Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [156]
The other man with him on that grave detail was a very religious young Dubliner. To him, it was bad enough that there was never time for last rites. It was bad enough that sometimes people delayed reporting a prisoner’s death just so they could get his ration. Sometimes they simply failed to notice a death until the stench reached an appreciable level. But the Irishman considered Wisecup’s act a sacrilege. He protested to the Marine, told him he was going to retrieve the body. Wisecup snapped at him to leave the body alone.
“John, we can’t do that, lad. No good will come of it. You can’t blaspheme the dead.”
Wisecup roared that the dead man was free at last. “Goddamnit, he’s out of the son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Leave that bastard laying over there.”
The Irishman said nothing. After a few minutes, Wisecup cooled down and went and retrieved the corpse. “I can remember that just so plain—them cold feet hitting me in the ass. I was thinking, ‘Look at him! He’s out of it! He ain’t got to put up with this shit no more!’”
CHAPTER 47
By the middle of 1943, the industrial base of the United States was at full wartime tilt. As silt, corrosion, and sea creatures were having their way with the old Houston, roiled by bottom currents off St. Nicholas Point, new ships were rolling off the line. The new light cruiser Houston was nearing completion, sliding off the ways at Newport News on June 19. The coming of that ship and so many others like her had been foretold to the Japanese slave drivers. It was the Australian doctor Weary Dunlop who did it in the spring of 1943, in the midst of the cutting project in the stony ridgelands of Hintok and Konyu.
Like every other doctor on the railway, Dunlop had been waging a war to keep the Japanese from forcing his sickest men out to work. After days of argument, which usually resulted in a sound beating for the doctor, a Japanese officer evidently tried to improve relations with Dunlop by inviting him to the screening of a propaganda film. The Australian agreed and that night was trucked up to the camp at Kinsayok and seated front and center beneath the projection screen with hundreds of Japanese on mats behind him. A sequence of propaganda pieces flickered on the screen, including a news review that depicted, as Dunlop wrote, “Nippon tearing Asia up into strips by the employment of every conceivable arm of the service.” The film highlighted the unpreparedness of the U.S. Navy and featured plenty of footage of Pearl Harbor burning.
The reaction from the Japanese audience was the predictable lusty chorus of “Banzai!” At one point they were doubtless startled to see Dunlop himself jumping to his feet, right there under their movie screen, and shouting “Banzai!” along with them.
“You think good? Nippon bomb-bomb, sink American and British ships?” someone asked him.
“Yes!” Dunlop roared. “Old ships no good—taksan [many] new ships now built—better!” he said. He could have known little about the naval forces marshaling to retake the Pacific’s far-flung realms, but his exuberant defiance would prove to be prophecy itself.
Ships were one thing; people were another. This was the first American war in three generations large enough to subsume entire families in the regular course of events. Thirty-seven sets of brothers, seventy-seven men, had served in the battleship USS Arizona. Fifty-two of them died. Off Guadalcanal the Navy lost the USS Juneau and five members of the Sullivan family, whose outsized legend would match that of the eventual flag raisers on Iwo Jima. Cdr. Al Maher’s brother James was for a time the captain of the light cruiser USS San Juan, launched the same day the Houston was sunk. The Houston’s Howard Brooks had three other brothers in the Pacific when he was working in the Burma jungle. His older brother was a Navy medic on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Another brother was killed in Luzon. The third Brooks boy was on the destroyer