24: HERO OF BATAAN VERSUS THE WAR DEPARTMENT
A censored William Dyess’s frustrated attempts to publicize details of Japanese treatment of its prisoners in the Philippines: Lukacs, Escape from Davao, 277–336, and Dyess, Dyess Story.
25: BAD TIDINGS
“The exterior was bare and boxy”: Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes: The Henry Hudson Hotel, 353 West 57th Street; From Women’s Clubhouse to WNET to $75 a Night,” New York Times, January 4, 1998.
Japanese atrocities revealed to an outraged American public: New York Times, January 28, 1944, A1, and other newspapers, e.g., Los Angeles Examiner, “Yanks Starved, Beheaded, Buried Alive By Captors”; and in following days, NYT headline, “Ruin Japan! Is Cry of Aroused Nation.”
26: POLITICS IN BRISBANE
Courtney Whitney’s role in the fate of prisoners at Davao Penal Colony: A lengthy description of the Rosenquist mission and its failure provides strong support of the view that Courtney Whitney and, to a slightly lesser degree, R. J. Marshall (deputy chief of staff) were responsible for the intentional detainment of Rosenquist at Brisbane for the purpose of dooming the rescue plan: Major General Charles A. Willoughby, The Guerrilla Resistance Movement in the Philippines (New York: Vantage Press, 1972), 56–63.
Mellnik and Rosenquist run into difficulties with Courtney Whitney at Brisbane GHQ: Mellnik, Philippine Diary, 386–92.
But from the moment Courtney Whitney got word: Courtney Whitney’s role in the fate of prisoners at Davao Penal Colony; Major General Charles A. Willoughby, The Guerrilla Resistance Movement in the Philippines (New York: Vantage Press, 1972), 56–63.
“I’m staying out of this G-2 brawl”: Memorandum from Acting Chief of Staff General Richard Marshall, February 1944, MacArthur Memorial Museum and Archives, Norfolk, VA.
Original documents, radiograms, and memoranda between staff at MacArthur’s GHQ and between GHQ and guerrillas in the Philippines: MacArthur Memorial Museum and Archives, Norfolk, VA.
27: “PROCEED TO KWAJALEIN”
Bill Mott Orders to Pacific: WCM interviews with John Toland, September, October, and December 1979; WCM Navy Orders file.
Kelly Turner biographical data: Fifth Amphibious Fleet database, NARA, College Park, MD.
Size of Joint Expeditionary Force: T. D. Stamps and V. J. Esposito, A Military History of World War II: Operations in the Mediterranean and Pacific Theaters (West Point, NY: United States Military Academy, 1953), 382.
28: THE BEST-LAID PLANS
Colonel Whitney’s improvement of nascent guerrilla operations in the Philippines and training of new recruits: Mellnik, Philippine Diary, 279–86.
Courtney Whitney’s block of rescue plan: Mellnik’s and Willoughby’s memoranda and, later, their books, all finger Whitney in crafting the serial delays of the Rosenquist rescue mission.
“Whitney’s influence too strong.” Harold Rosenquist diary entry. Sandra Rosenquist Kahn.
Sutherland influence at GHQ: Rogers, Good Years: MacArthur and Sutherland, 230–35.
Interaction between Rosenquist and Fertig on Mindanao: In his ghostwritten memoir, Fertig admits to disobeying GHQ prisoner rescue order Rosenquist handed him. Wendell Fertig, They Fought Alone (New York: Lippincott Company, 1963), 383–89.
In “A Critical Review of They Fought Alone,” Captain Clyde Childress criticizes Fertig’s military disobedience. Childress, who reported to Fertig, stated that Fertig was vain and self-absorbed—and routinely disdainful of General MacArthur and GHQ’s oversight of the guerrillas. “Had Fertig . . . engaged in better communication with his superiors in Australia and his guerrilla commanders on Mindanao, this fiasco could have been avoided . . . There were guerrillas already in place that were perfectly capable of performing the task that Rosenquist was sent in to do. Had the guerrillas been directed to keep the Penal Colony under surveillance, this failed mission and the loss of the POWs might have been prevented.”
29: INITIATION AT SAIPAN
“By mid-1944, the United States Navy was about to surpass all the world’s navies combined”: History International Documentary: Imperial Sunset at Saipan.
“Peace at War” poem, WCM, 1944, WCM poetry file.
Coastwatcher Chapman’s sighting of the Japanese fleet in San Bernardino Strait and Stahl’s assistance in relaying his message to Fifth Fleet: Robert Stahl, “The Turkey Shoot,” chap. 9 in You’re No Good to Me Dead: Behind Japanese Lines in the Philippines (Naval Institute Press Special Warfare Series, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 100–102.
Smith vs. Smith: From WCM interview with John Toland: “I was right in the middle of that one . . . It was just the difference in the way the marines and the army operated. The army believes in artillery barrages, etc. . . . and the Marines say, ‘Oh Christ. Go in and take your losses.’ The same thing happened on Okinawa. The marines had their part of the island cleaned up in no time. Of course, the army will say they didn’t have the same kind of opposition, but this was the marine way. Wherever you put a marine division alongside an army division, you’re going to have trouble!”
Source for Manila casualties in final Japanese rampage: Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 534.
30: DECAMPMENT
First-person accounts of the DAPECOL prisoners’ journey from Mindanao to Bilibid, a three-week ordeal: In addition to surviving prisoner letters sent to the Cross family, accounts by the following were excellent resources: Manny Lawton, Some Survived (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004), 138–48; McGee, Rice and Salt, 126–45; Alan McCracken, Very Soon Now, Joe (New York: The Hobson Book Press, 1947), 130–64.
“His morale was sky high”: Postwar letter from Ensign Andrew Long Jr. to Helen Cross regarding Barton Cross’s outlook in late 1944.
31: SEPTEMBER 1944, LILAC HEDGES
Under an unrehearsed divided command between the army and the navy, such incidents: James P. Drew, LCDR, USN, “Tarnished Victory: Divided Command in the Pacific and Its Consequences, et al.” (Thesis, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 2009).
Benny’s munitions factory speech: Source: Rockaway (NJ) Record, October 6, 1944. Benny delivered similar awards and stateside speeches to numerous converted munitions plants around the country. These factories variously made bomb sites, pistols, rifle receivers, and torpedoes.
Helen Cross letter to President Roosevelt regarding the Shinyo Maru POW transport sinking: A. Barton Cross Jr. Naval Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis.
32: HOPES DASHED
Major Harold Rosenquist told me he was here to: Sworn statement by escapee Jim McClure, MacArthur Memorial Museum and Archives, Norfolk, VA.
Several sworn testimonials from both guerrillas and escaped prisoners working with the Mindanao guerrillas averred that Rosenquist’s plan to rescue the prisoners from the Davao Penal Colony would have succeeded if Rosenquist had been allowed to depart Australia even one month earlier than he did. MacArthur Memorial Archives, Norfolk, VA.
With mounting resentment toward Courtney Whitney: A lengthy description of the Rosenquist mission and its failure provides strong support of the view that Courtney Whitney and, to a slightly lesser degree, R. J. Marshall (deputy chief of staff) were responsible for the intentional detainment of Rosenquist at Brisbane for the purpose of dooming the rescue plan: Major General Charles A. Willoughby, The Guerrilla Resistance Movement in the Philippines (New York: Vantage Press, 1972), 56–63.
This message is written with a prayer to God that it: Letter from Harold Rosenquist to Lieutenant Colonel Rogers, POW, MacArthur Memorial Museum and Archives, Norfolk, VA.
Letter from Harold Rosenquist to Colonel Rogers at Lincayan Airfield (Lasang): Source: MacArthur Memorial Archives, Norfolk, VA.
Re Coastwatcher LeCouvre’s urgent POW ship change message to army GHQ at Brisbane and its failure to forward it to US Navy submarines monitoring enemy shipping in the area: Virginia Hansen Holmes, Guerrilla Daughter (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2009), 149.
As required by the divided command structure: James P. Drew, LCDR, USN, “Tarnished Victory: Divided Command in the Pacific and Its Consequences, et al.” (Thesis, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 2009).
Official Japanese order to kill all POWs: Doc 2701, Exhibit “O” Source: NARA, War Crimes, Japan, RG 24, Box 2015.
Re Shinyo Maru survivor accounts: Heisinger, Father Found, 394–95; John Morrett, Soldier Priest (Roswell, GA: Old Rugged Cross Press, 1993), 110–14.
This is a headache: Penciled a note on the radiogram regarding a submarine rescue of the surviving Shinyo Maru prisoners, MacArthur Memorial Museum and Archives, Norfolk, VA.
33: SETBACKS
Medical air transport insight, description: Keith Wheeler, The Pacific Is My Beat (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943).
Background and details regarding 1944 Pearl Harbor summit, July 27, 1944: Costello, Pacific War, 491–96.
Re MacArthur guarantee that Luzon campaign would be completed in thirty days to six weeks: George Dyer, The Amphibians Came to Conquer: The Story of Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner (US Marine Corps, 1991), 975.
“Give me an aspirin . . . In fact, give me another aspirin to take in the morning”: William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), 369.
Submarine warfare effectiveness: Blair, Silent Victory: True, 17–20 and 87–88; Larry Bond, Crash Dive: Stories of Submarine Combat (New York: Tom Doherty, 2010), 234–37.
Re Halsey’s orders under divided command scenario: E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008), 325.
Divided command insight: “MacArthur’s Navy—Admiral Kinkaid and the Seventh Fleet and Admiral Halsey and the Third Fleet . . . a divided command creating a very dangerous situation indeed in the face of a brave and determined enemy.” Edwin P. Hoyt, How They Won the War in the Pacific: Nimitz and His Admirals (New York: Lyons Press, 2000), 422.
Additional divided command insight: Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, “MacArthur, FDR, and the Politics of Leyte Gulf,” Naval History 23 No. 5 (October 2009).
Re MacArthur’s tight control over communications between the Seventh Fleet and Halsey’s Third Fleet attack forces: “MacArthur was so damned insistent on having his own fleet and his own people that he wouldn’t let, would not have, any direct channel of communication between Halsey [Third Fleet] and the Seventh Fleet. There were no radio channels set up. Halsey was working for Nimitz, and so MacArthur would not include him in any of the operations plans. They had this long, complicated communications plan for the Seventh Fleet . . . There was no setup for that outfit to communicate directly with Halsey. It was part of MacArthur’s hatred of the navy or craving for power or something—I don’t know which, but he insisted on it being that way.” From oral history of Admiral George Van Deurs: USNI, 487.
34: THROUGH A PRISM: MACARTHUR’S RETURN
First-person accounts of USN flyers over Luzon, September 21, 1944: Wheeler, “For My Children,” 78–80; Heisinger, Father Found, 407–9 (including diary entries by Manny Lawton and Lee Stiles); Lawton, Some Survived, 108–110; Thomas Hayes, “Bilibid Journal,” 149–53.
After Enterprise’s Air Group 20 (led by Commander Robert Riera) supported the September 1944 Peleliu invasion, they struck Japanese airfields and shipping in and around the Philippines: http://www.cv6.org/1944/1944.htm.
Admiral King’s Second Report to the Secretary of the Navy, Combat Operations March 1944–March 1945.
Major Robert Lapham overtures to Courtney Whitney at GHQ for permission to conduct a Cabanatuan rescue mission: William Breuer, The Great Raid, 141–42; Charles W. Sasser, Raider, 119; Ray Hunt and Bernard Norling, Behind Japanese Lines: An American Guerrilla in the Philippines, 196–98; Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling, Lapham’s Raiders: Guerrilla Raiders in the Philippines, 1942–1945, 177–78.
Sinking of Hofuku Maru: “British state the American bombers are too bloody accurate”: Heisinger, Father Found, 410 (quoting from Lee Stiles’s diary); “They were a pitiful sight to behold”: Recollection of Curtis Beecher when he first saw Hofuku Maru survivors arriving at Bilibid. Unpublished recollection entitled “A Survivor’s Account of Americans Who Were Prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippine Islands April, May 1942–December 1944,” Brigadier General Curtis Beecher, USMC, Douglas County Museum, Roseburg, OR; Hofuku Maru survivors taken to either Bilibid or Cabanatuan: Sources: Cecil Peart, Peart’s Journal; Heisinger, Father Found; and McCracken, Very Soon Now, Joe.
Delivering his prewar client Douglas MacArthur back to the Philippines: RG-16 “Biographical Sketch,” Papers of Major General Courtney Whitney, 1942–1947, MacArthur Memorial Archives, Norfolk, VA., Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors (London: Verso Press, 2002), 93–94.
Courtney Whitney’s prewar activities and investments in the Philippines: Whitney worked for the top Manila law firm, Dewitt, Perkins & Enrile (as did the father of MacArthur’s G-2 assistant chief, Joseph McMicking). The firm handled all MacArthur’s investments and financial affairs in the Philippines. Another major client was Benguet Consolidated Mines, the country’s largest gold mining operation, in which MacArthur had a considerable investment. In 1936 Courtney Whitney was president of Benguet Consolidated Mines, either concurrent with his law partnership or immediately prior to it. Source—July 1936 American Chamber of Commerce of Manila—quoted below:
[Benguet] Consolidated Mines recently reported good results from its development work . . . of the vast chromite mine in Masinloc, Zambales. Courtney Whitney, Benguet’s President, is in the United States working on the sale of this ore. [Benguet’s] gold production has also improved steadily; gold output for the period under discussion is much higher than in 1935.
Total gold production in the five years preceding WWII was 37 tons per year, the Philippines’ most lucrative export.
MacArthur’s Philippine-derived wealth: General MacArthur sold his shares in Benguet after the war for more than $1 million.
Re Arisan Maru sinking: Calvin Graef, Official Statement to the War Department, December 5, 1944, www.rockawaymemories.com/JosephAngelone01.htm; William Bowen, The Arisan Maru Tragedy; Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (New York: William Morrow, 1994); “no bigger than a dime”: Calvin Graef and Melissa Masterson, Ride the Waves to Freedom (Kearney, NE: Morris, 1999), 73, telling of Graef’s imprisonment and survival following the sinking of the Arisan Maru.
36: THE ORYOKO MARU
Shields Goodman’s letter: “A letter from Bilibid Prison,” Shipmate, November 1989, 13–14.
Curtis Beecher observations: Curtis T. Beecher memoir, unpublished.
Bilibid Prison, December 1944: Pharmacist’s Mate Robert W. Kentner, diary entries on rostered patients and naval medical personnel.
Recollections of Oryoko Maru: Lawton, Some Survived, 145–54.
Prisoner experiences described in this chapter: family letters, diaries, unpublished memoir, as well as author interviews with survivors.
“Hikoki! Hikoki!”: Wheeler, “For My Children,” 83.
Robert Riera log entries: USS Hornet log and USS Enterprise ship’s muster, November, December 1944, and January 1945, www.cv6.org/company/muster/display_ag.asp?page=VB-20 and usshornet.org.
Description of Commander Frank Bridget’s announcements of American planes attacking the prison ship: “as cool as a tennis match referee, called the action”: Lawton, some survived, 160.
The men “hoped to hell they would score and hoped to hell they wouldn’t,” according to David Nash: Heisinger, Father Found, 456.
37: END GAME IN THE PACIFIC
Iwo Jima press conference: Robert Sherrod, On to Westward: The Battles of Saipan and Iwo Jima (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1945), 154–61.
Iwo Jima statistics: Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 495, and Sherrod, On to Westward, 163.
D-Day and D-Days Plus 1, 2, 3 at Iwo Jima: CINPAC Monthly Operations Rep
ort, February 1945, noted in Dyer, Amphibians Came to Conquer, vol. 2, 1027.
Text of Navajo message on Iwo Jima flag raising: “Ashdla-ma . . . nos-bas . . .”: Sally McClain, Navajo Weapon: The Navajo Code Talkers (Tucson, AZ: Rio Nuevo, 1944), 179–81.
38: A SAILOR’S NIGHTMARE
Kikusui: Literal translation is “floating chrysanthemums,” the longtime symbol of Imperial Japan. Operation Kikusui at Okinawa consisted of more than 1,500 army and navy suicide-bent aircraft. Operation Kikusui was launched in ten waves between April and June 1945: http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=15.
Correspondent Robert Sherrod’s recollection of early censorship of kamikaze attacks: Sherrod, On to Westward, 292–93.
Note on kamikazes at Okinawa: The rate of early ship losses to the kamikaze threat was stemmed by the establishment of an outer defense perimeter of radar picket ships. These vessels bore the greatest burden. Of the 206 ships that served on radar picket duty, nearly 30 percent were sunk or damaged by kamikazes, making theirs the most hazardous naval surface duty in World War II. Toward the end of the battle, the radar picket ships became the prime kamikaze targets as Japanese pilots despaired of getting through the “big blue blanket”—the constant presence of the blue-painted Hellcats and Corsairs over the fleet at all hours—to reach larger prey.
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