Target: Rabaul (68 page)

In lieu of rice, prisoners were paired off and shared a coconut, three times a day. The switch proved harmful, as the men were unaccustomed to the oily meat and the roughage. Within a day or two, recalled McMurria, “dysentery set in with a vengeance.”

With the outbreak, the confluence of terrible conditions in the camp reached a tipping point. The prisoners had already lost Hugh Cornelius, one of the marine pilots on the ill-fated mining mission. He died of pneumonia on April 9, less than two months after his capture. Thereafter the songs and the recipes and the movie recitals kept the specter of death at bay for several weeks, but the middle of the year brought a spate of misery upon the camp. In the second week of May, one of the best-liked captives in the compound took a turn for the worse due to complications from dysentery and malnutrition.

McMurria, who had become extremely close friends with the good-natured Charlie Lanphier during their months in the prison, sadly recalled the marine pilot’s last hours:

He was so sick. He crawled over to the
benjo
bucket, but he fell off, he was so weak. I was right there and held him up, got him straightened out. At that point, he said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it. I could make it, if only I could get some chocolate milk or some candy bars.”

Then he said, “I have to tell you something. My brother … ” and he told me about Tommy. He said, “Normally I would not have told anybody else, but now that I’m gone, I’ll tell you.”

Charlie told Jim something he believed wholeheartedly—that his older brother Tom had shot down Admiral Yamamoto more than a year earlier—because that was the story Tom had given him. Tom Lanphier’s boast was eventually disproved, but Charlie was a very proud younger brother when he died on May 15, 1944.

The next to go was a New Zealander, Flight Officer Leslie McLellan-Symonds, who ditched an SBD and was taken prisoner with a gunshot wound in his left thigh. He had arrived at the camp in April, but was refused medical attention by the Japanese. Delirious during much of his short time in the POW enclosure, McLellan-Symonds died of apparent blood poisoning on May 28.

Then came a death that hit every captive hard, for it made their collective outlook much gloomier. Jimmy Warren, who could tote two grown men on his shoulders, plummeted from healthy to dead in just a few weeks. That the strongest could fall so quickly—he died on June 5—took the starch out of several others. During the next three months eight more men succumbed to the vicious cycle of disease and neglect. On July 15, prisoners watched helplessly as a triumvirate of Allies—a Yank, an Aussie, and a Kiwi—died in a span of about two hours. A week later, John Todd went into a coma from complications caused by his infected hip wound and possibly a form of malaria known as blackwater fever. He died three days later on July 25.

The policy of the Japanese toward prisoners was brutally simple: feed them enough to keep them alive, but withhold all other forms of assistance including medical attention. When a prisoner died, the Japanese put on a show of contrition, which the surviving captives quickly recognized as a lifesaving opportunity. As McMurria recalled, the dead had an unexpected way of providing a parting gift.

The only example of bushido of any benefit to us came about after a prisoner died. We were asked what type of ceremony, if any, was customary for the dead. We told [the Japanese] that, in addition to saying prayers and recounting the goodness of the deceased, food should be placed at his head, to which the Japs complied, and added an incense punk at his feet. This, we said, was properly done while smoking and reflecting on life’s tribulations. These somewhat callous suggestions netted us a bowl of rice or sometimes a few bananas to be shared, and a few cigarettes:

Thus, with each death, the dwindling number of prisoners received a bigger portion of the food and cigarettes provided by the Japanese on behalf of the deceased.

Between early April 1944 and the end of August, at least twelve POWs died, prompting the survivors to name their camp “Death Valley.” The deaths impacted everyone, but Joe Nason displayed a singular coping mechanism. A sympathetic guard had given him an old horse blanket, under which Joe would sit, cut off from the outside, for days at a time.

It took Murphy’s special brand of badgering, Nason recalled, to escape from the clutches of the reaper:

At the end of 1944 I weighed only 95 pounds. I had just about given up hope, I think. Even in daylight I sat with my blanket over my head, tent-like. I was always
cold because of anemia, but also it was my way of escaping. In the darkness I could shut out everything, and I could slip into euphoria and dream and remember. But Murph would not let me surrender so easily. He derided me, loudly despised me, and threatened to cut off my rice if I did not stop playing the ostrich. I was determined to live, just to flaunt my existence in his hated face. Defiantly, I would uncover and splutter: “I’m going to live, you bastard, and I’m going to thrash you to within an inch of your life as soon as I’m strong enough.”

One day he had been baiting me without getting a rise, so perhaps he thought I was in danger of finally giving up the spark which is the difference between hope and the pit. He bent on me a look of studied contempt and jeered, “Nason, your mother must have been a low bitch to have spawned such a poor specimen of humanity as you for a son.”

That did it. My dormant adrenalin gushed and I let Murphy have my precious salmon can of soup fair in his sneering face.

“Cripes, Nason,” he said admiringly. “You’re still alive. It was hard to tell. I think you’ll make it, Joe.”

In my opinion it was just this prodding and jabbing that spurred my spirit when it lagged and the final apathy looked so welcome. I now feel, and I suppose others do too, that I owe my life to John Murphy. If there is any hero in this tale, it is John Murphy—undaunted and resourceful, cocky and scornful—who stands out in my memories of those dark days.”

Starting in September, a few signs of better luck appeared. Joe Holguin’s back got stronger, but the wound he had suffered to his jaw before he bailed out of
Naughty But Nice
more than a year earlier still festered. That he hadn’t died of blood poisoning was miraculous, for he still had a hole in his lower jaw. The drainage looked awful and undoubtedly smelled worse, but the prisoners were so filthy it contributed little to the overall stench. Joe was grateful nonetheless when a P-38 pilot inadvertently cured the situation.

In the middle of September lightning roared up the gully in a strafing run. The suddenness of the attack caught everyone by surprise, and as the prisoners jumped up from the floor to scramble into their bomb shelter, McMurria accidently slammed his knee squarely into Holguin’s jaw. “The corruption that came out of his jaw puddled on the floor and looked terrible,” recalled McMurria, “but we noticed it contained a small piece of bone.”

Holguin pulled out other loose splinters, which had prevented the wound from closing. In less than two weeks, his jaw healed without further complications.

Even better, the attack by the P-38 convinced the Japanese to move the camp closer to a Kempeitai compound, which occupied a cave system west of Tunnel Hill Road. Eleven prisoners were still alive to make the move on October 4, and they were glad to leave Death Valley. Their new enclosure was identical in design to the old one, built against the side of a gully with an air raid tunnel in the back wall. The
main difference was a partition that divided the enclosure into two rooms. One was for “healthy” prisoners, the other for those expected to die soon.

For months, the guards had been telling Joe Nason that he would be next. Like all captives, they addressed him as
Horio-san
(literally, Mr. Prisoner), saying, “You next die!” Looking as though he would soon expire, he was placed in the partition for sick POWs. “Nason deteriorated to a skin and bone condition, was afflicted with beriberi, frequent dysentery, and huge ulcers from which his very life seemed to drain,” wrote Holguin. “Still he managed to awake each morning, much to his amazement and ours.”

Another sickly prisoner was Harold Tuck. His mission over Simpson Harbor had come to an ignominious end on January 14, when one of his own squadron mates chopped the tail off his SBD. It was a ridiculous way to fall into the hands of the enemy, made even more troubling by the fact that his gunner, Paul McLeaf, had been among the prisoners executed on March 5. Tuck lingered for weeks, comforted by Holguin, before he finally let go on November 19. His slow death was difficult to watch, impossible to ignore. McMurria noticed that toward the end, dying prisoners seemed to bite the air, their jaws working as they struggled to breathe. Holguin added, “Of all the prisoners who died at the two Tunnel Hill camps, Tuck appeared to me to have suffered the most and the longest.”

Tuck was the first captive to die in the new Tunnel Hill camp, the last to expire in what had been a very long year of hardships. The remaining ten prisoners, looking more like scarecrows than human beings, thought they would face a dark, brooding holiday season—but the Japanese surprised them.

Just before Christmas, the captives received a large bundle of cured tobacco leaves and some old issues of Japanese magazines to be used as cigarette paper. Nearly all of them smoked, and often pounced fanatically on any discarded butts they could find. They also smoked just about anything they could get their hands on, including old leaves lying on the ground. Earlier, the Japanese had allowed them to build a simple rolling machine out of wood and other scrap items. With the machine and the cured tobacco, they rolled hundreds of cigarettes. It provided a popular pastime, and the cigarettes they produced were declared superior to those made in Japanese factories. The product also got them into good graces with several guards, yielding additional benefits.

On Christmas Day, one of the guards brought in a hand-cranked Victrola record player and some German recordings of classical music. The tabletop player was old and dilapidated, the recordings scratched and hissing, but the prisoners heard only music. McMurria, a castaway or a prisoner since January 1943, wept openly at the sound of the first music he had listened to in almost two years.

With new surroundings and beautiful arias to inspire them, the prisoners’ outlook seemed marginally better. If four more years seemed too long, one day at a time would do.

*
After flying with the marines, Lindbergh spent time with the 475th Fighter Group in New Guinea and helping them extend the combat radius of their P-38s. During two stays with the “Satan’s Angels,” he flew several combat missions and even shot down an Army Type 99 armed reconnaissance plane (Mitsubishi Ki-51 “Sonia”), though he did not receive official credit.

*
Quinones has been incorrectly (and inappropriately) labeled as a Mexican-American. His home of record was Mesa, Arizona, where his parents relocated before the war.

CHAPTER 23

Glory

T
HE ALLIED PLANES
kept coming. Throughout 1944 and well into 1945, bombers, dive-bombers, and fighter-bombers continued to hit Rabaul’s airfields to prevent their use; they kept a watchful eye on Simpson Harbor and attacked barges trying to resupply the garrison; they destroyed gardens to prevent the Japanese from growing food; and they strafed vehicles hauling supplies from remote caches. The number of sorties per month gradually declined, from a peak of approximately 2,200 in January 1944 to less than 300 by December. At the lowest ebb, an average of ten planes hit Rabaul every day, and the effort surged again in mid-1945 to more than five hundred sorties per month.

Of all the missions flown against Rabaul—or even throughout all of World War II—few were as unusual as the sixteen one-way sorties by unmanned “assault drones” in October 1944. Almost seventy years before the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as those used in the Global War on Terror, expendable radio-controlled drones were used to attack Rabaul. The TDR-1 looked conventional in almost every respect, with two inexpensive Lycoming six-cylinder engines, tricycle landing gear, and the capability to carry an external bomb or torpedo.
^*
A cockpit with flight controls was included for test or ferry flights, then faired over for the unmanned attack. Equipped with an RCA television camera in the nose, along with a gyro stabilizer and radar altimeter, the drones were flown by an operator in a stand-off TBM (General Motors–built) Avenger using radio control. Almost two hundred drones were manufactured, using lightweight tubular frames supplied by the Schwinn Bicycle Company, before the contract was cancelled. Most of the completed TDRs were shipped overseas with a unit called the Special Task Air Group (STAG)-1.

Before launching the drones against enemy targets, a live demonstration was conducted on July 30 for the benefit of the ComAirSols brass. Four drones
carrying two-thousand-pound general purpose bombs were directed by their control planes against
Yamazuki Maru
, a 6,500-ton merchantman beached on Guadalcanal. Technically the drones scored three direct hits, although one bomb failed to detonate. The fourth drone missed the superstructure by a matter of feet, exploding against the tree line.