Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [106]
The prisoners bucked up their morale however they could. No one knew what the future held, but the structure of the here and now could be made to stand on a foundation of optimism and bracing military routine. One day a Houston NCO brought a bit too much gusto to these efforts, pushing things a step too far. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was a U.S. Marine: 1st Sgt. Harley H. Dupler.
Dupler was intense and robust, filling his space like a steel beam anchored in the ground. Feared and respected in equal measure, he had always taken his rank and role seriously. Yet he could relate to his men too. He would share tales about his adventures during the Nicaraguan intervention, and in such idle moments he would allow his men to call him by his first name. He was always full of encouragement. “Hang in there,” he would say. “We’ll make it.” He knew something about team play, having starred on the Marine Corps football squad in the thirties. But when he was on the parade grounds leading them in close order drill, he was only ever Sergeant Dupler. Because the officers were kept in separate barracks and lived apart from their men, his was a crucial leadership role. The two Marine officers were no longer with the men. Lieutenant Gallagher was in Japan, and Lieutenant Barrett was with the Navy officers.
One morning after tenko, in the dusty clearing between the barracks used by the Navy enlisted men and the one used by the Texas artillerymen of the 131st, Sergeant Dupler called his Marines to attention. He had decided to lead them in close order drill. It was a bid to buck up sagging morale at a time when the liberation he had long exhorted them to believe in was increasingly unlikely. On the dusty parade ground the Houston’s Marine detachment assembled, wearing a hodgepodge of U.S. Army fatigues and green Dutch army uniforms. Then Dupler began marching the men back and forth—“right face, forward march”—building a cloud of dust. “Had anyone else tried to instigate such a thing,” Howard Charles said, “we would have told him to forget it. But we were eager to please Dupler.”
The Japanese guards took immediate notice, but they were amused more than anything else. They laughed too at the 131st Field Artillery’s commander, Colonel Tharp, who was said to carry a single-shot .22-caliber gun concealed in his walking stick. “The Japanese knew he had it and laughed at the fact that he had it,” Seldon Reese said. Any of them who heard Dupler tell his Marines to stay fit and encourage them with empty promises—“Any day, now, our guys’ll hit that beach out there”—surely laughed too. But if they did, it meant only that they didn’t appreciate Dupler’s deadly seriousness about keeping the proper frame of mind.
The other prisoners—the Texas artillerymen, the Brits, the Dutch, and the Australians, each in their separate barracks—noticed the commotion the Marines were causing. They were not amused at all. They were galvanized. They decided to follow suit.
As Howard Charles relates it, the British soldiers imprisoned on the other side of a fence were the first to line up and start their own close order drills. Then the men of the 131st Field Artillery came out, followed by the Dutch and the Australians. Confronted with a mass movement, the Japanese posture changed altogether. They feared losing control over the camp. “The guards poured out on the grounds to stop it then,” said Charles. The immediate object of their wrath was the instigator of the exercise, Harley Dupler.
Two Japanese guards ran to Dupler and brought rifle butts down on his torso and head. He reeled and faltered and kept trying to rise, but the guards bore down and worked him over. It was a beating the likes of which the prisoners hadn’t yet seen, certainly not to anyone who had survived. They beat Dupler until he couldn’t stand, and then they battered him some more.