THE CAUGHT SHORTERS
by
Marilyn P. Oppenborn Steber
March 30, 2007
On December 8, 1941 the inhabitants of Guam learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the way most of us Statesiders did–by radio. It was Monday on Guam and Sunday at Pearl, but there was only four hours’ difference between the two islands. It was noon in Miami, Florida.
Fred Burr Oppenborn of Miami was “caught short” there, as he painted on the seabag he brought back four years later: Caught Short Dec. 8, 1941. He was on Guam and was one of eleven Pan American Airways men “caught short” that day. These eleven men would call themselves the Caught Shorters’ Club and, for a membership card they signed a Japanese 50 Sen note. (Never mind that whoever wrote the words on the bill substituted the “a” in caught with an “o”.)
As a shocked Honolulu dealt with her severe wounds and an radio operator desperately broadcast the attack to the world, Guam was shaken awake with 150 pound bombs falling from planes marked with the symbol of the Rising Sun.
As the attack went forward, Fred’s boss, James Oscar Thomas, raced from the Pan Am Hotel, where he was having breakfast, to the Pan Am office to burn the radio code books. (* If they fell into the hands of the enemy–well, nobody knew the consequences. Giving the correct codes as planes navigated through the air-lanes identified planes as friend or foe, and it was essential that the code books not be captured. (Jim later wrote about this event in his article for the Signet of Phi Sigma Kappa “Punishment Without Crime”. He expanded on his experience in his book Trapped with the Enemy, Four Years a Civilian POW in Japan, copyrighted in 2002. He wrote the same to my mother, Carolyn Potter Oppenborn in Miami. Until the letter carrier came on Monday, December 9, we weren’t sure if that transfer had come through. That letter is lost because my paternal grandmother, Nellie Bly Burr Oppenborn, saved stamps and Mother was so distraught she wasn’t thinking about saving it for her daughter to write about many years later. Carolyn saved many other letters from FBO in a scrapbook now in my possession.) Of the eleven men Thomas supervised on Guam, eight were radio technicians, including Fred Burr Oppenborn, my father.
Fred was a new member of the crew at Guam, as was Jim. He had been there since late August and he had written his father, Peace Justice Henry L. Oppenborn of Miami, that he expected to be transferred to Manila by the end of September.
Fred Oppenborn was an avid HAM (Amateur Radio) operator. In our front yard in Miami at 244 Northwest 30th Street I remember his 25 foot antenna mounted on a base of rocks. It was a magnet for the kids in the neighborhood, but it worried him that it might interfere with neighbors’ radio reception. This was more elaborate than the antenna he had installed on my parents’ apartment building in Washington, DC some years before, to the horror of my mother, who thought he’d fall in the process. He had filled the tiny front room of our “Shot-gun” house* in Florida with all sorts of working, not working, and “under construction” radio wonders. (A shotgun house is a type of folk architecture. We always thought it was called that because a shot fired through it would hit every room in the house. I would take issue with the author of ALABAMA FOLK HOUSES by Eugene M. Wilson, University of South Alabama, 1975. His picture of a shotgun house on page 53 is far more elaborate than the house we lived in!)
At night Fred would tap out on his telegraph key “CQ, CQ” a sort of mating call for HAMS which meant that he was seeking anyone listening on their “rigs” at the time. When someone answered they would communicate in their fraternal and mystical “lingo” as long as they could, and then they’d get a mailing address so they could send a QSL card, a tangible proof of their ethereal meeting.
Fred had a “Good Wrist” meaning he could send Morse Code quickly and accurately. His call letters were W4DRR. I learned those letters when I learned my name and address: “My name is Marilyn Oppenborn and I live at 244 Northwest 30th Street and my father’s call letters are W4DRR”, I’d announce proudly. We didn’t have a phone. I was 5 years old in 1941.
On December 8, 1941, having disposed of anything in the Pan Am office the Station Boss, Jim Thomas thought might help the Japanese, he gathered up his men, provisions, weapons, the station wagon, and an hitchhiking Marine or two. They headed for high ground as bombing and strafing continued to wrack the Island, the Marine Barracks, the Hotel, and the docks. They took as much food as they could and hid it along the road. They spent a miserable first night enduring the tropical rain and then fighting the mosquitoes that came out to feast on them when the rain stopped.
It was from here that they watched, two nights later, the estimated 15,000 enemy troops as they came ashore with their tanks, flame throwers and guns. Hope for rescue by the US Navy died as they observed the invasion. The Marines on the island numbered only about 125 not counting a few medical personnel. Morale was low. Their position was hopeless. They had tried to radio out some last messages to the States, but all the frequencies were blocked by the Japanese.
On the 10th of December the Governor of Guam surrendered the Island and a message from the Japanese General now in charge of the island made an offer they couldn’t refuse: good treatment in exchange for their cooperation. They came down.
There were 475 persons captured on Guam and transported. Of those, we know the names of the Pan American men: James O. Thomas, Richard A. Arvidson, George Blackett, Max Brodofsky, George Conklin, Charles Gregg, Alfred Hammelef, Everett Penning, Robert Vaughn, Grant Wells, and Fred Oppenborn. Others were Ensign Lorraine Christiansen of Gunnison, Utah, Ensign Doris Yetter of Philadelphia, and Pharmacist’s Mate Durham, whose first name is not mentioned in the diaries I have. In all, there were about 130 civilians.
Before long they all were on the Piti Docks waiting to be loaded onto the Japanese luxury liner, Argentina Maru. Fred later said he broke into a cask of whale oil on the dock and drank as much as he could get down. It wasn’t particularly tasty, he reported, but after a month of limited rations, nourishment in any form was welcome.
In addition to “Caught Short” and “Argentina Maru” written on Fred’s seabag were the names of all the camps in which he and his companions were confined are memorialized, as it were. They were Zentsugi, The Seamen’s Mission, The Canadian Academy, and then Futatabi, their final place of internment.
By that time Fred and Dick Arvidson had collected by one way or another an assemblage of sundry radio parts. There is a little variance in the story here. Fred told us they worked on radios that their guards brought the radio technicians. “A little wire here, (“that’s no good”–to the customer) a vacuum tube there, (“that’s no good”), throw them on the sawdust floor and clean up the mess as they left, and pretty soon, they had a radio.
Arvidson says on page 26 in his diary that Oppenborn confided in him there was a small broadcast band radio in a warehouse the internees pilfered for clothes, food, bedding and so forth. He asked Dick if he could “modify it to receive shortwave news broadcasts from the United States. After considerable thought, I conclude that it might be possible.”
Jim Thomas doesn’t explain where the parts came from. He says on page 115 of the Signet article, “Fred Oppenborn and Dick Arvidson, two of my roommates and former Panair radiomen managed to assemble a short wave radio. They had carefully collected parts from outside sources and stolen parts from an old radio they found in camp.”
It goes without saying how dangerous it was for hungry prisoners to keep such a secret, but they did, and on that radio contraption they were able to hear Dinah Shore singing on a San Francisco radio station, and the pilots returning from Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.
On August 5, 1942 a Ham Radio operator, W. J. Lucas of Oakland California was twisting the dials on his short wave rig when he picked up a transmission from Japan. The next day he typed a QSL card and addressed it to “Fred B. Oberborn or Openborn (who is a war prisoner in Japan) Miami, Florida”. Across the top of the card he wrote a not to the ‘SUP’T OF MAILS: Please make every effort to deliver this card. Read and see importance of same. I am almost sure the name is Obenborn. He didn’t give street address. Thanks very much.” He affixed 5 more cents in postage to the penny postcard and dropped it in the mailbox.
The name Oppenborn was not unknown in Miami and to the credit of the Miami Post Office, that acknowledgment card arrived in the mailbox of Carolyn Oppenborn, 244 Northwest 30th Street, Miami. It wasn’t put in another envelope nor readdressed, either. On the message side of the card Mr. Lucas wrote:
“Heard Fred B. Obenborn on short wave radio from Japan last night. He said he was being held a war prisoner there after the fall of Guam where he was employed by Pan American. He said he was well and for you not to worry. Asked that anyone hearing him to please notify his wife, Mrs. Fred B. Obenborn but did not give Miami street address. He spoke in a very clear and assured voice. Said he was getting enough to eat and had a clean place to sleep. Was well, and hope (sic) everything at home was OK. The reception wasn’t very good last night and it was hard to get the name [undecipherable]. However, I think I am correct. I hope you receive this news. I am, W. J. Lucas 3036 Bona St., Oakland, California.
Sources: J. O. Thomas. Punishment Without Crime. The Signet of Phi Sigma Kappa, Tulane University, 1946; Letter from L. C. Reynolds, Manager, Pacific-Alaska Division, PAA, March 18, 1945, forwarding a letter from Department of State; Interview with Ensign Yetter from PHILADELPHIA RECORD, August 28, 1942: retyped clipping from unknown and undated Utah paper regarding Ensign Christiansen of Utah who graduated from Holy Cross Hospital in 1934; MIAMI HARALD, early 1942, Interview with Judge Oppenborn; Postcard from W. J. Lucas; Private communications with Fred Oppenborn and with Carolyn Oppenborn of Birmingham, Alabama; Alabama Folk Houses by Eugene M. Wilson, published by the Alabama Historical Commission, Montgomery, Alabama. 1975
