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  Contents

  Map of the Philippine Islands

  Preface

  PART ONE

  1. April 1942, Luzon, the Philippines

  2. Benny

  3. Helen

  4. Bill

  5. Cabanatuan, Spring 1942

  6. White House Map Room, April 1942

  7. “This Force Is Bound for Tokyo”

  8. Barton, 1930–1941

  9. The Perils of Escape—and a Little Baseball

  10. A Brother’s Burden: The Search

  11. Midway

  12. Under Siege: JN-25

  13. To Davao: En Avant!

  14. And Then There Was One: USS Enterprise Versus Japan

  15. The Other War: Army-Navy Football

  16. Happy Days at the Penal Colony

  PART TWO

  17. Winter’s Grief

  18. Escape: Crime and Punishment

  19. Farewell to the White House

  20. A Tale of Atrocities

  21. August 1943: Allied War Summit, Quebec, Canada

  22. Revenge on the Innocent and a Covert Plan

  23. Secrets Inside the Oxygen Tent

  24. Hero of Bataan Versus the War Department

  25. Bad Tidings

  26. Politics in Brisbane

  27. “Proceed to Kwajalein”

  PART THREE

  28. The Best-Laid Plans

  29. Initiation at Saipan

  30. Decampment

  31. September 1944, Lilac Hedges

  32. Hopes Dashed

  33. Setbacks

  34. Through a Prism: MacArthur’s Return

  35. What Benny Knew

  36. The Oryoko Maru

  37. End Game in the Pacific

  38. A Sailor’s Nightmare

  39. In the End, a Question of Casualties—and Sea Power

  40. No Peace at Lilac Hedges

  41. Final Hours

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Map of the Pacific Theater

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Image Credits

  Dedicated with love

  to the First Siblings,

  Adam Sutherland Mott and Jeannette Mott Fritz

  On New Year’s Eve of 1941, the American and Filipino army wounded at Manila’s Sternberg Hospital were rushed from their wards to an awaiting hospital ship, the last vessel to depart Manila before it fell to the Japanese. Looking on in disbelief, navy nurse Bertha Evans asked, “What about the navy patients? What’s supposed to happen to them?”

  Preface

  I have a clear memory of that moment when our innocence was fractured, perhaps because it was in such contrast to our blissful cousin-play. It was a midsummer night in the 1960s, and we were playing badminton on the south lawn of Lilac Hedges, our grandmother’s home in New Jersey. The highlight of those summer visits was seeing our cousin there, whom we adored and rarely saw otherwise. I know it was dusk because that was when the bats started dive-bombing the birdie, our favorite part of the evening.

  The adults—my father, mother, aunt, and grandmother—were having their cocktails on the front porch. Suddenly we heard Aunt Rosemary’s voice rise up over the rest, after which she burst into tears. Then we heard a glass break, which is when we stopped our play, got dead quiet, and strained our ears. When I say break, I don’t mean fall-off-the-table break; I mean throw-against-the-wall break. Then we heard our mother try to say something, and then she started crying.

  My father was an admiral, and at the time serving as the navy’s judge advocate general (JAG). He usually held the attention of the people around him—at work and at home. But his attempts to restore calm were in vain that evening, as apparently were my mother’s attempts to assist him. We couldn’t hear much, but without a doubt, the ever-charged topic was our mysterious Uncle Barton, a naval ensign who had been wounded and taken prisoner by the Japanese long before any of us was born.

  We kids had never met Uncle Barton, but my siblings, cousin, and I all knew what he looked like. There were photos of him on every wall of every room at Lilac Hedges. You would hardly have known that our grandmother had three other children. I especially remember Barton’s imposing oil portrait on the facing wall at the turn near the top of the front stairs. I was sure his smiling green eyes followed my every step as I walked up. We joked that he was winking at us, but whenever I reached that landing, I took those last two steps in a leap of terror, as though fleeing a ghost.

  We left Lilac Hedges abruptly the next morning for the drive back to Washington, DC. A flimsy explanation for the early departure was offered as four glum kids took turns hugging our cousin, promising him unconvincingly that we’d be back, and then piling into our old Chevy wagon. I don’t remember what reason was offered, just that none of us believed it.

  One thing was certain: there was always tension when this Uncle Barton’s name came up. Each time, I felt a familiar tingling at the back of my neck and then braced myself. Here we go again. What was going on here? As children, and then teens, and then young adults, we analyzed every syllable whenever the topic sprang from its dark corner, hoping to elicit conclusive details. But the mystery persisted long into our adulthood. Speculation on what had happened to him—and when—became a sort of a parlor game for us, and it never ended satisfactorily.

  When I set out to unravel this family mystery, my objective was to uncover the facts that led to the anguished outburst that night—and which ended our traditional summer visits to Lilac Hedges. I was determined to learn more about this Uncle Barton, but what I uncovered would have stunned the adults on that porch.

  PART

  ONE

  1

  APRIL 1942, LUZON, THE PHILIPPINES

  THEY HAD BEEN MARCHING at bayonet point when Barton Cross realized a fellow navy patient was dead. Neither Barton Cross nor Charles Armour—shouldering the other end of their friend’s crude litter—slowed his pace, despite the dreadful truth that passed between them. They didn’t dare stop. By this point in their imprisonment, they had learned that it was safer to proceed as silent pallbearers than call attention to themselves—risking a rifle butt in the rib, a bayonet in the back, or a shot in the head. Wordlessly, they moved in step with the grim prisoner procession through Manila’s choking heat and rising red road dust.

  Like Barton, the deceased had been wounded during the Japanese bombings of Cavite Navy Yard, the US naval installation near Manila. He was near death at the start of the march, but Barton and Charles had agreed not to let on if he were to die en route. They wanted to get him to a place where his name and death could be recorded. Hundreds before him had not been so lucky. As much as dying itself, all the prisoners feared being dumped into an unmarked grave, their fate forever untold.

  Barton’s own shrapnel wounds oozed with every step as he struggled under the corpse’s sagging weight. The filthy, matted dressing had fallen away, exposing months-old gashes in his leg and foot that had never healed properly. Ahead of him, Charles stared at the road passing under his boots in a grim, trancelike state. His own wounds were deep, but invisible; it would do neith
er of them any good if Charles were to break down again.

  Barton’s gold watch had been taken from him when he was captured, but since then he had marked off the long days and nights on an old ten-peso bill. It had been just over a hundred days since he was taken prisoner from a hospital cot in Manila, the tip of a saber at his temple. As Barton worked to absorb the loss of yet another friend, he tried to make sense of all that had happened to him since those first moments as a prisoner of war.

  IT SEEMED LIKE DAYS, not months, since Barton heard Don Bell’s anxious voice over KZRH, Radio Manila, blaring from a nearby barrack. The carousing ensigns had returned to Cavite late the night before and were walking to the mess hall for Sunday-morning sausages and hotcakes. It was December 8 (December 7 in Hawaii). “Those dirty little bastards have struck Pearl Harbor!” Bell shouted between audible panting. “Reports remain sketchy, but there is no doubt! Oh my God!” Bell was actually crying, near hysteria. “Those yellow-bellied Japs hit our ships at anchor!”

  The ensigns hurried on to the mess, which was in chaos over the news. All hands had been ordered to report to their commanding officers on the double. Captain Joel Newsom convened the crew of Barton’s ship, submarine tender USS Otus, in the Yard’s administrative building. Gathered, too, were the captains of submarines Sculpin, Sealion, Salmon, Sailfish, and Seawolf, all talking nervously among themselves and comparing notes on their clipboards. The room was abuzz with speculation but quieted instantly when Captain Newsom cleared his throat.

  “Men, listen carefully. The following message was received from Admiral Hart this morning. ‘To Asiatic Fleet . . . Urgent . . . Japan has commenced hostilities . . . the Pacific Fleet has been immobilized . . . govern yourselves accordingly.’ ” Admiral Thomas C. Hart was the Asiatic Fleet’s commander in chief and the highest-ranking naval officer in the Philippines; they knew this meant they were likely the next target.

  Captain Newsom proceeded to list a lengthy series of urgent tasks. They could come under attack at any time, and loading, camouflaging, and servicing the submarines were now time critical. Barton and Otus’s crew went straight to the docks following the briefing and ratcheted the work to a breakneck pace.

  Later that same day, exactly nine hours after the decimation of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese began their assault on the Philippines. Their opening salvos went to the heart of the island’s air defenses, which proved an easy mark. Despite Washington’s urgent, repeated orders to General Douglas MacArthur—at the time the US Army Forces Commander in the Far East—to launch his planes and initiate air operations, beginning minutes after the start of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he did not respond. Nor did he ever issue the order. As a consequence, virtually every US plane at Luzon’s primary airfields, Clark Field and Nichols Field, was bombed on the ground, wingtip to wingtip. The army’s entire staple of bombers, their payloads full, was wiped out in a matter of hours.

  The men at Cavite Naval Base reeled at the news. The loss was particularly alarming to the submariners, who relied heavily on army air reconnaissance to prevent enemy flyers from spotting them through some of the world’s clearest coastal waters. With air protection gone, Admiral Hart was forced to change his strategy. For officers and crew of the USS Otus, one of the fleet’s crucial submarine tenders, that meant preparing for immediate sortie into dangerous waters with the subs under their care. They would make for the relative safety of Darwin, Australia, and await further orders.

  The slender Asiatic Fleet had a few vintage destroyers, but its signature strength was a large contingent of submarines—more than double that of the Pacific Fleet. Because of its miles of coastline, eddies, and deep harbors, the Philippines was deemed ideal for a submarine defense. The Asiatic Fleet’s recent relocation from Shanghai to Manila was for the specific purpose of deterring a seaborne Japanese attack. The three tenders, Otus, Holland, and Canopus, were charged with keeping those subs, which required significant maintenance, action-ready and in uninterrupted service.

  Inside the Yard, antiaircraft units were put on five-minute-alert cycles. Barton and his shipmates worked deep into the nights of December 8 and 9. First priority was to ensure that the subs were stocked, armed, and primed for launch. They filled Otus’s exposed fuel tanks with water to prevent incineration if hit and installed antiaircraft guns on her deck. Surplus machinery and ammunition were stored in casements and tunnels around the Yard, and as Otus’s paymaster, Barton rushed to secure the ship’s funds and financial records.

  At approximately 1100 hours on December 10, warning sirens pierced Cavite’s soft tropical air. Following their wail came a stern broadcast over the Yard’s loudspeakers: enemy formations were approaching from the northeast. Within minutes the assailants were visible—fifty-four planes in three tight Vs, the whole formation making one large V. The Otus crew looked up in surprise; they had never seen bombers fly so high.

  Antiaircraft gunners squinted, aimed, and fired, but the planes were so far above the range of the 1918-vintage weapons that the shells burst in harmless black puffs less than halfway up to their targets. With air cover lost and only toylike antiaircraft guns for defense, the submarines had to get out to sea.

  Two submarines with their hatches open lay astride Otus. Their crews were topside, scrambling to take on a last cache of supplies. Barton shouted to them to close their hatches and get under way as one enemy bomber after another opened its payload.

  The first air group had barely cast a shadow on the east side of the Yard before ships, docks, men, and buildings started exploding in a line. The planes then flew at an almost leisurely pace to the other side of the Yard and discharged the rest of their payloads. The oil storage tanks erupted like geysers, and droplets of oily fire lit the surrounding ground. Corpses by the dozens flew into the air, their smoldering parts scattering down across the Yard.

  The next air group set its sights on the congested center of the facility, where its bombs cut a glinting path of destruction. In minutes, fueling depots, machine houses, and storage facilities were ablaze, and plumes of black, choking smoke shot up across Cavite. That was the last thing Barton remembered before he too was struck down by branding-hot shrapnel. The explosion that snared him crippled Sealion, one of the two subs he’d been shouting at, and reduced the dock and pilings to splinters. When he awoke, he was lying on a stretcher in Cavite’s base hospital intake area.

  Men all around him were blackened from head to foot and lying in puddles of their own blood. Slashes of ripped khaki, soaked red, were all that remained of Barton’s pant legs, and his shoes pooled with blood. Navy medics triaged among the wounded with surreal calm, applying tourniquets and giving morphine to some, and placing sheets over others.

  By evening, the base hospital, named Canacao, was overwhelmed with casualties. Worse, since it was located next to a packed munitions depot, it was a prime future target. With air attacks expected to resume the next day, the facility had to be evacuated. By midnight, hospital staff had requisitioned a boat to move the Canacao patients across the bay to Manila’s Sternberg Hospital.

  IT SEEMED THAT ONLY bodies and body parts were left to be counted as the stretchered wounded were jostled in the smoky dark to Cavite’s civilian docks. The stretcher bearers—an odd group of seventeen native musicians, none of whom Barton had seen before or since—struggled in the blackness to avoid stepping on some hideously burned arm or leg. Crews all around them gathered human remains to inter in bomb craters before the Japanese returned. The crews and stretcher bearers both had to sidestep frantic dogs, cats, chickens, and pigs tearing at the fallen flesh, already putrefying in the tropical heat. At the docks, a hastily appropriated pleasure cruiser named Mary Anne awaited.

  The patients were quiet as the Filipino captain threw off Mary Anne’s dock lines and steered toward Manila. The Cavite fireworks sliced up the night sky behind them, the Yard’s molten carnage lighting the ghostly remains of the anchorage. Disoriented and morphine-dazed, the patients lay abou
t the festively painted Mary Anne, muttering curses and such, making little sense. They periodically looked back at Cavite, shaking their heads. In front of them, Manila appeared relatively safe. They saw isolated columns of smoke over the city—but nothing like the conflagration at Cavite.

  This was the night Barton met Ensign Charles Armour, who had been discharged from the USS Louisville at Cavite for “treatment” just weeks before. “Yeah, well, my timing’s never been too good,” Charles said in a dry Arkansas drawl. This was no time for laughing, but Barton was amused by Charles’s quips in the midst of the madness all around them.

  There was something strange about Charles that he couldn’t pinpoint, though Barton felt grateful for the companionship under the circumstances. It was curious that his new friend was at Canacao in the first place. He had no obvious injuries.

  At first light, the Mary Anne downshifted and drew up to the Manila pier. Corpsmen unloaded the patients in the spectral quiet and slipped them into waiting ambulances. It was about this time that Barton began to inquire what had happened to his shipmates. Dead? Wounded? And his ship? Sunk? But none of the medical staff knew that while he had been drifting in and out of consciousness at Canacao, Otus hastened out to sea after the Sealion blast, leaving Barton behind. With no time to spare, Captain Newsom had ordered an evasive zigzag toward Australia at flank speed.

  By the time the navy patients got to Sternberg Hospital, Charles had fallen asleep. Barton’s stretcher was placed along a wall off the entrance foyer, this time among a group of bleeding and weeping civilians, themselves waiting for treatment. One of the most seriously wounded, Ken Koenig, whom Barton also befriended on the Mary Anne, was taken to surgery right away. Ken’s gurney disappeared through swinging doors, his attendants murmuring about blood loss and a weak pulse.

  In retrospect, Barton realized that Sternberg had lulled him into a false sense of security. It was so orderly and lovely with its Spanish architecture, gardens, and large, gracious wards cooled by polished mahogany fans. On that first night, even in the chaos, he had believed that Sternberg, a US military hospital, was the first of many steps away from uncivil engagement. Supply Corps officers weren’t supposed to be on the fighting front, were they? He hadn’t even been issued a gun.