Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [200]
Over Tokyo, Navy planes were dropping food over the prison camps, the pilots revealing their exuberance through their ailerons and rudders as they showed off their combat-honed talents in low-altitude aerobatics. At Ohasi, Red Reynolds, the chronicler of the late president’s 1938 tour on the Houston, was among the throng of prisoners marveling at an impromptu air show put on by a dozen or so U.S. dive-bombers. “They circled out and dived and wig-wagged,” he wrote in his diary. “My God, grown men looking up, waving and shouting with tears running down their cheeks. I too was a big baby, but I’m proud and not ashamed. I’ve waited three-and-a-half years for this.” As Reynolds recorded in his diary, one of the pilots zoomed in low and dropped a pack of Lucky Strikes, a book of matches, and a note reading, Cheer up, boys, only a few more days—Ens. W. F. Harrah, 2221 East Newton St., Seattle, Washington. “Boy he rates a bottle of Scotch from each man here,” Reynolds wrote.
In Washington on August 28, OSS field agent Nicol Smith appeared at a press conference, declaring: “Anyone having relatives on the crew of the Houston can be very optimistic.” That same day, American prisoners throughout southeast Asia began greeting their liberators, for out in Tokyo Bay a sight like no other greeted the residents of the capital city’s prison camps. Gliding into view came the sleek gray hulls of U.S. warships, camouflage paint schemes bright and angular. As lead elements of the U.S. Third Fleet approached, led by the battleship USS Missouri, other ships came for the prisoners. Commodore Rodger W. Simpson’s Task Group 30.6 happened to be led by the light cruiser USS San Juan, commissioned the day the Houston was lost and commanded in its early days by Capt. James Maher, the older brother of the Houston’s Arthur Maher.
Several LCVPs from the San Juan’s evacuation group, embarking medical parties, motored to the docks and tied up near Omori Camp No. 8. “The appearance of the landing craft in the channel near the prisoner of war camp caused an indescribable scene of jubilation and emotion on the part of hundreds of prisoners of war who streamed out of the camp and climbed up over the piling,” Simpson wrote. “Some began to swim out to meet the landing craft.”
Simpson was powerfully affected by conditions in the hospitals that his medics located. While he noted in his report the “almost universally helpful and outwardly polite” attitude of the Japanese, his outrage was nearly universal at the time: “With the end of the war, history started immediately to repeat, but we shall not be deceived again by the superficial friendship of this cruel race.”
Thus began an eighteen-day evacuation process that would mark an official end to the ordeal. That day an Associated Press reporter was moved to poetry in his wire dispatch: “The hand that fills in the blank pages in the book of war began to write again today. It began on a page bearing the title ‘USS Houston.’ And as it started its journey across the paper, hope, like a swiftly-flaring spark, burned brightly again in hundreds of hearts in homes scattered across America.”
Omori Camp No. 8, where Commander Maher was senior officer, was the first camp liberated. Its occupants were safely transferred to the hospital ship Benevolence in Tokyo Bay by the night of August 30. Before Maher received treatment, he requested to visit and personally thank the skipper of his brother’s old cruiser, Capt. George H. Bahm. Shortly thereafter, the Houston’s senior surviving officer found himself with an invitation from Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz himself to board the Missouri on September 2 and watch the Japanese sign papers of surrender. When Maher was taken to the ship and went aboard, he was greeted by a Naval Academy classmate. Rather than salute him, shake his hand, or embrace, by reflex of habit Maher bowed from the waist.
Word of the surrender took a while to trickle