The Guardhouse Murders

by Don DeNevi

  Equally interesting was observing a contingent of military police also waiting to bard from the 720 Military Police Battalion that had recently established a school for the highly-selected members. Standing at attention, looking smart in their freshly-laundered uniformed, they, like Peter and the other inmates, awaited their Pullman seats. In addition to guarding the prisoners-of-war, the MPs performed sentry duty at the Pittsburg wharf, docks, piers, tracks, utilities, waterworks in and around the base, and the highways and back roads leading into and out. The MPs at Camp Stoneham referred to themselves as the “red-headed step-children of the U.S. Army”. More than 300 MPs were instructing more than 3,000 of initiated, who, upon completion of their training, were to be dispatched to all occupied territories for policing, criminal investigate work, and security details.

  For three nights while in detention, they heard trains whistling as they slowly rolled in and out of Camp Stoneman. During the day while on exercise day, he saw through the heavy wire mesh fence trainloads of troops bound for “somewhere in the Pacific”, to say nothing of the steady stream of trainloads of tanks and heavy guns.

  The West’s biggest railroad was the Southern Pacific, headquartered on Market Street in San Francisco. Although its public relations office dubbed it, “The Friendly Southern Pacific”, the railroad company was totally mobilized for war. All railway lines converged on the Pacific Coast, especially California and Oregon, the main springboards for the offensives against Japan.

  And, the greatest pride of the “friendly Southern Pacific” company was the passenger train, the Daylight Limited, in the eyes of just about everyone, the most beautiful passenger train in the country. Like in peacetime, the Daylight ran in two sections, the regular Daylight left Oakland, then, Camp Stoneman in the afternoon for San Diego by tracks along the Pacific Ocean above Santa Barbara, then inland all the way to San Diego. The next morning, it would leave for Los Angeles, Oakland, and Camp Stoneman.

  Hearing the burst of a whistle shriek, Peter turned from observing the M.P.s standing at attention to watching the new train advance. With the engine in its two-tone orange red and black, and a train of 15 passenger nightsleeper cars, including a beautiful, shiny new observation car, Peter was impressed.

  Almost immediately, G1s in fatigues heading for nearby San Joaquin Valley field maneuvers began disembarking and unloading their packs and equipment. Then, without a pause, the assembled MPs and Camp Stoneman detention inmates boarded and prepared for a long train ride. The MPs were ushered into their seats, passenger car by passenger, three to a bench seat facing three, their gear in backpacks hanging from ceiling hooks. No sooner were all seated and the Daylight began to inch its way out of the camp when their early dinners were served in small box containers at their seats. Although every solider on board knew that each time the streamliner stopped, the MPs knowingly ran to the station’s canteen entrance.

  Since the Daylight did not stop long, everyone knew there was just enough time to be serviced with fast food bites and beverages, almost always coffee and Coca-Colas, by the railroad’s canteen service women. But, you had to move fast (run was the word) to the canteen, then get back on board, or get left behind.

  With the sun slowly descending into the Pacific, and the shadows growing longer, the MPs and detainees began to wrap themselves in blankets and fall asleep where they sat. Those luckily assigned to Pullman-type berths had to sleep in pairs, two in every lower berth, two, or more rarely, one, in the upper berth.

  Although Peter sitting without cuffs or chains with the other prisoners in the 12th passenger car with MPs at each end of the coach, realized this was no ordinary journey, he also knew it might be his last. Within a few days, the MPs would be on the high seas. He himself would be behind bars, assigned to finding a killer of young Marines. He was now wide-awake, listening to an MP in the next car playing an accordion, staring outside his window seat into the darkness.

  That night, he knew he was leaving behind a way of pre-war life--the taste of well-mustarded hot dogs and hamburgers and “pop” soft drinks, Cokes being the most painful to abandon. Would he ever again drive a car over a two-lane highway? See or pat the neighbors’ dogs named Shucks, Spot, and Barnacle Bill? His mother and father, and grandparents he loved so much? Southwest Stockton where he was born and raised? St. Mary’s Church where he had served as an altar boy for six years?

  That night, he thought a lot of issues over, Joan, of course, being the most critical. There was a lump in his throat, and certainly a tear filled an eye. It didn’t matter, he thought to himself, because no one would see it in the dark.

  With everyone breathing heavily, many snoring loudly, Peter decided to pull from his backpack his Armed Services Edition of a western by Charles Alden Seltzer entitled, “The Range Boss,” written and published in 1916. Not a digest, but a complete novel, the small pocket-size paperback was no larger than 3 ½ wide x 6” long. Thousands of titles in this format were known as “Overseas Editions” and were distributed by the Special Services Division of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. A non-profit organization, the Council on Books in Wartime, published and distributed them in American bases and camps stateside and occupied and friendly territories.

  All night long, the Daylight rumbled and rolled south, toward San Diego, stopping frequently to drop-off and pick-up military police passengers. The incarcerated Camp Stoneman detainees remained intact, under guard.

  Traveling at less than 35 miles per hour most of the journey, the Daylight paused, after exiting Camp Stoneman at Camp McQuaide, Fort Ord, the Presidio of Monterey, the Hunter-Liggett Military Reservation, Camp Roberts, Camp San Luis Obispo, Camp Brooke, Camp Santa Ana, Fort MacArthur, the Naval Station Reeves Field Maritime Training Station, San Clemente Fleet Training Base, Camp Pendleton, Camp Gallan, where they disembarked and boarded busses for Camp Elliott.

  All that Peter could remember on that long stop-and-go journey from Camp Stoneham between Pittsburg and Antioch to Camp Elliott on the outskirts of San Diego were blurred images, overheard incoherent rumors, fragmented and nonsensical, and an endless series of brief doses and short naps. Furthermore, from the afternoon of the day before to the early morning hour of the next day, Peter sat along at the window seat, his backpack on the seat next to him, and spoke nary a word, even to the three Marine prisoners in endless chatter or the harsh sounds of snoring.

  During that more than 15-hour train ride, he read three Zane Grey novels, “The Last Trail” (1909), “The Lone Star Ranger” (1914), and “To the Last Man” (1921). But despite his love of Grey, his favorite was Seltzer’s “Range Boss” which told him the story of Ruth Harkness, a lovely Eastern girl who comes west to claim her inheritance, a cattle ranch, The adventure begins when the range boss protects her from vermin rustlers, assassins, and the corrupt political and banking officials.

  Where the major rumor that circulated among the Daylight’s cars was concerned, only the “red-headed step-children of the U.S. Army”, the special unit created in 1942 of the 720th Military Police Battalion was concerned--and in anguish.

  Word got out that the 535th contingent, most of the MPs on board also on assignment to Camp Elliott was going to guard Axis prisoners of Germany, Italy, and Japan, at home and abroad.

  “What the hell is that?” Peter overheard an MP shout. “And for ‘the duration’? That means we’re being converted into Rangers. I’m all geared up to kill Krauts, Japs and I-tyes.”

  While Peter was prepared to read his four romantic westerns, one by Seltzer and the other three by Zane Grey, he was mesmerized by all the military routines and activities of the Pacific Coast, specifically California, at war. Before sundown that afternoon, as the Daylight slowly rolled and reverberated on railway sidings and railroad spurs south through eastside of the Bay Area, namely Carquinez, Richmond, El Cerrito, Berkeley, Oakland, Fremont, and San Jose, Peter believed the entire population was engaged in one form or another of military production.

  Everywhere he glanced, there w
ere Army and USMC convoys in various stages of movements. Whether on tracks, or highways and roads, adjacent to tracks, short clusters or long groups, small four-wheeled vehicles or large half-tracted carriers, all were either in transition, or preparing for journeying. And, behind the convoys on ramps and mounds, built as billboards or natural weeded lots, were signs, “To Hell With You, Hirohito, You Son-Of-A-____”; “The West Coast Has Rolled Up Its Sleeves. Have You?”; “Stay Put For The Duration. You’ll Be The First to Know When The War Is Won”; “America Needs You--Don’t Let Her Down. Do Your Part Today And Every Day”; and “Lest You Forget, Remember Pearl Harbor” and “Jinx To The Japs.” What brought a smile to Peter’s lips was how large they were, all in black bold-faced letters, usually in a variety of colored backgrounds.

  Since the Southern Pacific tracks ran along the shores of the East Bay, shipbuilding facilities were stretched from Richmond to East San Jose, every one of them operating around the clock. In the western distances of the Golden Gate Bridge were barrage balloons at varying heights, and high above them further out at sea, Navy blimps on the lookout for Japanese submarines which could easily surface and fire a dozen or so shells from their forefront cannons, then submerge, all in a matter of less than 10 minutes. Far below beneath them were lighthouse ships, permanently anchored to guard against enemy infiltrators rowed to shore from the submarines.

  Equally fascinating were the shoreline assembly plants of “who-knows-what?” operating in three eight-hour shifts. And, almost in every one of their yards were large piles of gravel, cement, ferro-silicon, small tin can depots and old rubber tire and rubber material dumps.

  The activity of the Alameda Naval Air Base and Coast Guard Air Base opposite Newark north of San Jose were also fascinating.

  Leaning back in his seat, Peter had no idea how the state of California alone was studded with bases, camps, schools, and training centers there were for the U.S. Military establishment, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area for the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. And, he thought to himself, I can’t even see the Bay’s elaborate and extensive fortifications grid of harbor defenses and hidden vital anti-invasion artillery and mortar point.

  With twilight, the streamliner was riding along past Mountain View, Watsonville, and Salinas for a long stopover at the Monterey Presidio Selectee Reception Center. In both locations, members of the High School Victory Corps Girls Riflery, along with mobile canteen unit staff served hot coffee, doughnuts, and other pastries and fish-tasting snacks.

  Between reading and napping, napping and reading on the way to King City and the Hunter-Liggett Military Reservation and Morro Bay submarine base, Peter noticed air raid wardens and citizens with small flashlights maintaining strict blackout conditions in trailer-court encampments outside small towns and larger cities. At the Camp Roberts Army Replacement Center, a two-hour layover was necessitated for the disembarkation of three-fourths of the 720th Military Police Battalion’s 535th contingent of Special Forces.

  Near Santa Barbara, after at least an hour’s uninterrupted doze, Peter noticed sandbagged oil well pumps, beach oil fields, and oil derricks, the first he had ever seen in California. All were near and around Goleta, where on February 23, 1942, the Japanese long-range submarine, I-17, lobbed 25 shells from deck guns into the oil fields and Ellwood Refinery. Now, two long sentinels walked posts around each individual unit.

  Although Peter pretty much was napping on the journey between the Fort MacArthur Selectee Center at San Pedro and the Fort Rosecrans Naval Base and Training Station-Destroyer Base near San Diego, he was wide awake as the Daylight pulled into Camp Callan and Camp Elliott, some 20 miles due east of San Diego.

  Fully alert, listening intently to any comment or description someone in the coach was uttering about Camp Elliott, Peter leaned forward to study every structural feature he saw on the outskirts of the camp.

  Suddenly it dawned on him.

  “Well, you young, garlicky fart, here you are. Now, we’ll see what you’re made of, iron or nothing more than an offensive smell.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  -

  Sunny, No More Than A Kid

  With dawn’s first sun-surges bursting over the rims of the eastern San Diego hills, Peter grinned at how the recently activated 29,000-acre Army tank and infantry training grounds known as Camp Elliott, bleak and gray, was suddenly mantled under a mosaic of vivid colors and clearly distinguishable structures.

  As the Southern Pacific Daylight slowly crept across the trestle over a dry creek road lined with a dozen black buses, it pulled up to a railroad siding adjacent a small station next to the main entrance of Camp Elliott.

  Even before the streamliner rolled to a complete stop, several Marine officers jumped aboard, including a tough-appearing staff sergeant ambling down the aisle of Peter’s coach, yelling continually,

  “Move, get moving, you bastards! Wake up! Outside, you miserable, disgraced sons-of-bitching Marines. Double-file! And, with your bag of turds over your shoulder, you yellow cowards.”

  Grumbling by the drowsy inmates swept through the coach from entrance to exit, then back again. Peter heard someone at the front end of the car shout,

  “Come over here, you miserable piece of shit. I want to show you something. And, when’s breakfast?”

  Everyone chuckled as the staff sergeant, oblivious to any or all insulting responses, ambled out and into the next car.

  As the uncuffed prisoners exited the coach, stepping down onto the siding platform, more than two-dozen white-helmeted MPs, each holding a polished baton, standing shoulder to shoulder at attention, awaited them.

  Not one smiled.

  With the last inmate descending from the coach, and the staff sergeant behind him slamming the passenger cab door shut, the men lined up in two rows, their bags and gear slung over their shoulders.

  While Peter stood at ease as the others formed the second line behind him, he noted from the large clock atop the station entrance roof that it was past 7:00AM by six minutes. The early morning weather was already hot and unusually humid. Yet, in the distant hills and plains, all was a grassy green.

  “Well, cowboy,” the prisoner next to Peter whispered under his breath as everyone, prisoner and MP alike, remained stone-cold silent, “I suppose the great sport of waving at everyone as we pitter-patter through Los Angeles is over.”

  Peter, glancing at him, sized him up. The nice-looking 18 or 19 year old, blond wavy hair, medium sized, well-built, although somewhat plump, continued, “The railroad workers in their filthy, oil-soaked overalls, along the tracks waving at us, the ranchers, farmers, and farmhands in the fields, waving back as we wave at them, and best of all, the girls with no blouses and thin see-through skirts, because of the heat, standing on house steps waving back at us, some bending over on purpose, as we waved at them, what fun, Lieutenant, buddy, what fun. And now, we’re off to some shithole jail.”

  The staff sergeant, the last to exit from the passenger car at the end of the train, waved his baton at the stationmaster waiting patiently near the streamliner’s forward engine, who in turn signaled the engineer looking down at him from the cab.

  As the Daylight slowly pulled away with hundreds of troops still seated within, peering out at them, the silent prisoners heard the staff sergeant shrill in a high, thin, piercing voice,

  “No cuffs, you shitheads. But try to make a run for it, all those fine, unsmiling champion redeemers standing in front of you, their batons at the ready, will catch and pound you into Gehenna, the bottomless Valley of Refuse.”

  With that, the staff sergeant beckoned for the long double-lined inmates to follow him, the MPs positioning themselves alongside every dozen or so prisoners. Peter and his young “partner”, were the eighth twosome in the long row. Trotting to the edge of the ravine, the doubles slid down with their bags and gear into the deep hollow where the large wide buses, motors waiting for their boarding.

  Observing the line-up buses observing up close for the f
irst time, Peter, amazed, exclaimed, “Just look at those troop-carrying monsters! Belching thick smoke from their overheating engines at varying throttling! What grim sorry-looking Black Marias! Huge, fat police or prison horses! The ugliest, most melancholy looking tubs the Army and Marine Core have to drive us to the brig in? Probably our coffins for our last rides.”

  “Oh my God,” Peter heard someone murmur behind him. “The Provost Marshall is talking to a bunch of officers near the lead truck right under the large sign “Marine Recruit Depot”.

  “Who’s he?” another asked.

  “He’s the guy you don’t want to meet because if you do, it usually means you’re in big trouble, big-time trouble. He’s the head of the Military Police on a base. He’s the Big Cheese, basically the Chief of Police, and he’s got the power to throw your ass in isolation, or give you any other punishment he thinks you deserve.”

  Seated next to each other, their bags under their feet, the young soldier commented,

  “I heard that beyond the creek bank we slid down, and that bridge under, the outer camp fence marks the beginning of the relocation camp that was thrown together in early ’42 to move the Jap-Americans to the centers.”

  “Oh, really?” perked up Peter.

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “I know we’re in Area One, the Prohibited Zone in which the Alien Exclusion Military Area Act is enforced.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Enemy Aliens, such as Japanese-Americans, are prohibited from residing here, and working these fields, in which wonderful crops were grown for decades by hard-working conscientious 1st and 2nd generations; these so-called ‘enemy aliens’ who tilled the soil and grew vegetables and fruits for the American people.”