by Peter Eisner
Morning brings another workday long.
Finally they lifted their baskets to the sky, gazed forward and upward to a new dawn, then circled again and left the stage.
The Japanese officers applauded warmly. Whatever they took from the dance, the traditional message played to the Japanese sense of the new Asia against the American oppressors. In actuality, the song was about oppression, and the Japanese were now the oppressors.
Next a spotlight illuminated the image of a goddess: Fahny, “strikingly costumed in gold brassiere and panties, with a trailing purple, taffeta skirt.” She wore a headdress copied from a pointed, pagoda-like costume that Hedy Lamarr had worn in a movie that had come out in 1939, Lady of the Tropics. She posed as a motionless statue on a black pedestal. David, the singing waiter, came to the stage, muscular, lean, wearing loose trousers, strips of gold cloth at his waist, and a turban. He placed an incense burner at her feet. “The scent of the incense brought the ebony statue to life, and as the tempo increased, dusky worshippers sprang from the shadows and joined the mad dance. As the performance continued with weird steps and contortions, I noted that our visitors were open-mouthed and attentive.”
David then stripped to a G-string and danced once more, gyrating and carrying a flaming torch in each hand. “Our orchestra accompanied his unpredictable leaps and bounds, more or less, with ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’”
One more performance: the Igorot wedding dance, a ritual celebration of the Luzon mountains. The evening was a great success; receipts were high and Claire saw she had a hit that could challenge and replace Ana Fey’s as Manila’s go-to nightclub. The opening could not exceed the Manila curfew. “When midnight arrived there was no doubt about the success of Tsubaki Club. All the varied parts of my little machine were running smoothly, and compliments showered down on me from the delighted patrons. Our achievement was reflected in my full cash box and the unfeigned gaiety of each member of my staff.”
Opening night was an immediate success on several fronts, both overt and covert. Importantly, newspapers reported the overnight triumph of Tsubaki Club. Meanwhile, the hostesses had gathered bits of information right away—ships in port, departures of Japanese squadrons, names of officers and crew—everything they could find. Only four months after coming down from Bataan, Claire had begun to solidify her position in occupied Manila as a trusted member of society. Word of mouth quickly made Tsubaki Club the latest hot nightspot in town. Japanese businessmen and men on international trade missions from Germany and other Axis partners began to visit. Tsubaki Club was also the place to go for visiting Japanese movie stars and performers. The world-renowned xylophone virtuoso Yoichi Hiraoka stopped by when his tour came to Manila. Japan had celebrated Hiraoka’s return to Japan when he decided to leave New York after at least a decade of performing there.
Two months after opening, Claire was making enough money to cover expenses in Manila and was almost ready to send supplies to Boone in Bataan, along with intelligence reports. She put together a new floor show for the holidays with decorations and a Christmas tree. Her Japanese patrons did not celebrate Christmas but crowded the place and did not even know to complain when Claire and the staff sang “God Bless the Philippines” to the tune of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”
After the successful performance, Claire tallied receipts and saw she had a surplus. The next morning she jotted off a quick message to John Boone: “Our New Show a Sellout, You can count on Regular Backing. Standing by for orders and assignments.” She gave the message and some money to Damian and sent him off to the hills.
People sometimes sailed across Manila Bay from the south shore around Corregidor, though Japanese patrol boats might stop fishing boats and others on the water. Claire’s messengers probably took trucks and trains as far as Dinalupihan and then stealthily slipped off the road into the mountains. Either way, it took half a day to travel the sixty or seventy miles up to Bataan and a few hours more to reach Boone’s camp. Damian showed the way to one of Claire’s earliest helpers, Bonifacio Reyes, nicknamed Pacio, who sometimes hid papers in the hollowed-out soles of his shoes. Waiters from the club also made the trip. Soon Boone started sending his Filipina girlfriend, Filomena Guerrero, though she often took a boat across Manila Bay for part of the trip.
Boone sometimes sent his second in command, a Filipino, Major Santiago Sunsheen, to Manila to meet with Claire. Boone was impressed with the quality of intelligence he received and was thankful for the supplies Claire was sending. He soon developed messenger routes and sent Claire’s reports to his fellow guerrilla leaders—Edwin Ramsey, Frank Loyd, and a team of American holdouts on Mount Pinatubo.
Claire found out quickly that most of the people she had known before the war were in prison camps if they were soldiers or were detained at the University of Santo Tomas if they were civilians from hostile nations—France, Britain, and other Allied countries. Claire’s friend Louise DeMartini was one of the civilian detainees. It might take some time to arrange shipments to Boone in the hills, but Claire began sending supplies to Louise within days. She had some money of her own and borrowed two hundred dollars in pesos from Judge Roxas for that purpose.
If the Japanese had any interest in providing food to the Santo Tomas internees, they had no infrastructure to do so. The food that internees had brought with them in January soon ran out. The Japanese officers in charge allowed friends and relatives on the outside to bring parcels of food to the gates surrounding the Santo Tomas compound. Louise was surprised and delighted when Claire’s first care package showed up, but she could not understand how Claire had managed all this time to be on one side of the fence while she and almost every other American friend were locked up.
Outsiders sometimes were allowed inside the gates on the proviso that they not speak to detainees. Slowly, however, the outside world got a clear view of daily life in Santo Tomas. The place was very overcrowded, with as many as four thousand people within. The crowding made it unbearable and conditions during the rainy season were worse. The smells of human waste were unbearable, even though the internee executive committee had organized sanitation squads. Food was sparse. Flies and mosquitoes plagued them all, spreading malaria and the kinds of maladies Claire had suffered in Bataan.
A well-to-do resident of Manila, Marcial Lichauco, was monitoring the plight of the detainees. Thirty-nine years old and married to an American, he was an attorney and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. A proud Filipino nationalist, he also was a friend of Judge Roxas and others in Claire’s circle. Lichauco kept a diary and became one of the great chroniclers of the Japanese occupation. He said the detainee executive committee at Santo Tomas had turned exterminating insects into a game for the camp children. “Mosquitoes are troublesome only after darkness sets in and the internees can protect themselves against them with mosquito nets, but the flies are a nuisance all day long. The committee in charge of keeping the premises clean recently offered a prize to the boy or girl who could kill the greatest number of flies in one week. A boy, twelve years old, won the contest by swatting approximately 14,700 flies.”
Claire vowed not to miss any opportunity to deliver food and clothing to the detention camp. Usually on Sundays and often more than once a week, she lined up with dozens of other people outside Santo Tomas. As required, she carried her ID card showing she was a Philippine citizen. A Japanese guard was stationed at the gate alongside American trustees wearing armbands who were designated to receive and deliver the packages. Claire usually hid messages to Louise in the packages. These were words of support and updates on her efforts to find a way to get Louise released from detention, either with false identification as an Italian national or on a forged medical pass. Bob Humphries, a fellow detainee who later married Louise, said Claire’s parcels were a godsend. “The food was crucial. We received packages of food, packages weekly, containing fresh vegetables, meats, fruits, occasionally there were vitam
in tablets, medicine in the packages. The food we needed very badly at the time, and we shared it with others who were sharing space at the table where we were eating.”
Though direct contact was generally taboo, sometimes, through bribery or laxity, visitors could get close enough to the detainees to speak with them or even visit. One of Claire’s new Japanese acquaintances introduced her to an officer in the Kempeitai named Masamoto, who worked at Santo Tomas. She tried to keep Masamoto at arm’s length—he was willing to help but he expected payback for his declarations of eternal love. He arranged a hearing for both Louise and a mutual friend, Mona, a pretty, red-haired twenty-year-old who was half Filipina and half American. There were no grounds for Louise’s release—she was American and healthy (sick and elderly inmates were sometimes released). Masamoto told Louise that he was willing to make “a trade-off,” letting her go in exchange for certain “services rendered,” but she wasn’t willing to do it. At that point it was too late to manufacture false identification for her, so she was stuck on the inside.
Mona, however, did get out of Santo Tomas based on her mixed parentage. She also had someone vouching for her on the outside, a well-to-do Japanese American businessman named George. Authorities also required a loyalty oath, but Mona went further than Claire had. Mona happily renounced her American citizenship and, when Claire criticized her, defended herself on pragmatic grounds for siding with the enemy. “At least, I’ll be living. George has the best of everything. You can’t imagine what the food was like at Santo Tomas.”
If she couldn’t spring Louise from detention, Claire vowed she would never miss a chance to send in food and supplies. She bribed guards so she could deliver a birthday cake and sent in enough food every week so that Louise and her boyfriend, Bob, could share with others. In the course of gathering supplies for Louise, Claire heard horror stories about thousands of American and Filipino prisoners in Manila and at POW camps far from the city suffering disease, torture, and neglect. Claire met like-minded people determined to save lives at any cost.
Night and Fog
Fort Santiago, Manila, August 1942
LUCKILY, JAPAN’S IMPORTED Nazi tactic of holding political prisoners incommunicado had failed in the case of Roy C. Bennett. After a number of months, Bennett’s family received word that the imprisoned anti-Japanese editor was alive. An American survivor of Fort Santiago was able to deliver the news to Santo Tomas that Bennett was still imprisoned there, holding on, defiant, though weak and hungry.
Not long after the surrender of Bataan, Japanese patrols had detained the survivor with two other Americans, all claiming to be civilians. Japanese military police intended to interrogate them and then—assuming their stories checked out—send them to Santo Tomas. On the ride from Bataan to Manila, one of the men, Lieutenant Edgar D. Whitcomb, a navigator in the Army Air Forces, had been successful so far in convincing his Japanese captors that he was a civilian mining engineer named Robert Johnson. As he was driven, supposedly to civilian detention, he rehearsed his story. He would say he was the son of Fred Johnson, superintendent of Lepanto Mines. The real Fred Johnson, an actual mining engineer, had escaped Manila for the States when the Pan Am Clipper was still flying the Pacific route. Whitcomb hoped he could make the story stick. As the car carrying Whitcomb and his two fellow officers entered the city, they drove along Dewey Boulevard and saw bone-thin figures of POWs repairing bomb-damaged bridges or performing menial jobs. Instead of turning away from the coast as it should have, the car took them past Intramuros and through an archway to Fort Santiago.
The privileged treatment ended. Whitcomb and the others followed their captors to a courtyard, toward an iron fence that enclosed a row of barred cells with men crammed inside. Whitcomb was roughly separated from the other two men and shoved into one of the cages.
A dozen sickly, almost-naked men stared emptily and said nothing. When Whitcomb spoke, one of the prisoners pointed to a sign on the wall:
YOU MUST NOT TALK WITH ONE ANOTHER OR SPEAK YOUR MIND TO OTHERS WITHOUT PERMISSION.
MAKE IT YOUR PRINCIPLE TO DEAL OBEDIENTLY AND FAITHFULLY. POLICEMEN WATCHING YOU.
The caged prisoners were to sit on the floor between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. and then to remain lying down from 7:00 p.m. to the following morning. Whitcomb sat close to the thinnest, most cadaverous of them all. The man’s bearded face and sickly frame made him look almost translucent, one arm was withered and paralyzed, and he wore only a pair of shredded underwear.
The man came close to Whitcomb’s ear.
“It’s alright to whisper,” he said. “But don’t let them catch you. Don’t tell anything to anyone in here. You don’t know who the informants are.”
The scraggly man, who spoke in an erudite tone, was Roy C. Bennett, barely surviving, it seemed, fifty-two years old but appearing much older. He had been taken to Fort Santiago after confinement for about three months at a holding center set up in Villamor Hall at the University of the Philippines. All the while he had been crowded in with a dozen men or more, usually in cages like this one. Among the other prisoners were Chinese and a few other Americans and Europeans, among them anti-Fascist Frenchmen and Spaniards. One person Bennett had recognized was Robert McCulloch Dick, the seventy-year-old publisher of the Philippines Free Press. On pain of further beatings and other punishment, the prisoners learned to cower before the brutal realities of imprisonment. The cages had no furniture nor beds, only two holes in the cement floor; one served as a toilet, and the other had a pipe and a trickle of water to drink and wash with. The prisoners could bathe once a week in theory, but Bennett said he had sometimes gone two weeks without a bath; prisoners were not allowed to shave, brush their teeth, or use toilet paper. They tried to trim their nails by rubbing them against stone or pieces of glass. Of course, the Japanese interrogators who summoned them from time to time said both Bennett and Dick could easily end their time in prison by simply agreeing to see the light. All they had to do was accept the new regime. Why not serve as journalists in the new Philippines, informing the world of the great, just society their Japanese brethren had created? Bennett and Dick steadfastly refused and were beaten for it.
When Whitcomb came to Fort Santiago in mid-August, Bennett had been there for several months. The beatings and torture at the hands of the Kempeitai had been frequent at first, but lately he had been left alone, though as Bennett warned Whitcomb, one could never be certain. It was possible that some of the Japanese finally had relented, realizing he would not break; perhaps they were impressed: “He was crippled, this old man, and they could torture him, they couldn’t break him.” Bennett told Whitcomb who he was, who he had been. He was the former editor of the Manila Bulletin, separated from his wife and daughters these months. He figured that they were somewhere in Manila but couldn’t say where. Bennett’s wife had determined that he was held at Fort Santiago and had tried to send him food and some basic supplies. The guards at Fort Santiago had refused to deliver anything. Bennett knew nothing of that, and the lack of information about the family was maddening. He gave Whitcomb his own key to maintaining sanity and survival: Be prepared. They may come for you tomorrow and never again. Now, or in two weeks, or two months, or never. You will never know.
Bennett appeared delighted to have Whitcomb to talk to. He was a sophisticated man; yet the severe treatment had converted him into a submissive, bowing prisoner of war under the Japanese boot. You must bow, you must not look directly at the soldiers, and you must answer roll call, learning the numbers in Japanese, he told Whitcomb. Whitcomb was dragged away. He was also beaten and questioned, but he held on to his assumed identity. Then the Japanese gave up. Not found guilty of anything other than being Americans, Robert Johnson, mining engineer, and his two partners were transferred to the civilian detention camp at Santo Tomas. At Santo Tomas they would be able to provide word to Bennett’s wife and children that they had seen Roy and he was still alive.
Th
e Kempeitai
Manila, October 1942
THE SCREAMS OF prisoners echoed through the arched dungeons of Fort Santiago. One of those who survived, Jose M. Lichauco, described how torturers tied him to ropes and chains dangling from the ceiling. Lichauco, a cousin of Judge Roxas’s friend Marcial Lichauco, was “beaten with a rubber hose, clubs, wire and wet rope [and then] was ordered to scrub latrines with bare hands.” Japanese guards also tied him down and forced water into his mouth and lungs—water-boarding—a tactic that brought its victims close to the point of drowning.
Colonel Akira Nagahama, the new commander of the Kempeitai in the Philippines, knew well what was happening. His office was meters away from the dungeons. Nagahama had come to Manila from Taipei in October to replace Colonel Seichi Ohta. The Kempeitai (Japanese for Military Police Corps) was the equivalent of the Gestapo. In fact, Adolf Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler sent a key Gestapo officer, Colonel Josef Meisinger, to Tokyo to serve as liaison with the Kempeitai.
The Kempeitai functioned parallel to and often separately from the regular Japanese Army. It had been formed in the 1880s as a select corps within the military in direct service to the emperor. With the rise of militarism in Japan in the 1930s, entrants were volunteers chosen from among experienced members of the military. The diverse training included advanced military courses—horsemanship, armed and unarmed combat, and strategy—but also specialized training in propaganda, espionage, counterespionage, and basic policing. As the war years approached, training programs had proliferated and the Kempeitai had also functioned as secret police within Japan to root out opposition to government policy. The Kempeitai’s importance in Japanese society had grown when Major General Hideki Tojo was appointed commander of the corps in Manchuria and promoted to the Tokyo area in 1935. Now that Tojo was the prime minister of the war government, the Kempeitai had a preeminent role. Kempeitai officers had a wide range of authority: They could police the conduct of soldiers and could regulate the comportment of and punish members of the regular Japanese officer corps, even those who outranked them. Civilians and military personnel at home in Japan feared the Kempeitai, and they soon would become just as terrifying in Manila.