“This is the captain speaking,” he said formally.
“For a bunch of Kansas hayseeds and Brooklyn thugs, that wasn’t half bad. And the chief of the boat would have told me by now if somebody had gone over the side.”
Chuckles and laughter ran through the boat.
Leaving the microphone open. Commander Lennox said, “Take her up, make turns for sixteen knots, and set us on a course for Pearl Harbor.”
He let the spring-loaded microphone switch go and motioned for the chief of the boat to come to him.
“Chief,” Commander Lennox said, “I would not be too upset, when you check the guns, if you were to find something that would take, say, thirty-six hours to fix” “Aye, aye, Sir,” the chief of the boat said.
“And, of course, if the men aren’t needed to help with the repair, there’s no reason I can see why they shouldn’t be given liberty.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” the chief of the boat said.
“Surface, surface!
“It. Rutherford ordered.
[THREE]
They had worked out a cipher:
On the fifth of February KSP had sent a message, as opposed to responding to one of Fertig’s messages. So far, all that establishing a radio link with the United States had done was to enable Fertig to get word to his wife that he was alive and not in a Japanese POW camp.
KSF FOR MFS NAMES OF TOWN AMD STATE WHERE PATRICIA LIVES
WILL BE USED AS CODE PHRASES FOR DOUBLE TRANSPOSITION STOP
SEND TEST MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY KSF BY
Patricia, Fertig’s daughter, was living with her mother in Golden, Colorado.
Using that as the basis for a rudimentary double transposition code, Fertig’s homemade transmitter sent a meaningless phrase to KSF. Receipt of the message was acknowledged, but the reply, in the new code was only:
KSF FOR MFS MO TRAFFIC FOR YOU AT THIS TIME KSF OUT
Two days later, on February 11,1943, there had been another message for
MFS:
YOUR STATION DESIGNATED WYZB REPEAT WYZB STOP ALL REPEAT
ALL FUTURE TRAFFIC WILL BE WITH KAZ REPEAT KAZ STOP KAZ
HAS FILE OF ALL PAST TRAFFIC KSF OUT
KAZ was the call sign of General Douglas MacArthur’s General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Command, in Australia. They heard KAZ on the air all the time, but had been unable to get KAZ to respond to their calls.
Now things might be different. But several hours of calls to KAZ had produced no response whatever. There were several possible explanations for that, the most likely that radiations from Gerardo Almendres’s homemade transmitter were for some reason unable to reach Australia. Fertig did not permit himself to dwell on the possibility that MacArthur did not want to talk to him, While Fertig did not personally know MacArthur, he had a number of friends who did. To a man, they reported that Douglas MacArthur, onetime Army Chief of Staff, later Marshal of the Philippine Army, and now once again in U.S. Army uniform, had an ego on a par with, say, Charlemagne’s.
While Fertig did not believe that the fall of the Philippines was MacArthur’s fault–indeed, he had acquired a deep respect for MacArthur’s military ability;
MacArthur’s delaying actions with his limited resources had been undeniably brilliant–he suspected that MacArthur was personally shamed by his defeat.
If that were the case, that shame might be deepened by proof that not all American officers and Philippine forces had hoisted the white flag and marched docilely into Japanese captivity.
During his brief service as an officer, Fertig had quickly learned an old soldier’s requisitioning trick. If you need something for one hundred men, and you want to be sure you get it, you requisition a quantity sufficient for two hundred. Or four hundred. Then, when the supply authorities cut your requisition by fifty percent, or seventy-five percent, you still wind up with what you really need.
Fertig had been “generous “in his communications with KSF with regard to his estimated strength report for the troop strength of the U.S. force in the Philippines. Not dishonest, just generous. He had elected to take the word of Philippine army officers who had not elected to surrender (putting his own serious doubts aside), when they told him how many men they had at their disposal, and how anxious–providing he could supply and pay them–they were to put themselves and their men under the command of Brigadier General Wendell W. Fertig and the U.S. forces in the Philippines.