The skipper pulled the release lever, and the barge’s ramp rattled into the shallow surf. After casting him a mordant glare, MacArthur began sloshing toward shore when a cameraman snapped the iconic shot of the wading general and his entourage. In a matter of hours, the famous photograph had flashed around the world. MacArthur’s terse expression would settle into the American conscience as a reflection of his grit, determination, and restored honor, not his flash of rage toward an impertinent barge skipper and otherwise all things United States Navy.
On the beach, MacArthur made his way to the microphones. “People of the Philippines,” he began, “I have returned!” In the next moment, the heavens opened up, releasing a torrential downpour. MacArthur raised his voice to compete with the pounding rain. “By the grace of Almighty God,” he continued, “our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.”
He delivered the rest of his speech against a dueling backdrop of heavy rain and raging combat in the hills behind him, to great dramatic effect and the thrill of an archipelago-wide radio audience. “The hour of your redemption is here . . . Rally to me!” he exhorted emotionally. “Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on! As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike! Strike at every favorable opportunity! For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike!”
As General MacArthur delivered his florid oratory, Colonel Whitney stood by wearing a self-satisfied smile. Delivering his prewar client Douglas MacArthur back to the Philippines—where the wealthy Whitney had left behind millions in gold and chromium mining assets—would ensure both men’s places in history, and their lifetime financial security as well.
IV.
On October 10, shortly before MacArthur’s vaunted Leyte landing, 1,803 prisoners, mostly American, were marched from Bilibid Prison to Manila’s Pier 7. When the draft arrived at the docks, they were relieved that the awaiting transport, Arisan Maru, was far too small for all of them. They traded bets on who would get to return to Bilibid. But the Japanese were of a different mind, determined to squeeze every last prisoner aboard.
Shivers McCollum was in one of the early boarding groups. The farther into the ship’s bowels he and that long line of prisoners were pressed, the more stifling it became. After 600 were loaded and the center hold was full, still more came, and more after them—until all 1,803 men were packed in, standing back to chest and fighting panic. The stygian enclosure was barely large enough for a quarter their number. No sooner were they loaded than the freighter promptly backed away from the pier. An unknown number of prisoners died of suffocation in the first forty-eight hours.
When Arisan Maru’s captain was alerted to American carrier pilots patrolling above, he steered into a cove at Palawan Island to wait out the threat. So many men died and were thrown overboard during the layover that some 800 prisoners could be moved to the forward hold, thus relieving severe crowding belowdecks. On October 20, the Arisan Maru returned briefly to Manila Bay to replenish supplies. Despite an incoming typhoon, she hastened back out in a twelve-ship northbound convoy the following morning. The prisoners were thrown about in the high seas, coating them in their own vomit and kicked-up coal dust from the hold’s previous cargo. Under these conditions, about a third of them had contracted dysentery, resulting in a further coating of fecal filth and the additional torture of swarming flies.
AS THE CONVOY PLIED north, two submarine wolf packs, Banister’s Beagles and Blakely’s Behemoths, lurked in their path, anticipating attempts by the Japanese navy to foil Allied troop landings at Leyte.
Shortly before midnight on October 23, Commander George Henry Browne of USS Snook ordered, “Up periscope!” He cupped his eyes tight to the lens goggle to confirm a beeping surface-radar report. Sure enough, as Browne arced the periscope around, a convoy of Japanese ships hove into view. Snook wasted no time firing her first round of torpedoes, and then another and another. In seconds, the dark waters surrounding Arisan Maru became a shooting gallery.
After diving deep following the banner kills, the sea wolves climbed from the depths the next morning in search of more prey. They had sunk eight of the convoy’s ships the night before, but four others were still afloat and in range. At four thirty in the afternoon USS Shark commander Ed Blakely sighted one of them through his periscope. It was barely making seven knots—piece of cake for Shark. Blakely radioed his fellow Behemoths: Shark was closing on Arisan Maru. Since the ship carried no markings or flag indicating its prisoner of war cargo, he could not have known the wholesale slaughter his next command would render.
Three torpedoes roared out of Shark’s forward compartments. Blakely lowered his periscope and waited for the explosions to reverberate against the submarine, confirming the kill. Instead, depth charges from two of the other Japanese ships in the convoy came laddering down toward Shark. Again and again they came, seventeen crashing explosions in all. Bubbles, oil, clothes, cork, and other debris surfaced shortly. Urgent, repeated calls to Blakely from Seadragon and Blackfish—“Come in Nan-Zebra-Foxtrot-Oboe!”—brought no response. USS Shark was never heard from again.
Aboard Arisan Maru, Japanese deck guards watched the bristling wake of the first torpedo race toward the bow of the ship. They made it to the rail just in time to witness a near miss, even as they spotted the rooster tails of a second torpedo hurtling toward the aft section. Spared again, by a hair. The panicked guards then drew their guns and fired at the handful of prisoners on the deck who had been cooking rice for the evening meal, sending the startled men back down into the hold double time.
It was at this moment that Shark’s third torpedo ripped into the hull of Arisan Maru and exploded amid the prisoners. Hundreds were instantly pulverized. Body parts, bones, and debris flew in every direction, and the hold was coated in blood. At its epicenter, the massive carnage yielded no remains “bigger than a dime,” recalled prisoner Calvin Graef.
In the ensuing melee, the guards cut the ladder rope to the forward hold and pounded the rear hatch shut before rowing away in the doomed Arisan Maru’s rubber lifeboats. Despite the shock of this additional setback, surviving prisoners acted instinctively to escape. They stacked a pyramid of corpses high enough for them to reach and dislodge the hatch and climb out. Those who made it into the water swam toward the Japanese destroyer that their former guards had just boarded. But when the prisoners heard the splash of bullets and saw Japanese sailors pushing survivors away from the side with long poles, they realized the wisdom of going no closer.
It was nightfall on the South China Sea when the remaining ships in their original convoy disappeared over the horizon. Arisan Maru survivors rode the midsea swells on pieces of wreckage or abandoned rubber lifeboats, calling out to one another until only a handful of voices could still be heard. The closest land, Formosa, was 225 miles to the east.
After two days, nine of the original 1,803 draft were still alive. Four were recaptured, but fortune smiled on the other five, who were rescued by a Chinese fishing junk. The Cantonese family operating the boat knew too well what would happen if they were apprehended by the Japanese. They took careful steps to keep the five survivors covered and destroyed all remnants of their raft.
The junk and its surprising catch came ashore at Namyung, Canton. The fishermen fed, bathed, and clothed the grateful men, and then risked their lives to help them evade roving enemy patrols. The mayor of Namyung made contact with Chiang Kai-shek’s military leaders and US Army Air Forces, who came to their rescue. The survivors of the Arisan Maru disaster were promptly evacuated to Washington for debriefing, even as the final draft of Bilibid prisoners waited in agony for word of their own shipment to Japan.
V.
On October 20, before Helen Cross extinguished her bed lamp for another night of fitful rest, she confided a final thought to her diary:
October 20,
1944
News of MacArthur’s Philippine invasion came last night, but I am so cold and numb with the horror of it all that I feel no elation. God be with prisoners everywhere—their position caught between Japs and Americans is of particular terror. I just have a sick feeling that cannot be comforted.
Her only diary entry the following day was, “Sick terror over Barton stops my pen.”
35
WHAT BENNY KNEW
BEING A RELIGIOUS MAN, Johnny Morrett bent his head in prayer often during the long series of flights from the Pacific to Washington, DC. Two months earlier, his prison ship, the Shinyo Maru—carrying 750 prisoners of war—had been sunk off Mindanao by an American submarine. Morrett had been one of the lucky eighty-two survivors, and he just couldn’t stop thanking God.
SHINYO MARU’S ALARM WHISTLE was still “screeching like a wounded child” when Morrett jumped into the water and grabbed a pair of floating timbers—two-by-fours, about six feet long. Miraculously, he managed to dodge the spray and splatter of rifle fire from Japanese guards manning the listing vessel’s rails, as well as the wrath of enemy scout planes periodically buzzing down and dropping depth charges on the American submarine that had torpedoed the ship.
As Morrett quietly scissor-kicked away from the fast-sinking wreck, he heard another prisoner thrashing in the water nearby. “I can’t swim!” the man cried. Paddling over to him, Morrett shouted, “Grab onto the boards!” But no sooner had the man grasped the makeshift raft than a Japanese bullet found its mark, cleaving the man’s skull. He slumped forward onto Morrett, who, with a measure of self-loathing, pushed the dead man away with his foot while keeping a watchful eye on Lieutenant Hashimoto, among the cruelest of the Davao guards, directing rifle fire from the bridge.
Staying low in the water, Morrett spotted the head of another prisoner, Major Harry Fischer, drifting with the tide toward shore. Morrett called out to Fischer and urged him to grab onto his makeshift raft.
Together the two survivors kept their heads and bodies as submerged as possible, looking back only once in response to a loud crackling sound—like the crumpling of heavy tinfoil, Morrett would recall. It was the ship’s final gasp before thrusting upward and slipping beneath the surface. Five hundred prisoners were still trapped in her hull.
In the evening twilight, Morrett and Fischer saw more bobbing heads scattered across the water’s surface: other survivors were either drifting landward with the tide or actively swimming toward shore. Faceless voices called out to one another, and a loose consensus developed: once ashore, they should all make for the heavy foliage fringing the beach. When their feet touched the sandy bottom, Morrett and Fischer—fueled by freedom-induced adrenaline—raced toward the underbrush.
But once in the thicket, they heard a threatening sound. “Pssst! Pssst!” Hearts pounding, the two men dropped low before turning toward the source: three grinning, shirtless Filipinos less than five feet away, bolo knives hanging at their sides. Tapping their muscular chests with their thumbs, they called out, “Guerrillas! . . . Guerrillas!” Forgetting himself, Morrett sprang to his feet and hugged one of them.
The scenes that followed were the province of dreams. The guerrillas, who moved like cats—noiseless, quick, and efficient—gathered up the first group of survivors on the shoreline and spirited them along a maze of dirt paths to a clearing. There, another group of Filipinos holding candles covered the shivering, mostly naked men with blankets and fed them raw eggs, boiled camotes, and bananas. The Filipinos were as gratified to be helping these Americans as the survivors were grateful; this resistance group had been fighting the Japanese for nearly three years.
An armed contingent of guerrillas led the revived men inland along a trail. They walked by the light of the moon, single file, for hours. The shipwrecked prisoners held up admirably despite their injuries and the trauma of the day. While they’d been pressed into many difficult marches in the Philippines, this was their first toward freedom and there would be no slowing or stopping on their account.
Those with bullet wounds or fractures were placed on the backs of caribou or, in the case of one man with a broken jaw and several broken ribs, on a mattress carried by four boys. The procession continued through intermittent jungle, tribal areas, tiny villages, and across bodies of water in outrigger canoes, all the while in the guerrillas’ protective custody.
On the fifth day, the survivors were met by their old Davao comrade Lieutenant Colonel John McGee, and learned of his daring leap from the prisoner transport that had departed Mindanao before they did. McGee was now working with guerrilla leader Robert Bowler—the same Robert Bowler who had intercepted Harold Rosenquist when he first landed on the wrong side of Mindanao the previous May.
After his escape from Yashu Maru, McGee had contacted Wendell Fertig and requested a role in his guerrilla command. Fertig dismissed the request, disparaging McGee as another crazed POW escapee who thought he knew exactly how to win the war. But Colonel Bowler—himself a seasoned army officer—knew better and immediately took McGee under his Mindanao guerrilla wing. Not only had Bowler grown wary of Fertig himself, but he was a prewar colleague of John McGee’s, a fellow West Point graduate, and a combat-hardened veteran.
And so when Bowler learned of the Shinyo Maru sinking, he did not radio Wendell Fertig as he had on Rosenquist’s arrival. Not this time. Here, finally, was Bowler’s chance to help the prisoners that had been held on Mindanao. Instead, he summoned like-minded McGee. The two men quickly forged a plan to convey the former prisoners—many of whom needed significant medical attention—off the island.
In the meantime, natives with first aid kits did what they could. They cleaned deep lacerations and bullet wounds with Merthiolate, and then sewed and bandaged them. They applied salves to infected ulcerations and immobilized broken bones, easing them into slings made out of improbable patchworks of cloth. And while a dentist saw to broken teeth, Bowler and McGee divided the able-bodied into three platoons, gave them khakis, shoes, and ammunition, and trained them in the use of the new American carbine. All eighty-two survivors were then moved to a heavily secured guerrilla camp to await the arrival of the USS Narwhal—the navy submarine that would take them to Australia.
WHEN HIS FLIGHT FINALLY arrived at Washington’s Bolling Field, Morrett and two other survivors traveling with him—USAAF captains Bert Schwarz and Gene Dale—were met by Major Ellis Gray, chief of the army’s Captured Personnel Branch. Gray arranged a private car to take the trio to the swank new Statler Hotel at the corner of Sixteenth and K Streets NW, a short walk from the White House. Gray told the men to bill any expenses to the War Department and to get some sleep—Pentagon and other debriefings would be lengthy and tiring, he said, and would take at least a couple of weeks.
At the Statler, Morrett finalized his Shinyo Maru casualty list—including branches of service, ranks, and hometowns. These 667 men either had gone down with the ship or were shot flailing in the water following the fatal torpedo blast. Morrett, now the ad hoc adjutant of the survivor group, had readily agreed to prepare the list; these men had been his close friends, and he wanted their fates to be known. Nonetheless, the tabulation had been sad, grim, and slow.
Morrett and the other survivors then assisted the War Department with the heartrending task of notifying the next of kin. Next came the long debriefing sessions with numerous military and other government divisions concerning Philippine airfield conditions, disposition of Japanese troops, guerrilla operations, and many thousands of prisoners still listed as “missing in action.”
One of the debriefings was at a location described only as “Box 1142.” It was the top secret MIS-X headquarters in Virginia, from which Lieutenant Harold Rosenquist had been dispatched to rescue them nearly a year before. Among other epiphanies at that remarkable compound, the Shinyo Maru survivors witnessed a stark contrast between the treatment afforded German POWs being detained there and their own treatment as prisoners of the Japanese.
Japa
nese atrocities toward Allied prisoners in the Philippines had roiled Washington ever since the Dyess story’s first electrifying airing eleven months earlier. Morrett and his fellow escapees were asked to provide actionable examples of Japanese mistreatment of prisoners of war. They proceeded to provide lengthy depositions at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Offices of the Judge Advocate and Adjutant Generals.
In each case, there were also questions on how the Shinyo Maru came to be sunk, which the survivors answered in detail. But even in the context of a global war in which ships were being sunk daily, the escapees were surprised at the low priority given the possibility that this had been a case of Americans firing on Americans. The subject of friendly fire, it seemed, was not a friendly one at the Pentagon.
It was through the Navy Casualty Section that Benny Mott learned of the Shinyo Maru survivors’ arrival in Washington. Commander Jacobs and his successor, Commander H. B. Atkinson, were complying dutifully with Bill’s request to let Benny know of any developments that might shed light on Barton’s fate. Benny’s Ship Characteristics and Fleet Requirements Office was two long corridors away from Casualty. But despite the Pentagon’s size and byzantine layout, “hot dope” traveled fast.
With predictable apprehension, Benny leafed slowly through Johnny Morrett’s casualty list. He turned each page carefully, running his index finger down column after column until he reached the last name on the last page.
Another reprieve! Barton was not a Shinyo Maru casualty. But where was he now? What could these men tell him about his brother? Benny finally left a note for Morrett at the Statler Hotel, requesting a call. Could they get together?
The Jersey Brothers Page 36