Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [96]
According to John Wisecup, Ross could not seem to summon the will to live in captivity. “He gave up a long time ago,” Wisecup said. “This guy was an overaged lieutenant. He was in his thirties and was a very moody type of guy.” Senior officers, who usually had the best access to information and were well suited to evaluate it, could be the most despondent prisoners in the camp. Commander Epstein succumbed to the despair that education and knowledge sometimes brought. According to Al Kopp, where others with more hopeful outlooks managed to work their way through the most difficult days on naive faith, Epstein, though well loved by the sailors, who could be his sons, became mired in pessimism. Thus, when Lieutenant Ross died, it was another lieutenant, a Naval Academy man and a line officer, who ascended to lead the Houston contingent. Having shown his mettle trying to save Ross from contagion, the man who helped bury him, Lt. Harold S. Hamlin, took over as commander of the Navy company.
With the Houston’s other senior officers pulled away and shipped to Japan, and with the officers left in camp housed in separate quarters, Hamlin feared the enlisted men would dissociate without the officers there to lead them. He thought they might conclude that they were “all in this together on an equal footing.” Such egalitarianism was unacceptable to Hamlin. He worried that small acts of rebellion unconscionable on a Navy ship were becoming everyday occurrences. Enlisted men stole from the waterfront. Some dispensed with saluting and used first names or nicknames with officers. John Wisecup, a gifted cartoonist who was as ruthless with the sketch pad as he was with mouth and fists, lampooned one and all with his illustrated satires of camp life. He resisted the temptation to spoof the camp guards only at the behest of shipmates with a surer sense of self-preservation. As useful as this leveling idea might have been from a survivalist’s perspective—and as useful as it would occasionally prove later, when life got worse—there was value in hierarchy and internal accountability. Prison morale grew from the sense of order and structure that the captives built independent of that which the Japanese imposed upon them. It helped them keep their dignity and thus built a foundation for survival.
Lieutenant Hamlin called several meetings of his men and, quoting Navy regulations from memory, reminded them that the authority of officers extended beyond the hull of the ship. “Generally speaking,” he wrote, “petty officers behaved splendidly in this respect and after I had held ‘Captain’s Mast’ and assigned extra duties as punishment, discipline returned to normal.”
According to Hamlin, “Organization was kept in every way as similar to normal Naval organization as the circumstances would permit.” The group was subdivided into divisions commanded by an officer assisted by a chief petty officer. Lt. (jg) Leon W. Rogers was appointed executive officer. The supply officer, Ens. Preston R. Clark, assisted in the preparation and distribution of food. The third senior officer, Ens. J. M. Hamill, was appointed first lieutenant and, assisted by the carpenter, was in charge of the upkeep and cleanliness of the barracks. The medical department was under Commander Epstein. Hamlin arranged for a rotating schedule of daily watches and installed two yeomen, John C. Reas and John A. Harrell, in a Japanese-equipped office to compile personal records. They kept one copy for their captors and another, secretly, for themselves.
The officers and NCOs cobbled together battle reports for the actions in the Java Sea and Sunda Strait. Lt. Leon Rogers interviewed survivors and began to keep a log of their movements, disciplinary offenses, and so on. “We were professional sailors,” said George Detre, “and this was the only way we went.” Throughout the ordeal,