To some extent, his landing on the beach had been staged for publicity purposes, but those words of warning to the Japanese regarding the treatment of POWs hadn’t been hot air. MacArthur meant them deeply. He had issued a warning to the Japanese, and he planned to stand by it. He wanted them to understand that, make no mistake, there would be punishment and retribution for harm to American POWs.
“I have no shortage of rope to hang every last one of those sons of bitches if necessary,” he had once told Sutherland.
On the other side of the coin, there were relatively few Japanese taken prisoner, given their adversary’s determination to die for the Emperor. The Japanese were indoctrinated that surrender or capture would bring dishonor on themselves and their families, perhaps for generations to come. They were told that a man who surrendered could never return home again. Given these high cultural stakes, you couldn’t blame the average Japanese for refusing to give up.
Nonetheless, at least a few Japanese had the sense to surrender or were captured. But bitterness flowed both ways. He knew that sometimes Japanese prisoners did not make it back to the POW compound behind the lines. He frowned on such things and discouraged it. He wanted his soldiers to be men of honor, right down to the lowliest private. They needed to practice self-control.
Then again, MacArthur had seen the bodies of men killed by the Japanese. Some of the bodies had even shown signs of torture. The sight had sickened him. He could understand why Japanese prisoners sometimes didn’t survive for long in combat areas, but the general did not condone it. Americans were better than that.
Once Japanese prisoners reached the POW compound, they were treated well. They were given food, clean clothes, medical attention. It was another sign of American power that they could be generous and magnanimous toward prisoners of war.
After all, US forces were winning. The maps indicated that MacArthur was driving back the Japanese on all fronts. One thought that troubled him almost as much as the Japanese was the disposition of the US Navy. He was in constant operational contact with naval forces, and they certainly had a common enemy, but the two branches of the service were always trying to make an end run around the other.
The way that MacArthur saw it, the navy would gladly have tried to win this war on its own and taken all the credit for it. To be fair, the same attitude was probably true of the army.
The truth was that he didn’t always know everything that the navy was up to. To that end, he had a plan.
If his junior staff believed that MacArthur never bothered to learn their names, they were sadly mistaken. There was not much that escaped the general’s attention.
He leaned into the hallway and bellowed, “Oatmire!”
Working in a cramped room two doors down, Captain Jim Oatmire heard his name being shouted by the general and very nearly threw up his recent breakfast of powdered eggs and black coffee.
Holy crap!
Having been summoned from on high, Oatmire had no choice but to come running, his footsteps echoing through the metal hallways of the ship. Other officers glanced at him but were careful not to meet his eyes. They just figured that Oatmire was running toward his doom.
Oatmire had gone ashore with a small contingent of General MacArthur’s staff during the general’s initial landing on Leyte. He hadn’t exactly been in combat, but he had been close enough to hear the shooting.
Come to think of it, so had the general. MacArthur hadn’t appeared to be troubled the least bit by the sounds of combat.
Since then Oatmire had found himself back aboard USS Nashville, wielding nothing more lethal than a sharp pencil and dodging nothing more dangerous than the mess hall’s version of meat loaf.
“Sir?” asked the breathless young officer, who like most of the other junior staff remained in awe of the general. That awe and apprehension was clearly written on his face.
“Pack a seabag, son. I’m sending you as a liaison over to USS Kalinin Bay with the Seventh Fleet. The captain is an old friend of mine, and I’ll lay on some story about interservice learning and cooperation. He’ll probably smell my bullshit from a mile away, but he’ll laugh about it. I just need you on that ship. I hear they’re heading out to pay a visit to the Japanese Navy.”
“Yes, sir.” Oatmire’s blank look indicated that he still had no idea what the general had in mind. What the hell was interservice learning and cooperation, anyhow? “What do you want me to do while I’m there, sir?”
“Relax, Oatmire, you’re not being transferred to the navy. Not yet, anyhow. I want you to observe and report back to me.” A smile creased the general’s face. “You’re going to be my fox in the navy henhouse. In other words, son, you’re going to be my spy.”
CHAPTER NINE
There was a reason that Oatmire had joined the army rather than the navy. The reason was that he preferred dry land rather than the sea.
He was reminded of this preference while being bounced around in a small launch that was crossing a very large expanse of ocean. He suspected that the boatswain was doing his best to hit all the waves sideways, thus maximizing the rocking and bouncing of the boat to unnerve the ground pounder huddled miserably in the bow.
Oatmire felt his stomach begin to churn. He tried not to dwell on the extra helping of reconstituted powdered eggs that he’d had that morning, washed down by a mug of the navy’s thickest black coffee.
His mood was not helped by the salty spray that pummeled him in the bow. In fact, he seemed to be doing a good job of blocking the spray and thus preventing any of the actual navy personnel from getting wet, God forbid.
“How much farther?” Oatmire shouted, the breeze threatening to whip away his words.
“The ship is just over the horizon, sir.”
“All right. For a minute there I was worried that we were headed back to Pearl.”
“No, sir, we wouldn’t have enough fuel for that.”
Oatmire checked for a smile on the boatswain’s face, but the man had said it deadpan, as if he had taken Oatmire’s wisecrack about crossing the Pacific seriously. On top of that, the sailor had been concerned only about the lack of fuel, and not the lack of size of the launch.
“Good to know.”
Oatmire shook his head, managing to take a fresh face full of cold sea spray in the process. Sailors. Everybody said it was the marines who were trouble, but he wasn’t so sure about that.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if someone in the navy brass really had decided to send MacArthur’s aide all the way back to Hawaii in an open boat, just as a way of poking a stick in the general’s eye.
Disconcertingly, USS Nashville was slipping out of sight. Though massive in person, the distant ship seemed insignificant on the blue Pacific. A vast sky studded with puffy clouds swept down to meet the sea at the horizon. They were much too far out to sea for any glimpse of Leyte, of course.
The launch rode up a wave and sliced down in the trough, then up again, wild as any roller-coaster ride. His head spun, and he suddenly felt himself losing the skirmish with his queasy stomach.
He leaned over the side and heaved up his breakfast. He sat up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. At least he’d had the good sense to lose his breakfast over the downwind side of the launch.
The boatswain made no comment, perhaps out of a sense of interservice diplomacy. Oatmire suspected that he’d been trained to ignore seasick army officers, lest they be even further embarrassed.