Following the ceremony, the Ninety-First Coast Artillery Band was to play the national anthems of the United States and the Philippines, but their barracks had been bombed and their instruments were burned.
11
VOLUNTEER
Her body was failing, and she was scared. So little was known about her affliction, and the void was filled with terror.
Though her husband’s main interest was infectious diseases, he knew far more about tuberculosis, which caused some thirty thousand deaths a year in the islands, than leprosy. Mycobacterium leprae was among the first bacilli identified, back in 1873, but it remained a medical mystery. It wasn’t part of the standard medical school curriculum, and few physicians bothered to learn about it. There was no vaccine for leprosy, and no one could say for sure whether it was hereditary or a contagious disease. It was commonly believed that you got leprosy by sharing food or drink with a leper or by touching an infected person.
In the Philippines, leprosy sufferers hid the early symptoms under clothing as long as possible, until it was no longer an option. When the lesions couldn’t be covered, victims were ejected from their communities, becoming charity cases, outcasts, or beggars, forced to leave behind their lives, their jobs, their loved ones. Because of unfortunate wording in the Old Testament, leprosy was regarded in some cultures as a punishment for sinfulness, transforming sufferers’ physical ailments into a moral condition. Stigmatized, they were driven into hellish government- or church-run colonies in the rural provinces, away from society.
There were some eight thousand known cases in the islands at the start of the war, but the chaos of battle had sent many more into hiding for fear they’d become the easiest casualties of the new occupying regime. This was not an irrational fear. In 1912, soldiers in a city in southern China rounded up lepers in their own colony, drove them to a pit, and shot them, women and children included. And then they burned the bodies. Fifty-three people died that day, and the massacre was met with public approval. More recently, in 1937, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, leprosy victims were promised an allowance of ten cents—a ruse—and when they gathered to accept the allotment, more than fifty of them were executed.
The American health authorities in the Pacific Islands adopted a policy of segregation and isolation, shipping the afflicted to far-flung colonies or medical facilities for treatment with an injectable form of chaulmoogra oil, the only drug that showed any promise. With the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States, those who weren’t caught and dispatched to leper colonies were now stuck in cities with shuttered pharmacies.
Joey desperately needed medicine to keep her disease under control, but it was virtually impossible to get in the shredded city. Sometimes the drugs could be found on the black market, but the expense was so high, out of reach. So the leprosy ran rampant, attacking her body, destroying her flesh, and causing her joints to stiffen.
She couldn’t just stay at home, in isolation, and waste away. She prayed, sought higher instruction, until one day she had an epiphany. If she believed anything, it was that even the lowliest could be a vessel, could be of service to the greater good. She thought about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who led France into battle, driving back the English and reclaiming the crown. If she was going to die, she would do so with dignity, face her fate with honor.
In the face of slow death, she decided to live, to use whatever was left to help her people. She approached a friend she knew to be in the underground resistance movement that had formed since Japanese soldiers marched into the city on January 2, 1942. The network was vast, but the guerrillas lived in constant fear. The Japanese army was attempting to purge the city of guerrillas. Soldiers would cordon off a neighborhood, called a zona, and position sentries at every possible entry or exit. They would then call all residents out of their homes and force them to parade past a mole, a Filipino traitor wearing a burlap sack over his head. Known as the “secret eye,” the traitor would indicate with a nod or gesture when a suspected guerrilla passed. The soldiers then pulled that person from the line for questioning. Most never returned home.
Joey knew the risks. Still, she volunteered.
“I want to be a good soldier,” she told her friend.
“Then go underground,” he said. “I will give you a name.”
Her friend gave her the name of a man she knew well from the Ateneo. She was surprised to learn that he was a leader in the underground resistance. She was due for a lot of surprises. She tracked the man down and told him she wanted to work for the resistance.
“We don’t take children,” he told her. She was only twenty-four.
“You’d be surprised what children can do,” she told him. “After all, Joan of Arc was just a young girl—not much more than a child—wasn’t she?”
12
LEAFLETS
The bombers appeared again, three of them on January 26, and the sirens shouted, but there were no concussions to follow, not this time.
Leaflets fluttered down from the sky like wounded birds, spinning and somersaulting in the morning light, catching in the treetops and tumbling to the dirt. They fell over Corregidor and Caballe, El Fraile and Carabao and Bataan, into ravines and onto rooftops and at the feet of soldiers, tired and hungry and homesick.
On one side, a picture of a nude brunette sexily seated, her left hand in her hair, her face and breasts bathed in studio light. On the other was a note:
TICKET TO ARMISTICE
USE THIS TICKET, SAVE YOUR LIFE
YOU WILL BE KINDLY TREATED
FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS
1. Come towards our lines waving a white flag.
2. Strap your gun over your left shoulder muzzle down and pointed behind you.
3. Show this ticket to the sentry.
4. Any number of you may surrender with this one ticket.
JAPANESE ARMY HEADQUARTERS
13
GONE
The general was prepared to die.
By all accounts, MacArthur had been unafraid to stand outside Malinta Tunnel, unflinching, without so much as a helmet, as Japanese bombers pounded the Rock into dust and ash. They didn’t talk about defeat on Corregidor, but without the supplies and reinforcements Washington had promised, the men on Bataan stood no chance. Nor did the men on Corregidor. A colonel under MacArthur broached the subject, suggesting maybe Roosevelt had been bluffing about the support convoy to get MacArthur and his men to hold out as long as possible, to delay the Japanese advance south and essentially allow the United States time to protect Australia.
“If you are correct,” MacArthur told him, “then never in history was so large and gallant an army written off so callously!”
MacArthur was a brave son of a bitch, and he faced the reality that he might die upon Corregidor. He tried to send his wife, Jean, and young son to safety on a submarine or with the Quezon family, which was preparing a daring escape through enemy waters to Australia, but Jean would have none of it. “Jean is my first soldier,” the general told an aide. Another asked about his son. “He is a soldier’s son,” MacArthur said.
As the days ticked by, President Roosevelt had second thoughts about leaving the new war’s only hero to die unprotected. Getting him out alive would be a huge challenge. He kept his thoughts private.
MacArthur said good-bye to his friend Manuel Quezon, who was boarding a submarine called the Swordfish for Australia. The Philippines’ first president gave MacArthur his ring. “When they find your body,” he said, “I want them to know that you fought for my country.”
On February 23, MacArthur’s orders came from the commander in chief. He was directed to a southern island to assess whether a Bataan defense could be sustained. But then he was to go to Melbourne to take command of all US troops. MacArthur wrestled with his decision for days. At a staff meeting in Malinta Tunnel, he told his comrades he’d made a decision. He was going to refuse the president’s orders, give up his position, and join the troops fi
ghting on Bataan as a volunteer, but he acquiesced after his staff protested. He told Gen. Jonathan Wainright to tell his men on Bataan that he had protested many times but had to follow orders. “If I get through to Australia you know I’ll come back as soon as I can with as much as I can,” the general said.
“I’ll be on Bataan if I’m alive,” Wainright replied.
On March 6, a Filipino gave Harbor Defense Headquarters a message sent by the Japanese. “Our invincible artillery will pound Corregidor into submission, batter it, weaken it,” the message said, “preparatory to a final assault by crack Japanese landing troops. Be wise, surrender now and receive preferential Japanese treatment.” But the skies were quiet on March 7, 8, 9, and 10.
As he prepared to leave the island, MacArthur told Maj. Gen. George Moore to reduce rations on Corregidor to last four months, until June 1942. He cautioned Moore that in case of the ultimate fall of Corregidor, Moore was to make sure that the armament was destroyed to such an extent that it could not be used against an American effort to recapture the Philippines.
On March 11, after dark, General MacArthur, along with his wife, son, and staff, headed to the pier, where four patrol torpedo boats idled, waiting to whisk them south to Mindanao, where a bomber would fly them to Melbourne.
MacArthur clasped Moore’s hand in a fervent embrace and a tear fell down his cheek.
“Don’t give up the fort, George,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
The general, dressed in civilian clothes, took one last look at the bombed-to-hell island, then replaced his cap and climbed aboard. Under a moonless sky, they motored south. MacArthur was headed toward his future, toward “Supreme Command of the whole Southwest Pacific,” as Roosevelt would put it. But the general had left his men behind.
14
ESPIONAGE
Joey lived near a building that had been converted into a Japanese garrison. Her first assignment was to watch the garrison and report all troop movements in and out. Her friends were afraid she was being reckless.
“If I don’t run risks, I won’t find out anything worthwhile,” she told them. “All the important things are carefully watched.”
She hid behind the shutters in the windows of her house, scratching notes on a piece of paper. She counted the trucks and the soldiers in the beds of the trucks, noting their appearance, whether their uniforms were soiled or clean when they returned. She noted the men who entered the garrison, what time, when they left, and in which direction. When she had filled a notebook, she hid it and carried it to the address she had been given and handed it to a suspicious-looking man. She gave him her underground name: Billy Ferrer. He thanked her and closed the door.
Not long after that, some clueless Japanese officers living near her home invited her to a party at the Engineering Building. The thought of going was revolting, but she realized it could be an opportunity to get information. The Japanese had been busy fortifying the university campus, and she wanted to know what, specifically, they were doing. She asked two friends to accompany her, and once on campus, she nonchalantly asked for a tour of the buildings. The hosts agreed. Joey was full of endless questions.
“Why does that woman ask so many questions?” one of the officers asked.
Her friends were worried about the suspicion.
“Did you hear that officer,” one said. “Look out.”
Joey assumed a new tact: flighty ignorance. She started asking silly questions to throw them off. After a few minutes, she noticed a large entrance dug into the ground behind the Engineering Building and saw soldiers going in and out.
“What is that?” she asked.
“That is an air-raid shelter,” the officer said.
“May we go inside?” Joey asked.
“There is nothing inside worth looking at,” the man said.
The tour continued until Joey again noticed a similar opening near the corner of Isaac Peral Street and Taft Avenue and again asked what it was.
“That is another air-raid shelter,” the man said.
She watched a man walk out of the hole and recognized him. She had seen the same man entering the hole behind the Engineering Building. These weren’t air-raid shelters; it was one long, secret tunnel. That evening she drew the tunnel on a map.
15
SPEEDO
More leaflets fell over Bataan as the men, down to three-eighths rations, wasted away, dropping weight and dropping dead in the sand, from bullets or beriberi. They fell like a blizzard of white-winged butterflies.
“Your U.S. Convoy is due in the Philippines on April 15th but you won’t be alive to see it. Ha! Ha!”
The soldiers used the leaflets as toilet paper.
Still, they fought, as Japanese soldiers pushed them into a smaller and smaller area. Four-fifths of them struggled with malaria, and three-quarters had dysentery. A third of the soldiers suffered from beriberi. The boys joked that God had seen fit to create two kinds of mosquitoes for the Philippines: the big ones that bit in the daytime and caused dengue fever and the small ones that bit you at night and gave you malaria.
The rations were down to fifteen ounces per man per day, and half of that was rice. Digging a foxhole, which typically took an hour, now took all day. The two open-air hospitals were stuffed with ten thousand men, and seven hundred more men came down with malaria every day. The grunts were so starved that the decision was made to butcher the Twenty-Sixth Cavalry’s horses, the same beasts that had led the charge at the village of Marong, the last mounted cavalry charge in US military history. The horses were the first real meat the soldiers had eaten in weeks.
One Thursday afternoon in the middle of March, Japanese planes dropped thousands of beer cans on Bataan. They were empty but for a letter.
To His Excellency Major-General Jonathon Wain-wright, Commander-in-Chief of the United States in the Philippines.
We have the honor to address you in accordance with the humanitarian principles of “Bushido,” the code of the Japanese warrior.
It will be recalled that, some time ago, a note advising honorable surrender was sent to the Commanderin-Chief of your fighting forces. To this, no reply, as yet, has been received….
Your Excellency, you have fought to the best of your ability. What dishonor is there in avoiding needless bloodshed? What disgrace is there in following the defenders of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Netherlands East Indies in the acceptance of honorable defeat? Your Excellency, your duty has been performed. Accept our sincere advice and save the lives of those officers and men under your command. The International Law will be strictly adhered to by the Imperial Japanese Forces and Your Excellency and those under your command will be treated accordingly. The joy and happiness of those whose lives will be saved and the delight and relief of their dear ones and families would be beyond the expression of words. We call upon you to reconsider this proposition with due thought.
If a reply to this advisory note is not received from Your Excellency through a special messenger by noon of March 22nd, 1942, we shall consider ourselves at liberty to take any action whatsoever.
The letters were signed by General Homma. When Wainwright read it, he said, “The bastards could at least have sent a few full cans of beer.”
As April neared, the soldiers were urged to write their last letters to loved ones. They were also asked if they wished to take out $10,000 life insurance policies. Wainwright ordered radio operations to cease so they could transmit thirty thousand applications to the United States.
On April 3, General Homma sent a request that the commanders surrender. When he got no response, he ordered the most violent strike in the war thus far. The air and land assault on the Second Corps thundered across Bataan for two days as the men retreated, leaving behind the dead and injured, the moaning and cursing men who were missing limbs or had been smeared into trees or were staring into pulsing open holes at their own gut sacks. On April 8, most of the soldiers retreated to Mariveles Bay, dismantled their weapons, and waited
for the island’s new rulers to appear. Some commanders gave their men the option of surrendering or scampering off into the jungle. Several detachments, finding themselves surrounded by the enemy, disappeared into the thickets, refugees in a strange land.
Among these detachments were Edwin Ramsey and Joe Barker, the latter so emaciated he now wore his West Point ring on his thumb. The two had been cut off from their unit and found themselves surrounded, hiding in the thick jungle. But the concussions had stopped. The woods had fallen silent. Perhaps Bataan had fallen.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Ramsey asked.
“I don’t see how it could be anything else,” Barker said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
“What’ll you do?” Ramsey asked.
“Don’t suppose I’d last long in a prison camp,” Barker said. “Surrendering doesn’t appeal to me.”
On April 9, Gen. Edward King, a Georgia native whose grandfather fought for the Confederacy, was thinking of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House as he rode to meet General Homma. Four months of warfare had killed some six thousand Americans and thirty thousand Filipinos. Of the remaining soldiers, only 25 percent were considered combat ready. One general had sent headquarters a handwritten note from the field saying only half his command was even capable of fighting and the rest were so sick or tired they could not launch even a mild attack. King felt he had no other choice. The commander of the US and Philippine troops on Luzon finally gave up. But the orders never reached Ramsey and Barker.
They divided the few supplies they had left and shook hands.
The Leper Spy Page 5