Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

Most RAMPs were evacuated by railroad to Yokohama’s Central Station. Early arrivals were greeted by the IX Corps band, an honor guard, high officials in military regalia, and Mrs. MacArthur, who was a regular presence. The army was less than cordial to the ICRC, whose “preliminary work—which in some ways has facilitated theirs and could have served to greater advantage if we had been consulted in the least,” bristled one report, “was ignored.”

  The Recovered Personnel Section had taken over a warehouse, where RAMPs were bathed, clothed, and fed hot food, given physical exams, and provided with bedrest, if necessary. Four tables were set up where the newly liberated filled out Red Cross reports and were allowed to send telegrams home. Behind a battery of typewriters, clerks typed out names, ranks, and serial numbers for airplane manifests. There were litter-bearers and nurses on staff, whose lovely smiles and natural compassion led to the first contact that most of the men had had with a Western woman in years. But by and large the Recovered Personnel Section had little idea of just how poor the health was of the ex-prisoners of the Japanese.

  John Plath Green, an intelligence officer with the Eighth Army, was horrified by the situation at Omori. He drew up plans for the accelerated evacuation of POWs, which he presented to American and Japanese officials as well as to Marcel Junod of the ICRC. Junod had urged that POWs in Hokkaidō be rescued first because of the conditions in the coal mining camps. But there were also an estimated 10,000 POWs in southern Honshand on the island of Shikoku, to the southeast. Green’s idea was to create small mobile units consisting of a commanding officer, an officer’s assistant, and three or four enlisted men who could fan out over the Home Islands. But he was short on personnel. He asked Lieutenant Travis J. Smith, a former Ōsaka POW he had met in Yokohama, if he’d be interested in helping establish a district headquarters for the Eighth Army Recovery Personnel at the New Ōsaka Hotel for processing RAMPs. Smith took up the challenge and enlisted seventy-five RAMPs as volunteers for recovery teams. Within eighteen days the Eighth Army liberated 23,985 Allied POWs in Hokkaidō, Honsh, and Shikoku, and many of them were recovered by RAMPs.

  The POWs at the Ōsaka Red Cross Hospital had one thing on their minds: going home. On September 6, 1945, an American recovery team arrived at the hospital, and on September 7, the day MacArthur officially assumed control of the occupation, Ōhashi selected Fred, John, and four corpsmen to evacuate forty-seven patients on a special Pullman train, outfitted with sleeping berths and bound for Yokohama. Page, Stan Smith, and Murray followed the next day along with the remaining patients and personnel.

  It was hard to say goodbye. The fall of Bataan. The siege of Corregidor. The prison hospital in Bilibid. The farm at Cabanatuan. The voyage of the “sugar ship.” That hellhole Ichioka. The American firebombing of Kōbe. Fred, John, and Murray had been through so much together that words were inadequate to the occasion. Maybe they’d catch up with one another for that blowout in San Francisco. Maybe not.

  On arriving at Yokohama’s Central Station, Fred recognized Admiral Richard Byrd, surrounded by a throng of marines, bayonets at the ready. Byrd was in Japan as a confidential adviser to the navy. He had been on Okinawa at the time of its capitulation, attended the surrender ceremony on the Missouri, and remained in Japan to help inspect the atomic bomb damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Fred introduced himself to the admiral, told him about the trainload of sick RAMPs from Ōsaka, and asked him if he would come aboard so they could catch sight of the celebrated polar explorer. Byrd agreed and shook the hand of every last man.

  In Yokohama they saw a city that had been 80 percent destroyed by the firebombing of May 29, 1945. The chimneys of bathhouses and the steel safes of businesses were all that remained standing in some neighborhoods. The brick and concrete buildings that survived near the waterfront, like the old Customs House, still wore black camouflage. The seven-story Yamato department store had crumpled like an accordion. A nation starving for scrap metal had devoured Yokohama’s bridges, railings, stanchions, and gas main covers. Thousands of bicycles lay in heaps of twisted metal. Stores were bereft of consumer goods.

  The Recovered Personnel Section handed Fred and John khaki shirts, trousers, underwear, socks, shoes, and shaving gear. It issued them repatriation identification numbers. The Americans were transferred to ships returning to the States via Guam, or they were flown from Atsugi to San Francisco with stopovers in Guam, Kwajalein, and Honolulu. Page was repatriated to England by way of Okinawa and Manila. Akeroyd was flown to Australia. Those unfit for air travel were placed aboard LSTs (landing ship, tank) and taken to the hospital vessels, the HMS Tjitjilengka, the USS Marigold, or the USS Rescue. Stan Smith returned to the States aboard the Rescue, which processed 6,300 RAMPs alone.

  Fred and John left Yokohama on an LST that had been converted into a small hospital ship. The staff physicians spoke of their new patients with great interest but failed to ask a single question of the ex-POW doctors. They speculated as to why so many men had edema, then permitted them to stand on the chow line for twenty-four hours, which only made them sicker.

  Maybe Fred wasn’t interested in talking anyway. It was so damned hard, he now found, to control your emotions, to put into perspective what had just happened, what had been happening for the past three and a half years. As the ship chugged toward the Marianas, movies were shown on board. Fred found himself sitting alone in a corner, bawling like a baby.

  Once back in San Francisco, the RAMPs did the craziest of things. At Letterman General Hospital they saluted officers who wore hospital clothes. They wandered into the administration building day and night to check on the status of their orders. They consumed enormous quantities of food, eating six to twelve hamburgers at a time. They used a spoon for every dining purpose, as they had during the years of their confinement.

  Murray was flown to the States, so he saw the Golden Gate before either Fred or John. Prior to his departure he spent the night on the USS Iowa, the battleship that had supported air strikes against Luzon during MacArthur’s landing on Leyte, and served as Admiral William F. Halsey’s flagship in the surrender ceremony. When the captain, Charles Wellborn, Jr., heard that Murray had been assigned to the 16th Naval District in Cavite, he invited him to his quarters. It was like being invited back into a gentlemen’s club after a long hiatus. Wellborn handed Murray some aerial reconaissance photographs of the Cavite Navy Yard after it had been bombed by the Americans during the Battle for Manila. It turned out that they knew many men in common. Wellborn was eager to know who had survived, who had not, who had become a POW, and who had eluded capture. So much in war, the captain agreed, was the luck of the draw. He could just as easily have been in Murray’s place.

  Several officers on the Iowa noticed the peculiar hand-sewn canvas trousers and army-issue boots that the young navy doctor wore, and pitched in to buy him a new pair of shoes. It was a gracious gesture and prompted Murray, not yet thirty, to look back on the life he had loved and lost after boarding the President Garfield more than four years earlier. And as his plane took off from Atsugi air base on September 8, 1945, he couldn’t help but wonder about the life that lay ahead as he watched Japan fade away.

  26

  Coming Home

  “SO YOU SEE,” my father said, “I had nothing. The Japs made us feel like the lowest of the low. We dressed, ate, and acted like tramps. We smoked cigarette butts like tramps. I was garbage. And when I returned to the States, it was as if I had landed in a foreign country. I hadn’t heard of DDT. I’d never seen penicillin. I knew nothing about modern medicine. I had been on ice for four years, and I couldn’t shake this feeling of being different from everyone else.”

  It is nighttime on Bataan. The air is heavy with humidity. From our hotel in Mariveles, we can see flashes of lightning and hear thunder rolling across Manila Bay. Normally reserved, my father has spoken to me more honestly during our trip to the Philippines, more freely about himself, than at any time in my life. Stori
es bubble up like waves filling tidepools.

  The heat is brutal, but it slows us down little. My father is remarkably active for a man eighty-six years of age. We visit the site of the old Cavite Navy Yard, now as quiet as a cemetery; search for the tunnel above Sisiman Cove where he holed up with John Bookman; try to find Cell Block No. 3 in Bilibid Prison, once again Manila’s municipal jail; and step onto the beach at Lingayen, where Japanese forces landed on Luzon.

  There are times when my father seems happier than I have ever seen him, excavating and explicating his past, as if my presence, my interest in it confers legitimacy on his experience. At one point he begins to sing Kipling: “On the road to Mandalay/Where the flyin’-fishes play /An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay!” I cannot remember ever having heard him sing before. There are moments, too, of sober reflection, as we look for names we know on the Wall of the Missing at Manila’s American Cemetery; hunt for the site of Hospital No. 2 in the thickets of Bataan; or pause before the Pacific War Memorial on Corregidor, which is designed so that every year on May 6 the noontime sun casts a halo of light around a commemorative plaque that reads: “Sleep, My Sons, Your Duty Done . . . For Freedom’s Light. Come Sleep in the Silent Depths of the Sea, or in Your Bed of Hallowed Sod—Until You Hear at Dawn the Low, Clear Reveille of God.”

  He is determined to find his bivouac position in Government Ravine, but the roads on Corregidor differ from the ones blown off the Rock nearly sixty years ago, and the scorched earth has been reclaimed by jungle. We never do find the exact spot, the juncture that divides his life neatly into two: before he became a prisoner of war and after.

  Conversation peels away layer after layer of the past. At times he speaks in a whisper, as if afraid his words will be overheard. Some scenes are as clear as day; others are mistakenly remembered or, as he admits, missing entirely. His story reads like a bildungsroman in reverse, a tale not of development, I realize, but of unbecoming.

  It didn’t feel right to stay in San Francisco, especially after he had received, on September 14, 1945, a radiogram at the Aiea Heights Hospital in Honolulu:OVERJOYED TO HEAR FROM YOU ALL WELL

  IMPATIENTLY AWAITING YOUR ARRIVAL

  HAPPY AND HEALTHY NEW YEAR--

  MOTHER DAD FAMILY.

  But it didn’t feel right to be back in New York, either.

  The homecomings were strange for so many of the men. There were no brass bands, no parades, no welcoming committees to greet them as they landed on native ground. In the end, the defense of Bataan and Corregidor, which had slowed but could not halt the Japanse juggernaut in the Pacific, had more symbolic than strategic significance. But symbols ring hollow once removed from their context. As Murray put it, “We lost our part of the war.”

  He was pale, thin, and withdrawn. He was moody, his sister Estelle said, and he had a hair-trigger temper. He grew furious when he heard one doctor describe the hardships Americans had suffered under rationing on the home front. He was mystified as to why the story of an Army Air Corps B-25 bomber crashing into the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building the previous July had seized the city’s imagination. He had no job and no home he could call his own, and he discovered that every girl he had ever dated was now married. Having had so little control over his life in captivity, he was confounded by his hard-earned freedom.

  He contacted the parents of Fred and John to assure them of their sons’ safety. As much as he wanted to turn his back on the war, as much as he wanted to forget, he was obliged to write to the loved ones of those who never made it back. It was understood that if you witnessed someone’s death, you would notify the next of kin at the earliest opportunity. Relatives replied asking for more details, a parting gesture, a final word. There were family members who stayed in touch for years seeking consolation.

  “Was John Edgar cheerful?” Mrs. Goddard wanted to know from Imperial, Nebraska.

  Did he give you my address or did you get it from records?

  Had he been ailing long before coming to the hospital or would you know?

  Did he talk about coming home?

  Did he know he wasn’t going to live?

  Did he have anything to say about any one or thing in particular?

  Was his teeth good and was his hair still black?

  Sometimes Murray wondered if the war would ever end. And he couldn’t help but wonder about George.

  It was the summer of 1945 when the mailman brought a letter addressed to Lucille Ferguson from Commander H. B. Atkinson, the officer in charge of the Casualty Section at the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington, D.C. She was at her parents’ home in Wausau, Wisconsin, and knew at once that something was wrong. She refused to open the envelope. Her uncle read the letter himself, then passed it on to her. There was no mention of the Arisan Maru by name. There was no mention of the total number of dead. There was no mention of the fact that the Japanese freighter had been sunk by an American submarine. The only explanation offered was that the ship “bore no mark to indicate it was carrying prisoners of war.”

  Atkinson concluded: “The Navy Department shares in your loss and extends sincere sympathy to you in your loss. It is hoped that you may find comfort in the knowledge that your husband gave his life for his country, upholding the highest traditions of the Navy.”

  So it was over. It had been nearly five years since she had last seen George, five years during which she had been planning, hoping, and dreaming of the life they would begin together. Five years of waiting. Perhaps there had been a mistake.

  “Records maintained by the Japanese authorities in the Philippine Islands have come into the possession of United States Naval personnel,” Atkinson had said, “and these records reveal that your husband did not survive the sinking.”

  But what if the records were wrong? She knew there had been survivors.

  She wrote to Avery Wilber, asking if he knew George.

  “He was of medium build, had dark hair and eyes, and very dark, heavy eyebrows. Would you remember whether or not he was on your ship?” she asked.

  She wrote to Donald Meyer.

  “He was a very good friend of mine,” Meyer replied. “I thought very highly of him. . . . Everybody liked him.”

  She clung to the hope, as did George’s mother, that he was somewhere, somehow, alive. There were so many questions and so few answers, but as time went by, there appeared to be only one certainty: George was gone.

  For nearly a year after his death, Lucille Ferguson continued to receive those little POW postcards from her husband in the Philippines invariably listing his health as “excellent.”

  It was a story whose end was anyhing but clean.

  None of the three other navy doctors could accept George’s fate. On October 18, 1945, Fred wrote Lucy from the U.S. Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, telling her to keep her chin up “and hang on us as long as there is a spark of hope.” In Guam he had met Warrant Officer Martin Binder, one of the Arisan Maru survivors. George had been in excellent physical condition, Binder reported, and had had plenty of time to get off of the sinking ship. “I have not given up hope that he made it,” Fred affirmed, “possibly to some obscure place in China—or island off the China coast for I am sure that if there was anybody on that ship that could do it—it would be George.”

  But that month belief hardened into cold fact. Murray was the last of the three doctors to write:November 22, 1945

  Dear Lucy—

  I’ve wanted very much to write to you ever since I got back to the States—a little over a month ago—but I’ve hesitated because I’ve been so intimately associated with your husband George.I was afraid anything I might say would be re-opening an old wound.However I understand from Johnny Bookman that he has written to you and that Fred Berley has written to you & that there’d be no harm in my writing too.I don’t know whether you’ve heard from Carey Smith but George, Fred,Jake,Carey & I were all part of an intimate group who lived,ate & slept together
while we were prisoners for a period of 2 years.We were together on Corregidor after the surrender,at the Bilibid POW hosp.& at the Cabanatuan POW Camp.We shared everything,our food,cigarettes, money,clothing—even our mail.So you see we got to know each other very well & I don’t think I’ve ever met a finer person than George. Fred,Jake & I were together in Kobe when we first heard rumors about that ship George was on—& it was a terrific blow to us—we refused to believe it at first—claiming that it was just rumor & we heard all sorts of rumors while we were prisoners.But Jake & I were in Wash. a couple of weeks ago—& they were pretty definite about their information. . . .

  We knew about you—George had told us. I knew all about your wedding—George had told the whole story—about his being worried at coming late—etc. But then I’d told George all about my girl & we knew all about Fred’s, Carey’s & Jake’s families.We used to watch George pull out a couple of letters from you—time after time—while we were at Bilibid—& we were green with envy. He was the only one of the group who’d received mail at that time—& boy were we jealous.

  So I’ve known you for a long time Lucy—since I’ve known George so well I’ve an idea how you must have felt.

  Believe me—& I mean every word of this—if there is ever anything at all I can do for you—don’t hesitate to get in touch with me—You see we’re old friends.

  Sincerely,

  Murray Glusman

  It could have been Fred, John, or Murray. It could have been any of them. Of the fourteen navy doctors whose narrative histories had been written up by Commander Hayes in his “Report on Medical Tactics,” which had been buried—along with his diary and notes—in hermetically sealed containers beneath Bilibid Prison’s commissary, half were dead. In addition to medical officers Lieutenant George T. Ferguson and Lieutenant George P. Hogshire, nearly 100 corpsmen were lost on the Arisan Maru. Of the 277 Navy Medical Department men on duty in China and the Philippines when hostilities erupted, 154 died, only 7 of them during combat. The mortality rate of navy medical personnel exceeded 55 percent.