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By Root 1618 0

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.

*A sen, no longer used in Japanese currency, is 1/100th of a yen.

CHAPTER 31

In 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