Horror in Paradise (5 page)

When I was unable to keep the experience to myself any longer, and interrupted to say I had seen the queen, Auntie Emma looked at me squarely for a long moment. I had known she was named after the queen and had been for many years a hostess at Queen Emma’s Summer Palace, which has been restored as a museum. Now quietly and contemplatively she said, “Many people have told me I’m her re-birth.”

Then she continued with her story.

After touching the eyes of the two apparitions, she gazed at the tips of all six tingling fingers. There was nothing different about them that she could see. She rubbed them with her thumbs again and again. Then she brought her hands together with the ends of the three fingers of one hand touching those of the other. And as if from some magnetic attraction, her hands stuck together. She tried to separate them but could not. She pulled and pulled and pulled but could not pull them apart. Finally, with great effort, she managed to do so. She looked at the tips of the fingers again—still nothing different to be seen. Again she rubbed the three fingers on each hand with their respective thumbs—still the tingling was there. Then, with her fingers, she stroked her eyes a few times. When she stopped and opened her eyes, everything she saw appeared nearer and clearer.

She got up and walked back to the house, where her grandfather was standing on the lanai. “Emma!” he demanded. “Where have you been?”

And when she said nothing, he told her that her eyes looked different.

Before she left the Contessa that day, Auntie Emma, who says she’s approaching seventy, broke into a big smile. “All my life people have told me I would have a Chinese daughter,” she continued. “I always wondered how that was going to be. The day after your doctor told me about you, I said to my sister Marion, ‘My Chinese daughter has come.’ ”

A week or so later, I told Auntie Emma over the telephone that the more I thought about Queen Emma appearing at my home, the more honored I felt. “Imagine! Hawaiian royalty condescending to visit my humble shack, when I’m a total Chinese without a single drop of Hawaiian blood or a solitary Hawaiian cell in me.”

“That’s right,” Auntie Emma’s voice said at the other end of the line. “In this life.” A long pause. “In one of your previous births you were a Hawaiian.” Then she went on, “Did you not say that you felt something telling you that you were moving away from Ann Arbor before you came out here? Did you not say that you felt something telling you that you were moving out of your former apartment in Honolulu before you settled at the Contessa? There must be a meaning behind all this.”

In trying to sense out this meaning, I recalled the Chinese concept of the relation of heaven, earth, and the individual: a person completes one life cycle when he reaches sixty, and a new cycle begins at sixty-one. At sixty, after wandering for thirty-five years from one rented apartment to another in the United States, I had at last bought a permanent residence. But it was not until I had come to know Emma de Fries—as kahuna, auntie, mother, and queen—that I was made to feel at home, and ready for a new cycle to begin.

Eugene Burdick

Born in Iowa in 1918, Eugene Burdick went as a child to California. After high school he worked as a clerk, ditchdigger, and truck driver until he had saved $150, enough to enable him to enter Stanford University. He was graduated in 1941 and soon thereafter was married, taken into the Navy, and sent to Guadalcanal. As a gunnery officer aboard various ships, he spent twenty-six months in the Pacific.

With a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, Burdick won a Ph.D. degree and while a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley published his first novel,
The Ninth Wave
(1956). Thereafter he gained celebrity as co-author of
The Ugly American
with William Lederer (1958) and
Fail-Safe
with Harvey Wheeler (1962). “The Puzzle of the Ninety-Eight” is taken from
The Blue of Capricorn,
a collection of factual and fictional writings about the Pacific (1961). Burdick died in 1965 of a heart attack during a tennis match.

THIS story is nine-tenths true. The ninety-eight died, and they died in the circumstances which I depict. These facts are as accurate as the records of a military court-martial can make them. But no court-martial knows what goes on in the minds of ninety-eight men who lived the most isolated life of any prisoners of World War II. That must be the task of imagination.

Wake Island is a V-shaped atoll which rises about twelve feet above the water. The land above water is tiny, no more than two and a half square miles. It is also miserable—coral rubble and sand so porous that it will hold no fresh water. Few plants can live on such land, but the morning-glory vine, a shrub called desert magnolia, and a dwarf Buka tree supply patches of green color.

The open end of the V-shaped atoll is closed by a barrier reef. The great sea waves rage at the reef incessantly, and their booming can be heard over the entire atoll.

Wake is one of the most solitary islands in the world. It is no part of a friendly archipelago. The closest islands, and they are tiny, are far distant. It is thousands of miles from ports like Honolulu or Tokyo. There are no signs of Pacific peoples there, and there is nothing to stay a person—no water or vegetation or shelter. The water around Wake is an endless reach of virgin waves. They surge against Wake and then go on for thousands of miles more before touching land. It is lonely beyond the telling.

The waters immediately around the atoll and within the lagoon are magnificent. On the lee side of the island the water is utterly pellucid. One can see the details of a brain coral at a depth of over a hundred feet. In the lagoon and about the reef there is an abundance of barracuda, yellow tuna, mackerel, shark, and giant ray. On land the only living indigenous creatures are great swarms of birds, a multitude of small land crabs, and that is all. Rats have escaped from ships wrecked on the reefs of Wake and have grown huge and sleek. These living creatures, all of them, play an important part in the story.

Wake would be valueless, uninhabited, bleak and forgotten except for one thing: the airplane. Its very loneliness, its isolation in the midst of empty ocean, made it an invaluable piece of land. It provided a place where planes, to and from Asia, could land and fuel. It was also a place where the military apparatus of the United States could put an advanced outpost—not a strong outpost, for it was too small for that, but a sort of military eye to sweep the emptiness. It was an outpost that was necessarily without muscle. Even the mechanical ingenuity of Americans could do little with such a tiny area.

On the morning of December 8, 1941, Wake Island (it is across the international date line and in Pearl Harbor it was the morning of December 7) bustled with activity. A total of 516 servicemen and 1,216 civilians were at work. An airstrip had been laid out and was in primitive operating condition. The three small islands of the atoll, Peale, Wilkes, and Wake itself were jammed with dumps of ammunition, gasoline, unmounted guns, big water distilleries, small mountains of food. A Marine squadron of twelve F4-F wildcat fighters had just been flown into the island. The Pan American plane, the China Clipper, was at anchor in the lagoon. There was no aircraft detection apparatus of any kind on the island.

At 11:58, eighteen Japanese two-engine bombers, hidden by clouds and unheard because of the booming surf, barreled down on the island in power dives, dropped fragmentation bombs, made a long graceful curve in the sky, and came back to strafe.

It was the beginning of a short, bloody, and ferocious battle. On Christmas Eve, Colonel Devereux did what few Marines have ever been called upon to do. He left his command post with a white bag tied to a broom handle and began negotiations for the surrender of Wake. There was no humiliation in the surrender. The defenders had fought well. The Marine fliers, working under unbelievable difficulties and overwhelming odds, feverishly cannibalized each plane as it was destroyed, until their last plane was literally a mechanical mongrel made up of the parts of six other planes. Then it, too, was lost. The ground defenders fought off one Japanese assault force. The civilians tried to enlist in one or another of the Armed Forces, but were turned down for their own good. If they stayed civilians they would be treated as noncombatants. With a fine disregard for international law the civilians “attached” themselves to various units. They hauled ammunition, set up guns, fired them, dug trenches, fought fires, repaired planes, and died. But none of this could turn aside the inevitable. When the Japanese returned they returned in numbers so vast that the issue was never in doubt.

With the surrender, the Japanese faced a difficult choice. They were determined to build Wake into one link of a powerful chain of fortified islands from which they could continue their strikes eastward. The hundreds of Americans on the islands were merely a hindrance to this, and the Japanese decided to evacuate them as soon as possible. However, they also wished to use the equipment which the Americans had installed on the island. It was intricate and strange machinery. They needed American help to maintain it and they knew that.

The Japanese made a fateful choice. All of the American military personnel was to be evacuated and most of the civilians. The evacuees were sent to Shanghai and most of them survived the war. But one hundred Americans stayed behind.

Not one of the hundred selected Americans was alive after October 7, 1943. Two of them died ordinary deaths. One succumbed to septicemia and was buried. Another, a confirmed alcoholic, displayed great ingenuity in stealing liquor from the Japanese. The third time he was caught he was ordered to apologize and to agree never to steal alcohol again. With the strange lunatic courage of the absolute alcoholic, he looked his captors in the eye and refused. The next moment he was beheaded.

The remaining ninety-eight Americans were to die in one of the most eerie, lemminglike, mysterious, and courageous episodes of that or any other war. Or perhaps it was simple madness.

The Japanese, aided by the captive Americans, began an amazing fortification of Wake. Almost literally they dug deep into the coral and then pulled it over themselves. They built hundreds of coral and concrete pillboxes, underground magazines, and carefully dispersed command posts. Most of these were “bombproof” and were connected to one another by a complex pattern of tunnels and trenches.

Above ground they laid down a fantastic array of defenses. The entire length of the oceanside of the atoll was protected by huge tank traps. Seaward of the traps was a system of slit trenches with steel and concrete pillboxes scattered among them. At the very edge of the sea there was a low hummock of barbed-wire entanglements with land mines placed underneath them. The raised parts of the island bristled with cleverly concealed guns of every description. Anything that could be damaged was buried. Every jeep had its own revetment, every barrel of fuel was buried deep. The island was one vast honeycomb which housed 4,500 Japanese and their ninety-eight American helpers.

They busily dredged the channel between Wilkes and Wake to permit submarines and ships to enter the lagoon. They started to dredge a turning basin for submarines off Wilkes and a channel which would allow submarines to come alongside shoreside quays for replenishing and repairs.

But the Japanese had made a terrible strategic miscalculation. Their vast row of defenses, aimed at Australia and all of Oceania, was stopped short. Midway remained in American hands. Kwajalein and Eniwetok became available to American forces. Also American cruisers could lie safely out of range and lob shells onto the island. Wake became a “milk run.” Cruisers and battleships returning to Pearl Harbor emptied their magazines on the island. Task forces going west used Wake as a practice target, but were given careful instructions not to hinder the dredging of the submarine turning basin—it would be valuable when the Americans repossessed the island. In any case the American air cover over Wake was so intense that no Japanese sub could use the basin. In the midst of a holocaust of bombs and shells the dredge working the turning basin operated with perfect immunity. Carrier planes, and later land-based planes, were almost constantly overhead. It soon became impossible to reinforce or supply Wake by surface vessels. Instead of being a redoubt in a massive defense line, Wake had become an isolated and tortured island, under continuous siege.

The last attempt at surface reinforcement came in 1943. The
Suwa Maru
of ten thousand tons came to Wake with supplies. A patrolling American submarine torpedoed her twice just as she came to her moorings. In desperation, her skipper ran her onto the reef, where her rusty carcass can be seen today. Now for long months and then years the empty horizon around Wake was broken only by hostile ships which came in quietly but brazenly, lobbed in their devastating bombardments, and then vanished.

The ninety-eight Americans were, under the circumstances, given remarkably good treatment. The Japanese, knowing that they were essential for the maintenance of the island’s intricate communication and distilling systems, gave them better rations than the Japanese soldiers received. Even so, the ninety-eight lived in a queer and dreamlike world. In those scattered hours when it was possible to be above ground they worked for the Japanese to repair bomb and shell damage. At night they crowded back into their two shelters and talked. They were all highly skilled craftsmen, and it is safe to assume that their intelligence was a cut or two above average.

What do men do in such utter isolation? They talk, they conspire, they form cliques, they engage in irritable arguments, and they exchange rumors. Indeed, rumors become the staff of their psychic life. This is true of all prisons and concentration camps. But most prisoners, by one means or another, have a contact with the outside world. Even in the most closely guarded of Nazi concentration camps, there were clandestine radios and fairly accurate reports of what was happening on the “outside.” Guards could be bribed for information, the progress of the war could be charted, escape committees could be formed, hope could be nourished. But on Wake there was not the slightest possibility of contact with the outside. The Americans did not speak Japanese, and the Japanese themselves had only the most meager radio contact with Japan. There was also the stunning and always present realization that they were surrounded by hundreds of miles of open sea. The Pacific, the sheer immense bulk of water, was their most efficient guard, kept them in the most perfect isolation. The Japanese knew this too, and the actual guard maintained over the prisoners was slight.