Then they brought him here. The Navy flew him across the Pacific, hopping from one island base to the next in an assortment of flying boats and transports. He crossed the equator and the international date line on the same day. But when he reached the boundary between Nimitz’s Pacific Theater and The General’s Southwest Pacific Theater, it was like he’d glided into a stone wall. It was all he could do to talk himself onboard a troop transport to New Zealand, and then to Fremantle. The transports were almost unbelievably hellish: steel ovens packed with men, baked by the sun, no one allowed to go abovedecks for fear they’d be sighted, and marked for slaughter, by a Nip submarine. Even at night they couldn’t get a breeze through there, because all openings had to be covered with blackout curtains. Waterhouse couldn’t really complain; some of the men had traveled this way all the way from the East Coast of the United States.