Ship of Ghosts (47 page)

Starting with just six names, Hodge would network aggressively among the community of USS
Houston
family members. As news about prisoners reached Washington via the International Red Cross in Switzerland, he collated it all, pursuing every conceivable link between shipmates as he found them, triangulating offhand mentions of this sailor’s “buddy” or that one’s “pal,” contacting families with sons in the same division or with similar ratings to determine whether they knew who that buddy might be. Through the good offices of his congressman, Sen. Guy Cordon (R-Ore.), he tried to get the Navy to release the ship’s roster. He was tireless, and even though he failed to determine whether his own brother had survived, the work gave him something to do with his days besides worry.

The experience filled Fred Hodge with disgust at the dilatory and opaque state of the Navy’s bureaucracy. Agents from the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI, concerned that he might be running some kind of perverse con game on bereaved families, investigated his activities. Hodge used the results of the investigation, which cleared him of any suspicion, to encourage recalcitrant families to cooperate with him. He saved his anger for the Navy Department’s stubborn refusal to provide a crew list. When the Navy wrote Senator Cordon that a final list of officers and crew killed in action had not been compiled, Hodge wrote to his constituency of
Houston
kin, “Such a statement is either a deliberate evasion or further proof that the Navy Department has returned to its Pearl Harbor status wherein one department wasn’t supposed to know what went on in another department.” Nevertheless, Fred Hodge, as champion of the
Houston
families’ interests a generation before the Freedom of Information Act went to its first legislative committee, did immeasurable good. As a journalist would write after the war, “It is impossible to estimate the value of Mr. Hodge’s work to home morale. There are thousands of questions in the minds of relatives who have heard nothing beyond the ‘missing in action’ announcement by the navy.” Such was a brother’s love that it could embrace the entire family of the ship and endure long past the time that he learned that
Lieutenant Hodge, once spotted alive and well and in command of a life raft drifting in Sunda Strait, had never been seen again.

Edith Rooks remembered her husband’s portentous farewell in Honolulu. “One thing that has always discouraged me in counting too much on Harold’s being a prisoner,” she wrote Admiral Hart, “is that before he left me he urged me to accept the fact that the
Houston
would be one of the first ships to fight the Japs and that if I heard it was sunk to remember that literally he would be the last man to leave the ship.”

It galled her that she couldn’t find anyone with first-hand knowledge of the
Houston
and the fate of its captain. On December 7, 1942, she had received a letter from the War Department’s Office of the Provost Marshal General stating that the International Red Cross had officially confirmed through interviews with
Houston
officers in captivity that her husband was presumed dead. When she pressed for details about this “official” information she received a reply that epitomized bureaucratic incompetence. It urged her to hope that the Merchant Marine would soon be able to reveal more about the loss of the “SS
Houston
.”

Admiral Hart, in Washington, kept up a heroic correspondence that cultivated Edith’s hope even as it eased her toward acceptance of her husband’s loss. But as she learned of the Navy’s halting progress in investigating rumors concerning her husband, the uncertainty took a toll on her. Hart had shared a hopeful rumor, mentioned in a letter from Lt. Joseph Dalton, placing Captain Rooks in Formosa. He realized that he might have stoked her hopes too vigorously. On May 5 he wrote.

In this letter he went further, dispensing once and for all with the tortuous hopes that the both of them had held open for the
Houston
’s commanding officer.

Yet Edith’s response to Hart’s attempt to close the door on hope just pushed her the other way on the seesaw of denial. In the same letter in which she mentioned settling her husband’s affairs, apparently convinced of the finality of his loss, she also wrote, “I must say more and more I feel the promise of Harold’s death seems based on flimsy proof.”

In May 1943, the Navy’s first prisoner list named 1,044 men held by the Japanese. The report at once kindled hope and sowed doubt. There were survivors. But only seven from the
Houston
were named. Family members joined all their countrymen in wondering about the survivors from the U.S. Asiatic Fleet’s flagship. But they would not get the whole story until a disastrous world war had been set right and won.

T
he Pacific Ocean’s vastness was an irreducible impediment to planning, to communications, to every measure of effectiveness given to man and to machine. If the entire European combat theater was a triangle of land and sea formed by lines connecting Murmansk, Gibraltar, and Tobruk, six such triangles could fit like puzzle pieces inside that portion of the Pacific within which America and Japan fought. One story in particular brought home the gulf of distance that separated the men from their home and the inscrutable way that fate at least occasionally allowed some news through.

Grievously wounded when the
Houston
was sunk, Lt. (jg) Francis B. Weiler had died of his wounds on March 26, 1942, at a small Dutch hospital near Pandeglang after guiding his raft of survivors ashore. Less than one year later, a Marine courier showed up at the home of Dr. and Mrs. George Weiler, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to give them their lost son’s U.S. Naval Academy class ring.

Entrusted by Lieutenant Weiler to a Dutch nurse just before he died, it found its way to a Dutch doctor, who surrendered it to a Japanese officer, presumably at the Pandeglang hospital. It should have remained an untraceable loss, like any of the million other
workaday lootings perpetrated by victors on the vanquished. Except Lieutenant Weiler’s ring was different.

A world away, eight months later, U.S. Marines were in the fight of their lives on Guadalcanal. In the midst of a firefight, a Marine captain named Gordon Gayle was approached by a party of stretcher bearers, one of whom handed him a Naval Academy ring, saying it had been taken from a dead Japanese soldier. The Marines must have figured a Naval Academy graduate such as Captain Gayle would know what to do with the keepsake, and they were right. Looking at the ring later, Gayle saw the engraved name of Francis B. Weiler, his Annapolis classmate and the chairman of the class ring committee.

Gayle gave the ring to an artillery officer, a Captain Swisher, who was due to return to Henderson Field. Gayle asked him to get the ring to the division quartermaster so it could be returned to the States. But before Swisher could leave for the rear area, he got new orders to go to the front and spot artillery for an Army infantry unit in the thick of the fight. Swisher probably never heard the scream of the mortar round that killed him.

The ring passed next to an Army private named Charles Stimmel, a radio specialist with the 164th Infantry Regiment, the unit that Captain Swisher had gone to help. When Stimmel in turn was mortally wounded by shrapnel, on November 23, 1942, his dying request, made to his closest battlefield friend, was to return all his personal effects, which included the Naval Academy ring, to his parents in North Dakota. That is how by March 1943 the ring had made its way through the hands of nine different people, over 3,000 miles of ocean to Guadalcanal, and across another 5,500 miles to the Weiler household in a suburb north of Philadelphia.

I
f Fran Weiler’s ring could find its way home, there had to be hope for a prisoner of war, even one in the middle of the monsoon at Hintok Mountain Camp who had every good reason to abandon hope.

“There has got to be another way out, if we are to live,” wrote Ray Parkin, survivor of the HMAS
Perth,
who was gifted with an extraordinary ability to rise above his circumstances. “I am believing, more and more, in my Psychic Inductance theory. I am trying to find out how many vitamins there are in beauty. I am beginning to understand, as a purely factual statement,
man shall not live by bread alone
.
The bush is full of ‘every word of God.’ I think, perhaps, that faith and hope are a couple of unclassified vitamins. I don’t mean faith in any dogma—but in what I see in the life of the heart of the bush.”

Though the imperturbable teak forest was itself unmoved by human struggle, it had enough heart to inspire poetry by Kipling and even bring a man on the edge of death to a naturalist’s reverie. Even as it tried to kill him, Ray Parkin was enthralled by the wilderness all around him, by the cool blue-green bamboo, by the slapping wings of Asiatic nightjars and hornbills, by the swarms of brownish butterflies, by “hooded lilies, several iris-like orchids, wild ginger, and banana (which bears no edible fruit), clumps of orchids in the branches of trees like corsages of yellow jonquils. There are waves of perfume in the bush which we sometimes walk into. Cinnamon, chocolate, and one honey-sweet like clematis. Sometimes the early morning dew on the dry bamboo leaves smells like the Australian bush—or is it just nostalgia?”

Parkin’s “unclassified vitamins” were all around him, and his obsession to catalog them was the kind of force that gave a man a reason to stay alive. “Vines are leaping with bright new green leaves a foot or so across. They are heart-shaped—some are like two hearts alongside each other. Trees are blossoming. One purple like lilac, and growing like a giant ti-tree…. There are more bird calls; monkeys call like Swannee whistles—flutelike on a slurred scale. All nature moves and has its being, and we seem to sit on it like a scab.”

John Wisecup or Charley Pryor or Red Huffman or Lanson Harris wouldn’t have waxed poetic about Death Railway flora even if it had blossomed in their hair, hauled them aloft with the winds, and winged them clear to Pearl Harbor. They found strength in other things. Most mornings, before they began a new day of labor, Wisecup, Gordon, and the rest of the men at Hintok Mountain Camp awoke to the commotion of baboons, savage and frightening, making a racket on the cliff top southwest of the camp. The men had the idea now and then to hunt one for dinner, but few such plans survived the first sight of the savage animals. They settled for less-dangerous prey. Cobras offered pinkish meat that tasted like fish or chicken. A four-foot iguana was a delicacy.

As bad as the diseases in the mountain camps were, tropical ulcers were dreaded more. Slow, decaying killers, they started with a breach in the body’s outer defenses—a small cut from a saw blade, a nick from a flying fragment of rock—and in time were gnarled
caverns of necrotizing flesh. “The thing eats faster than a cancer can even think of eating,” Charley Pryor said. Swelling out and turning up at the edges, the wound unfailingly drew a cloud of blowflies seeking a chance to lay eggs. The only remedy Pryor used was boiling water. It was too hot to touch, but it felt fine on the ulcer. He spent every free minute pouring it over a rag spread over his wound.

Some put maggots into the wounds to eat away the dead flesh. In Burma, the medical staff in Branch Five tore blue cloth from mosquito netting and used it as bandaging. But natural healing was nearly impossible under the circumstances. The best treatment involved outright removal of the gangrenous tendons and muscle—Dr. Henri Hekking favored curettage with a sharpened mess-kit spoon—followed if possible by local treatment with phenol or Lysol and a sprinkling of iodoform powder. His orderly, Slug Wright of the Lost Battalion, called this “the dry method.” It used no water, no soap, no ointment, no mud. You scraped and you sealed and counted on healthy flesh to scab over and heal by itself. Progress was evident after just three or four days. A man usually didn’t survive amputation. Dr. Hekking did not lose a man to a tropical ulcer.

One day when John Wisecup was working at the Hellfire Pass cutting site, the Japanese engineers detonated a load of TNT unannounced and caught him in a crossfire of limestone chips. He expected the wound to heal, but it festered and grew. There were good medical people around, but at Hintok they had nothing to work with, not even bandages. Wisecup covered his ulcer with mud and washed it with a hot salt-and-water solution. More ulcers opened up on his feet and legs, then beriberi swelled his belly to the point that the several-mile walk out to Hellfire Pass was too much to take. He was put on light duty: digging pits. The dying buried the dead, most of their graves unmarked. Fighting through roots and mud, Wisecup and Crayton Gordon put as many as seventeen men in a single flooded hole.