The Jersey Brothers

by Sally Mott Freeman

  Topside, the men gulped the humid air as if it were forbidden fruit. By the time Barton cleared the hatch, the deck was crowded with prisoners, and several had already begun the swim toward shore. Suddenly they heard the drone of airplane engines on the southern horizon; seconds later, four dive bombers descended toward Oryoko Maru. Almost in unison, the unmistakably white, bare-assed prisoners, both on deck and in the water, started waving their arms and shouting.

  The formation leveled off as if to commence a bombing run when suddenly a plane on the flank waggled its wings and passed low over the scene without dropping its load. The rest of the planes followed suit. They then circled and retreated to the south without firing a shot. Finally, it seemed, they knew.

  Charles Armour had never learned to swim. He didn’t believe he could make the quarter mile to the beach. Astonishingly, several other prisoners had the same problem. Though weakened, Barton was in relatively decent condition, and years of tackling the Jersey Shore’s burly waves had made him a strong and confident swimmer. Once in the water, he beckoned to Charles—who, not surprisingly, had refused to shed his clothes or cap.

  In the water, Barton secured Charles under one arm and paddled toward Olongapo with the other. When their feet touched sandy bottom, they waded toward Colonel Beecher, who was standing at the shoreline. Beecher’s attention had been drawn to swimmers struggling against the tidal current. Could Barton help them? he asked. Without a word, Barton dove back in and swam toward his floundering fellow prisoners.

  Oryoko Maru was nearly empty when David Nash went looking for life jackets for other nonswimmers still on deck. Revived by fresh air and some candy and raw cabbage he found, Nash scavenged further and came across a chest of medical supplies in an aft passageway. Knowing it would prove invaluable ashore, he tried with difficulty to drag it to where it could be lowered onto a raft. In searching for assistance, he saw someone—breathing but unconscious—lying on a high shelf in the aft hold. It was Ensign George Petritz.

  Nash approached and shook his friend’s foot. “If you’re alive you better get the hell out of here,” he told Petritz. “Everyone else is just about gone.” Disoriented but unhurt, Petritz managed to get to his feet and follow Nash, who had asked him for help getting the medicine chest ashore. “I will help you load it onto the raft,” Petritz said, “but I’ll never be taken alive by the Japanese again.”

  After loading the supplies and shoving Nash off, Petritz did some scavenging of his own.

  He found Japanese clothing, a life preserver, and a jar of brown sugar and Japanese celery. After gobbling all that he could stomach, he put on the clothes and life preserver and lowered himself over the starboard side. Once in the water, he slipped under a floating wooden crate and waited. When he estimated that the lowering sun’s reflected glare on the water would impair the gunners’ view from the beach, Petritz slipped off the life preserver—which made him too buoyant in the salt water—and began swimming toward the far shore.

  He swam for nearly an hour before coming across a banca with two Filipinos aboard: a boy and his grandmother. Seeing that he was American, the boy pulled Petritz aboard, and they took him ashore. Giving him his first taste of freedom in nearly three years, local villagers and guerrillas fed and protected Petritz as they might a family member. In time, they arranged for his conveyance to the Leyte beachhead in a navy PT boat. From there, he was evacuated stateside and eventually to Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, DC.

  37

  END GAME IN THE PACIFIC

  PLANNING THE SEQUENTIAL AMPHIBIOUS invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa was a months-long undertaking and the most complicated of the Pacific War. Where invasion rehearsals were staged was a minor logistic in the epic context. But when Leyte Island in the Philippines was selected for the Okinawa rehearsals, the earth moved under Bill’s feet. He hoped only that it wouldn’t be too late.

  His long-sought goal of reaching Barton finally seemed at hand, and Admiral Turner knew it. Late on the evening of the Okinawa rehearsals decision, a wound-up Turner telephoned his groggy flag secretary to discuss a matter to which he’d given considerable thought: Bill should take liberty on their arrival at Leyte, Turner told his startled aide.

  The Philippines should be firmly in hand by their scheduled arrival in March, the admiral continued. He wanted Bill to take the earliest possible opportunity to search for his brother. With the sequential D-days for Iwo Jima and Okinawa—code-named Detachment and Iceberg, respectively—set sequentially for February 19 and April 1, the flagship might be conducting rehearsals in the Philippines for as long as three weeks between the two invasions. This would give Bill ample time to go ashore and investigate.

  Bill listened quietly at first, too stunned to respond. But when Turner finally paused for breath, he gratefully accepted the admiral’s offer; this was no time for forced selflessness.

  Turner said he hoped to meet Barton after all the good things he’d heard—maybe even aboard the flagship, if it could be arranged. After a pause that gave them both a moment to savor the scenario, Turner returned to the mechanics of his proposal. First, he indicated that the planners’ five-day estimate to secure Iwo Jima might be overly optimistic. But even a week’s delay would still have them at Leyte by early March, he hoped. Either way, Bill would have time to go ashore. By that time, the Philippines would almost certainly be in Allied hands, and there would be some system in place for locating prisoners.

  If his penchant for alcohol had been a factor in Turner’s unusual late-night call, that concern was vacated when the energetic amphibian commander reiterated his overture the next morning, and even made recommendations on where Bill might make inquiries. As though to counterbalance his sanguine proposals, Turner also cautioned Bill to prepare for what he might or might not find.

  His boss’s interest struck a deep chord, especially since Bill’s quest to find out about Barton had become an increasingly lonely and discouraging enterprise. Recent communications from his mother and Arthur devolved into diatribes against the president, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and—not least—the United States Navy. Nothing less than Barton’s safe return home would assuage them now.

  More disturbing was that Bill’s latest entreaties to Benny seemed to be falling on deaf ears. It had been weeks since his last letter inquiring about the latest dope from the Casualty Branch and escaped prisoners now in Washington. Why had Benny not responded? In the meantime, Bill had done his own sleuthing, but it brought scant comfort.

  Captain Mac McCollum, back in Australia with the Seventh Fleet, confirmed that prisoners had been aboard some of the recent enemy ships sunk off the Philippines. All had been quartered on Japanese merchant vessels traveling north toward Japan. None had been flagged as carrying prisoners of war. Maddeningly, no manifests were available, but Bill had faith that McCollum was motivated to get his hands on them; he was as anxious about his cousin Shivers as Bill was about Barton.

  Next came the news of a prisoner massacre on the Philippine island of Palawan. Survivor affidavits stated that on December 14, upon hearing US planes approaching Palawan, Japanese guards at Puerto Princesa herded 150 prisoners into air raid shelters—wood-lined, subterranean enclosures recently constructed by the prisoners themselves on orders by their captors. When the prisoners were loaded, the guards poured gasoline through shelter air slats and tossed in flaming grenades. The pits exploded into raging infernos.

  Engulfed in flames, screaming prisoners rushed the exits only to be met by guards with machine guns, bayonets, and clubs. Miraculously, eleven of the 150 prisoners escaped in the melee, though all badly burned. They survived thanks to their quick interception by Filipino civilians and transport to the Leyte beachhead by yet another guerrilla band. Palawan survivors were on their way to Washington, where they would be treated and debriefed. Such reports threatened to reulcerate Bill’s stomach.

  One encouraging rumor made its way to Bill just before he shoved off for Iwo Jima. Another prisoner rescue pla
n was in the works: this time from a prison camp on Luzon. The plan seemed to be gaining traction thanks to the advocacy of one particular American guerrilla on Luzon, Major Robert Lapham. Convinced that more prisoner slaughter was in store, Lapham had persisted in his call to liberate prisoners from a place called Cabanatuan before it was too late. Most of the camp’s population had been removed in October, but apparently hundreds of prisoners were still there.

  Bill’s pulse shot up and down with every report, each one maddeningly devoid of details that might hint at how Barton fit into it all. Which prisoners had been massacred? Which had gone down with their ships? Which were candidates to be rescued? Did the escaped naval ensign, George Petritz, have any of these answers—or news of Barton? As the amphibians set sail for Iwo Jima in January 1945, Bill sent Benny one last letter, summarizing his findings.

  Hinting at recently garnered intelligence, he listed unanswered questions and offered Benny guidance on where he might find answers. What, for example, was the status of the Palawan survivors and this Ensign Petritz—all, presumably, in Washington now? Why hadn’t he heard back? Was Benny too beset by his own troubles? Or did he know something too dreadful to share?

  NEW OBSTACLES LOOMED AHEAD of the amphibians’ departure for Iwo Jima. It might have been Bill’s obdurate navy perspective, but one way or another, they all seemed to lead back to Douglas MacArthur. The general’s consecutive setbacks in retaking the Philippines had now seriously thrown off the schedules for Operations Detachment and Iceberg.

  MacArthur had assured the Joint Chiefs—and President Roosevelt—that he would take Leyte with four divisions in thirty to forty-five days and begin air strikes on Luzon shortly thereafter. But with nine divisions and in twice that time, the job still wasn’t done. Since six weeks’ spacing between MacArthur’s Philippine and Nimitz’s Iwo Jima invasion was necessary—as they were using the same combatant ships for their respective operations—Detachment had to be postponed from January 20 to February 3, and then again to February 19.

  The April 1 invasion date for Okinawa (Iceberg) could not be postponed, due to the predictable onset of the pernicious spring typhoon season. MacArthur’s every delay in retaking the Philippines therefore shortened the amphibians’ rehearsal hiatus in the Philippines—and Bill’s window to search for Barton.

  Admiral Turner and his planners had little time to grouse about MacArthur or his slipping timetable. They had more immediate problems. Amphibious warfare techniques were evolving so rapidly that fresh lessons from recent invasions had rendered many of their planning labors obsolete. From hydrography and underwater demolition to the loading and unloading of mammoth amounts of supplies to beachhead organization and gunfire support, amphibian invasion “best practices” were in a constant state of change. More than once, they had to scrap entire planning sections and start over.

  Such were the challenges facing Admiral Turner and his strategists as they labored through eighteen-hour days over a four-month period, from October 1944 to January 1945, to choreograph the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Comparable in size and scope to the amphibious landings at Normandy—itself years in the planning—the Iwo Jima and Okinawa campaigns would pull thousands of ships and nearly a million men from every branch of service.

  A primary difference between these operations and their European counterpart was supply-line logistics: the supply line across the English Channel in support of the Normandy invasion was approximately ninety nautical miles. The supply line for Iwo Jima and Okinawa would stretch an incomprehensible four thousand miles.

  ON JANUARY 10, 1945, staff and crew saluted as Admiral Turner’s colors soared up the yardarm of his brand-new flagship, the USS Eldorado. Weeks of shakedown followed before she nosed out of the Pearl Harbor channel bound for Iwo Jima, but by all accounts, it wasn’t much of a sight. Like her predecessor the USS Rocky Mount, Eldorado resembled a drab cargo vessel barely able to navigate an inland waterway—a crafty disguise for the electronic nerve center of the amphibian fleet and most powerful communications and operations center ever set afloat.

  From her state-of-the-art CIC deep within the armor of the ship’s hull, staff could monitor and direct shore and air battles as never before. The control room was outfitted with a dizzying alphabet soup of the latest in radar and sonar equipment: SP, SG, PPI, DRT, CASCU, CAP, TBS.

  Together these various devices facilitated real-time communications among all sectors of the amphibious machine: from weather updates, to troop interaction ashore, to detection and defense against enemy threats, be they planes, ships, mines, or submarines. Updates on all the above were applied continuously to illuminated Lucite boards lining the CIC. Shipborne technology had traveled light-years since the morning of December 7, 1941, when the USS Enterprise’s Jack Baumeister had puzzled behind a black curtain over a radar report on his single, low-resolution screen.

  When Eldorado hove into Iwo Jima’s waters in mid-February, an assault force of some nine hundred ships came into view. Extending to every horizon was an anchorage of aircraft carriers, destroyers, transports, hospital ships, landing vessels, and scores of smaller vessels taxiing among them. Each was poised to play its specific role in the painstakingly choreographed invasion of Iwo Jima.

  Also known as “Sulphur Island,” the objective was a putrid, eight-square-mile heap of scrub, volcanic ash, and razor-sharp kunai grass, which crawled with biting, typhus-carrying insects. The terrain resembled a Hollywood moonscape. The island was a treeless, cratered, inhospitable piece of ground yielded from boiling magma vomited forth in prehistory through an errant crack in the earth’s crust. Reeking gasses hissed from ubiquitous rock fissures, its beaches were black as death, and Mount Suribachi, Iwo’s 550-foot volcanic high ground, menaced over its general wretchedness. But to war planners, Iwo Jima was solid gold.

  Reverently labeled “the unsinkable aircraft carrier,” it boasted a trio of airstrips half the flight distance to Japan from the current B-29 bases in the Marianas. It was also valued for its powerful symbolism in Japan. As a Japanese infantry officer wrote in his diary in June 1944, long before the Iwo Jima assault was planned, “Iwo Jima is the doorkeeper to the Imperial capital.”

  On February 16, war correspondents crowded into Admiral Turner’s wardroom for a final prebattle briefing. With his usual powder-keg intensity, Kelly Turner studied Bill’s fresh supply of intelligence communiqués, memorizing which facts could be publicized ahead of battle and which could not. Press censorship had relaxed considerably since the war’s dismal early going. The powers in Washington had learned—to their collective surprise following the seismic response to the Davao escapees’ atrocity reports—that strong media coverage actually galvanized public support, which in turn boosted faltering war bond sales.

  As a result, the gathering correspondents would be reporting more about the battle for Iwo Jima than would ever have been allowed three years earlier. And with Eldorado’s broadcast capacity rivaling that of Radio Honolulu, their stories of valor and heartbreak would be received stateside before any spilled blood had dried—rather than the days, via ship or floatplane, that it had taken to sound the horrors of Guadalcanal.

  Readying their notepads and pencils that morning were some of the world’s best-known journalists. A handful of them had covered the Pacific War since the first scrappy hit-and-run carrier raids, as well as Turner’s own baptism by fire at Guadalcanal—the Battle of Savo Island.

  Bob Sherrod of Time and Life and Keith Wheeler of the Chicago Sun-Times were there, along with Walter Davenport of Collier’s, John Marquand of Harper’s, Hamilton Freon and Clark Lee of the Associated Press, and John Lardner of the New Yorker. With heavy straps and loaded with equipment, photographers Lou Lowery of Leatherneck magazine and Joe Rosenthal of AP also jostled for position, along with a pool of radio broadcasters that included NBC’s popular Bud Foster.

  Bill greeted the correspondents as they filed into Admiral Turner’s inner sanctum. As the ship’s censor, he was already
acquainted with a number of them from the long days and nights aboard Rocky Mount during the battles for Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. That was when he’d met Sherrod and Wheeler, who had regaled him with tales of riding along in Enterprise Sky Control with Benny Mott during the 1942 carrier raids. “You must be little Benny!” Wheeler had crowed at their first meeting.

  Bemused to hear a nickname he hadn’t heard since plebe year, Bill nodded in cautious assent. The warm and garrulous Wheeler moved on to a geyser of Benny stories, making Bill happy and sad at the same time. These were stories about Benny in Benny’s World of the USS Enterprise. In two short years, it seemed this veteran correspondent had pocketed more priceless anecdotes about his older brother than Bill had accumulated in a lifetime.

  Hearing such tales from these new acquaintances felt like watching his brother through a hidden camera with his other family, in his other home—constellations away from their proprietary, Garden State–rooted, three-decade fraternal past. It felt good having big-shot reporters like Wheeler and Sherrod laud Benny, but it made Bill homesick for his brother’s companionship. Perhaps the reverse had been felt aboard Enterprise in those dark days of 1942. Otherwise Wheeler might never have heard of “Little Benny.”

  THE ROOM CAME TO a hush when Admiral Turner moved to the microphone. He assembled his papers and cleared his throat like a maestro tapping his music stand. The briefing had been his idea, and for good reason. Counteracting MacArthur’s widely publicized criticism of the navy’s amphibious campaigns as “unnecessary slaughter” had been a principal motivator. A 1944 Time cover story featuring “Terrible Turner” wearing his best sneer had also had its effect.