Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [97]
The hyperactive machismo of a guy such as Wisecup, reined in over time by the likes of senior sergeants including Walter Standish and Harley Dupler, bred the Marines’ reputation for aggressive efficiency that led so many prisoners to vest their hopes in rescue. When would it finally come? Despite a mounting impression that no one was riding to their aid, the prisoners kept an eager ear on the news.
News was a gold-standard commodity, as valuable to the mind as food was to the body. It was power. It was strength, the key to withstanding the psychic assaults of the guards at tenko. Somewhere along the line at Bicycle Camp, Charley Pryor found a Malay-English dictionary. He studied it like a Bible in catechism. Three weeks of cramming enabled him to talk with natives and get the scoop on the outside world. “They would tell us about great naval battles and what the Allied forces had destroyed and that they were on Ambon, or they’d landed to the north in the Celebes or on Borneo, and they were on Sumatra. Oh, it was just a matter of a few days, you know, and they’d be on Java.”
There were plenty of reasons to question the sunny outlook. On a work party out at the Dunlop tire factory one afternoon, Paul Papish was stacking tires, cussing a blue streak. “What’s the matter, sailor?” a voice behind him asked. Papish replied, “These damned Japs don’t know where they want this stuff.” Reaching for another tire, he saw out of the corner of his eye a split-toed tabi belonging to a Japanese sergeant.
Turning, Papish stood and looked around for the speaker. “I don’t know where this voice is coming from, speaking just as good English as I am,” Papish said. As he realized it must have been the Japanese, shock spread across the American’s face, and the sergeant grinned and said, “That’s all right.” Papish could not have guessed how all right it was. As it happened, this soldier had more in common with a New York cabbie than with one of Tojo’s finest. He told Papish that before the war started he had in fact been a taxi driver in Manhattan. On December 8, the date of the Pearl Harbor attack in Japan, he was home visiting his aging parents. Stuck thereafter in Nippon, he was conscripted into the army and there was no looking back.
“Listen, I want to tell you something,” the sergeant said. “There’s a lot of Japanese who speak good English. They won’t be like me. Remember that.” The sergeant gave Papish a cigarette later that day, as well as some canned beef to mix with his rice. Papish asked him, “Look, tell me something. What do you think of this war?”
“Well, sailor, I’ll tell you this. You and I both know who’s going to win, but it’s going to be a long one. Yes, it’s going to be a long one.”
Paul Papish had persuaded himself that liberation was just around the corner. If denial morphed into fantasy, and the result bucked up the spirits, why not cling to it? The Japanese might have the upper hand at the moment, but it wouldn’t be for long, he consoled himself. Yet the English-speaking sergeant’s candor eroded his confidence that the war would go well. “That just kind of took the wind out of my sails,” Papish said. A Catholic, he sought out a Dutch priest and asked if he had anything he could pray with. The priest gave him a rosary.
The frightful possibilities had a few weeks to gain a foothold in the sailors’ minds before, as expected, United States troops finally appeared, marching on the gates of Bicycle Camp. But it was not the U.S. Marines who came for the Houston men. The Army did the honors instead.
CHAPTER 28
The four-hundred-odd soldiers who appeared at Bicycle Camp on May 14, 1942, belonged to the Second Battalion of the 131st Field Artillery Regiment of the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division, Texas National Guard. Reaching Bicycle Camp under the command of Col. Blucher S. Tharp, the soldiers, in full dress, marched in hauling duffles and