In the urn below rest the ashes of 333 sailors, soldiers and airmen of the British Commonwealth, the United States of America and the Kingdom of the Netherlands who died as prisoners of war in Japan. The names of 232 are inscribed on these walls. The identity of their 51 comrades is unknown. There be of them that have left their name behind that their praises might be reported, and some there be which have no memorial. But their righteousness hath not been forgotten and their glory shall not be blotted out.
Long rows of names were engraved on the facing walls—some very recently. Since the listings were organized by service and country rather than alphabetically, Bill had to first locate the US Navy insignia, beneath which he read through lengthy columns of surnames. Peterson, Church, Goodpaster, Conover, Weeks, Magnusan, Murchison, Austin, Gardner, Butler, McGee, Baker . . . And then, finally, there it was: Arthur Barton Cross Jr., Ensign, USN, age 25.
Did he reach up and run his fingers along the sharply etched letters before surrendering to overwhelming guilt and sorrow? Whatever the answer to that question, my father took advantage of several opportunities in his life to redeem that loss. In many respects, both his professional and personal postwar lives were parallel progressions toward honoring his brother’s sacrifice and ensuring that he had not died in vain.
IN 1946, COMMANDER BILL Mott became chief of the navy’s International Law Branch and Foreign Claims Office. In this capacity, he served as a delegate to the International Red Cross Conference in Stockholm. I cannot imagine any more productive an outlet for a grieving brother of a perished prisoner of war. In Bill’s work as a conference delegate, he played a direct hand in reforming the 1929 Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of war prisoners. Working to ensure that future POWs would not suffer as Barton and his colleagues had—and would live to come home—was both redemptive and a powerful palliative.
Any signatory to the revised and greatly expanded Articles would be bound by their strengthened protections, including proscriptions against torture, acts of violence, and other inhumane treatment. It also required that prisoners be provided adequate housing, food, and clothing, and that medical care be provided. And just as important, it required that any ships carrying sick or wounded prisoners be explicitly marked. The Convention’s new Article III—which put in place the strongest protections in history for prisoners of war—was adopted by the Swiss Federal Council in 1949. To date, 196 countries have committed to obey them, including Japan.
CAPTAIN BILL MOTT’S ORDERS to Pearl Harbor had been to serve as legal advisor to the new commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Arthur Radford, a rising star in the constellation of navy admirals. Admiral Radford’s and my father’s worldviews were identical, especially regarding their postwar commitment to “peace through strength.” A veteran of both world wars, Admiral Radford was an ardent and controversial advocate of expanded investment in ship strength and carrier aviation in an era of shrinking military budgets and a civilian-minded Congress. But it was also an era of rising global instability, Radford argued relentlessly, and my father became a lifelong disciple of his fierce opposition to any policy or budget designed to contract American naval strength or readiness, both with respect to ships and personnel. A strong navy, he believed, was also the best protection for crews posted to dangerous places. It would keep future Bartons out of harm’s way.
In October 1950, President Truman made a stopover at Oahu en route to his Wake Island meeting on the expanding Korean crisis with General MacArthur. One of my father’s most pleasant duties was to accompany the president on his early-morning walks. As the two made their way around the Makalapa Crater one of those mornings, the president and my father got into a conversation on the complicated geopolitics resulting from America’s use of the atomic bomb. At some point, Truman shook his cane and said, “Aren’t you the young man who brought back the estimates of six hundred thousand American casualties if we invaded mainland Japan?” Bill was prompt with his reply. “Yes, sir, I am.”
That, the president said, is why it was the right thing to do.
“As commander in chief, I would never approve an operation where there was an estimate of six hundred thousand American casualties. I had no credible evidence that Emperor Hirohito or the Japanese military had any intention of suing for peace. And that is why I authorized the dropping of the atomic bomb.”
This oft-repeated story brought my father both pride and solace. It affirmed his part, however large or small, in preventing a ground invasion of Japan, which saved hundreds of thousands of lives, including his own, if not his brother’s. And it had spared their families as well—from a grief he knew too well.
Admiral Mott’s last set of active duty orders came at the start of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. The 1960 appointment was to serve as the navy’s twenty-first judge advocate general. He had in that position another opportunity to keep young men out of harm’s way—and also to help bring an end to a tense and dangerous nuclear standoff with Russia.
In the fall of 1962, my father proposed an alternative to mounting Pentagon support for a military strike against Russian-backed, nuclear-armed Cuba. The alternative was for the US Navy to repel approaching arms-laden Russian vessels by establishing a perimeter of American warships around the island nation, cordoning off its seaborne approaches. He had first proposed the idea of a naval “quarantine” (also called a shipping interdiction or defensive maritime zone), to President Eisenhower in 1955. That Oval Office meeting had been convened to evaluate nonbelligerent options for protecting Formosa (now Taiwan) from incursions by Communist-controlled mainland China via the Formosa Strait.
The Cuban Missile Crisis had intensified by the day in October 1962. Finally, after reviewing all his options, President Kennedy, himself a former naval officer and PT boat commander, chose the naval quarantine over the others. After announcing his decision, the president turned to CNO admiral George Anderson and said, “Well, Admiral, it looks as though this is up to the navy.” Anderson replied, “Mr. President, the navy will not let you down.”
And it didn’t. The quarantine was put in place immediately and was an unqualified success. One after another Russian vessel reversed course at the five-hundred-mile arc of American warships arrayed off the coast of Cuba. The standoff ended without a single shot being fired.
This historic action is frequently referred to as a naval blockade, but blockades can be imposed only in times of war, which is why such terminology was carefully avoided, at least at the time. War was precisely what the quarantine sought to prevent. Having been through one war and lost so much, my father saw high value in the tactic of brandishing American naval strength without having to use it. The role he played in helping to end the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of his proudest accomplishments.
It was as a parent, however, that he faced perhaps his best opportunity to compensate for Barton’s death. During the Vietnam War, my brother Adam was a US Air Force officer flying intelligence missions over combat zones in the North. From his post in Saigon, he contacted our father at his office in Washington, DC.
Adam had a favor to ask: Could Dad arrange for his temporary detail to the USS Forrestal, out in the Gulf of Tonkin? In Adam’s mind, “that was where the action was.” Our father replied that he could easily arrange it; his good friend and Annapolis classmate Admiral James Reedy was commander of the Seventh Fleet and as such had oversight of the carriers in the Tonkin Gulf. But his response to Adam was an unequivocal “No.” Years ago, he told Adam, he had, with the best of intentions, used his influence to arrange another family member’s military orders: his brother Barton’s.
“That,” he said, “is why I no longer play God with orders.” It was after my father denied Adam’s request that a freak Zuni rocket exploded on the flight deck of the USS Forrestal, still in the Gulf of Tonkin, and set off a chain of explosions that sparked a devastating fire; 134 of her crew were killed and another 161 severely injured.
MY SIBLINGS AND I all remember another particular story,
just the way my father told it. He gave many speeches throughout his career, as a high-ranking officer in the navy and later as an executive in the private sector, as head of two legal nonprofits he founded, and on behalf of the American Bar Association. After one of these speeches, the story went, a man approached him and introduced himself as a fellow prisoner of Barton’s. The man was reportedly near tears and spoke haltingly. “I escaped from that camp where we were imprisoned together,” the man told Dad. “But it wasn’t supposed to be me—it was Barton they wanted with them. I was the alternate. Only your brother refused to go for fear the Japanese would make good on their threat to execute ten prisoners for every escapee. So I was selected to take his place.”
The man said his guilt over this matter had worsened over the years, and when he heard that Dad would be speaking locally, he decided to come and confess to him what had happened. I do not remember what my father replied, only that he thanked the man for his courage and candor, and told him that he, for his own reasons, also struggled with the memory of Barton.
My father told this story infrequently, but often enough and so emotionally that it is etched in my memory and that of my siblings. Before I typed this just now, I called and asked them to tell me again what they remembered of it, and it had not changed. Perhaps we remember this story so well, and other similar ones, because they all seemed to awaken a rarely exposed emotional side of Bill Mott.
We could not get enough of these stories—in part because of how animated he became when he told them. But we also loved them because of their personalized historical content. We heard about Churchill’s Map Room code name (“Former Naval Person”), his jumpsuit and drinking habits after midnight, the rakish angle of FDR’s cigarette holder, and Madame Chiang’s soft southern contralto yet unpopularity with White House domestic staff for the way she clapped her hands when she wanted something. They riveted, always.
Madame Chiang was one of my father’s favorite White House visitors, in part, perhaps, because of Helen’s Wellesley connection. But he spoke of her often, and when he visited Taiwan during his JAG tenure (1960), he saw her again, and wrote about it in a letter home. “Our visit to the presidential palace was the highlight of the trip. Suffice it to say . . . I felt Madame Chiang stole the show. She is as I remember her from my White House days—a gracious, charming woman. She doesn’t look a day older, in fact she has grown more beautiful with age.” Madame Chiang apparently remembered him warmly as well; he brought home a sleeve of her paintings she had given him, and also two beautiful painted vases. The letter from which I just quoted lives inside one of them.
The stories were especially seductive because they unmasked a rarely seen side to a deeply emotional man, one that we knew more for his exhortations on parsimony, ladylike behavior, and school performance, and his own mental discipline. They were the one window we had on what lay beneath that tough exterior.
BILL AND ROMIE’S MARRIAGE disintegrated soon after his return from the Pacific. Many factors led to the divorce, not least of which was the corrosive mix of Bill’s postwar grief and Romie’s own emotional struggles, which had worsened over the lonely two years her husband had been half a world away with Admiral Turner and the amphibians. But even out of this personal defeat, an opportunity for love and family emerged.
A year after the divorce, Bill met Edith Grace, a Boston native and wartime analyst for the Manhattan Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Shortly after their nuptials in 1947, the newlyweds moved to Pearl Harbor, where the first of four more Mott children was born. Not only did my father find love, but he built the large, boisterous, and loving family that had eluded him in his own childhood. We all went on to have families of our own, and restored that cousin joy interrupted one summer evening, decades earlier, by the argument on our grandmother’s porch.
PART OF MY QUEST to repair that broken day was not just to learn our Uncle Barton’s story but also to track down the men who had witnessed it. I wanted to know how his fellow POWs had gotten on with their lives, and whether part of Barton had remained with them. Some were simply lost after coming home, but others had moved on just as I had imagined Barton would have.
Charles Armour’s mother also received a letter from the navy in September 1945, but hers relayed that Charles was alive and would be returning stateside—to a naval hospital in Memphis, 125 miles from their home in Little Rock. Charles would need time to recuperate, the letter said, and discouraged the family from visiting him in the hospital. Finally, one day in October 1945, a taxi pulled up to the curb at 501 Holly Street, and Charles Armour stepped out. His sister Jane had an indelible memory of that moment.
Jubilant when she looked out the window and saw her brother emerge from the taxi, she raced out the front door to greet him. But Charles was oddly quiet and standoffish. “On the surface he was home, but he . . . looked at me like I was a stranger,” she recalled. Charles later told the family about his beriberi, which had damaged his heart. He was also being treated for dysentery and scurvy, and the scars on his face and hands were from multiple skin cancer surgeries he’d undergone at the Memphis hospital.
Charles’s ailments were not all physical. He frequently sat at home by himself, staring at nothing in particular. “I guess he was just remembering things,” Jane said. In the afternoons, he would dress in his naval uniform and go to the town movie theater to watch newsreels and movies about the war. Sometimes he would sit through the same show two or three times. “He didn’t know anything about what had gone on, what happened in the war, what it all looked like,” Jane said.
Charles married a nurse that he’d met at the Memphis Naval Hospital. Following a simple ceremony, Charles and Millie had a celebratory dinner at the Peabody Hotel and danced to Al Jolson. Charles died of a heart attack in 1953.
Widow Millie recalled years later that Charles never could seem to get enough to eat, especially rice. Ironically, he had insisted she cook it the way the Japanese did, steamed and served in balls. He told her that the prisoners whittled away the hours trading favorite home recipes. They had sustained themselves on the memory of the tastes and smells of home-cooked food. They would get into fights over whose mother was the best cook, he’d told her, and showed her his faded navy cap where he had stored the recipes away. “Sad,” Millie recalled.
When he talked about his time as a prisoner, which was infrequent, it was usually late at night while they were lying in bed. He talked a lot about that tennis court, she remembered, and the long voyage to Japan. But he got uncomfortable talking about the latter because he said it reflected badly on our own. “If someone died on the prison ship,” he said, “others would scratch at them and drink their blood.” Asked if Charles had done that, Millie replied she didn’t know, he never said, but that he frequently woke up at night screaming and sitting bolt upright. At one point, he warned her: “If I start fighting you, if I start touching you and screaming, don’t fight back.”
In an interview shortly after his 1945 release, one unidentified officer who survived the forty-nine-day journey from Manila to Moji told a newsman, “Yes, the Japs are as bad as you say. But we, the three hundred or so [that survived], we are devils, too. If we had not been devils, we could not have survived. When you speak of the good and the heroic, don’t talk about us. The generous men, the unselfish men, are the men we left behind.”
WITH ONLY A LETTER to Helen Cross postmarked November 1945 and a long-defunct return address to go on, I searched endlessly for Robert Granston, the other man who was with Barton at the end. Finding no obituary, I looked in every veteran database, directory, and archive. After two years of searching, my persistence finally paid off. I came across a transcript of an “oral history” interview he had given in 2002—at a tiny public library in Palm Coast, Florida. With that, I went to the electronic White Pages for Palm Coast and located a telephone number. When I dialed it, Bob Granston answered on the second ring.
His first reaction to my stumbling introduction wa
s shock—then tears. Bob said he had just been thinking about Barton the other day, remembering their final hours together. He was eighty-nine years old. I flew to Florida to see him the following week. When I pulled my rental car up to his house and saw a pair of matching Japanese-made Lexuses in the driveway, I suspected this was a man who had forgiven his former enemies and gotten on with his life.
Unlike Charles Armour, Bob Granston had survived the war with body, mind, heart, and soul intact. He told me he weighed 102 pounds at his release, but once returned to a hearty diet of Granston farm food, he was up to 190 pounds in no time. He credited his survival of tropical diseases and harsh treatment to the powerful immunities he gained from a childhood full of farm dirt, germs, and love.
One month and a day after his release, Bob married his high school sweetheart, Norma, the girl he had described in detail to Barton in those final dark and frigid hours aboard the Brazil Maru. Two children, Jeff and Sharon, soon followed. After earning a Stanford MBA, he moved his family to Washington, DC, where Bob continued his navy career for thirty more years. After retiring as a captain, he moved to Florida.
PERHAPS THE MOST REWARDING connection I made in my commemorative search for Uncle Barton was with his namesake, my cousin Barton Cross-Tierney, Aunt Rosemary’s son. This was the young cousin with whom we had been playing badminton when loud voices on the porch broke the peace at Lilac Hedges back in the 1960s.
The announcement that her brother would not be returning began Aunt Rosemary’s long descent from life of the party to angry, depressed, and increasingly alcohol dependent. She married briefly after the war, but reportedly only to sire a son to “replace” her brother. She succeeded in this—and named that one son Barton Cross-Tierney—and then promptly divorced the father. It would not be her last divorce.
As children, we were always cautious around Aunt Rosemary. She had a penchant for sudden and terrifying outbursts—at the navy, at my father, at young Barton, and even at our grandmother Helen, whom we called Kiki. Rosemary’s impaired ability to parent, however, provided Kiki a special opportunity: she played a dominant role raising our Cousin Barton, who bears a striking resemblance to his namesake.
The Jersey Brothers Page 50