Books: On Jap-held Guam

ROBINSON CRUSOE, USN — as told to Blake Clark by George Ray Tweed —Whittlesey House ($2.75).

The story of George Ray Tweed, the Navy radioman, who spent two and a half years on Jap-held Guam (TIME, Aug. 21) is as packed with adventure, suspense and endurance as Robinson Crusoe’s own. In many respects Crusoe’s 20th-Century counterpart went Crusoe one better. Tweed had no handy wrecked ship from which to salvage an “abundance of hatchets,” nails, knives and other carpenter’s tools. The only tool he had to build some of his furniture was a machete.

Hare & Hounds. Unlike Crusoe, Tweed was a fugitive as well as a castaway, and his story is a harrowing tale of hare & hounds. Never for a moment did the Japs relax their hunt for him and the five other U.S. servicemen who chose to hide on the 225 sq. mi. island rather than surrender with the rest on Dec. 10, 1941. Time after time Tweed abandoned a hideaway only minutes before a Jap hunting party arrived.

After several weeks in the bush (“a devilish shrub . . . chest high and thickly matted together, it is covered with sharp thorns half an inch long”), Tweed and his friend Al Tyson moved into a hole in a hillside that was “practically the Waldorf-Astoria.” And a native friend brought them a radio. But a search party soon drove them out.

Next, in a cave on the side of a hill overlooking the sea, Tweed felt “for the first time in over three months . . . that I had successfully eluded the Japs long enough to enjoy a breathing spell. . . . My cave was well concealed, and I was already turning over in my mind the ways in which I would make it more comfortable.” With ingenuity and the help of an enterprising Chamorro he soon succeeded.

Good Man Friday. A stolen gasoline generator was rigged to provide current for a light bulb and another salvaged radio. With the aid of a battered but usable typewriter, Tweed even began publication of a newspaper, the Guam Eagle, (for a circulation of five loyal Chamorros.) “My cave became a rendezvous. It was growing more comfortable all the time. … In exchange for world news supplied by the radio and the Guam Eagle, I received a steady flow of supplies and local intelligence from a few friends.” All this had to be abandoned hastily when Tweed discovered that the Chamorro who owned the cave was more than half friendly with the Japs and permitted him to stay only because he liked having an American dependent on him for life itself. “Here he is,” he would say to his friends, pointing to Tweed as if he were a caged animal. “I keep him here. I feed him.”

Most of the Chamorros, however, were good men Fridays to the modern Crusoe, though even the best of them could never appreciate the importance of secrecy in their ordinary talk. Yet, hauled before the Japs, they held their tongues despite unspeakable tortures. Some had hoses shoved down their gullets till the water pressure swelled them like balloons. A girl, Tonie, who had brought supplies to Tweed, was beaten with telephone wire, eviscerated with a bayonet.

“Never Give Up.” Sick and discouraged at such sacrifices, Tweed was about to surrender (to certain death, as he learned later) when a native schoolteacher, married to an American, dissuaded him. “Never give up,” she said, “no matter what happens. . . . The people of Guam feel that as long as you hold out the Americans will come back. If you surrender, they will believe you have lost your faith and think the Japs have won.”

So Tweed held out. One by one, the other Americans were caught and beheaded or shot. His days of electric-lit caves and radios were over, but high on a cliff facing the ocean at the northern end of the island, he found at last the perfect haven. Only one man, his friend Antonio, came there to bring him food. Tweed stayed for 21 months with only an algebra book, nine magazines and a pack of cards for company until the day a U.S. destroyer crew caught sight of his mirror and flag signals, sent in a motor launch to start him home.