Not only had swearing, fighting, and incredible filth become the norm, but disease was now sharply on the rise. Dysentery patients were moved in increasing numbers to “the hospital area,” a planked platform directly above the hold. The helpless patients’ uncontrollable diarrhea dripped through the floorboards onto the prisoners in “the pit” below. On January 5 John Wright wrote: “Two more deaths last night, two more today. Just waiting, wondering, and praying.”
In the second week of January, it finally seemed the ship was being readied for departure. The number of deaths on both ships allowed for consolidation, and the Brazil Maru prisoners were moved to Enoura Maru. The Japanese also laid in new supplies, including several burlap sacks of sugar. A large tanker was brought alongside them as well, signaling the assembly of a convoy. But the new arrangements brought new troubles.
Stored sugar within feet of starving men was too great a temptation for Charles Armour and others. Despite stern Japanese warnings, Charles broke open one of the bags and gobbled down handful after handful. A stubble of sugar crystals covered the lower half of his face. Emboldened, other prisoners followed suit. Either too honorable or too fearful of reprisal, Barton withdrew from the scene.
After spying loose sugar at the foot of the hold’s ladder, a passing guard called out to his superiors in urgent staccato. Seconds later, an angry Mr. Wada appeared at the top of the ladder. “You will surrender the thieves!” he demanded. No food or water until this was done, he warned. The silence that ensued surprised no one. Experience had taught them that deliverance of anyone under such circumstances meant certain torture and likely execution.
Colonel Beecher made a plea for volunteers to step forward on behalf of the whole, promising extra rations. After a weighted silence, a tired but resolute voice called out. “I’ll go.” A sea of bodies parted with deference as a man named Hannenkrant, an army medic, headed for the ladder. Then another voice rang out. All eyes settled on a young British sergeant named Trapp. A pall of shame hung over the rest of them as the two brave men disappeared up the ladder.
Miraculously, the pair returned within an hour after only being cuffed and slapped. The prisoners speculated that their captors had spared them out of respect for their raw, and by now rare, courage.
At 0930 on January 9, a relative calm prevailed in the hold as breakfast was distributed. The prisoners were settling into their meal just as a loud whine of diving aircraft shattered the quiet. There was a burst of running and shouting above them, then the rapid ack-ack from the antiaircraft guns.
ON THIS SAME MORNING, General MacArthur’s ground troops came ashore in full force at Luzon’s Lingayen Gulf. As with MacArthur’s mid-December Mindoro landings, Admiral Halsey’s Task Force 38 was summoned for air support and the beachhead was secured before the day was through. Halsey’s carrier pilots began their sorties early that morning, targeting multiple sites from which the enemy might attack Allied ships unloading in Lingayen Gulf. Airfields in southern Formosa were their primary objectives, but the airmen also prized any shipping in Formosan harbors, particularly tankers.
At 0915 on January 9, target coordinator Commander Robert Riera—and his same Air Group Eleven that had decimated Oryoko Maru in December—sortied from the USS Hornet in a tidy line. Carrying 250- and 500-pound bombs, the twelve fighter planes rounded the tip of southern Formosa in as many minutes. After climbing through tier after tier of scattered clouds, they broke into the clear at 6,500 feet. Takao Harbor spread out like an aerial photograph beneath them. It was “the only spot so favored on the coast,” Riera noted in his after-action report. “Twenty-five ships were counted in Takao’s inner harbor, more in its outer perimeter, a bomber’s dream. Some [ships] were moored in pairs, presenting unusually attractive targets.”
One after another, each plane went into a 5,000-foot dive and dropped its load onto the oil tanker and the Enoura Maru next to it. “Four good hits were observed, with others probable . . . antiaircraft [fire] moderate. The most successful antishipping strike flown by this squadron to date,” Riera boasted.
THE FORWARD HOLD AND engine room received direct hits. The bomb intended for the second hold—where most of the prisoners were eating breakfast—exploded alongside the ship, shredding the starboard hull. Beams and hatch covers crashed down, and torrents of steel splinters and shrapnel sprayed into the hold.
The result was a smoke-filled hell pit of ripped flesh, severed limbs, and crushed skulls. David Nash recalled the horror: “Before it could register in our minds, we were being jarred by falling bombs . . . All around us were killed and wounded . . . A near miss had made a sieve of the side of the ship. One sight haunted me for days. That was a man whose skull was laid wide open and yet he breathed for hours. About that time, I discovered that my leg was bleeding from a deep gouge. I don’t know when I received it.”
Ken Wheeler also recounted the scene: “When the dust and fire cleared away, I was stunned [by] the carnage . . . Over 300 in our group were killed outright. Almost everyone was wounded . . . The hatches, hatch covers, and massive plank . . . had been blown into the hold on top of us.”
Those not crushed to death were pinned beneath the fallen beams.
There was a stunned silence in the hold after the attack, as dazed survivors took stock. After the initial trauma, those able to move started toward their wounded comrades. Barton was in shock following the blast, and his head ached, but his injuries were nothing compared with those around him. The macabre scene unfolded like a soundless nightmare. Ensigns Bob Wuest and Jack Ferguson were both mortally wounded and covered in blood. Without immediate assistance from the Japanese, they—and hundreds of other wounded—would surely die. Barton joined the other able-bodied who were crafting crude tourniquets and splints while they waited for medics.
Nothing was heard from the Japanese for hours after the blast, and the situation rapidly deteriorated. Finally, Colonel Olson, with his forearm blown off and a rag tied above the elbow, mounted the ladder and called out for Mr. Wada. He appeared after several long minutes and glared down at Olson like an angry chimera. “I ask nothing for myself,” Olson began boldly, “but these men are dying. In . . . the name of the Gods that you believe in, can’t you do something for them? They will die without bandages or medicine or food and water.”
Mr. Wada curled his lips, baring a mouthful of yellow, protruding teeth. “They were your planes that bombed ship,” he sneered. “They were your planes, and they have killed our men too. We don’t care if you die.” With that, he disappeared.
At Wada’s departure, the only sound below was the weeping and moaning of grown men who had lost every last hope. But then another voice called out—urgent, steady, and clear. Every man recognized the speaker. “Listen to me, men! You must listen to me!” It was the deep, resonant voice of Father Cummings, the Catholic chaplain who had earned universal authority the hard way: by going through every inch of the agony with them. Some had been with “Father Bill” since Bataan; others gratefully remembered his prayers and counsel at various prison camps, and all of them during the Oryoko Maru ordeal. The hold went silent as men of all faiths strained to listen.
The beloved priest who at Bataan had declared, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” did not follow with a plea for faith. Instead, Father Cummings simply began praying aloud in his comfortingly familiar tone: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .” Some men murmured the Lord’s Prayer along with him; others followed with closed eyes and clasped hands. They listened as never before.
“Father Cummings’s prayer,” wrote Sidney Stewart, “floated like a benediction . . . caressing every one of us.”
“It penetrated our very souls,” wrote David Nash.
As if by celestial intervention, Japanese guards shortly thereafter began lowering bandages, bottles of iodine, mercurochrome, and buckets of water into the hold. Encouraged, survivors started to reorganize and function; some dressed wounds with the new supplies, while others cleared
away debris and began the grisly task of stacking bodies by the hatch.
Two more days would pass before the Japanese sent down working parties to remove the dead; an excruciating process that itself took another two days. Thirty bodies at a time were loaded onto cargo nets attached to a cable, and then winched out of the hold and deposited onto an awaiting barge. The bodies jumped grotesquely as the crane operator jerked the cable for amusement, laughing as bloody pieces of flesh and body parts splattered and slid on the barge’s cambered surface.
“So passed an additional four hundred,” Beecher lamented. “For the eight hundred or so men [remaining], though more dead than alive, the ordeal was far from over.”
IT WAS DURING THIS postbombing grimness at Takao, Formosa, that Barton Cross—separated from his closest comrades either by death, incapacitation, or unknown shipboard circumstances—teamed up with another ensign, one he only came to know after returning to Cabanatuan from Davao Penal Colony. Like Barton, “Bob” Granston was reeling from loss. Chuck Wilkins had died aboard Oryoko Maru. The two Washington natives had been best friends at the University of Seattle and signed up for the Navy Supply Corps together. Barton and Bob forged a bond through a paradoxical combination of need, shared grief, inborn optimism, and the will to survive.
Granston wrote Helen Cross of their survival pact aboard Enoura Maru: “It was from this point forward that Bart and I joined forces and shared our fortunes. And we did, in every respect. We slept when we could sleep together to keep one another warm, we evenly divided every morsel of our food and every drop of our water. I am sure you can see why Bart meant so much to me.”
All prisoners knew that “buddying” greatly improved survival odds. It had become protocol by this point. Prisoners who withdrew from others, whether due to exhaustion, delirium, or irreversible misery, did not last long.
Over the next twenty days, there would be no secrets between Bart Cross and Bob Granston. The two men came to know as much about each other as any of their respective friends, lovers, or family members had ever known. Indulging in the continuum of stories that had shaped their young lives up to those frigid, dark hours was the only remaining salve that could not be wrested away. With their tacit pact sealed, they moved together to the final ship that would carry them to Japan.
Barton was a very close friend of mine, and I shall always cherish that friendship born in a common struggle.
Robert Granston to Helen Cross
ON JANUARY 14, THE shrunken prisoner band—shivering, filthy, bandaged, and emaciated—moved from the crippled Enoura Maru back to the Brazil Maru, which had not been damaged in the American air attack. Those who died in the difficult transfer were thrown overboard. The Brazil Maru then weighed anchor and pressed north in a twelve-ship convoy. Inconceivably, on this voyage, the men suffered their greatest hardship since departing Manila.
During this last trip, food and water were almost non-existent. We all became weaker every day. Many went to sleep at night and never woke up the next morning. They were just simply too weak from cold and lack of food and water to carry on.
Charles Armour to Helen Cross
THE SHIP SAILED INTO the coldest Asian winter in forty years. Icy drafts whooshed through the hold as they reached cruising speed—a cruel harbinger of what lay ahead. On the first night out of Takao, twenty men died. Brazil Maru’s daily death rate rose unabated after that.
Through a winter scrum each morning, just enough light slanted belowdecks to permit a body count of those who had passed away overnight. The dead were first stripped of desperately needed clothing and then piled in a passageway. After each morning count, they were removed to the deck and buried at sea. Only in this manner was initial overcrowding on the third ship relieved. Day and night, chaplains murmured last rites to the point of monotony.
Barton’s resilience slowly ebbed aboard the Brazil Maru. Less than a day after Bob Wuest’s wounded, wasted corpse was cinched and spiraled out of the hold, Jack Ferguson followed in the same manner. One after another, the haunting remains of the dearest friends Barton had ever known—the men he’d bolstered and who had bolstered him—twisted naked and lifeless out of sight.
Until Father Cummings himself died, the good chaplain asked for a moment of silence every evening so that he might offer a brief prayer. His voice grew progressively fainter and weaker until he could no longer speak his comforting refrain: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.”
Despite the increasingly nightmarish environs, “Bart” and “Bob” always retreated to the transformative refuge of conversation. They moved through the annals of their respective lives—stories large and small, successes and failures, love interests, and their families and homes. Even as hollowed-out men all around scrambled like rodents for the tiniest edible or spoonful of water, even as the ship dodged submarine fire and pitched in the high seas, even as they wallowed in a hold slick with filth and disease and shivered in subfreezing temperatures, the two men indulged in the simple joy of storytelling, sourced entirely from their pasts.
I came to know all of you, intimately, for Bart introduced each of you to me. We swapped endless yarns and family stories. Bart described you all in detail and never once gave up hope he would see you again . . . In turn, I paraded my family life before his eyes. He was fascinated by my family, certainly less prominent than the Crosses, but it is a warm, close family. There were so many stories he wanted to hear over and over again . . . By so doing we passed many long hours and forgot for long stretches of time the hopelessness of our situation.
Robert Granston to Helen Cross
THERE WAS A CADENCE to their yarn swappings. One would start with a story about a time, a place, or a life episode. A corresponding chronicle from the other would follow, related in some way to the initial story. Characters from their respective pasts burst out of dusty sterling frames and old leather albums they’d long since left behind. One elaborately rendered scene after another hovered above them like guardian spirits.
Granston’s childhood vignettes were in stark relief to Barton’s. His renderings were of an alluring world of rural western life on a small farm outside Seattle, Washington. Barton was mesmerized. With all its formalities and unvoiced tensions, Lilac Hedges was galaxies away from the open and affectionate traditions of the Granston family farm. His heart swelled with vicarious pleasure over freedoms he had never even dreamed of.
The simple abundance of a boisterous Granston dinner was a Barton favorite. With each sentence, Bob filled out the dreamscape of an unadorned farm kitchen full of heavenly smells and happy faces, a weathered, wide-board table groaning with freshly harvested delights—all enjoyed amid lively conversation, pea-shooting, and frequent laughter. Barton sat rapt, knees to chest, like a child. He salivated over the menu, but also the textured riches of a raucous, informal, and intensely loving home.
Barton’s stories centered on growing up in New Jersey, but also described ventures into New York City, the stuff of dreamy escapes for Bob Granston. Barton waxed on his early taste of independence at Christ School, and his surprising and enduring epiphanies there.
He also told, with a weakening smile, of his truncated baseball and singing careers, both of which reached their zenith in prison camp. Then there was the almost–love of his life, a girl named Eve that he’d met at Pearl Harbor before setting sail for Manila.
Bob Granston was a keen observer, even in his own fragile state. He saw that all Barton’s childhood and teen recollections had a similar subtext: of being prodded to become something he was not. Nor did it take Granston long to figure out that the Cross clan hailed from a higher social order than his own, or to grasp that material wealth was no guarantee of happiness.
But despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, the two men bonded like alloyed steel. They talked to exhaustion each evening. The power of such unburdening was surel
y a comfort to Barton. The simple exercise of seeing his brief life through the compassionate eyes of another both resolved its disappointments and affirmed its value. Only when the final half-light withdrew from the hold each evening and their wasting brethren grew indistinct did Bart and Bob draw close for warmth and doze off.
IN THE LAST FRIGID week of January, Barton reached the limits of human endurance. Snow swirling into the hold could neither revive him nor cool his burning forehead. Granston urged him on by the hour, but a triple assault of dysentery, pneumonia, and infection springing from a hidden head wound—likely obscured by a wild mat of filthy hair—joined forces with exposure, starvation, and thirst to immobilize him.
Barton now depended upon Granston like an infant, and Granston did not disappoint. He divided whatever sustenance came his way—every sip of water and infinitesimal issue of rice was split and shared. He would raise Barton’s head, open his mouth, and spoon it in, dose by tiny dose. But by the time they arrived at Moji Port in Japan on January 28, Barton was drifting in and out of consciousness.
I know I have not spared you much—I have gone into great detail that might well have been kept from the Cross family. But your letter was a plea for information (good or bad) about Bart. It is in answer to that plea and my own love for Bart that I have written of all the conditioning circumstances that led directly and indirectly to his death.
Robert Granston to Helen Cross
WHEN BRAZIL MARU DOCKED at Moji on January 29, a contingent of Japanese military personnel boarded the ship and peered into the hold. At the sight of the five-foot-high corpse pile, they turned and departed in shock. Hours later, the prisoners were instructed to organize in alphabetical order to receive an issue of clothing.
At the call of their name, each prisoner went up to the deck to receive an issue of green flannel Japanese military uniforms, shoes, and woolen overcoats. With Barton unable to sit up, much less stand or talk, Bob Granston made for the ladder when “Cross” was called. He returned to the hold with the chilly garb, damp to the touch and smelling vaguely of mildew and cigarette smoke. He proceeded to dress his friend, still clinging to life but in a feverish stupor.
The Jersey Brothers Page 48