Courage in a White Coat

by Mary Schwaner

  We hid the auto in a shelter, destroyed the military plates and my pass from General Cristy. A battle had been fought at Passi and the soldiers were moving toward Calinog. We took a few things and went to the Hospital. About midnight there was a burst of automatic rifle fire. Two of the three sentries at the bridge behind the Hospital were killed on the main highway from the south. Then all was quiet.

  The family huddled on the hospital bed made available to them. The children slept fitfully, twitching in their sleep each time a spate of machine gun fire disturbed the night.

  At dawn Dorothy slipped from the bed to peek from the window. The hospital was situated on a small rise and overlooked a lovely market square. Blooming bushes framed the lantern posts and lined the quaint pebbled walks.

  But what should have been a tranquil scene was now dominated by a machine gun nest in each corner of the square.

  A chill penetrated her white coat and lodged deep in the marrow of her bones. Bobby’s first stirring noises pinched at her heart. She turned to look at her little family, just as Carol Joy swung out a sleepy arm to settle Bobby back down.

  She’d brought them to this. She would bring them through this. There was no question of whether her children would survive. She would allow no other outcome. But what, dear God, had they done?

  Dorothy buttoned her white coat. She would make her rounds, just like any other normal day. She settled her stethoscope firmly around her neck, like a badge proclaiming her neutrality. The Japanese soldiers who were beginning to stir in the square would find nothing sinister here. Merely doctors. Doing the work to which they were best suited.

  Saving lives.

  She stepped into the corridor and halted. Across the hall three Japanese officers paused from eating their breakfast. They looked at her, assessing her as she assessed them until she turned away and began her rounds.

  They had taken over her hospital. Apparently without incident. In the hours before dawn.

  She circled quickly through the closest ward, then hurried back to the room where the children slept.

  “I didn’t know where you were,” Fred said, his voice weary from the night’s ordeal.

  “Checking the ward,” she smiled. “Greeting the three officers who seem to be enjoying the cafeteria food.”

  Fred swallowed. “So you’ve met the Japanese.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Well then.”

  By midmorning the main body of troops arrived. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers swooped through the village on bicycles, a startling and unexpected image amid the tromp of feet and rumble of tanks that drowned all else. Japanese soldiers descended from the backs of trucks. Some entered the rear of the Hospital and asked for quinine. Clearly, they were no stranger to malaria.

  A Japanese officer who seemed to be in charge told Fred that if the family remained within the bounds of the Hospital compound, no harm would come to them.

  Fred’s memoir

  I talked with a Japanese officer who appeared to be a medical man. Our conversation might well have been other than captor and captive. He regretted, as I did, that we had to meet under such circumstances. It was evidence of what we were to experience during the next three years: Japanese soldiers who had no heart for the War but wished to get home to their families. Many seemed to wish to help us in any way feasible.

  Dr. Waters was taken upcountry to try to help the Japanese locate the USAFFE (United States Army Forces in the Far East). He knew little or nothing.

  Dorothy asked permission of a sentry for us to return to our house to get some toys for the children. He accompanied us and when he saw the mess in which our house was left by raiding soldiers he exclaimed apologetically, “Good and bad soldiers!”

  While we were away at the house, Japanese officers came looking for me to question me. It was fortunate that I was away (perhaps, another Providential fact) for with my knowledge of USAFFE headquarters, etc., they might not have let me off lightly if I had not given them the information they needed. However, they never came back to question me.

  Late Sunday morning two Ford trucks drove up in front of the Hospital in Calinog. Dorothy and Fred, along with the other Americans and foreign nationals present, were told they had one hour to get ready to leave.

  One hour. They had nothing but the gotta-go bags. But the one-hour warning gave Dorothy time to rethink things.

  She hurried to the Pharmacy tucked away in the hospital’s interior and filled her medical bag with a variety of drugs and things for the children. If this was outright theft, then she prayed God would stay her hand.

  A doctor went past. Two nurses stepped up beside her to get medicines for patients. The short Filipino nurse turned to go and then caught Dorothy’s eye.

  “You know, Dr. Chambers,” she said, and Dorothy held her breath. “You’re going to need this.”

  She pulled a key from the pocket of her uniform and opened the double-locked cabinet, pulled out three full boxes of sulfa tablets and dropped them into Dorothy’s gotta-go bag.

  With a flick of the key she locked the cabinet back up, laid a hand on Dorothy’s arm and said, “God be with you.”

  Shouts echoed down the hall now.

  “You get in trucks!”

  Their captors made a great show of loading their rifles before pointing them at Dorothy and Fred as they were hustled into the trucks. Henry Waters climbed in next and took the baby from Ann before helping her into the truck bed with their other two children. Americans and Filipinos who were ambulatory patients at the hospital crowded in after.

  Bobby scrambled off his mother’s lap and perched atop a pile of luggage, and there he stayed as they were driven south through the battle-scarred country. Through the bomb craters and cratered vehicles. All the way to Iloilo City.

  And the whole way, little Bobby clutched his “nye-nye” teddy bear and sang at the top of his lungs.

  . . . .

  Two hours later the truck rumbled up to the doors of the hospital Dorothy and her staff had fled just days earlier. Beyond it Iloilo burned, thick black smoke coiling up from the bomb-ravaged port city. Nothing about the hospital grounds looked the same. Foliage had been crushed into the mud by what looked to have been tanks. Here and there a door hung off its hinges.

  Dr. Waters was first to jump from the truck. He was stunned as he took in the changes war had wrought so swiftly. It took him a moment to register that the Japanese guard with a bayoneted gun pointed at his chest was getting angry.

  The fellow clearly wanted him back on the truck.

  Around him, Filipino nurses, patients and doctors were ushered into Iloilo Mission Hospital, but all Americans and Brits were kept at gunpoint aboard the two trucks.

  Once personal possessions were sorted, the two trucks took off with a jerk and proceeded to the Provincial Jail, where those still on the trucks were forced out and into the jailhouse.

  It made all sorts of sense to Fred. He’d come twice to the jail in hopes of bringing aid or comfort to Japanese nationals who had been interned in this very jail by the Philippine government. Now the Japanese would use the same jail to house their Allied prisoners.

  “What do we do?” an English businessman asked, frustrated at the prospect of sleeping on the hard jail floor.

  Dr. Waters laughed, then spoke in a suddenly serious tone.

  “Men and rats adapt.”

  Fred blanched. It was a shocking statement, and yet he’d already witnessed evidence of just that very principle. He’d seen the English businessman before, on several occasions. Always impeccably dressed. But today he looked weary and disheveled, in nothing but dirty shorts and sneakers.

  Men who had spent most of their adult lives behind a desk were now showing a bit of muscle from the physical work recent weeks had demanded of them. They were adapting.

  “Dink, Mommy! Needa dink!”

  Bobby was wailing now. Parched by the dusty ride.

  Dorothy steppe
d into the lavatory and turned the tap, not really expecting anything, and not getting anything. The city water system had been destroyed by the Americans when they evacuated Iloilo.

  “Thank you ever so much, fellas,” she moaned.

  A Japanese guard had followed her into the lav, and above Bobby’s screeching she managed to get the fellow to understand that they needed water, and they needed it now. He forced her to take Bobby back into the cell and then closed the door on the women. Within minutes she understood why. He was rounding up the men and barking orders to them.

  He was taking them in search of water.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  NINETY-POUND BATTALION

  Nights were the hardest, when they were confined to the cells. Men in one cell, women and children in the other.

  Bobby seemed to have suspended his need for sleep, and more than one internee threatened to box his ears if he didn’t keep quiet. But they underestimated the child. Now, instead of just singing, he moved around the cell on his rubbery two-year-old legs. Dancing.

  Carol was another matter. Overnight she’d become mother to everyone in the cell.

  “Mrs. Lady needs a blankie, Mommy.”

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Sojer Wife. We’ll help you wash that tomollow.”

  “No, Mr. Big Person, you alla-ready had yours.”

  The remarkable thing was that whether she was commiserating or scolding, people for the most part smiled and accepted her pronouncements.

  And on the first Sunday of captivity, Carol Joy led the singing.

  Fred quietly organized a worship service, and much of the group of internees convened in the jail chapel. Fred delivered a sermon from Dr. H. E. Fosdick, reading from a book he’d refused to leave behind. It was a treasured volume, one that Dorothy had gifted him on their first anniversary. It would not be abandoned.

  The makeshift little chapel offered a familiar setting, under unusual circumstances and with a good deal of tension, and most heads remained bowed, even while Fred spoke. When he announced a hymn, they joined tentatively in a lyrical whisper, casting glances from the corners of their eyes to see the reaction of their Japanese guards.

  With one exception, that is.

  When Fred called the name of the hymn, little Carol Joy immediately stood up, walked to the front to stand beside her Daddy-boy, and sang in her pure, sweet treble. Her perfect melody emboldened hearts that were beginning to feel cowed. And when she concluded the final verse, there were twice as many Japanese guards at the chapel door than when she started.

  . . . .

  That same day, they met Loreto Tupaz.

  The mood of the camp was still quiet. Guarded. Most of the one hundred internees were still keeping to themselves, organizing a spot for their things, and keeping a suspicious eye on anyone who came uncomfortably close.

  Internees had to fend for themselves in all things, and especially where food was concerned. The preparation and cooking over open fires consumed a good bit of time in the middle of the day for many, not just in rounding up food, but in collecting firewood and something to use as a cooking pot.

  At first, mealtime was “every man for himself”. But on this first Sunday, several of the internees contributed canned meat, and two had baby potatoes to boil. And they all ate together in the jail yard. It was satisfying and left most of them feeling that two meals a day were going to be okay. But more than that, the communal meal seemed to birth the fledgling idea that cooperation might be the best path to survival.

  Just as the Sunday meal was being cleared up, they heard a commotion at the front of the jail. One voice rose above the rest—clear and honey-laced—and captured the attention of the internees.

  “How you doing today, officuh?”

  The chipper voice could be heard moving from place to place in the outer room. “Oh, you betta get dat fix, officuh. Not good it get infect.”

  They could hear her clucking and chatting with the Japanese guards, and all the while the chatty voice came closer and closer to their enclosure.

  It was mesmerizing. Japanese growls turned to polite responses, and there was even a chuckle or two here and there.

  Eventually, the door to the cell block was opened by a Japanese guard who held it ajar and nodded respectfully to the small woman who smiled her thank you. But before entering, she turned back to the crowd of soldiers in the front room and whispered something in a soft, respectful tone and elegantly bowed.

  Loreto Tupaz stood about four-foot-nine, and was more than engulfed in a navy blue woolen nurse’s cape with a red cross emblazoned on her left chest. The cape was of the old style and flowed to her ankles. On her head she wore a crisp white nurses’ cap that must have dated to the 1920s.

  She moved around the cells, making greetings quite similar to those she’d made to the Japanese. Her tempo seemed the same, never tarrying longer with one internee or hurrying away from another. But all along the way she would catch the eye of each internee, and as she moved away, her foot would slide a small cloth-wrapped package toward the internee as she passed along.

  By the time she’d circled the cell block, there were thirty small packages quickly concealed by the internees, each package having magically fallen from the internal folds of the petite young woman’s voluminous cloak.

  Within weeks the internees had dubbed this tenacious little lady their “ninety-pound battalion”, for nothing less than a battalion could have walked right through those Japanese guards as she had.

  Loreto came weekly to the jail, always managing to bring the very thing someone was needing. Vegetables, bandage rolls, aspirin, canned milk.

  Gradually, her tempo changed. She asked to see the internees first, spending a little more time with each visit.

  Once she’d checked on each internee, she spent equal time with the Japanese soldiers. They never once wondered why she wore the huge woolen cape, many sizes too large for her, in the humid heat of Iloilo City.

  Whether or not she had anything to do with it, they would never know, but after a month in the jailhouse, a Japanese officer came to the men and made a startling announcement.

  “We busy fight war. You take burned building. Make fence. Go round three school building. Move there.”

  Move out of the jail!

  There was no question they wanted to do that very thing, and that afternoon the men were taken out by a Japanese lieutenant and set about collecting materials and erecting the fence.

  For days they were marched around the neighboring city blocks and set to ripping sheets of corrugated tin from the rubble to carry back to the schoolyard. The metal sheets offered about two seconds of welcome shade as the men hoisted them overhead for the trek back. But within minutes the heat they’d collected lying in the beastly tropical sun was strong enough to penetrate the men’s makeshift gloves and sear their hands.

  Once they’d collected as much as each man could carry, they were marched in a group, under guard, about six blocks away from the jail to a small schoolyard with three small buildings where they set about erecting a very sturdy fence.

  Fred gloried in the freedom of being away from the jail. He would stride along, deep in thought, or mentally embracing some particular challenge he needed to think through. His mind was miles away one day when he nearly bumped into the person in front of him as the group suddenly came to an abrupt halt.

  It took a moment for Fred to get his bearings, and to assess what the devil was going on as they were quickly formed into ranks as if ready for inspection.

  A Japanese officer came striding across the street from the guard post he’d been inspecting. The man’s arms flailed angrily as he approached the small group of internees. Without warning, he strode behind the front row, slapping each prisoner in the back of the head until they realized he wanted them to bow. When he reached the end of the row, he knocked the cap off Fred’s head.

  The small group of men looked at one another confused until Fred turned t
oward the soldier and brought his posture to full attention. Under his breath he urged the group to follow his lead.

  “Bow. Now.”

  The Japanese officer paced back and forth in front of them in full rant. As Fred began his slow bow, the man stopped mid-rant and stared as the entire small group of white men bowed low from the waist.

  A smile crept across his face as he took in the ‘honor’ they paid him, and answered their bow with a full bow in return.

  A new fact of their internment was learned that day. If one came near any Japanese officer, one had better be prepared to bow. Nothing inflamed them more than to have a prisoner pass by without bowing.

  But true to the Japanese code, the officers would always stop to acknowledge the bow. It was one of the many contradictions they had seen already. The Japanese army could show horrific disregard for human decency, even for human life. And then turn around and offer some kindness or gesture of politeness or good will.

  It kept the internees in a constant state of uncertainty.

  But it wasn’t easy for the men, enduring the intense physical labor it took to build the fence that would free them from the jail. The substandard nutrition conspired with the heat to take its toll on the men—enough so that their guard adopted the habit of giving them frequent rests. When shade was not available, the men would take turns standing behind the others seated on the ground, offering impromptu and most welcome shade with their bodies.

  One particularly hot day Fred found himself seated not far from that day’s duty guard and drew him into conversation.

  “Your English is excellent,” Fred said as they passed around water to fill their tin cups. Only one inch of water per internee was allowed on these work breaks. Never more.

  The guard nodded and attempted to hide a satisfied grin.

  “Chicago.”

  Fred looked at the fellow. “Chicago? You’re from Chicago?”

  “Six month. I study there.”

  Fred was aghast.