The Jersey Brothers

by Sally Mott Freeman

  Finally, the news arrived via Signal Corps radiogram in mid-June. Signed by Rosenquist, it said, “Walked around Penal Colony. Found no, repeat, no POWs . . . Convicts say they were evacuated ten days ago, probably to Manila.”

  Momentarily unsteady, Steve Mellnik lowered himself into his chair and reread the cryptic message, maddening in its dearth of detail. He then covered his face and sobbed.

  SUBSEQUENT MISSIVES FROM ROSENQUIST contained better news: all was not lost, it turned out. There were still several hundred Dapecol prisoners on Mindanao. Two separate work details had been detained to complete airfields on the island, including one called Lincayan. Rosenquist was racing the clock, he intimated, to rescue those remaining prisoners. With American planes flying frequent reconnaissance missions overhead, the nervous Japanese were expected to ship them out, and soon.

  This time Wendell Fertig did not interfere with Rosenquist’s rescue planning, likely due to guilt over the fate of the more than 1,200 prisoners removed after his first meeting with Rosenquist. With the aid of Claro Lauretta’s guerrillas and Jim McClure and Jim Haburne, two escapees from a Dapecol fence detail, the scheme began to crystallize. “We are working to locate the garrison where [the prisoners] are quartered, the guard strength, and the [potential for] their release,” Rosenquist radioed Mellnik.

  With mounting resentment toward Courtney Whitney, whom Rosenquist privately blamed for his failure to reach the other prisoners in time, Rosenquist asked escapees McClure and Haburne to pen statements on the potential success of a Dapecol rescue had Rosenquist been allowed to depart Australia earlier, as planned originally.

  Haburne wrote:

  “After staying in this particular prison camp for nineteen months, going to and from Davao City on work details, seeing the communication system of the Japanese, the number of guards in the prison, how they were armed, and after staying with various units in Davao Province for months after I escaped, I am sure that those prisoners of war could have been saved if Major Rosenquist had gotten to Davao Province before he did.”

  McClure was more specific:

  Major Harold Rosenquist told me he was here to release the prisoners at Davao Penal Colony . . . and should have arrived on the east coast of Mindanao by a submarine [no later than] May 28, 1944, but that the submarine commander was off course and decided to proceed to the west coast . . . I gave all the information I could to Major Rosenquist about the conditions . . . when I left the prison camp—number of guards, how they were armed, location of Japanese outposts, communications from the Colony to Davao City and . . . the best possible way to attack the Colony . . . I believe that [had] Lieutenant Rosenquist arrived in Davao Province not later than May 1944, all of the American prisoners of war could have been released . . . [T]he job could have been completed with minimal loss of troops.

  Rosenquist refocused his efforts to rescue the men laboring at Lincayan Airfield. First, he dispatched a letter via Filipino courier to smuggle into the prisoner barracks at the airfield. It was addressed to Colonel Rufus H. Rogers, a trusted friend of Colonel John McGee, one of the two Yashu Maru passengers who had jumped over the rail and survived. McGee had made it back to Mindanao and joined the guerrillas, and he felt certain that Rogers was alive and on the Lincayan detail.

  August 11, 1944

  TO: Lt. Col Rogers USA

  Prisoner of War.

  This message is written with a prayer to God that it may be safely delivered to you, that you and all the remaining POWs at Lincayan may know that you have not been forgotten all these months, that you can be encouraged that freedom from the Japs is near. It has taken some time and the hurtling of some obstacles to get here . . . but whatever may happen, it is the result of the untiring effort of Col. Steve Mellnik to bring you a message, and perhaps help to the boys who were at the Penal Colony.

  You will be glad to hear that the entire story of the atrocities of the Japs on the “Death” March, their treatment of Americans at Cabanatuan and Davao Penal Colony were given by Mellnik and McCoy to Life Magazine which published the whole story . . . in the February 7, 1944 issue. I have a battered copy, shown to hundreds of Filipinos who have befriended our party as well as many Americans now fighting with the guerrilla units here. Remember Lt. Jim McClure? He is now with me, escaped with Wohlfield, Watson, Campbell, and Haburne. We heard that the others were recaptured and killed. Is that so? And were there any reprisals?

  Col. John McGee escaped from the boat taking the 1,220 [sic] to Manila, jumping off at Zamboanga, now safe at “A” corps Hq . . . McGee gave me your name as a reliable contact . . . so here’s hoping fervently that you get this message, and that you believe it!

  Accomplishing that first step, we have to rely on you for some facts to effect your release and that of others.

  1. What hours of the day do you work, where, under what guards?

  2. Help us to help you by giving us all the information possible. We have at least 100 men with arms, ammo and grenades. The risk should not be too great for the protection of you and your comrades.

  Most any day now, maybe before you receive this message, Lincayan Airfield will be bombed. SWPA and General MacArthur know you are there and have been informed of your barrack location. The advantage of the bombing and resulting confusion may offer you the best opportunity for escape. If that comes true, make for the guerrilla units north of you; they are not far. I am writing this letter within 25 kms of the Airfield.

  The war progress is given on the back of this letter. Is it any wonder you can be encouraged . . . It has been so long but read the news and judge for yourself. May God grant the delivery of this message and your reply safely here.

  HAR

  It is not known whether Rosenquist’s missive reached Colonel Rogers, the senior officer of the Lincayan detail, before US Navy planes swooped down and began dropping bombs on the airfield in mid-August. The prisoners cheered as the bombs blasted large craters into the runway they had just built, rendering it unusable. Their incensed guards slapped and kicked the men nearly insensate before marching them back to the barracks, which were, in fact, untouched during the raid.

  From that point forward, the prisoners were put on reduced rations and confined to the heavily guarded barracks. Then, on September 3, they were marched barefoot to the local dock, where they joined the hundred-man prisoner detail that had been rebuilding the airfield east of Davao City. Together the 750 men crammed into the hold of the Erie Maru, the same unmarked Japanese freighter that had taken them from Manila to Davao in October 1942. The ship departed immediately in a Manila-bound convoy; it would make one Mindanao stop en route—at Moro Bay in Zamboanga Province.

  When the news of the sudden departure of the final DAPECOL draft reached him at Claro Lauretta’s guerrilla headquarters, Rosenquist was devastated. “Guess I won’t get the chance to do what I really came here for,” he wrote mournfully. Ex-prisoners McClure, Haburne, and the guerrillas of Lauretta’s regiment were equally distraught. They had been so close.

  THE MINUTE THE LOCAL coastwatcher saw American prisoners being loaded onto Erie Maru, he sent a radio dispatch to Mindanao’s guerrilla headquarters. With American carrier planes and submarines now patrolling Mindanao waters in force, Erie Maru—lacking explicit markings as carrying prisoners of war—had little chance of making it past the patrols.

  When guerrilla headquarters received the dispatch, it promptly radioed MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane, which in turn notified the navy. Thus alerted, the submarine patrol allowed Erie Maru to pass. When her convoy stopped overnight at Zamboanga, another coastwatcher, Don LeCouvre, sent another dispatch through the same channels, and Erie Maru was again allowed safe passage when it departed the following morning.

  But late on the night LeCouvre sent the first dispatch, the prisoners were removed from Erie Maru and loaded onto another ship, Shinyo Maru. LeCouvre promptly tapped out a second message, marking it Priority. The prisoners had been moved, it said, and were now aboard a differ
ent transport named Shinyo Maru, also unmarked. He directed that patrols be advised and allow it to proceed unmolested.

  LeCouvre’s urgent bulletin was forwarded to Brisbane, as required by the Divided Command structure, with directions to transmit it immediately to navy submarines patrolling off Zamboanga. But this time, LeCouvre’s flickering message languished at an empty switchboard at MacArthur’s Brisbane headquarters (GHQ). By the time the message was transmitted from there to the navy, Shinyo Maru had already departed Zamboanga.

  JOHN MORRETT WAS ONE of the lucky survivors of the torpedo attack by the USS Paddle. He remembered two massive blasts inside the hull of the Shinyo Maru where they were quartered. The first pulverized men all around him, and the second brought large ceiling beams crashing down on them. Prisoners were covered in blood and piled in mangled positions all over one another—arms, legs, and bodies broken.

  Miraculously spared, Morrett climbed the ladder to find the deck strewn with dead Japanese soldiers. But others had grabbed their weapons and were firing through blast holes and hatch openings at the trapped prisoners below and at any that had escaped into the water.

  Denver Rose was beyond relieved when he was plucked with several others from the sea by a circling Japanese patrol boat. But his reaction was short-lived. “They tied our hands behind our backs . . . [and] started to machine gun us, but then changed their minds . . . One by one they took us to the aft end of the ship and shot us with a rifle . . . I was the fourth man up.” But Denver Rose escaped back into the water after severing his rope manacle with a wire cable.

  Japanese executions of prisoners trying to escape the doomed Shinyo Maru were not just acts of Bushido-sanctioned rage. They were following explicit orders. An August 1944 War Ministry order, issued to all prison camp commanders, directed that all remaining POWs be killed. It also proposed methods for their final disposition. The order read, in part:

  Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates. In any case, it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.

  On September 12 a chilling radio dispatch from a coast-watcher station in northern Zamboanga lit the airwaves. Local guerrillas had picked up eighty-three survivors of a torpedoed ship, it said. They had floated with the tide to the shoreline and were being cared for by Filipino civilians in a local barrio. The rest of the prisoners aboard Shinyo Maru were presumed dead.

  Colonel John McGee, now working with a guerrilla unit near Zamboanga, received a subsequent dispatch: the eighty-three survivors needed immediate medical attention and were being taken to Sindangan City. Before departing to assist his onetime fellow prisoners, McGee radioed GHQ in Brisbane. Could these injured men gain submarine passage to Australia?

  In Australia, Courtney Whitney reviewed the dispatches concerning the Shinyo Maru sinking and its relatively few survivors. With casual detachment, he penciled a note on the radiogram regarding a submarine rescue of the surviving prisoners. “This is a headache,” he wrote in his elegant script, “but can be worked out.”

  As Shakespeare penned in Richard II, “Such is the breath of kings.”

  33

  SETBACKS

  MEDICAL AIR EVACUATION FROM the mid-Pacific to Pearl Harbor was by far the fastest option, but it had its downsides. The shriek of the Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport’s engines as it climbed ten thousand feet from Guam’s reclaimed Northwest Field surely caused Bill Mott’s head to ache as much as his ailing gut. The flat chill of the prone aluminum berths, hinged to the metal curve of the plane’s interior, felt less like a bed than being splayed on New Jersey’s frigid Mill Pond after an ice skating spill, minus the laughs. But Bill was in decent spirits.

  The reason was none other than “Terrible” Turner himself. The boss had a hard, gruff exterior, Bill mused, but inside, the irascible admiral was as soft as a grape. With everything the commander of the Pacific Amphibious Forces had been through during Operation Forager—and with everything he still had to do—Kelly Turner had personally arranged for this junior officer’s transportation and (relative) comfort, as a father might a son. Better yet, his parting words had been for Bill to get well and to return as his permanent aide and flag secretary!

  He would get better, Bill thought—he would will it. His grandmother Lauretta had marveled over his determined boyhood recovery from a grievous bout of typhoid fever. Perhaps he imagined her voice above the engines’ high whine, remembered her soft hands, with their gentle scent of Hinds hand cream, caressing his burning forehead. Thoughts of his kindly grandmother, who had cared for that small, sick boy when it seemed nobody else had the time or inclination, were always a source of strength.

  Inside the plane, disfigurement and pain were everywhere. By their first hop at Kwajalein, two marines—barely visible under a tangle of tubes draining pus and administering morphine—had died. The flight nurse, in baggy GI shirt and pants, took their pulses one last time to be sure before recording the names and serial numbers and pulling the sheets over their ashen faces. Such scenes of misery and mercy characterized the entire flight from the Marianas.

  Under the circumstances, Bill could not yet bring himself to engage in Turner’s parting literary gift: Somerset Maugham’s popular tale of a young man’s search for meaning in a postwar world. He drifted in and out of fitful sleep through the time zones. When awake, he cradled Turner’s pronouncement that his orders would be made permanent, but he worried about not being found fit to resume duty—yet another hurdle in his quest to reach Barton.

  It was nearly dusk when the pilot lowered his blighted cargo through the mist onto the concrete strip at Hickam Field. After a final insult of precautionary vermin delousing, Bill and the handful of other “walking wounded” made their way into a waiting hospital bus. Stretcher cases would follow separately.

  The patients gazed out the bus window at the passing sights: the dimming harbor, reconstructed hangars, and an acres-wide stretch of white crosses marking the graves of those killed on December 7, 1941. A baritone grind of gears and a sudden shift into low signaled the final approach to Pearl Harbor’s base hospital. The reticent driver steered his last load of infirmities of the day up the steep macadam drive.

  Made of fireproof steel and concrete, Aiea Heights Naval Hospital was a brand-new, four-floor beacon of modern architecture. Surrounding the main hospital was a veritable village of temporary structures—mostly trailers and corrugated iron Quonset huts—that had been erected hastily to meet the hospital’s rapidly expanding patient load. The new structures were painted dark green to blend into the towering backdrop of primeval-looking Norfolk and Keiki pines. Rising sharply behind the evergreens was the darkening Pali Lookout, its peak shrouded in cloud. Aiea Heights seemed a world unto itself.

  Bill grasped an outstretched hand at the foot of the bus steps. Nurses armed with clipboards and the sort of kindly warmth unknown aboard any navy ship greeted the walking wounded. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

  In January 1944, the year-old hospital had rostered only 1,709 patients—1,358 of them still recovering from wounds received at Tarawa the previous November. But patient intake at Aiea had exploded by midsummer when the last group of Operation Forager casualties arrived. In June and July an additional 6,256 casualties from Saipan were logged, followed by 1,848 from Tinian and Guam. When Bill Mott arrived at Aiea in August, he had 7,667 fellow patients—in a facility built to accommodate an imponderable 5,000 casualties at any one time.

  Bill was placed under the joint care of Aiea’s chief of medicine, Captain Manley Capron, and the deputy chief, Commander Edward Delbridge. The next few weeks were a blur of waking, sleeping, poking, prodding, and invasive gastrointestinal procedures. His days at Aiea blended one into the next, punctuated only by rotating call nurses and Somerset Maugham’s needling reminder that this phase of his life woul
d in time yield to some unknown other.

  A bright spot was the weekly call from ever-loyal Benny, who happened to be well schooled in the byzantine process of reaching a patient in the back warrens of Aiea’s mini-bureaucracy—a mission as challenging, they would joke, as getting past the enemy alive. What fine medicine to laugh with Benny again! And whether or not Benny expressed his relief in those calls, he had feared as much for Bill’s life at Saipan as Bill had ever worried over him on the Enterprise.

  They talked at length about their unwitting role reversal: Benny now getting his fill of hard-nosed, self-important admirals, generals, and bureaucrats, and Bill now all too familiar with cramped quarters, K rations, carnage, and ever-present death. But the switched roles gave them all the more in common. After each restorative conversation, Benny always dutifully promised to communicate Bill’s improving health status to the rest of the family.

  JUST BEYOND AIEA’S STEELY confines, the long-simmering Pacific command rivalry had resurfaced once again. In late July 1944, President Roosevelt himself finally entered the army-navy fray over the direction and overall command of the Pacific War. FDR had been frustrated by months of conflicting advice from his top advisors on how to resolve it. As commander in chief of the army and the navy, he decided to sidestep all the bias and go hear from his Pacific commanders himself. The seminal meeting took place a stone’s throw from Aiea Heights Naval Hospital, which the president visited afterward.

  More than two and a half years into the war, command of the Pacific War zone was still divided in half. General MacArthur was still the supreme allied commander of the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA), and Admiral Nimitz, commander in chief, Pacific Ocean Areas (POA), in charge of the rest of the Pacific theater. Conflicts had burned between the two commands since the start of the war—over strategy, objectives, delegation of ships, and jealously guarded latitudes and longitudes. Each fracas had been handled on a case-by-case basis by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with neither Admiral Nimitz nor General MacArthur ever having to answer to the other.