Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [95]
One day at Bicycle Camp a guard was hollering at a big Australian kid, who couldn’t understand what was being demanded of him. The guard slapped him. The Australian reared back and struck the guard right in the jaw, knocking him back several steps. “All these other Jap guards rushed out immediately, and they started beating on this Australian,” Lloyd Willey said. “They beat him all afternoon. They made him stand at attention, and anytime that he dropped down, they’d go out and beat him some more. That lasted almost three days, until he just laid on the ground. He was practically dead, and then they started kicking him until he was dead. Then they tied a rope around his ankles, and they pulled him up and down every street in Bicycle Camp.” They called the Allied officers over. “‘This man died an easy death compared to what the next man will get who hits a Japanese guard.’”
CHAPTER 27
In the deprived conditions at Bicycle Camp, hygiene was difficult to practice. An outbreak of dysentery at Serang had left hundreds of men unable to crawl to the latrine. A few days after the officers’ departure to Japan on April 8, Marine Pvt. Donald W. Hill, removed to the courtyard outside the Serang theater, died of the disease. He couldn’t stomach the food the Japanese were serving. According to Marvin Robinson, Hill “willed himself to die” by repeating these words as his dysentery drained him: “This is not the way my mother made bread.…”
The Houston sailors had long ago adjusted their constitutions to resist the contagions of Asiatic Fleet service. Sudden sicknesses were liable to wash over the crew at any moment. Once, before war broke out, the ship’s sick bay became so overcrowded that the Marines had to be evicted from their berthing area to make room for the ill. They got savvy to the ways sickness spread, controlling contagions by careful hygiene, requiring coffee be drunk from disposable paper cups.
Though an enterprising Marine sergeant had procured a showerhead down at the Batavia docks and converted the rudimentary plumbing in the Navy barracks into showers, dysentery and malaria were rife. To combat them, the Japanese gave prisoners access to the camp hospital, where medical officers and pharmacist’s mates worked as staff. The Houston’s entire medical department, including its two doctors, Commander Epstein and Lieutenant Burroughs, and pharmacist’s mates Al Kopp, Eugene Orth, Raymond Day, Griff Douglas, and Lowell W. Swartz, worked there. Proper medicine was unavailable. They had lab dyes, slides, and cover glasses but no microscope. One day, Burroughs cajoled a Japanese optometrist into finding them a new microscope. In the morning he smuggled in a 1920 vintage Himmler model.
But when disease came, their defenses were unprepared. John Wisecup fell ill with bacillary dysentery and then its amoebic cousin. He came close to death. Passing blood and growing anemic, he dropped thirty pounds from his normal weight of 175. “This stuff is just like a knife in your guts,” he said. “The smell of any kind of chow made me sick.” Not treatment by charcoal solution nor rice soup or salts cured him. “I was a walking wreck. People wouldn’t even come near me…. I could see them looking at me: ‘Jesus! This son-of-a-bitch is going to die!’ You know, I looked that bad.”
The worst case belonged to the senior surviving line officer from the Houston, Lt. Russell R. Ross. They called him “Rosie.” He had contracted a case of bacillary dysentery that defied the best work of the men at Bicycle Camp’s hospital. Hamlin repeatedly asked the camp commander, a lieutenant named Suzuki, to allow him to go to Batavia to buy medicine, where there was known to be an ample supply. The Japanese refused. According to Hamlin, “Finally a British colonel interceded and told the Japs it would be plain murder if they