It is the story of a twisting, tortuous journey on prison ships from Manila to southern Japan during which men died from Japanese bullets, American bombs, suffocation, starvation and murder. Some went insane . . . Its accuracy is unquestionable.
The story begins in Manila. December 13, 1944 . . .
DOWN AT THE NAVY Department’s Casualty Section, a perspiring Commander Atkinson doggedly responded to each of Helen Cross’s salvos, but he never wavered from the navy’s original claim of Barton’s cause of death:
Dear Mrs. Cross:
Receipt is acknowledged of your letters addressed to President Truman and referred to this Bureau for reply concerning your son, the late Ensign Arthur Barton Cross, Jr.
Although you state your son died as a result of Allied bombing attacks on a Japanese prison ship, the records available to this Bureau indicate he died of acute enteritis. There is no evidence available in the Navy Department to substantiate your belief that your son died as a result of Allied bombings.
After the war was over with Japan in August, 1945, the captured enemy records were carefully translated and scrutinized for clues as to the fate of Army and Navy personnel who had fallen into the hands of the enemy.
In some instances, it was learned that naval personnel who had survived Japanese attacks had subsequently been taken into custody and killed by the Japanese. Other prisoners died of disease due to malnutrition, among whom was listed your son.
Your anxiety to learn the details of your son’s death is appreciated and it is regretted there are no additional facts known in his case.
Sincere sympathy is again extended to you in the loss of your son.
By direction of the Chief of Naval Personnel.
Sincerely Yours,
Commander H. B. Atkinson
Officer in Charge
Casualty Section
Bureau of Naval Personnel
Washington 25, DC
Yet Atkinson had a mother, too, and he did what he could to assuage the aggrieved Helen Cross. He sent a warm personal note with Barton’s Purple Heart medal, awarded posthumously for wounds he received in the December 1941 bombings at Cavite. He thought she might also like to know that Barton had been promoted to Lieutenant (jg) while a prisoner, something he expected would make her very proud. But Atkinson’s efforts were unrequited. She replied to his every missive (with courtesy copies to members of Congress and President Truman) with withering scorn:
Dear Sir:
Answering your last letter I was for a moment confused—it had been so long since I had addressed the President and then only when the Navy seemed quite unconcerned.
As to your Purple Heart, its late arrival was not mentioned to me by my family who intercepted it in fear of further anguish being brought me. However since the story of [sic] a Major General receiving one for a broken leg received when he fell drunk from a second story—this medal leaves me quite indifferent.
If that is all the Navy has to offer those poor devils whom it bombed and killed after three years of horrible imprisonment by the Japs, you may have your Purple Heart back.
As to my son’s death, he was bombed by Navy fliers in Subic Bay and again by Navy hands off of Formosa, and after such sufferings reportedly died of exhaustion and pneumonia which might be blamed on the Japs.
This was not the work of Army fliers, mind you—thank God that their branch was not guilty of so terrible a mistake!
And then, what does the Navy do? Does it send one ranking surviving officer who might have been with our dear one in his last hours? No, you killed our son, not even in fair battle either, and never has there been such callous disregard of heart-broken relatives as the Navy has shown in this instance.
Furthermore, though my son has been gone from this earth for approaching a year, and the Red Cross has notified me of his insurance and back pay, not any of this has reached me. Not that ten times the amount would atone for one of my son’s fingers, it just further confirms dilatory Navy procedure.
Don’t take this personally. It is the Navy we despise, “Bull” Halsey who gave orders to those fliers and the brass hats in safe places who didn’t care. Only Congressional investigations will cure Navy arrogance and stupidity.
The public is awake to it—witness how few officers of the Reserve care to remain in such an organization.
Very sincerely,
Helen C. Cross
cc: President Harry S. Truman
Senator Albert Hawkes (R-NJ)
More-satisfying responses to Helen’s missives were trickling in from Barton’s comrades who had survived the ordeal. Most were written from beds at military hospitals across the country and arrived over a period of several weeks. Helen hungrily read and reread each moving fellow-prisoner testimonial. They were her sole consolation, providing a montage of Barton’s world over the past three years and filling dozens of blanks she had long agonized over.
The letters were also full of anecdotes and unabashed declarations of respect and affection for their lost friend. She and Arthur both were amazed—and taken aback—by the picture that emerged of their son, who had been transformed in his bondage. The letters attested to the courage, strength, honor, and persistent optimism Barton had to the last—none easy traits to retain under such conditions. They described at length the difference “Bart” had made in their respective lives, which, they attested variously, had been critical to their own survival.
Who was this person these fellow prisoners described? Could her son really have left home such a boy and in captivity become such a man?
“In all those three years, under humiliating and weakening conditions, Bart was ever the gentleman, a true inspiration to all who knew him!” wrote one.
Another said: “I was with Bart under all kinds of conditions, and I can truthfully say he was one of the finest men I have ever known. He never complained. He was cheerful and courageous until the end.” And another: “He organized a Sunday choir, concerts, a glee club, and baseball games—and even a baseball team that played against the Jap guards. His courage was unbelievable, and his morale building efforts were continuous among officers and men in both the prison camps and aboard the prison ships.”
Each treasured account added its own texture, depth, and color to a portrait of the man this grieving mother’s boy had become beyond her care. The correspondence was mostly from naval ensigns and young lieutenants. Some had been quartered with Barton since the Philippines fell; others had known him only at one camp or another. One man said he didn’t really get to know Barton until they were thrust together on the last of the three hellships, but under such conditions, he wrote, they formed a sure and fast bond.
Their precise recounting of Barton’s final moments varied to a degree, doubtless due to their own drastically diminished conditions. One fellow prisoner claimed Barton had succumbed to wounds incurred when a navy bomb struck their ship at Takao, Formosa. Another said Barton had died from starvation and exposure. One said dysentery had claimed him; another said it was pneumonia, of which so many had died on that final, frigid voyage. Try though she did, Helen was unable to reconcile these accounts. Perhaps, she mused, he had fallen victim to all of them.
Barton’s fellow prisoners all stressed that by the end of the forty-nine-day trip, those still alive were barely so. They unanimously declared it a miracle that any of them had survived. The final numbers were grim. Of the 1,619 prisoners that departed Manila on December 13, 1944, 450 arrived alive in Japan on January 30, 1945. Of those, 161 died in Japanese labor camps shortly thereafter.
Describing the details of Barton’s last days and hours was painful for Barton’s fellow prisoners, but tell they did, perhaps believing that the only possible salve for his family was the truth.
41
FINAL HOURS
Dear Mrs. Cross,
I have been in the hospital for several weeks and just received your letter. I am very sorry that I have not written you sooner—but then too, I didn’t want to merely
write a letter and let it go at that . . .
Bart and I were captured in Manila on January 1, 1942. He and I were together all the time until his death. We were in camps on Luzon, moved to Davao, Mindanao, and then back to Cabanatuan on Luzon in the summer of 1944. We were returned to Bilibid Prison in Manila that October and left there on December 13, 1944, on a Japanese ship bound for Japan. This ship was sunk . . .
Charles W. Armour to Helen Cross, dated November 2,
1945, from a naval hospital in Memphis, Tennessee
My Dear Mrs. Cross,
I am so glad that you have written me. I do appreciate the many unanswered questions that must be in the minds of Bart’s family. I know he would wish that I be as truthful and frank as possible with his family. With that in mind, I shall do my very best to accurately recall the important things.
I met Bart at Bilibid Prison after the fall of Bataan. From that time on, we were in the same camps and became close friends . . .
Kenneth R. Wheeler, dated November 3, 1945, from
a naval hospital at Oak Knoll, California
Dear Mrs. Cross,
Yes, I did know your son. I only wish I could talk with you about him in person rather than set the facts down in an impersonal letter, but I will do the best I can. I’m awfully sorry I didn’t know how close I was to you when I traveled to Philadelphia to see Captain and Mrs. Wuest. Their son Bob was also a close friend of ours, and I wanted to give them his U. of Penn ring I managed to bring back. He died on the trip from Manila to Moji, Kyushu, and, like you, they had little or no information about his death . . .
Bart and I met after the surrender [at Corregidor]and were sent to Cabanatuan, where we ensigns all lived in one barrack. In the fall of 1942, Bart and quite a number of other naval personnel were sent to Davao on Mindanao. About July 1944, I believe, the Davao detail returned to Cabanatuan, and we were all together again. We ensigns had quite a bit of fun at Cabanatuan. We stuck together in all things and that in itself made life a lot easier. That October, we were all sent down to Bilibid to await transportation to Japan.
Because of American raids on Manila, we were kept at Bilibid until December 13th. Then a typhoon gave the Nips the break they were waiting for. We were loaded onto the “Oryoko Maru” that same afternoon and sailed within several hours. American planes began bombing the ship on the 14th and sank her on the 15th. Bart and most of the other ensigns made it ashore. We were kept there at Subic for 5 days . . .
Andrew Long Jr., dated November 6, 1945, from a
military hospital in Springfield, Missouri
DECEMBER 15, 1944
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time surviving Oryoko Maru prisoners were herded together on the beach and marched to an improbable new enclosure: a tennis court on the former US Naval Base at Olongapo. It was only about five hundred yards away, but the men staggered the distance from the combined trauma of shock, exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. They also struggled to carry their two hundred wounded, some at the point of death.
A scowling Mr. Wada greeted Colonel Beecher—still damp and attired only in socks and boxer shorts—at the tennis court gate. Waving the ship’s manifest, the interpreter demanded a survivor count. Beecher agreed, but insisted wisely that he be allowed a confirming second count before certifying it. A miscount in the chaos could falsely indicate escape, triggering a fresh round of Japanese reprisals; this he wished to avoid at all costs.
Beecher’s method was to send a hundred prisoners through the court gate at a time, but so many passed back and forth carrying in the wounded that he quickly lost track. The process took hours, with no certain count at the end of it.
The following morning, Beecher began a second count after mustering a burial detail to inter the three men who died in the night. He then dragged the tall referee’s chair to the court’s center and began calling roll. It went badly from the start. Beecher recalled,
[W]hen a man didn’t answer to his name, it had to be repeated several times in order to be sure the man who . . . was actually missing. The doctors and corpsmen had to nudge patients to respond, as many were in such condition as to be unable to recognize their names when called . . . When there was no answer, I asked, “Well, does anyone know what happened to him?” A voice might say “I think he passed out last night” or “I believe I saw him with the dead on the deck of the ship.” Then there would be contradictions. “The hell you did! He was in the bay next to me. A bomb fragment got him.” Another might respond, “How could a bomb have got him when I saw him swimming away from the ship?”
The sun was low on the horizon on December 16 by the time a survivor count of 1,320 prisoners was submitted. Beecher calculated that some 50 of the 300 casualties had occurred during the two horrific nights aboard Oryoko Maru; the rest died during the aerial attacks or at the hands of guards gunning from the seawall. They had shot any prisoner deemed to be swimming off course.
By dusk the second day, an order of sorts had emerged on the Olongapo tennis court. So, too, had the prisoners’ realization that they had survived the Oryoko Maru only to endure a bizarre new phase of suffering. On the ship, they had endured suffocating heat, maddening thirst, random acts of murder, and a vicious—if unwitting—attack by their own navy. Those fortunate enough to make it ashore now questioned how lucky they really were.
The tennis court measured sixty feet by eighty feet, barely larger than the ship’s hold. To fit, they were packed into eleven lines of a hundred men each, their legs either drawn knees to chest or scissored around the man in front of them.
The wounded were housed in the court “hospital,” a sand-and-gravel width behind the faded baseline shaded by a piece of torn sheeting. Surviving doctors, themselves depleted and barely clothed, did what they could to dress wounds while calculating which men’s hours were numbered and beyond care.
There was a water source at the court—a significant relief. But accessing the single, trickling spigot was no small effort. The men queued up at all hours, and guards were posted by the spigot around the clock. A lucky few still had a cup or canteen to fill for their effort, but most had to hold their mouths to the water for as long a draught as the guards would allow.
Despite their unpleasant new circumstances, the prisoners were relieved to no longer be heading to Japan. Every hour they remained in the Philippines, went the thinking, their chances for rescue by the fast-approaching Allies improved.
BARTON AND CHARLES CONDUCTED a survivor count of their own on the tennis court. Two members of their tight ensign fraternity—George Petritz and Shields Goodman—had not been seen since the order to abandon ship. Nor had Ensigns Chuck Wilkins and Warwick Potter Scott. They mourned quietly, remembering their late comrades with anecdotes drawn from three years of shared misery and privation.
Small sacrifices had made big differences. Charles reluctantly shared his old navy cap for an hour or so at a time so that the others could get temporary relief from the head-scorching sun. Before doing so, he removed a tiny address book from the inside flap in which he’d painstakingly recorded dozens of recipes over the years. The significance of the miserly Charles’s hat loan was not lost on the others. His accumulated recipes had become almost as important to him as food itself. That hat had safeguarded them as much as it did his head.
Somehow Barton had hung on to his strapped canteen, despite the lengthy amount of time he’d spent in the water. He traveled back and forth to the spigot line at all hours, each time returning to pass the canteen around to the ensigns. When it was empty, he got back in the water queue. Barton engaged in his usual self-deprecating banter to deflect their gratitude, but his colleagues knew the man better by now.
In this manner, water was plentiful on the tennis court, but food was not. Their first food was finally tossed through the court gate on the second day, but in the form of two seventy-pound sacks of uncooked rice. Without cooking facilities, two level tablespoons of hard rice kernels were meted out to each prisoner. To supplement the meal
, several reached through small openings in the fence perimeter and pulled up grass. A forearm’s width of bare ground soon surrounded the enclosure.
As the prisoners chewed their stony rations, Admiral Halsey’s planes returned in full view of the tennis court. Against a brilliant azure sky, one bomb load after another found their marks on the listing Oryoko Maru. Prisoner cheers went up with each direct hit, with the biggest whoop reserved for when the hated vessel burst into flames and slipped beneath the surface.
An apprehensive silence followed when Commander Riera and his air group made a circle and flew directly toward them. The planes circled and dove, circled and dove, striking fuel depots and other targets all around the prisoners. They seemed to be taking pains to avoid the court itself, igniting fresh hope among the prisoners. This must mean the flyers knew that these were the abandoned soldiers and sailors of Bataan, Cavite, and Corregidor. Surely they would hasten to send help. But yet another cruel spike in optimism ended in disappointment. There was no rescue, and no planes returned after December 16.
As the calendar pages turned, misery on the tennis court compounded. By noon each day, tropical heat pushed the concrete slab to over 100 degrees. The barely clad men baked and blistered on the black, unshaded surface. When afternoon mercifully faded to dusk, the relief was brief. Chill evening breezes transformed the court into a cold, hard torture rack. At night, protruding hips and ribs were marked by purpling welts and bruises. The men huddled together for warmth.
The evening winds also brought clouds of biting flies and mosquitoes. The insects feasted on open wounds, and sunburned skin turned to gooseflesh. Of those long nights on the tennis court, Manny Lawton recalled that the prisoners were “cold, hurting, and hungry. Few slept.” By the third day, cases of gangrene had set in.
Removal of a gangrenous arm with a mess kit knife was the first surgical procedure in the court hospital. The patient was Marine Corporal Eugene L. Specht. The arm had taken a bullet that guards fired into the ship’s hold on December 15. After hearing his options, Specht agreed with the medics: his only chance at survival was removal of the arm.
The Jersey Brothers Page 46
