The Jersey Brothers

by Sally Mott Freeman

  With the exception of George Petritz and Shields Goodman, the ensigns were placed under the command of Colonel Curtis Beecher. The forty-seven-year-old marine—a decorated Great War veteran, whose commendations included the Croix de Guerre, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart—was universally respected, even by the Japanese. The ensigns placed every remaining ounce of faith in him.

  But Beecher had his own misgivings. “It was hot in the noon-day sun,” he wrote of the march from Bilibid to the docks. “Everyone had lost weight and was in much poorer physical condition since their arrival at Bilibid . . . Many were barely able to walk, and quite a number were picked up along the route after passing out . . . It was a poor start for what at best would be an arduous journey.”

  The column stumbled past the Metropolitan Theater, across the Pasig Bridge, past the Legislative Building and the Walled City, Intramuros, colonial Manila’s historic core, and General MacArthur’s prewar headquarters. In every direction, weeds, trash, and abandoned buildings lined cratered streets. Approaching the harbor, they passed the Manila Hotel and then the Army and Navy Club, the latter no doubt evoking bittersweet memories for Barton. The rising sun flew atop its flagpole, and the once-boisterous poolside bar was boarded up. The grounds, trim and verdant in 1941, were vacant and overgrown.

  But at each turn, bands of street boys were silhouetted against the ruins, flashing their signature V signs. Inside houses along the route, radio volumes were turned up to blaring as the procession passed, another defiant signal of loyalty to the Americans.

  HOT AND EXHAUSTED FROM the four-kilometer march, the ragged columns finally massed at Pier 7 around one thirty in the afternoon. With characteristic optimism, Barton was encouraged when he eyed the awaiting vessel at the dock. Handsome-looking cabins and parlors lined every level. It was large, attractive, and multidecked—more like a luxury travel liner than a troop transport, Barton observed, to a derisive Charles. Oryoko Maru was painted on her sides and stern.

  Admittedly, the ship did appear considerably more comfortable than any other they had been hosted on so far; with just a little crowding, there might even be room to accommodate all of them in the topside cabins. Barton’s initial reaction was shared by a number of the others: this might not be so bad after all.

  But there was an ominous retrofit to the civilian liner: antiaircraft gun mounts on the bow, stern, and along the decks in between. The ship bore no flag or markings indicating that it would be carrying Allied prisoners. Nevertheless, some satisfying sights awaited them at the waterfront.

  This was their first close-up of the tremendous damage that American naval aircraft had inflicted on the port facilities: sunlight poured through gaping holes in docks and sheds all around the pier. Out in the harbor, masts from dozens of sunken Japanese ships poked through the surface like scattered stubble in a winter cornfield.

  When the prisoners arrived at Pier 7, it was already jammed with civilian Japanese carrying bundles of personal belongings. They, too, it seemed, were preparing to board Oryoko Maru. The prisoners took heart that this obvious exodus meant the Japanese knew they were about to lose the Philippines. The majority of the civilians were women in brightly colored kimonos, their babies and children in tow. In addition, a large contingent of Japanese troops were preparing to board and a sprinkling of merchant seamen as well, likely former crew of ships sunk in Manila Bay.

  While these groups streamed up Oryoko Maru’s gangway, the prisoners were held for hours without food or water in a sweltering metal warehouse alongside the pier. They grew increasingly discouraged by the loading: the ship looked crowded already without a single one of the 1,619 of them yet aboard. There was further disappointment when the odious Mr. Wada and his heartless boss, Lieutenant Junsaboro Toshino from Davao Penal Colony, appeared at the dock. Toshino, they learned, would be in charge of the prisoner draft. But the Davao contingent knew all too well that Toshino vested wide-ranging authority in his malevolent interpreter.

  Shusuke Wada was new to Colonel Beecher, as he had not left Cabanatuan with the Davao contingent. But the seasoned marine sized up the problem quickly. “Wada was a detestable, gnome-like man, with a screeching, high-pitched voice,” Beecher wrote. “I went up to him on the dock to ask a question in connection with the loading and got a snarly, arrogant reply. It was then that I found out that he was going with us, and I felt we were going to have a hard time with him . . . [T]he very fact that all business had to be done through him gave him authority . . . [H]e could refuse to transmit requests and put his own interpretation on orders by his commander.”

  It was late afternoon by the time all the Japanese passengers were loaded. Then, clearly anxious to weigh anchor and depart while they still could, guards rousted the prisoners to their feet and issued boarding instructions. Three holds belowdeck were assigned to them. The aft hold would be loaded first, the forward hold second, the center last.

  It took more than an hour for the first group of seven hundred men, including Petritz, Goodman, and Warwick Potter Scott, to disappear down the long ladder into the aft hold. Guards used various means to hasten the process. At the bottom of the narrow steps stood Sergeant Dau, another Davao guard loathed by the prisoners who knew him. Dau and three Formosan conscripts urged prisoners farther and farther back into the hold’s dark reaches—Dau with the aid of a drawn sword, his privates with brooms. With no source of ventilation but the open hatch, those in the rear of the space began to faint well before the loading was complete.

  Early cries for air and water from the aft hold were fully audible to the second group climbing the gangway. Barton, Charles, and approximately six hundred others fell in behind Colonel Beecher. They were herded across the hot deck toward the bow, where another hatch revealed a steep, narrow ladder lowering twenty feet into darkness. Their final destination was similar to the one at the rear of the ship: a black and airless space measuring approximately sixty by one-hundred feet, with a four-foot-high wooden shelf extending around the sides.

  When the forward cargo space was filled to capacity, with barely room for the men to sit and still 150 to be loaded, Colonel Beecher asked Mr. Wada—standing at the top of the ladder—if the rest of the group could please be redirected to other quarters. The hold was full, Beecher said; men would suffocate if any more were added. But Wada brusquely declined. “Ippai! Ippai!” he snarled, which means “chock full.”

  The loading continued with the help of another familiar Davao sentry: Kazutane Aihara, whose fondness for swatting the men’s legs with sharpened lengths of bamboo the Davao prisoners also remembered. Now Aihara used a shovel to press them so deep into the forward hold that men were wedged in the tiny corners of the bulkhead and against the hot side plates of the ship. They sat tight against one another, knees drawn to their chests. Without portholes or vents, their breathing quickly became labored.

  On the dock, the temperature was approximately 90 degrees. On the metal-seamed deck, it was closer to 100. Halfway down the ladders, it was hotter still, and in the loaded holds, the temperature quickly reached 120 degrees or more. Having been given no water since their teacup of lugao that morning, men along the bulkheads tried to lick the beads of moisture from the rising cloud of perspiration forming on the boards.

  The final group of about three hundred descended into the center hold. These were the fortunate ones on Oryoko Maru: the center hold had ventilation and, while crowded, it was far from ippai.

  It was under these conditions that Oryoko Maru cast off at sunset. Buckets containing a mixture of seaweed, fish, and rice were lowered into the three holds, but in the dark, distribution was uneven and chaotic; most men managed to grab a handful, but many clawed two, and others got none. Water was lowered as well, but in quantities so small it ran out while being ladled near the hatch openings. The men in the rear got none at all. Panic began to rise.

  Oryoko Maru’s slow, cautious course through the harbor shipwrecks failed to generate the air circulation the prisoners had hoped for
with the movement of the ship. She then halted at the breakwater to await the convoy of freighters and destroyers with which Oryoko Maru would travel north. As each hour passed, conditions in the baking, oxygen-deprived holds grew more desperate. In addition to the maddening thirst, overflowing latrine buckets spilled, and their dungeon floors became a shallow bath of human waste.

  While the ship awaited the escort vessels, prisoners in the aft hold began begging for air and water. Mr. Wada shouted back, “There is no water for you! You are disturbing the Japanese women and children! If you do not remain quiet I will close the hatch!” This brought no end to their cries. Rising chants of “Air! Water! Air! Water!” continued. Similar pleas came from the forward hold.

  Wada responded by slamming shut the aft-hold hatch, its only source of ventilation. This happened around ten o’clock, marking a sharp descent into the most terrifying night in the lives of those who survived it. Colonel Beecher stood watch in the forward hold throughout the night, attempting to keep order—but, as he wrote later, “I have seen death, starvation, brutality, and torture, but have never experienced anything like those 12–14 hours. Men [went] crazy, moaning, groaning, singing or just muttering to themselves . . . It was pitch black, the moaning of the crazed and dying and the shouts of men fighting and killing each other.”

  During their long imprisonment, all the prisoners had suffered periods of terrible thirst; but that night on Oryoko Maru, they experienced the converging mind-altering tortures of extreme thirst and acute oxygen deprivation. The lucky ones suffocated to death before sunrise. Others, increasingly weak and dehydrated, went out of their minds.

  Some drank what urine they could drain from their own bodies or from the waste buckets. Others slit open their own veins, or those of their neighbor, with switchblades or broken glass in order to suck the blood. Still others became violent in the hellish dark, beating to death those near them with fists or empty canteens for real or imagined transgressions. Some—including Barton Cross with Earl Ferguson and Robert Granston with Chuck Wilkins—paired up for mutual support and protection. They hung back quietly in the rear recesses of the hold’s shelving as madness reigned all around.

  At 0300 Oryoko Maru again weighed anchor and got under way, this time in convoy. Turning north into the South China Sea, the convoy hugged the relative shelter of Bataan’s jagged coastline. The date was now December 14.

  At first light, a weary Colonel Beecher ascended the ladder and asked the sentry for a word with Mr. Wada. When the hunchback appeared, Beecher informed him that men below were dead and dying from suffocation and thirst. The burly marine, who towered over Wada, negotiated vigorously for water and requested that the prisoners be allowed to rotate onto the deck for air.

  Wada relented on the water request, allowing a detail to come up and fill buckets from a cabin bathtub. The group worked quickly, managing to procure enough for one half a canteen cup per man; for men with swelling, paper-dry tongues, it was better than nothing.

  After the water was distributed, Beecher reiterated his request to Wada that prisoners be allowed brief rotations to the deck, beginning with those who had lost consciousness. While Beecher waited for Wada to consult with Lieutenant Toshino on the matter, the lookout in the ship’s crow’s nest began calling excitedly, “Hikoki! Hikoki! Takusan hikoki, American! Kaigoon hikoki, takusan!” The ship’s air raid alarm followed.

  On the deck above, the prisoners heard the drumming of running feet mixed with deafening bursts of antiaircraft fire. Pleading for calm at regular intervals, Beecher angled himself onto the ladder, where he could see the action through the open hatch.

  THE AIR SQUADRON BEARING down on the convoy was led by Commander Robert Riera, Annapolis class of 1935 and a former Enterprise colleague of Benny’s. One of her rising star pilots, Riera was awarded the Navy Cross for his daring sorties from Enterprise in the battle at Leyte Gulf.

  Now flying missions off Enterprise’s sister carrier Hornet, Riera’s December 14 log noted the targeting of a northbound convoy creeping along the Bataan coast. At 0710, near the entrance to Subic Bay, Riera gave the signal, and one Hellcat after another dove down behind him with all they had: bombs, rockets, and relentless sprays of machine gun fire.

  Beecher watched from the ladder in suspended disbelief as eight Hellcats peeled into steep dives toward them. Concussive explosions followed, each violently shaking the ship’s bulkheads. Not lucky misses, Beecher knew; they were going after the destroyer and freighter escorts first. Oryoko Maru’s antiaircraft gunners fired furiously at the dive bombers, bringing fierce responses from the planes’ rear and wing gunners.

  The atmosphere in the hold turned quiet and expectant as guns hammered away and bombs dropped all around them. Over the cacophony, one of the chaplains, Father Duffy, raised his voice in prayer: “Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do.”

  Commander Frank Bridget, a navy flyer himself, sat atop the aft ladder and, in the words of one witness, “as cool as a tennis match referee, reported the action.” Bridget: “Flight of American navy planes headed this way. Two peeling off to attack a freighter . . . another hitting a tanker . . . several burning ships in view. Here they come! Everybody duck!”

  The trembling prisoners heeded Bridget’s warning as they heard the plane engines accelerate into their dives. The prisoners heeded his every word, but David Nash recalled “hop[ing] to hell they would score and hop[ing] to hell they wouldn’t.” One by one, the bombs hit the water, each with a violent thump before exploding. The ship bounced like a bathtub toy, and the men below were soon covered with dust and rust chips shaken loose by the detonations.

  Suddenly light and air poured into the hold; burning shrapnel had ripped a jagged hole in the side of the ship. Dozens were wounded, but the hole brought improved airflow and enabled a better view of the action.

  Now they could see their own planes retreat, circle, and roar back for a strafing run. Riera’s audacious bombers dropped their bombs from 1,200 feet but strafed at nearly mast height. Bright flashes preceded the rapid chatter of guns firing hundreds of burning rounds down Oryoko Maru’s throat. Fifty-caliber machine gun bullets—forged by patriotic factory workers in places such as Elizabethtown, Tulsa, Texarkana, and Ypsilanti—peppered the ship and its human cargo. Scorching bullets and casings ricocheted into the holds. Between attacks, doctors and corpsmen crawled from man to man, dressing fresh wounds with scraps of cloth torn from clothing of the dead.

  The worst carnage was above them. Japanese gun crews and their serial replacements had stood and died at their mounts. Pooling blood from the deck dripped down onto the calm, moustachioed Commander Bridget, who continued to interpret the action from his slatted perch. “Not going to Japan, boys. Still right off Subic. Not going to Japan . . .”

  In one- and two-hour intervals, Riera’s squadron returned to attack the convoy at least nine separate times that day. At nightfall, Oryoko Maru was the only ship in the doomed cortege still afloat, and barely at that. With a broken rudder and riddled with holes, she limped into Subic Bay. Doctors were ordered up from the holds to treat wounded Japanese. On return, they confirmed massive casualties throughout the upper decks, cabins, parlors, and dining areas. The topside first-class cabins had been particularly hard hit, they said; chintz window dressing offered no protection from bombs and bullets.

  With so many dead and the ship’s sides punctured, oxygen supply for the surviving prisoners had improved. But in all other respects, the second night in the hold was as bad or worse than the first. Screams of the insane competed with groans of the wounded, and fights between possessed men could not be stopped.

  By dawn on December 15, an eerie quiet hung over the crippled Oryoko Maru. The ship was dead in the water about five hundred yards off Olongapo, the onetime US Navy base. Subic’s gentle current rippled against her hull as morning light filtered into the hold. Able to see again, doctors began moving about, treating wounds as best they could and gathering up the dead. They worke
d with dispatch; the bombers were expected to return to resume their work.

  When the dazed prisoners gradually came to, they realized that except for a few guards, the Japanese passengers had all been evacuated. Were they being kept aboard intentionally to be sunk by their own navy? The answer came at 0800; the distant grind of airplane engines confirmed the imminent return of Riera’s squadron.

  Within minutes, unopposed bombs came whistling down. A large explosion convulsed the ship, and she heeled sharply to port. The aft hold had taken the direct hit, instantly killing some 250 prisoners. More died when the guard Aihara emptied his pistol at blast survivors rushing the aft-hold ladder.

  In the forward hold, just as listening prisoners began to expect the worst, Mr. Wada spat down new orders: “Abandon ship!” The men were to remove all clothes and shoes and swim ashore. At this, the surviving prisoners seemed to regain a modicum of sanity, even discipline, as they worked together to first hoist up the wounded. Wada ordered Colonel Beecher to depart for shore and organize the incoming prisoners. The imperturbable Commander Bridget took charge on deck.

  Bridget reiterated Wada’s orders: remove any remaining clothes and shoes, exit the ship from the port side (which faced Olongapo), and swim ashore. The Japanese Naval Landing Party had set up machine guns on the beach and seawall. Orders were to shoot anyone who swam off course. “They mean what they say,” Bridget warned.

  Ensigns Earl Ferguson and Barton Cross emerged slowly from beneath the wooden shelving in the rear of the hold, weak and shaken, but unharmed. Two other ensigns, Robert Granston and Bob Glatt, did the same. Chuck Wilkins, Granston’s best friend and initial Oryoko companion, was dead. Like many who had wisely paired up in the hold, faithfully dividing whatever sustenance came their way and keeping watch while the other slept, they had survived the worst of it aboard Oryoko Maru.

  Separated from Charles since the beginning of the voyage, Barton was no doubt grateful when he saw his tall, gaunt figure stumble across the eerie space. At the ladder, the ensigns tried to assess the losses to their once inseparable band. Word quickly reached them that Ensigns Shields Goodman and Warwick Potter Scott had died in the bomb blast of the aft hold. They could not locate George Petritz, and fretted that he, too, had met the same fate in the aft hold.