"Embarrassingly Friendly"

Embarrassingly Friendly

Far out in the Pacific, on the late afternoon of July 3, the U.S. destroyer Murray sighted the Japanese hospital ship Taka-sago Maru, bore down on her and ordered her to heave to. In two small boats, a party of 26 heavily armed Americans, led by the Murray's executive officer, Lieut. Commander Robert H. White, approached the dingy white two-stacker.

Back in port last week, the Murray's boarding party reported that their meeting with the enemy had, in the main, been "embarrassingly friendly."

As White climbed the ladder, the Takasago's grinning captain held out his hand to help him aboard. He wanted to cooperate fully in the search, he said; he was on 'his way to bypassed, isolated Wake Island 300 miles to the south, to evacuate 960 sick and 14 wounded Jap soldiers. He offered his visitors coffee, tea, cider, sake and whiskey--all declined by the Americans.

Strictly Pink Tea. Lieut. Commander White, very much on guard, decided to stay on the bridge with the Jap captain during the search. For two and a half hours they held what White called "a strictly pink-tea conversation." The Jap captain, who said he had spent ten years in New York City as a youth, asked how the New York Yankees were doing, wanted to know if Babe Ruth was still alive, said he missed American movies and magazines. (When they went back to their ship, the Americans sent over some old copies of TIME and the Reader's Digest.)

The searchers found the Takasago "a very second-rate ship" by U.S. standards --insanitary, inadequately staffed, poorly equipped, and with food and medicine for only about 150 of the nearly 1,000 men it was going to pick up. Only the hospital space was comparatively clean; everywhere else there were dirt and cockroaches.

Strictly Filthy. The destroyer tagged the Jap ship for two days; when she sailed from Wake, the Americans prepared to board her again. From 1,000 yards to windward, the crew of the Murray was sickened by the stench of sickness, "like the sweet, sickly odor of rotten fruit."

The Takasago's patients were more dead than alive. A Navy doctor estimated that 15% of them had been so underfed that they would never reach Japan. Another 15% had tuberculosis. The rest were in varying stages of emaciation, suffering from pellagra, beri beri and scurvy. To treat them, the Japs had no plasma or whole blood, no penicillin, sulfa or synthetic vitamins.

Wishbone-shaped Wake, scene of one of the Marines' heroic stands in the war's early weeks, had another last-ditch garrison aboard. But no one went to rout them out. They were dying on the vine, as dozens of other bypassed garrisons in the Pacific were dying.

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