s lament as best he could. Never far from his mind were his own four children, also in uniform and in harm’s way. In that, the parental anguish of Helen Cross and Franklin Roosevelt were one and the same.
Soon thereafter, the president received an effusive response:
Lilac Hedges
Oceanport, New Jersey
September 9, 1943
To the President and Mrs. Roosevelt,
Dear Friends,
How can I consider you other than friends when you were good enough to give me time out of your busy lives? Time to say a few words to assuage a mother’s real and protracted anxiety! Your letter must have brought good luck, for the next day a postcard arrived from Barton, from Military Prison Camp Number Two in the Philippines. It bore his dear signature in a firm hand and the information checked that things are not too bad.
Thank you also for your kind words about William. I am proud also of his brother, Commander E. Bertram Mott of the “workhorse of the Pacific” . . . and our Ensign Rosemary Cross of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
God bless you in your wise and single hearted direction of our land!
Sincerely Yours,
Helen Cross
In time, however, the tone and content of Helen’s correspondence with President Roosevelt would change dramatically.
22
REVENGE ON THE INNOCENT AND A COVERT PLAN
AFTER CROUCHING FOR THIRTY days in feces-strewn wire hutches and in constant dread of summary execution, the fellow tenants of the four escape-party-occupied barracks were let out of their cages and ordered to line up outside their isolated compound. A weakened Barton Cross and a subdued Charles Armour fell in with their fellow prisoners. It appeared their deaths were near, in keeping with the Japanese ten-for-one shooting squad rule on prisoner escape.
In his immaculate uniform and shiny boots, Major Maeda twitched his riding crop as he paced up and down the nervous, hollow-eyed assembly. His demeanor betrayed a mix of contempt and disgust—but also something else: Was it resignation? Maeda began his address to the prisoners. When the interpreter translated the remarks into broken English, the men could barely maintain their fixed expressions.
They had been “bad boys,” the interpreter delivered, for having allowed their barrack mates to escape, and they were ungrateful to the benevolent Japanese for having spared their lives. Their punishment, therefore, would be severe: the prisoners would lose all the monies they had “earned” during their imprisonment, which, Maeda asserted, had been deposited on their behalf in Japanese postal savings accounts.
The comedy of the punishment was lost on none of its recipients. That they might have ever received such funds—and this was the first they’d heard of their existence—was not a prospect they could even contemplate. A dead man can’t spend a penny, and all they could think when the interpreter finished was that, incredibly, they were not going to be executed.
Resisting the urge to throw his head back and laugh out loud had to be difficult for Barton. But as sure as he stood unsteadily on his filthy bare feet listening to Maeda’s dispensation from the harshest rule of prison life, he believed the worst was over. If they could survive this, he would say later, they could survive anything.
Still, when the sequestered prisoners were returned to the main camp, they found a changed attitude among their captors, even among the previously friendly guards. Lieutenant Yuki, once compassionate and understanding, barely spoke to the ensigns after their return, indicating only that he felt betrayed for his previous kindnesses.
Reduced rations were now the new norm, and random beatings increased. Not surprisingly, unguarded work details were also a thing of the past—which drastically reduced the prisoners’ ability to supplement paltry rations with food skimmed during farmwork. Some had lived this long only by snatching from these sources to supplement their starvation diet. To those men, this was the worst consequence of the escape.
Barton was among a small faction of prisoners who did not begrudge the escapees: to survive in the jungle and reach safety (if indeed they had; nobody knew) seemed a feat larger than life itself. Perhaps they felt this way because the navy man, McCoy, and the marine, Austin Conner Shoffner, had been respected as men of conscience. Surely these men would get word back to their families, let them know they were alive, tell them where they were; surely they would do at least that on behalf of the prisoners left behind.
This prospect was especially keen to Barton. Here it was summer 1943, and he still had not received a single piece of mail from his family. Nor did he know whether they had received the cards he had written them. He agonized over the possible reasons. For all Barton knew, his family had given him up for dead. Maybe those escaped men will get word about us to the outside world, Barton hoped. That would make it all worth it.
Such had been his ruminations during those long nights in the rabbit hutch. Some good might very well come of this.
But the majority of prisoners were bitter about the escape and ensuing crackdown. They could barely speak the escapees’ names without modifying epithets. In their minds, those ten men had willfully inflicted mass punishment on nearly two thousand innocents. To the majority of prisoners at Davao, this was unforgivable.
IN SEPTEMBER 1943, AFTER lengthy hospitalization in Brisbane, Steve Mellnik and the other escapees flew thirty-six hours across nine time zones to Washington, DC. Their debriefings at the Pentagon, the State Department, and other relevant agencies went on for weeks. Throughout the process, he was reminded repeatedly that his experiences were a military secret. Like his fellow escapees, Mellnik was under strict orders not to divulge, even to his family, any detail of what he had been through. It was a new and cruel form of incarceration for all of them, especially because these men believed their escape would be justified—and their guilt assuaged—only by exposing what the Japanese were doing to Allied prisoners.
Mellnik took particular offense at disdainful bureaucrats who intimated he had lost sight of the greater war because of his singular concern for the prisoners he had left behind. Others, however, listened respectfully. Once Mellnik realized the degree to which a calm and professional demeanor improved his credibility, he conducted himself with special
care. The combined stress of the debriefings and forced repression landed Mellnik back at Walter Reed Hospital for recuperation from a vicious recurrence of malaria. But the respite gave him an opportunity to refine his plan.
The idea had first come to him during the escapees’ Brisbane debriefing. Mellnik’s detailed description of the strengths of Mindanao’s guerrillas was met with intense interest by MacArthur and his colleagues. What he had described wasn’t an underground resistance with a few shortwave radios but a broad, deep, and sophisticated military network that included an island-wide supply, defense, and communications system. The guerrillas also commanded the deep respect and loyalty of virtually every island resident—thanks to their reliable enforcement of law and order and their ruthless treatment of the hated Japanese occupiers.
The original and core purpose of the guerrilla organizations—on Mindanao, in particular—had been to restore civil order when local authority crumbled at the war’s outbreak. This function expanded rapidly to include harassment of enemy garrisons across the island. Word of their brutal and highly efficient ambushes spread fast, and the Japanese increasingly feared them.
How did they accomplish these feats with so few resources? At Brisbane’s GHQ and later at the Pentagon, Mellnik quoted the words of one guerrilla leader over and over: “What we don’t have, we make, what we can’t make, we steal, what we can’t steal, we do without and still get the job done.”
Brass curtain rods were melted down to make bullets, gunpowder was extracted from firecrackers, and the jungle was so laced with trip wires, sharpened bamboo spikes, and other death traps that the Japanese were afraid to stray from the main roads. And they stayed well away from the guerrilla strongholds dotting the island. The guerrillas had some natural advantages as well. They knew Mindanao’s treacherous terrain intimately and navigated easily through even its most inhospitable areas. They had adapted and formalized military protocols to jungle life and abided by them. The American escapees—all professionally trained military officers—had been suitably impressed by the guerrillas’ twenty-four-hour combat readiness.
The Jersey Brothers Page 24