Ship of Ghosts (30 page)

It wasn’t a long trip. The trucks drove them some sixty miles to Java’s capital city, Batavia. A Dutch installation there, known as “Bicycle Camp,” had been the headquarters of the colonial army’s Tenth Battalion, a unit of bicycle troops, before General Imamura’s troops seized it and turned it into a prison. The trucks passed through the gate and unloaded the prisoners along the long macadam road running straight through the camp. On either side of the entrance road, long barracks stretched a hundred yards or more, separate ones for the Dutch, Australian, British, and Americans. Constructed from concrete blocks, the barracks had smart red tile roofs and porches running the length of them on both sides. The sleeping quarters inside had no bunks as such. Prisoners slept on bamboo platforms that lined either wall. The barracks were subdivided into cubicles, each holding five or six men. Though the compound was ringed with concertina wire, it was full of relative luxuries such as running water and sewers. After the squalor of Serang, Lloyd Willey thought Bicycle Camp “looked like the Hilton.” About five thousand Allied prisoners of war would call it home in the summer of 1942.

For the
Houston
’s seasoned crew, it was boot camp all over again. Whenever a guard walked into the camp area, which they did day and night, the first man to see him shouted “
Kiotsuke
”—attention! “The whole camp froze,” said Jim Gee. “You stood like statues. Rank didn’t make a bit of difference. As long as you were a prisoner, you froze. And if the Japs saw you move, if you were a hundred yards away and you moved, you kicked something, or you picked up something, boy he’d walk directly to you and knock you right down with the butt of his rifle or do whatever he wanted to.”

Several times a day, whenever a Japanese officer saw fit, muster
was called. Whenever
tenkos
were ordered, the prisoners counted off—“
Ichi, ni, san, shi, go
…” If a guard came within forty feet, a crisp, forty-five-degree bow was required, arms straight at the sides. The slightest failure—of posture, of appearance, of obedience to the babel of commands—brought a swift blow to the head by open hand, fist, stick, or rifle butt. The prisoners adopted the British term for this abuse, “bashings.”

It was no special form of torture. It was standard treatment in the Imperial Army, which routinely enforced discipline through physical abuse, humiliation, and corporal punishment. Though the Japanese had little regard for an enemy who surrendered—the Japanese army’s interpretation of the code of Bushido gave no such option to the emperor’s troops—the bashings were little different from what they gave their own troops. In the Imperial Army pecking order, the beatings flowed downhill from the sergeants to corporals to the several levels of privates, to the Korean conscripts, and finally to the prisoners. “When a guy got out of line, they didn’t bawl him out. He had to stand at attention, and they belted the piss out of him,” said John Wisecup. “Officers did it to one another, so they did it to us, only more so.”

Many of the Japanese noncoms initially at Bicycle Camp were first-team combat veterans with years of experience in Manchuria and China. Though their odd split-toed
tabi
sneakers and oversized uniforms struck the Americans as comical, their prowess was evident enough. “They were hard cases,” said Wisecup. The front-line troops, who temporarily administered the camps until combat operations ended, were tough, disciplined, occasionally brutal, and every so often surprisingly humane. “They were looking for a soft billet,” said
Houston
sailor George Detre. “They just wouldn’t bother you unless they had to.” Later, when rear-echelon support troops arrived and Korean conscripts were given charge over the prisoners, the treatment would grow much worse.

The only reliable way to avoid a bashing was to will yourself into the woodwork. Taller guys had a hard time being inconspicuous, and because the Japanese and later Korean guards seemed sensitive to the racial height disparity, taller prisoners were often made to stand in pits or sink to their knees so the guards could knock them around. The Marines, chosen for Asiatic Fleet service in part for their stature, paid a price for their genetic blessings. John Wisecup was an imposing specimen, long and lean, with a squint of New Orleans
character in his looks. Jim Gee stood six foot three, one of the better boxers in the fleet, nicknamed “Caribou” for the size of his frame. According to Gee, “Some of them were so short that when they’d start to hit you with their fists you could sort of straighten up and miss it. And that would make them mad! Oh, they’d get mad when you’d do that! And so once, being a tall person, one of them was so little that I could miss his slap every time he’d try it. So he marched me over to a building, and he stood upon the porch, and I stood down on the ground, and he literally slapped me back and forth until I decided, ‘I really shouldn’t do that anymore. I’ll just let him hit me once or twice next time and miss the rest of it.’”

The worst thing a prisoner could do while under assault, short of retaliating, was to fall down. “You did your damnedest to hold your feet, and you did your damnedest to hold in any kind of a groan or anything like that,” said Seldon Reese. They learned to stand and take it. “After a while, hell, a bashing didn’t mean nothing to you,” said Wisecup. “Christ, it was a way of life.”

Amid the daily grind at Bicycle Camp, local Dutch women appeared outside the barbed wire from time to time, riding by on bikes, flashing the prisoners a V for victory, cheering them on, sometimes offering them food, soap, sugar, or news. This incensed the Japanese, who more than once knocked the women off their bikes and beat them on the ground. The prisoners learned to dread the women’s friendly gestures, knowing the likely reaction from the guards. But their courage was inspiring. “I must say that if they were fighting the war, it might have turned out differently,” said Jim Gee. “The women and the kids had more intestinal fortitude than any group of people that I have ever seen or know of.”

The guards’ conduct confirmed the basest Western stereotypes of the Japanese even as it shocked them with its brutality. “The Japanese soldier placed great emphasis on his masculinity, lowering his voice several notches by force to make it sound deeper, meaner, and harsher,” Howard Charles would write. “He strutted, pulling the corners of his mouth down like an actor in a Kabuki play. He appeared to engineer his anger, starting at one level and building his rage to the point of explosion. If you never hated before, you did now. But you could not let it show, if you wanted to live.”

Other guards showed kindness and generosity to their captives. A three-star private nicknamed Smiley professed to be a Christian and said that he had a brother who lived in the Sacramento Valley in
California. “I’ll always thank some good Christian missionary, I guess, for his work with this individual,” said Charley Pryor. “This old boy had a mouthful of gold teeth. He opened his mouth, and it looked like the sun coming up.” His time in the States seemed to dispose him kindly to his prisoners. “At nighttime you’d hear some noise around your cell door, and there’d be a little tin of water he slid under the door or maybe a tin of rice that he had taken from the natives’ kitchen,” Pryor said. But such behavior was exceptional. Once in a while, a prisoner would start to feel his oats a little too fully, bringing a reprisal that reasserted powerfully who was in charge.

One day at Bicycle Camp a guard was hollering at a big Australian kid, who couldn’t understand what was being demanded of him. The guard slapped him. The Australian reared back and struck the guard right in the jaw, knocking him back several steps. “All these other Jap guards rushed out immediately, and they started beating on this Australian,” Lloyd Willey said. “They beat him all afternoon. They made him stand at attention, and anytime that he dropped down, they’d go out and beat him some more. That lasted almost three days, until he just laid on the ground. He was practically dead, and then they started kicking him until he was dead. Then they tied a rope around his ankles, and they pulled him up and down every street in Bicycle Camp.” They called the Allied officers over. “‘This man died an easy death compared to what the next man will get who hits a Japanese guard.’”

I
n the deprived conditions at Bicycle Camp, hygiene was difficult to practice. An outbreak of dysentery at Serang had left hundreds of men unable to crawl to the latrine. A few days after the officers’ departure to Japan on April 8, Marine Pvt. Donald W. Hill, removed to the courtyard outside the Serang theater, died of the disease. He couldn’t stomach the food the Japanese were serving. According to Marvin Robinson, Hill “willed himself to die” by repeating these words as his dysentery drained him:
“This is not the way my mother made bread.…”

The
Houston
sailors had long ago adjusted their constitutions to resist the contagions of Asiatic Fleet service. Sudden sicknesses were liable to wash over the crew at any moment. Once, before war broke out, the ship’s sick bay became so overcrowded that the Marines had to be evicted from their berthing area to make room for the ill. They got savvy to the ways sickness spread, controlling contagions by careful hygiene, requiring coffee be drunk from disposable paper cups.

Though an enterprising Marine sergeant had procured a showerhead down at the Batavia docks and converted the rudimentary plumbing in the Navy barracks into showers, dysentery and malaria were rife. To combat them, the Japanese gave prisoners access to the
camp hospital, where medical officers and pharmacist’s mates worked as staff. The
Houston
’s entire medical department, including its two doctors, Commander Epstein and Lieutenant Burroughs, and pharmacist’s mates Al Kopp, Eugene Orth, Raymond Day, Griff Douglas, and Lowell W. Swartz, worked there. Proper medicine was unavailable. They had lab dyes, slides, and cover glasses but no microscope. One day, Burroughs cajoled a Japanese optometrist into finding them a new microscope. In the morning he smuggled in a 1920 vintage Himmler model.

But when disease came, their defenses were unprepared. John Wisecup fell ill with bacillary dysentery and then its amoebic cousin. He came close to death. Passing blood and growing anemic, he dropped thirty pounds from his normal weight of 175. “This stuff is just like a knife in your guts,” he said. “The smell of any kind of chow made me sick.” Not treatment by charcoal solution nor rice soup or salts cured him. “I was a walking wreck. People wouldn’t even come near me…. I could see them looking at me: ‘Jesus! This son-of-a-bitch is going to die!’ You know, I looked that bad.”

The worst case belonged to the senior surviving line officer from the
Houston
, Lt. Russell R. Ross. They called him “Rosie.” He had contracted a case of bacillary dysentery that defied the best work of the men at Bicycle Camp’s hospital. Hamlin repeatedly asked the camp commander, a lieutenant named Suzuki, to allow him to go to Batavia to buy medicine, where there was known to be an ample supply. The Japanese refused. According to Hamlin, “Finally a British colonel interceded and told the Japs it would be plain murder if they did not permit the purchase of medicine for Lt. Ross and an Australian soldier who was also critically ill.” The medicine was delivered, but it arrived too late. Ross died on May 5, the Australian a day or two later.

According to John Wisecup, Ross could not seem to summon the will to live in captivity. “He gave up a long time ago,” Wisecup said. “This guy was an overaged lieutenant. He was in his thirties and was a very moody type of guy.” Senior officers, who usually had the best access to information and were well suited to evaluate it, could be the most despondent prisoners in the camp. Commander Epstein succumbed to the despair that education and knowledge sometimes brought. According to Al Kopp, where others with more hopeful outlooks managed to work their way through the most difficult days on naive faith, Epstein, though well loved by the sailors, who could
be his sons, became mired in pessimism. Thus, when Lieutenant Ross died, it was another lieutenant, a Naval Academy man and a line officer, who ascended to lead the
Houston
contingent. Having shown his mettle trying to save Ross from contagion, the man who helped bury him, Lt. Harold S. Hamlin, took over as commander of the Navy company.

With the
Houston
’s other senior officers pulled away and shipped to Japan, and with the officers left in camp housed in separate quarters, Hamlin feared the enlisted men would dissociate without the officers there to lead them. He thought they might conclude that they were “all in this together on an equal footing.” Such egalitarianism was unacceptable to Hamlin. He worried that small acts of rebellion unconscionable on a Navy ship were becoming everyday occurrences. Enlisted men stole from the waterfront. Some dispensed with saluting and used first names or nicknames with officers. John Wisecup, a gifted cartoonist who was as ruthless with the sketch pad as he was with mouth and fists, lampooned one and all with his illustrated satires of camp life. He resisted the temptation to spoof the camp guards only at the behest of shipmates with a surer sense of self-preservation. As useful as this leveling idea might have been from a survivalist’s perspective—and as useful as it would occasionally prove later, when life got worse—there was value in hierarchy and internal accountability. Prison morale grew from the sense of order and structure that the captives built independent of that which the Japanese imposed upon them. It helped them keep their dignity and thus built a foundation for survival.

Lieutenant Hamlin called several meetings of his men and, quoting Navy regulations from memory, reminded them that the authority of officers extended beyond the hull of the ship. “Generally speaking,” he wrote, “petty officers behaved splendidly in this respect and after I had held ‘Captain’s Mast’ and assigned extra duties as punishment, discipline returned to normal.”

According to Hamlin, “Organization was kept in every way as similar to normal Naval organization as the circumstances would permit.” The group was subdivided into divisions commanded by an officer assisted by a chief petty officer. Lt. (jg) Leon W. Rogers was appointed executive officer. The supply officer, Ens. Preston R. Clark, assisted in the preparation and distribution of food. The third senior officer, Ens. J. M. Hamill, was appointed first lieutenant and, assisted by the carpenter, was in charge of the upkeep and cleanliness
of the barracks. The medical department was under Commander Epstein. Hamlin arranged for a rotating schedule of daily watches and installed two yeomen, John C. Reas and John A. Harrell, in a Japanese-equipped office to compile personal records. They kept one copy for their captors and another, secretly, for themselves.