Ship of Ghosts (34 page)

A
t Bicycle Camp, suspicions flourished—along with budding resentment—that the officers of the 131st were keeping a stash of money for their own benefit. The rumors were correct. The officers had a bankroll of $150,000 intended for supplies and payroll. The Japanese never confiscated it. They allowed the artillery officers to
buy food in native markets outside camp, supplementing the modest pay the Japanese gave the soldiers for working: 25 sen per day for officers, 15 for noncoms, and 10 for enlisted men.
*
The men seized the opportunity to buy tins of corned beef, pinto beans, meats, fruits, sweetened condensed milk—especially prized for its concentrated calorie content—coffee, tea, and sugar. The twice-daily main course of rice got a little more interesting with some spicing up.

The inequality led to grumbling, and an every-man-for-himself attitude was festering. The resentment grew intense enough that the 131st’s noncoms designated Master Sgt. E. E. Shaw to take the complaint to the officers. When Shaw threatened to pursue the issue after the war, he was summarily court-martialed and busted to private for thirty days. Maj. Windy Rogers intervened to keep his punishment from being worse. But the confrontation had its intended effect. Thereafter the funds were used to benefit all Americans in Bicycle Camp. They ate well for the duration of their stay there. And despite the near rebellion, a number of officers—most notably Major Rogers, Capt. Samuel H. Lumpkin, Capt. Ira Fowler, and Lt. Jimmy Lattimore—won the wholehearted respect of the enlisted men. Prisoners of other nationalities noticed the Americans’ inexplicable wealth and took to selling their own hoarded provisions to them. The Australians were usually able to charge a considerable premium and in this way the lifesaving wealth trickled down.

The source of the money was an officer who remained something of a mystery to the men in the camp, 2nd Lt. Roy E. Stensland. He was a Los Angeles native and a West Point man, a member of a team of carefully selected junior officers dispatched to the Dutch East Indies by General MacArthur’s headquarters to buy food and charter vessels to supply the Philippines through the Japanese blockade. Stensland went to Makassar with an 800,000-guilder letter of credit, but once the Japanese encroachment made it impossible to requisition ships to break the blockade, the mission dissolved and Stensland fell in with the 131st.

A well-funded liaison role was unusual for a second lieutenant, but Stensland was no usual officer. He rated in the top one percent
on the Army’s scale for resourcefulness. More than a little hairy, with a thick frame and long arms, he was fearless and intimidating. “He’d remind you of a damn gorilla walking down the road,” said Marvin Robinson. “I mean, that’s his appearance. But he was all man.” The Japanese called him “King Kong.” His fellows in the 131st called him “Mr. Bear.”

More intriguing than Stensland’s physical stature was the fact that he seemed to live in an alternative dimension where the usual rules of offense and consequence did not apply. He liked the booze, but his drinking took nothing from him. He took from it. It seemed to give him strength and superabundant willpower. When a guard came down on a prisoner it was often Stensland who stepped in and took the beating. He was good at staying on his feet. Reportedly the Japanese guards even invited Stensland to drink with them on occasion. Once they allowed him to hunt pigs with them, although that time, reportedly, Stensland himself became the target of a few rifle shots. But nothing ever touched him while he was out front spotting artillery fire against the Japanese on Java. Why would a rifle shot from a drunken guard perform any better?

One day as he was heading to work on a dockyard
kumi
—he was one of the few officers regularly to do so—Stensland witnessed a Japanese guard beating a Dutch woman. She had ridden her bicycle to the camp that afternoon, stopping by the fence and holding high some bananas as an offering. Seeing this, the guard rushed her from behind and struck her. She toppled off the bicycle and hit the ground. “Lieutenant Stensland, before you knew what was happening, was over there, and he knocked that Jap down,” Lester Rasbury of the 131st said. “The Jap went one way, and the rifle the other. The lieutenant helped the lady up, and, boy, that Jap picked up his rifle and ran. He got out of there, and he didn’t do anything about it. It scared him, I think.”

“I thought he was a dead man,” said the Lost Battalion’s Houston “Slug” Wright. “He came out of it because that Japanese was afraid to go to his superiors and say that an American beat him up. He was lucky as the dickens, and that wasn’t the only time that he walked right into a situation and told the Japanese what they could do and walked away from it. If it would have been me, they would have killed me, but old Stensland was the type of man that had more courage and guts than anybody that I have ever seen.”

What seemed to distinguish Lieutenant Stensland from Sergeant Dupler—at least what may begin to explain the diverging reactions the Japanese had to the two courageous leaders—may have been that Stensland had a little of Pack Rat McCone in him: a raging mind, mercury in the blood, and a visible unconcern with the personal consequences of rebellion.

I
n June, the spirit of the Japanese darkened, and Jess Stanbrough, Jerry Bunch, and others in the secret radio news circle were first to figure out why. There had been a terrible collision between the American and Japanese aircraft carrier fleets. From the sound of it, the battle—fought near Midway Island, alarmingly close to Honolulu—dwarfed the Battle of the Coral Sea fought thirty days earlier. Something big had happened. A decisive battle had been won. But one didn’t need a radio to know that something had displeased and disturbed the guards.

A prisoner had to keep his optimism closely guarded, like a secret straight flush. Their heightened energies seemed to draw directly from the reserves of their captors. Ens. John Nelson let his exuberance get the better of him when a Japanese guard tried to taunt him about the progress of the war. “This one day we were on a working party,” said Lloyd Willey, “and Ensign Nelson was with us. This one Jap guard was sitting down with a stick in the dirt. He said, ‘San Francisco—
boom boom boom boom!
New York—
boom boom boom boom!
’” Nelson, who was plugged in to the latest news courtesy of KGEI and had heard of Jimmy Doolittle’s April raid on Japan, wasn’t buying it. Willey said, “Nelson listened for a while, and then he said, ‘Tokyo—
boom boom boom boom!
’ That made the guard suspicious. He
said. ‘Radio? You have radio?’” There were innocent denials all around. The Japanese searched the barracks but did not turn up the radio.

If your ego got the better of you, if you gave in to the urge to fight back, you could get yourself—or worse, somebody else—killed. The Japanese said they would execute ten men for every man who tried to escape. That was at the heart of the moral dilemma that plagued the prisoners. U.S. military regulation imposed a duty to attempt to escape, and the Geneva Convention recognized that duty. Yet they were held by an enemy who believed in mass reprisals and punishment by proxy. Because only the seniormost officers appreciated these legalities, the enlisted POWs were often bewildered to find their officers variously encouraging and forbidding escape. On June 14, the Japanese solved the ambiguity for their Bicycle Camp guests when they gave the officers a legal document to sign.

It was a pledge not to escape. It read in part, “I will obey all orders from the Japanese.” According to Ensign Smith, “We refused to sign this document and nothing more was heard of it for a short time.” Lieutenant Hamlin tried to negotiate the language of the pledge to eliminate its conflict with American military law, which required prisoners to attempt escape. To the phrase “I will obey all orders from the Japanese” he proposed adding, “insofar as they are not contrary to my oath of allegiance to the United States.” If it was a labor negotiation, management held all the cards. The Japanese were going to have things their way.

Shortly after the no-escape pledge was foisted upon the prisoners, they got the opportunity to take their subversive radio arts to new levels, not merely to receive news but to make it, to go international, to broadcast word of their survival to a nation that still wondered at their fate. One day the Japanese invited Allied officers to write letters and read them over Batavia’s Japanese-controlled shortwave radio. Ever suspicious of propaganda, they refused, at least until cooler heads realized it might be a way to send word home and reassure family that there had been plenty of survivors of Java’s collapse.

It fell to the Australian broadcast veteran Rohan Rivett to go to the Batavia studio each day to read a letter over the air. The first was written by an Australian army captain. The second correspondent, another Australian captain, described Bicycle Camp’s conditions as “comparable to those of Dudley Flats.” The Japanese, believing the reference to Melbourne’s slum was a compliment, permitted the
broadcast to go out. Quickly enough Rivett realized the value of the tool he had been given. On June 20 his own turn came and he sent the following broadcast, intended not to detail the fates of the
Perth
and the
Houston
but to offer the first indication of the damage they had inflicted and to narrate the path the ships’ survivors had taken through Serang to the Batavia compound.

According to Rivett, “From first to last perhaps a hundred men of all ranks and nationalities had letters broadcast, while at the same time the Japanese were also transmitting the names of all those in the camp at a rate of twenty-five names every two days. It was a painfully slow business, but it was better than nothing, and those of us whose names were sent home were much luckier than tens of thousands of others in Japanese hands, whose people did not hear that they were prisoners until late in 1943.”

The broadcasts soon rippled on American shores. In early July, the mystery of Captain Rooks’s fate became what in 1942 must have passed for a minor media event. Japanese-controlled Batavia radio broadcast Rivett’s first message, stating that a thousand survivors of the
Houston
and
Perth
were at a former army barracks at Batavia. The media began focusing on the question of the survivors of the USS
Houston
and its captain. Edith Rooks seemed able to withstand it. Speaking with reporters, she never sank into despair or pity. She only ever spoke of her admiration for her husband and her pride that her son was following in the bright wake of the Rooks family naval tradition. She would circulate widely in wartime Seattle, sponsoring the launchings of new warships out at the shipyard, working with
Navy Relief, and staying current with the traumas and bereavements in the network of Navy women around her. She was direct and brutally frank in discussing with her fellow war wives the pain that attended the long absences and occasional losses, confronting things no one wanted to talk about, and cleansing dark thoughts by exposing them to the light and air of forthright discussion. She was like a latter-day Unsinkable Molly Brown, steady and stalwart in the face of tragedy, headstrong as her ship began to sink. She had a rare ability to confront the worst in life without flinching and wrestle it to the ground. It was, after a fashion, a way of coping.

The War Department had duly notified the parents of soldiers in the 131st Field Artillery that their sons were missing. Drawn tight as a community in grief, they began meeting for mutual support. The battalion’s five batteries were pulled from tiny towns throughout north-central Texas. Their sons might be lost, but the families had found each other.

Sgt. Crayton Gordon’s mother wrote the
Ft. Worth Star-Telegram,
“I know many of the boys who are now in Java and particularly do I remember Sergeants Billy Joe Mallard and Wade H. Webb, both of Hillsboro. I was closely associated with these young men of the ‘Lost Battalion.’ I know the ability of those boys and know that they can meet whatever faces them like men. I am proud of the boys and of their brave parents.” Reportedly it was a
Star-Telegram
writer who coined the nickname “the Lost Battalion.” It stuck fast enough and became nearly official.

Until they became un-lost, the families would make do. The mother of Frank Fujita, a sergeant with the Lost Battalion who happened to be Japanese American, bucked up her courage and wrote a letter to the
Abilene Reporter News,
published in October 1942.