On September 1, just as the first prisoner-loaded hospital ships prepared to depart Japan, Admiral Turner and his flag staff departed Manila for a particular battleship in Tokyo Bay. The formal Japanese surrender would be held at 0900 the next day on the USS Missouri, which was still Admiral Halsey’s flagship.
After the ceremony, while a grand display of a thousand naval aircraft roared over Tokyo Bay, Admiral Turner asked Admiral Hall, freshly minted commander of the Tokyo Naval Force, if a sedan might be made available to take him and his staff into Tokyo. Hall referred the request to General Robert Eichelberger, the army area commander. Eichelberger hedged, saying that the army had not yet established patrols in Tokyo and could not ensure Turner’s safety. But he did not say no, and in a manner unknown, a sedan was procured.
Admiral Turner and his entourage thus drove off, stopping first at a police station to get directions to the shrine of Admiral Tōgō, victor of the Tsushima Strait Battle in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War. Turner had been greatly impressed by the Tōgō shrine during his 1939 diplomatic mission to Japan aboard Astoria.
“We went into the police station to get a road map,” recalled one staffer. “The police were very polite to us, and we were very polite to them. When we came out of the police station, Admiral Turner said, ‘When they surrendered, they really surrendered.’ ”
Standing before the Tōgō shrine, Admiral Turner made this prescient observation: “If we play our cards well, the Japanese will become our best and most worthwhile friends. They have certain fundamental virtues in their character, which in time, I hope, will be appreciated by all worthwhile Americans. We should be most careful to respect their Gods and their traditions, and I hope they will come in time to respect ours.”
Here again Turner was his usual thoughtful and brilliant, and the moment left an indelible print on his flag staff. But Bill was still privately roiled by persistent rumors of post-surrender reprisals against Allied war prisoners. As stunning and memorable as the day’s events had been, he could think only of getting back to Manila. Once there, he would dissect every single roster of ships returning prisoners from Japan and search the faces of debarking men for Barton.
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NO PEACE AT LILAC HEDGES
SEPTEMBER 1945 BEGAN AT Lilac Hedges as it had for decades. Despite the ecstasy of Japan’s surrender and the subsequent agony of waiting to hear from or about Barton, Helen had her autumn gardening schedule to keep. Without a conventional job, she battled corrosive anxiety by working her seeds and soil as hard as any man labored at the office. Arthur had his textile business to keep him from going mad with the waiting.
They had relished the joyful news of Japan’s unexpected surrender, toasting each other with highballs. “To Barton!” Then came the ongoing news of Allied prisoner liberations from such alien place names as Omori, Sian, Kyuryu, Sham Shui Po, Kanchanaburi, Mukden, Karenko, Nong Pladuck, Konan; after which came gleeful media reports of POWs reuniting with their jubilant families. Their nerves frayed as the days grew shorter and the list of liberated places longer, with no news of their son.
As the month wore on, Bill’s regular but increasingly anxious assurances from Manila had yielded little. So preoccupied was Helen that she barely sniffed at Bill’s own good news: that the Pacific admirals had formally recommended his transfer from the reserves to the regular navy, a long-sought goal.
With little else to distract her each morning after seeing Arthur off for the train, Helen took to the garden before the sun cleared the oak canopy on the east lawn. She would first drag a heavy brick across the porch to wedge open the door so as not to miss the much-awaited telephone call. Then, after fastening her bandana and donning her dirt-smudged apron, she gathered up her tulip, tiger, and rockery trowels, a mattock, hoe, and shrub rake, and went to work.
There were endless spent blooms to pinch, rosebushes to corset, and arbors to tie up. And with so much of her landscaping ripped away in last year’s hurricane, there was the planting of new hemlocks, dogwoods, and Japanese maples to oversee. And then she must turn to the rigors of mulching, using the rich nutrient yield of fallen leaves already flecking her lawn. Ticking off tasks on these to-do lists became Helen’s units of measure for marking time in September 1945.
As each day progressed, she kept a vigilant ear above autumn birdsong and honking geese for the mailman’s footsteps and the particular pace of passing cars. Any day now, the mailman might bring joyful, if belated, tidings—and if no car slowed to a stop in front of her house, no uniformed officer could emerge with news she could not bear to hear.
How she missed Sable! For years, he had accompanied her morning garden rounds, courting her moods and patiently listening to her musings. But the graying spaniel had suddenly passed away in late January. Helen was convinced Barton’s beloved dog finally died of a broken heart.
So she forged ahead alone that September, mapping out a gardening regimen that would take her through October, she calculated, what with putting in the young saplings, tulip and crocus bulb planting and transplanting, raking, composting, and mulching. Soon enough would come the job of spreading that black gold over her sleeping beauties in carefully delineated quadrants. This alone would take days.
But Helen did not follow her scripted plan to the letter that autumn. Early in the month, she declined to pull up the summer annuals on schedule—why void the lovely mounds of white impatiens lighting up the lilacs’ understory before Barton’s return? The same occurred the day she had scheduled cutting back her hydrangea. They still had good color, she reasoned, some deepened to a purplish garnet, others a sun-kissed bronze. Wouldn’t he love to drive up after so long and see her garden “just so”?
She had loved it more than she ever let on when Barton would say, “Everything looks swell, Ma!” He had always complimented her horticultural flair. While she rarely spoke of it, his gift of noticing even the most mundane garden adjustment made her feel uniquely appreciated.
That September, it seemed that every one of Helen’s gardening decisions had a Barton counterpart. She coaxed Lilac Hedges’s summer glory to hang on so that Barton could see it before the garden faded to browns and grays.
THE FIRST FREED WAR prisoners in Japan had been from a camp called Omori. The September 7 article said they were actually liberated at the end of August, before the surrender was formally signed. Helen was trembling by the time she finished reading the front-page piece in the New York Times. With the help of a magnifying glass, she scrutinized the accompanying photo: a dirty band of gaunt, shirtless, exhilarated men. It caught them in a state of sheer exuberance, midshout, midlaugh, some with fingers fixed in Vs, others waving British and American flags.
“What of Barton?” she groaned. She asked this again and again, to her diary and out loud, but no longer to Sable, whose reliable attention and empathy she particularly missed now.
Besides her various trowels, Helen’s only other weapons for taming anxiety were her fountain pen and typewriter. Since Japan’s mid-August surrender announcement, she had repeatedly written both the army and navy. The war was over! Prisoners were being released all over Asia! Where was her son? September dragged into the double digits, and the gardening and letters continued apace, but replies from Washington never varied: “At last report to this Department, Ensign Cross was interned as a prisoner of war in the Philippines.”
News of a darker nature had also begun to agitate Helen. Following each camp’s liberation came a fresh round of press accounts—no longer subject to a war censor’s pen—on Japanese treatment of their onetime captives. Front pages were crammed with one chilling ex-prisoner interview after another. The stock tales were of starvation, beatings, and beheadings, but another, more troubling, theme was also emerging.
The men told repeatedly of being shipped to Japan from conquered territories, shoved deep in the bowels of unmarked Japanese transports. So frequent were these stories that the press dubbed these vessels “hell ships.” Drastic conditions and st
unning cruelty aboard these ships spilled out daily in black and white. Worse, went the stories, as many as a dozen of these vessels had been attacked en route by the United States Navy.
If these accumulating newspaper reports were accurate, prisoner transports exiting the Philippines received particular attention by the US Navy. According to one survivor account, hundreds died from a single air squadron strike on his prison ship in Subic Bay at the end of 1944. Subsequent air strikes killed hundreds more prisoners before their voyage was done.
Carrier pilots’ orders had been to “eliminate” all enemy shipping except hospital ships or those transporting prisoners of war, but none of the latter were marked as such. This was a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, but Japan had not been a signatory to those global rules of conduct. Helen simmered. Hadn’t the navy learned by that point that the Japanese were not marking their prisoner transports? She had written Roosevelt on this subject over a year earlier!
The fall equinox came and went at Lilac Hedges with still no word from Ensign Cross. Helen was certain she knew the name of every Japanese prison camp in Asia by this time. They sounded unbidden in her head, in sync with the mourning meter of autumn crickets or to the rhythm of her shoes sloshing through wet grass, like a bad tune that cannot be banished: Saitami, Hokkaido, Shikoku, Ofuna, Shinagawa, Kawasaki . . . She spat out the names on the ever-lengthening list of liberated prison camps.
With each report, Arthur’s forced optimism grew less convincing, even as he assured his fretting wife that there were still camps in Korea yet to be liberated. She just needed to be patient.
And so September dragged on, day in and day out.
On Tuesday, September 25, various morning headlines held little interest for Helen or Arthur. That the 1945 World Series would pit the Detroit Tigers against the Chicago Cubs was a disappointment to any self-respecting baseball fan. One sportswriter dubbed it the “World’s Worst Series.” Another quipped that he didn’t think either team could win. Though they could have used the distraction, Helen and Arthur couldn’t muster their usual enthusiasm for America’s final baseball contest of the season.
Then there was the bit about Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his “deserving” retirement from public service. As far as Helen and Arthur were concerned, Stimson had neither protected their son at the start of the war nor done anything to bring him home at the end of it.
Arthur made for the train a little after eight, and Helen set out for the garden. When dark skies and wind gusts threatened rain in late morning, she headed back toward the house. But as she started up the porch steps, the mailman’s distinctive gait stopped her in her tracks. Having sent off so many inquiries, she could only hope that today he brought a glimmer of news.
After placing her clippers and cuttings on the step and pulling off her garden gloves, she gratefully accepted the short stack of mail. With the dexterity of a card shark, she leafed through the mix of bills and letters. She stopped at the prize card—finally, a letter from the navy! With a mix of anticipation and nervousness, she sat down on the step and ripped open the envelope. Inside was a one-page letter, folded in thirds and neatly typed.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Cross:
It is with deep regret that this Bureau informs you that it is in receipt of a cablegram from the International Red Cross in Tokyo, dated 19, September, 1945, stating that your son died of acute enteritis on 30 January 1945 while aboard a Japanese transport ship apparently en route to a prisoner of war camp in Japan.
The delay in the arrival of this information is a result of the slowness with which the Japanese Government has cooperated in the handling of the information concerning prisoners of war.
The Bureau deeply regrets its inability to supply further information at this time. The cablegram from the International Red Cross was brief and did not state the place of burial, type of ceremony, or medical attention administered. Now that the Japanese have surrendered, additional information is becoming available daily. Should further details be received concerning your son, they will be forwarded to you from the Navy Department.
The various agencies of the government having jurisdiction over settlement of death benefits in cases involving deceased naval personnel have been informed. These agencies will forward to you the necessary forms to be used in order to file a claim for any benefits to which you may be entitled.
The Navy Department extends sincere sympathy to you in your great sorrow and hopes that you may find comfort in the knowledge that your son gave his life in the service of his country.
By direction of the Chief of Naval Personnel.
Sincerely Yours,
H. B. Atkinson
Commander, USNR
Officer in Charge
Casualty Section
How long did it take for this news to sink in—that her son had been dead already eight months? How long for Helen to begin sobbing and rocking back and forth on that porch stair, for her bandana to slide off, for the strands of gray mingled with defiant red to mat her face, the tear-soaked letter still in hand? Had she already known on some unconscious level—felt that ominous, marrow-deep inkling that only a mother can decrypt?
At some point, Helen must have managed her way back into the house, past her War Mother’s Flag still boasting a proud quartet of blue stars. It had adorned the front window for nearly four years now. Soon enough, a fellow War Mother would arrive, discreetly, and sew gold thread over the third one down to announce the incomprehensible loss of a dear child to a distant war.
There were no uniformed officers at her door to thank for their kindness in her moment of great anguish, no body to weep over, no forehead to stroke one last time, and, without a body, no funeral to plan. All conventional palliatives for a mother’s grief were denied her. Helen had only this letter from the Navy Department to respond to—and respond she would. Her heart would bleed with purpose, she determined, through the nib of her pen.
That they had declined to notify her in person was perhaps the greatest insult. Her four children all naval officers and the navy too busy to come to her home, even with the war concluded? And her dear one’s death due to “acute enteritis”? After everything she had read in the previous three weeks, she rejected this with every fiber of her being. Years of incompetence, and now lies!
Arthur mourned as any well-trained son of the British Empire might—silently and stoically. He reeled from the death of his namesake, but spoke little of it and cried less. While Helen announced her grief with vehemence, Arthur’s only solace was work, to which he returned in too few days following the terrible news.
Helen abandoned her gardening for the rest of 1945—anguish and rage had snuffed out the joy it had once brought her. But she did not sit idle. As autumn leaves fell unanswered on tufting grass and spiking weeds and chill winds blew them about neglected beds, stacks of letters weighed down the mailman in his daily retreat from Lilac Hedges.
Her first round of salvos—to the army, the navy, and President Truman—demanded the names and addresses of surviving prisoners who had known her son. If Pentagon and White House powers couldn’t or wouldn’t help her learn the truth, she resolved to get the answers elsewhere. Once she received the contact information, she would solicit Barton’s prison comrades for answers.
In the meantime, she gathered as much information as she could on the much-publicized hellships, easily confirming that her son had died after seven weeks of incarceration in the rusted, boiling-then-freezing hulls of three such vessels. The first two, Oryoko Maru in Subic Bay and Enoura Maru at Takao Harbor, Formosa, had been laid to waste by exploding bombs dropped by navy carrier planes, each time killing and wounding hundreds more American prisoners.
Surviving prisoners of the second prison ship bombing at Takao Harbor, including Barton, were transferred to the hull of a third ship, Brazil Maru. This last crumbling, stinking hulk then set course for Japan—into the teeth of its coldest winter in decades. All were starving, ill, and emaciated, and many
had untreated shrapnel wounds from the previous bombings. Prisoners in the horse manure–laden hull of the Brazil Maru died by the hour. The death rate on this final, bitter leg to the enemy’s homeland reached forty men a day, their purpling corpses stacked like cordwood together with the men in the hull.
With every new revelation, Helen absorbed fresh shock and grief. Then she gathered herself up and fired off a fresh barrage of accusations and questions to Washington. As postwar press scrutiny of these doomed prisoner voyages intensified, Helen became increasingly convinced that Barton was a victim of friendly fire. Official replies never satisfied.
Even as the navy resisted her building rationale that Barton was killed by one of his own, Helen reasserted her mounting evidence against them. Article after article, all drawn from survivor accounts, continued for months after the war. Without wartime censorship, the military was powerless to stem the rising tide of damning information.
One brutally candid fourteen-part series, based on some of the first press interviews after surrender, left Helen shattered. Barton had been on every one of the ships described in the cruel forty-nine-day odyssey.
In the syndicated “Cruise of Death,” Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent George Weller of the Chicago Daily News spared no detail. The series ran in December 1945 and was carried by major newspapers across the country:
SEVEN WEEKS IN JAP-MADE HELL
Story of Cruise of Death of 1600 American Prisoners Told by the 300 Who Lived
George Weller Pieces Together the Record of Bombs, Suffocation, Starvation, Murder on Voyage from Manila.
This is the story of a cruise of death. It is the story of 49 days of savagery and tragedy unequaled in the war in the Pacific, of a Jap-made hell from which approximately 300 Americans from more than 1600 emerged, alive . . .
Survivors were interviewed in prison and rest camps in the Pacific.
The Jersey Brothers Page 45