And so it was showers for Jack and Stew, and sick bay for Ted, with a smiling Mary hovering over him. But the battle went on. Every carrier sent its full quota of dive bombers and torpedo planes to sink ships in the harbor and wreck shore installations. Speedy cruisers, destroyers, and PT boats came in next to put on the finishing touches. After these came troop transports and landing barges. Marines and GI Joes swarmed ashore by the thousands. By late afternoon they were ten miles inland. The battle was won.
That was not all. They reached the prison camp, knocked down the gates, and set free more than five hundred prisoners who had not looked on the Stars and Stripes for two long years.
Two hundred of the prisoners were put aboard the Black Bee, for she would be the first ship to reach Pearl Harbor. The hole in her side had been shored up, making her safe for a journey, but not for combat.
As Jack watched the prisoners—ragged, unshaven, and lean-faced, with hungry looks in their eyes—line up on the deck, he recalled a song he had sung back in school days:
Tramp! tramp! tramp! the boys are marching,
Cheer up, comrades, they will come,
And beneath the starry flag
We will breathe the air again
Of the freeland in our own beloved home.
Others watched too. All of a sudden Mary let out a cry: “Tom! Tom! Oh! My dear!” She threw her arms about a slim, bearded youth who could have been but a boy on Bataan.