Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [104]
When the Japanese driver returned, the sailors were rewarded first by the epithets the horrified soldier hurled at himself—translated loosely: “You dumb bastard! Where’s your truck?”—then by the reaction of his superior, a sergeant, who received the missing vehicle report. A festival of brutality ensued as first a private and then a corporal appeared. Each heard the sergeant’s story and each beat the driver in turn. When they looked around and failed to find the truck, the sergeant was forced to tell the camp commandant, Lieutenant Suzuki, who came over, lined the four of them up—driver, private, corporal, and sergeant—and hammered his doubled-up fists over the top of each head. Suzuki searched for the vehicle himself, at one point pausing and resting a hand on the bed of the very vehicle he was seeking, so thoroughly stripped as to be unrecognizable. Watching from the bamboo, Feliz, McCone, and the other Americans were “just choking ourselves to keep from laughing,” Jack Feliz said. They were relieved the officer hadn’t touched the hot radiator.
As audacious as he was, McCone was bound to get caught every now and then. Once he was collared borrowing a quart of Scotch from the docks. The guards knocked him to the ground and beat him with a bamboo stick, then made him kneel in the gravel with a thick bamboo pole wedged in the pit of his knees. He knelt in that gravel for some six hours with a sign around his neck that said: “This man stole many things.” For about three days afterward, he could hardly walk. “He was the type of guy that could actually get you in trouble because somewhere, built in with him, Pack Rat had to steal something,” said Marvin Robinson. “And I think he honestly stole it with the intentions of getting caught.” Maybe he had something to prove. The Japanese worked on Pack Rat, then and on other occasions, but they never seemed to get to him. His resourcefulness and guile existed on a plane far removed from the one where beatings mattered.
CHAPTER 30
You took your chances challenging a system as rigidly hierarchical and ruthless as the Japanese Army. Most of the Americans found the courage on occasion to try. A successful challenge, either public or covert, could inspire. A failed one often stood as a morale-crushing cautionary fable.
In their dual accountability to the Japanese on one hand and to their own men on the other, the Allied officers occasionally walked the edge of a razor blade. The Japanese officers communicated only through them, holding them responsible for discipline, for cleanliness, and for turning out the kumis that labored at the docks. Their men, quite inadvertently, frequently put them in a difficult position by waging a low-level campaign of petty sabotage against their captors.
Lanson Harris, the Houston’s enlisted pilot, was not the type to submit meekly to the prisoner’s life. Though quiet and studious, he was unlikely to make, or to want to become, an officer because, as Red Huffman put it, he didn’t have the capacity to swallow baloney. One day the guards sent Harris and some others into Batavia to fill trenches in a city park. Four or five hours on a shovel gave him some painful blisters. When the pilot complained to a guard, he instructed Harris to hold out his hands. Out came the scissors, off came the top of his blisters, and back to work went Harris.
“Now when you get in a situation like that,” Harris said, “you have to have something to think about. Most of the time we spent thinking about how in some small way we could get back at the guards…. Shortly after the blister-cutting