In the literature of war, the telling of POW-MIA stories — the dogged search for information and answers, the happy repatriation of survivors, or the somber identification and return of remains — has become an earnest genre of its own. The eventual cooperation of former enemies, advances in forensic science and the computerization of records have led to the recovery and homecoming of so many. Just this month, the remains of Marine Warren Nelson, 20 years old when he was killed in action during the South Pacific battle of Tarawa in 1943, were returned to Lakota, N.D., for burial with full military honors.
It took just the length of World War II, but great effort and determination, for the Mott boys of New Jersey, Navy officers Benny and Bill, to track the story of their younger brother. Barton was captured after he and other Navy personnel were wounded in the Japanese conquest of the Philippines shortly after Pearl Harbor.
"The Jersey Brothers" is nearly 600 pages of intense, thoroughly researched family and world history, as engaging and readable as a fine novel. It took author Sally Mott Freeman — the daughter of Bill Mott, niece to Benny and Barton — 10 years to piece together the story of Barton's capture, imprisonment and torture and his brothers' relentless drive to find him.
The Mott brothers were in remarkable position to press the search. Bill Mott, like Benny a 1930s graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, was an intelligence officer who spent a good part of the war overseeing President Franklin Roosevelt's secret "map room" at the White House, often conferring with the president himself and with important visitors, including British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Benny served as a high-ranking officer on the USS Enterprise, the aircraft carrier that was spared from the attack on Pearl Harbor, participated in later decisive battles and led the resurgent U.S. fleet to victory in the Pacific. (This is indeed a Navy story, with several disdainful shots aimed at Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur.)
The grim narrative is built through interviews with former POWs who recounted sadistic beatings and beheadings, starvation and untreated disease at camps in the Philippines and aboard "hell ships" that carried many to Japan. Through those painful accounts supported by research in American and Japanese archives, diaries, unpublished memoirs and other documents, Freeman offers a grimly detailed account of what life was like for her uncle those three turbulent years of captivity. She details big-picture strategy and paints intimate scenes of despair with dialogue, settings and characters that ring true. She also documents the anguish and anger of her grandmother, Helen, waiting at her home in New Jersey for the son she had tried desperately to keep out of harm's way. Helen besieged Roosevelt and top naval authorities with pleading and accusing letters, demanding to know why more wasn't being done to find and rescue her youngest.
Chuck Haga, a former Star Tribune reporter, teaches newswriting at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.
The Jersey Brothers
By: Sally Mott Freeman.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 588 pages, $28.
