Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [105]
They put water into carburetors and generators, stole sugar not only to eat but to pour into oil drums or the gas tanks of vehicles. They loosened the caps on the drums and stacked them so they would leak. “If you had a chance to sabotage, this was uppermost in your mind,” said Paul Papish. “Here again was an opportunity to—what you might say—keep your self-respect.” Among the more dangerous acts of subversion were the efforts by several of the technically minded prisoners to build and operate radios. The twenty-three-year-old radio section chief in the 131st, Jess Stanbrough, had been collecting parts. Like Pack Rat McCone, he was adept at scavenging useful things, always on the lookout for copper wire down by the docks. Since copper’s principal applications included radio construction, it was dangerous contraband to handle.
During the early weeks of captivity, a GE portable AM radio about the size of a small breadbox was smuggled into camp by a Lost Battalion sergeant named Jack Karney. He gave the radio, in a small leatherette case, to Stanbrough, who was proficient with a ham radio, a field transmitter, and Morse code. Stanbrough went right to work repairing the radio, rewinding its oscillator coil for shortwave reception. Before Java capitulated, he had noticed while riding in a command car that the island had no AM reception, so he looked farther afield and at 1,200 megahertz found a signal. On KGEI San Francisco, he heard the voice of William Winters, and Dinah Shore singing. The station, established by General Electric in 1939 for the Treasure Island World’s Fair, would become the model for the Armed Forces Radio Service. It was a principal news source for U.S. troops in the Philippines, who rebroadcast the signal throughout the region with their thousand-watt transmitter at Bataan until its fall. Before long, Stanbrough was getting BBC newscasts from India and even London.
Soon another radio turned up in camp, a small Zenith, which Stanbrough rewired and concealed in a wooden Velveeta cheese box. Though it had good reception, it was voltage-sensitive and prone to noisy static—much more than a mere annoyance under these circumstances—and so he gave it to the Navy boys. Radioman first class Jerry J. Bunch Jr. kept it running, helped by his old department chief, Harmon P. Alderman.
Stanbrough hid his radio inside the corner post of his bunk and powered it by running a wire into the electric light socket overhead. Knowing the danger the radio would pose were it discovered, he replaced the speaker with some earphones scavenged from the docks and stashed an aerial antenna in the attic of the barracks. His dispatches were given to a POW who worked inside the Japanese camp headquarters and thus had access to typewriters. He typed up the news and circulated a clandestine bulletin that was sneaked into the barracks, read aloud, and burned.
As the Japanese guards grew suspicious of the prisoners’ improved mood, Stanbrough became increasingly careful about sharing news. When the news was bad, he paid a price from his own men too. They often asked him how long he expected them to be in camp. Having heard a broadcast that disclosed the disastrous final tally of the Pearl Harbor attack, Stanbrough told them, “Oh, it looks to me at least six months. We won’t be home by Christmas.” But the result was that “some of the boys would not even speak to me with that much bad news.” Spirits rose when word came of the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Japanese had been only too happy to describe the sinking of the USS Lexington in that