Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [94]
The only reliable way to avoid a bashing was to will yourself into the woodwork. Taller guys had a hard time being inconspicuous, and because the Japanese and later Korean guards seemed sensitive to the racial height disparity, taller prisoners were often made to stand in pits or sink to their knees so the guards could knock them around. The Marines, chosen for Asiatic Fleet service in part for their stature, paid a price for their genetic blessings. John Wisecup was an imposing specimen, long and lean, with a squint of New Orleans character in his looks. Jim Gee stood six foot three, one of the better boxers in the fleet, nicknamed “Caribou” for the size of his frame. According to Gee, “Some of them were so short that when they’d start to hit you with their fists you could sort of straighten up and miss it. And that would make them mad! Oh, they’d get mad when you’d do that! And so once, being a tall person, one of them was so little that I could miss his slap every time he’d try it. So he marched me over to a building, and he stood upon the porch, and I stood down on the ground, and he literally slapped me back and forth until I decided, ‘I really shouldn’t do that anymore. I’ll just let him hit me once or twice next time and miss the rest of it.’”
The worst thing a prisoner could do while under assault, short of retaliating, was to fall down. “You did your damnedest to hold your feet, and you did your damnedest to hold in any kind of a groan or anything like that,” said Seldon Reese. They learned to stand and take it. “After a while, hell, a bashing didn’t mean nothing to you,” said Wisecup. “Christ, it was a way of life.”
Amid the daily grind at Bicycle Camp, local Dutch women appeared outside the barbed wire from time to time, riding by on bikes, flashing the prisoners a V for victory, cheering them on, sometimes offering them food, soap, sugar, or news. This incensed the Japanese, who more than once knocked the women off their bikes and beat them on the ground. The prisoners learned to dread the women’s friendly gestures, knowing the likely reaction from the guards. But their courage was inspiring. “I must say that if they were fighting the war, it might have turned out differently,” said Jim Gee. “The women and the kids had more intestinal fortitude than any group of people that I have ever seen or know of.”
The guards’ conduct confirmed the basest Western stereotypes of the Japanese even as it shocked them with its brutality. “The Japanese soldier placed great emphasis on his masculinity, lowering his voice several notches by force to make it sound deeper, meaner, and harsher,” Howard Charles would write. “He strutted, pulling the corners of his mouth down like an actor in a Kabuki play. He appeared to engineer his anger, starting at one level and building his rage to the point of explosion. If you never hated before, you did now. But you could not let it show, if you wanted to live.”
Other guards showed kindness and generosity to their captives. A three-star private nicknamed Smiley professed to be a Christian and said that he had a brother who lived in the Sacramento Valley in California. “I’ll always thank some good Christian missionary, I guess, for his work with this individual,” said Charley Pryor. “This old boy had a mouthful of gold teeth. He opened his mouth, and it looked like the sun coming up.” His time in the States seemed to dispose him kindly to his prisoners. “At nighttime you’d hear some noise around your cell door, and there’d be a little tin of water he slid under the door or maybe a