Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [98]
The Texans, a world away from their headquarters at Camp Mabry in Austin, had become orphans on the Army’s organizational chart shortly after their unit was placed under federal control on November 25, 1940. After conducting maneuvers in the Louisiana swamps and pine forests in the summer of 1941, the Texans were “surplused”—detached from the Thirty-sixth Division and sent to the Pacific, earmarked for a secret location named “PLUM.” They left San Francisco on board the SS Republic just two weeks before the Pearl Harbor raid. PLUM turned out to be the Philippines. Their mission was to support Allied forces under General MacArthur.
For the Houston survivors, the arrival of this sharply uniformed, well-supplied battalion of ostensible liberators was the long-awaited moment of deliverance, the restoration of the natural order of an America-centered universe. At least it was all of these things for a few minutes. Like their dream fantasies about roast beef and fresh bread and sweet pork and beans vanishing at the end of hungry slumbers, the idea that the Army had come to free them shimmered briefly and gave way to scraping reality. It dawned quickly on the Houston men that the Texans were not rescuers. Herded into Bicycle Camp, they were coming to kneel alongside the Navy company in submission to Imperial Japan. Back home, their fate unknown, the unit would acquire a nickname that had the ring of legend: “The Lost Battalion.”
As the fleet-wide assignment of the Houston Volunteers showed, the Navy Department forbade its ships from having the kind of provincial identity that characterized the Lost Battalion. Each of its batteries was drawn from a single Texas town—D Battery from Wichita Falls, E Battery from Abilene, F Battery from Jacksboro, Headquarters Battery from Decatur, and so on. Though the Houston’s crew hailed from all across America, it had a number of Lone Star Staters, including Marvin Robinson, Charley Pryor, Jim Gee, Frank “Pinky” King, and Bert Page. A few of them actually had friends in common with the Guardsmen. It highlighted the clannish nature of the Texans—and also their greatest strength. By virtue of their selection as Asiatic Fleet flagship and the president’s private fishing yacht, the Houston men had developed a special sense of identity that became the basis for everything they did. But the Texans of the 131st were born with it. The Alamo spirit grew out of small-town friendships, rooted in local pride. As it happened, more than a few of the Houston sailors could relate to them on that level. Pinky King’s older sisters had gone to school with 2nd Lt. Clyde Fillmore’s wife back in Wheeler County. They had to meet halfway around the world in an enemy prison camp to discover it.
The first asset the artillerymen brought to camp was their number. With the arrival of the 534 Texans, there were a total of 902 Americans at Bicycle Camp. “We felt very good because we felt that in numbers there was strength. We needed that,” said Jim Gee. If some of the Houston Marines wondered what kind of soldiers these Guardsmen were, others had seen some of their handiwork earlier, on the long march to Serang. Charley Pryor had seen Japanese trucks burning by the roadside, trees denuded of foliage, and the odd corpse of an Imperial Army soldier in khaki and split-toed boots. Who was doing the fighting they could hardly have known. Swift though the Japanese conquest had been, it was not a complete walkover.
The Texans, appalled by the ragged condition of the Navy “gobs,” responded with generosity that brought the sailors a step back toward humanity. Their extra clothing and gear was distributed among the bedraggled Houston men until everyone had gotten something. They passed around blankets, pants, shirts, smokes, cans of Spam, spoons,