by Peter Eisner
Relief for the Greater Need
Manila, December 1942
CLAIRE’S EMPLOYEES at Tsubaki Club had become fervent participants in the supply, rescue, and intelligence operation. One of the waiters, Totoy, came in one day with a wrenching story. The sickly, emaciated American prisoners at the old Park Avenue School in the Manila suburb of Pasay were dying at a frightening rate. Totoy’s aunt, Clara Yuma, and her family lived close to the school and watched in horror as the men marched by every day to and from their work details.
Totoy took Claire for a visit. “Those poor men are dying like flies,” Clara Yuma told her. “I’ve seen the awful food they are given, and a pig would not touch it. . . . It is a miracle that these men could live on that swill.” Their main job was to repair the runway at Nichols Field, damaged by bombing runs as MacArthur’s air units tried to fight off the Japanese occupation. Nichols was about four miles from the Park Avenue School. It was a long walk followed by grueling work in the heat, and the men were starving. The women put together a plan. Clara would set up a stand outside her house where they would sell rice cakes, bananas, and other fruits. Claire would provide the money and supplies. When they were ready, they sent a blind message into the school with a trusted Filipino mechanic named Pedro for whoever among the prisoners might be in charge. A note came out from one of the officers inside, known only as Captain Muir. Muir told them that he would distribute any money Claire could send in and asked that she supply some money directly to him to replace a pair of broken eyeglasses. The women sent in 150 pesos, 50 for the glasses and the rest to be distributed. Muir sent back a receipt for 120 pesos—the Japanese had taken a cut of the money. It was the price they had to pay. Claire returned to the club very excited that night and showed the letter and receipt from Muir to Mamerto, her bartender.
Eventually they were able to bribe the Japanese guards posted outside the school with money and gifts as they marched by with the Americans every day. “The soldiers would be allowed to stop at the stand, pretending, of course, to buy food, we would have bags with food and money inside, and that kept up for well over a year.” More than once, though, a mean-spirited guard forced the stand to close. One day one of the guards walked over and slammed Clara Yuma in the face with his rifle butt. She recovered, and after a few days they reopened the stand.
Any POW supply operation that involved secret communications and bribery came with serious risks, but in the end Claire and Clara Yuma were able to provide relief and lessen the suffering of the POWs at Park Avenue. Before Claire had come to visit, the prisoners “had nothing. They were eating with their fingers.” The women sent in eating utensils and plates and shoes, because many of the men had been left with worn boots or no shoes at all. Under the circumstances, Claire and her allies were ready to take almost any risk to help escapees and evaders of imprisonment.
Still, they had to be on the lookout for con artists and traps. Claire was burned more than once. A young American soldier identified only as “Beans” was sent over to meet her one day. Beans was one of the occasional army stragglers who would show up in the city, moving frequently as they managed to elude capture. Claire said he was a charmer, tall, handsome, and twenty-two years old, making her think of her lost lover, John Phillips. She even gave money to Beans, along with two of Phillips’s suits.
A couple of days later Beans stopped by, wearing one of the suits and asking for more money. He had gone out gambling and lost all she had given him. Claire threw him out. She resolved to be more careful after that. In this case Beans was a money-grubber, nothing worse. However, one day the Kempeitai might try to test her loyalties by sending in someone like that. “It made me think and think hard, of the very thin ice on which we were all skating, and I resolved to be much more careful in my future dealings with strangers.”
Love Letters and Lives
Cabanatuan, June 1943
CLAIRE, PEGGY, and the Manila underground could measure their success in lives saved. The relief operation was definitely having an effect in Cabanatuan. In the months after the death march, dozens of men died every day in a fetid, overcrowded camp hospital from dysentery, malaria, and other jungle diseases or just exhaustion from the lack of food. Now at the three sections of the Cabanatuan prisoner complex more food was available and fewer men were dying. Colonel Arthur Lee Shreve Jr., a forty-six-year-old POW officer, was keeping track of life and death in the camp and could document the change. Shreve kept statistics on everything; making lists, cataloging life, and writing a diary kept him sane. He had been called to active duty from his home in Baltimore and arrived in the Philippines only weeks before the start of the war.
Shreve recorded 149 deaths at Cabanatuan in December 1942, which actually was a grim improvement, and he was the one to announce that December 15 had been the first day without a fatality among the prisoners. On February 6, 1943, he sounded even hopeful. “The additional food is having its effect, both that supplied by the Japanese and from the Red Cross. Everyone is gaining weight and our death rate is falling steadily, 72 last month and less than 10 so far this month.” Shreve and other officers had a separate and slightly better living situation than enlisted men in the camp, and he was mostly too isolated from them to know the difference between Red Cross shipments and the supplies sent in by Peggy, Claire, Ramón, Naomi, and their coconspirators. The International Red Cross did manage to get rations into Cabanatuan several times, but hunger still ruled.
Despite the improvement in food, there were severe problems. Shreve said that men under forced labor were rebuilding a nearby airstrip but sometimes were barely able to move. On February 15 the American POW officer in charge of the airport work detail appealed to Colonel Shreve for help in interceding with the Japanese. “The men were faint from lack of food doing so much hard work.”
Many officers hardly knew anything about the Manila supply operation. Shreve vaguely had information that some “Spanish girls” were helping out. Even in Manila operational security was maintained. Claire had her side operations and so did Ramón and the others.
Some prisoners knew more than others—Captain Tiffany and Lieutenant Colonel Mack were part of the operation. Others also were in touch with the women in Manila through morale-boosting letters. Claire was writing to at least half a dozen men, who told her the letters were as important as food and medicine and some of whom proposed marriage sight unseen. Love letters, they called them, morale boosting mixed with flirtation in every envelope, combined with money in various denominations so the prisoners could bribe guards and send out for food and medicine. The Japanese prison had allowed the creation of the commissary, but food costs were just as high there, and soaring. Claire and the others were giving as much free food and credit to the prisoners as they could afford. Many of the men rejected charity and sent trinkets and jewelry back with Naomi for sale in Manila. Claire said she was happy to sell the trinkets, but was not interested in taking money from the prisoners. “Between you, me and the lamp post,” she wrote one of the POWs, “I don’t want or ever expect to get one-tenth of this money back.”
• • •
Claire’s flirtatious, lighthearted letters were uplifting for men who were starved for more than food. Where the Japanese saw scraggly prisoners trudging along muddy camp roads, the men had created a city of culture and light. They named Cabanatuan’s main gathering area Times Square. The main camp road was Broadway, and it intersected along the way with Fifth Avenue. Many had died and some were still dying, but the men of Cabanatuan willed themselves to live. And Claire was one of the stars of their surreal fantasy.
The prisoners of Cabanatuan could dream beyond the barbed wire; they established reading and study groups, scrounged a library and a film projector to watch old American movies, staged periodic song-and-dance revues, and even performed Shakespeare. Enterprising men used hand tools to fashion musical instruments from wire and scraps of metal and wood, then gave regular jazz perf
ormances to packed audiences. They organized lectures, card games, and religious services, filched seeds to plant their own victory gardens, and bartered contraband for food with willing guards.
And now, in the spring of 1943, a woman who called herself High Pockets was sending in money and letters and supplies and helping the men dream. Around the same time, one of the POW officers, Major Dwight E. Gard of the U.S. Army Air Corps, was noticing a difference in the health and mood of the men around him. At first, shipments and letters had mentioned Miss U—Peggy was their benefactor. The change was evident. In the course of the spring, Gard and Captain Tiffany saw that someone new was communicating with them and was supplying the food, medicine, and money to the camp. It was about the same time that they had told Peggy that Jack Utinsky was dead. Gard said later that High Pockets was taking over. “It was all High Pockets. . . . The change was in about February of ’43, as I recall; it was only about a month that I heard about Miss U at all, then I didn’t hear no more about it at all.”
In a long note to one of the POWs, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Yeager, Claire teased him and was alluring about her name and her appearance. “My code name is High Pockets,” she wrote. “I am one of the main people in the group to deliver and collect mail for the several Prison Camps. Also sometimes I have to carry other material that it would not be healthy for me to be caught with. . . . I put them down the front of my dress. . . . Also I am very tall and my pockets are very high. I am five feet six inches, 35 years old, a widow, dark and not bad looking. But . . . hey, this is not a proposal. I’m getting ahead of myself.” When Yeager wrote to her about his living conditions, she turned that into a teasing comment too. “So you meant the Bahays [huts] were 18 foot square not the man. I was wondering what kind of men were there.”
When Claire learned that Gard was from Portland, she wrote to him too and went out of her way to help and comfort him. Gard said the letter “was a greeting and a hope for my health, and she enclosed, the first time that I ever received a note from her, it was either a five or ten peso note was enclosed with it.” Often the men would not even speak to one another about the letters. “The people who were receiving notes were a little nervous because there was always a possibility there might be a traitor who would tip off the Japanese for personal gain. So it was kept somewhat hush hush.”
Claire’s letters had a major impact on morale. Gard wrote back and thanked her. He didn’t need the money to buy food, he told her, because he was healthy enough compared to others around him. He said that Captain Tiffany, one of Naomi’s main contacts at the camp, was focusing on those who needed the most help.
Gard knew that Captain Tiffany, the camp chaplain, was already in touch. High Pockets had asked for a list of men who were hungry and sick and who had a particular need for help. She sent in duck eggs, a crucial source of protein. She was also providing other nutrients and medicines; Tiffany told Gard the supplies included citrus juices—Claire, Peggy, and the others were boiling down calamansi lemons into concentrate for juice, and sent in fruit and candy. Gard said Tiffany “had been charged by High Pockets to pick out the very sick prisoners and distribute the money and other materials she sent in to the very ill prisoners, which he did, and very conscientiously, I might add.”
Gard, thirty-four, was lucky compared with the thousands of men who did the forced march to Camp O’Donnell after the fall of Bataan in April. He surrendered in May 1942 with the fall of Corregidor and was sent to Bilibid Prison in Manila for six days before he and other men were packed into a boxcar and taken to Capas Station, the closest to the new Cabanatuan POW camp. From the station they marched eleven miles one day to Camp No. 2 and then five miles more two days later to Camp No. 1. He was in reasonably good health when he got there and complained little as he saw the grave illnesses of others.
• • •
In some sense and to some degree, the worst of the horror was over once the Filipinos had been furloughed from Camp O’Donnell in June 1942 and thousands of Americans were taken to Cabanatuan. However, many more died; prisoners still were suffering from neglect, still mired in filth, subject to disease and a daily dose of cruelty.
The camp commander also issued a projected food plan for the prisoners. Gard kept a diary in which he listed the daily amounts: about 270 grams (less than ten ounces) of uncooked rice, 100 grams (about three ounces) of greens from a sweet potato, and the same amount of corn for men who were on work detail, 20 grams (less than an ounce) of fish and 15 grams (half an ounce) of vegetable oil. This was a starvation diet and some of the food was rancid. Colonel Shreve, Gard’s fellow officer, said that to add insult to injury, “there is so much that is spoiled or full of maggots that we cannot eat that we average less than fifty grams (less than two ounces) per ration.” By 1943 the Japanese officials overseeing Cabanatuan were looking the other way or accepted bribes so that extra food, medicine, and supplies, meager though they still were, made up the difference.
While Gard and the other POWs starved, they conjured up gourmet menus of meals they imagined cooking and savoring, instead of the scant, bland diets they suffered through. Gard made a list of meats that should be on hand at a fine restaurant: (“beef tenderloin, (bake and fry), T. Bone—Porterhouse—(Fry), Top Sirloin”) and also produced recipes, including one contributed by a fellow officer, Major Marshall Hill Hurt Jr.: “Cheese Casserole, Layer of stale, broken bread in casserole—layer of grated cheese—build up in layers until full. Beat eggs in milk, salt, pepper, butter. Pour mixture over layers of bread and cheese. Leave in refrigerator overnight then bake. Ingredients can vary.” Gard added a sobering postscript at the end of Hurt’s recipe: “The major died before the end of the war—he would never be able to enjoy the recipe himself.”
Gard also kept lists of clothing in an imagined closet: uniforms, shoes, and hats, where they were purchased, and how much they cost. Making up a wardrobe was as surreal as inventing a gourmet meal: The men were almost naked. They wore shredded shorts or G-strings, which they kept on until they fell off, and only some were lucky enough to have shoes. Claire, Peggy, and their allies were able to send in some shoes, but not enough.
Gard was delighted with his correspondence with High Pockets, especially when she wrote she was from Portland. “I told her that when we got back [to Portland],” he said, “I would take her to Jack and Jill’s,” a popular Portland tavern and nightclub.
Gard’s diary also had a more utilitarian function: He kept a phonetic list of useful words in Japanese that might help him avoid a beating or worse:
wakarimasen—I do not understand
yasume—at ease (as you were)
bango—count off
While the prisoners tried out such Japanese words and phrases with the guards, they also gave them nicknames for how they appeared and acted: Donald Duck, Laughing Boy, Web Foot, Little Speedo, and Beetle Brain.
Of all the lists Gard recorded in his diary, his box score of the POWs of Bataan was the most meticulous: Of 22,000 Americans at the start of the war, he listed 1,650 Americans dead at Camp O’Donnell in the six months of its operation, 2,600 at Cabanatuan through the end of the war, and thousands of others at other prisons and for other reasons. In total, he estimated that 8,355 men had died, 38 percent of the original number. The exact number was hard to calculate. Along with that, he wrote down the addresses of the men he knew, either to contact them after the war or to memorialize them if they hadn’t made it home.
Japan had a total of 132,134 Allied prisoners in the Philippines, Japan, and more than a dozen other occupied countries in the Pacific, of whom 35,756, or 27.1 percent, died. The death rate of American POWs alone was much higher, more than 33 percent. By comparison, 235,473 Allied prisoners were held by Germany and Italy in Europe; 9,348, or 4 percent, of them died.
Life and Death Foretold
John Boone’s Camp, Bataan, February 1943
“I’M A PSYCHIC,” said George
Williams, a Filipino officer with John Boone. Williams was fairly certain that the Japanese were about to attack their camp. “I know things.” Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Ramsey looked hard at Williams, who had mixed British and Spanish heritage. “I know, for example, that I will not survive the war.” Williams said the guerrillas would be hit hard and soon.
The prediction about an attack was not difficult to make. Boone and Ramsey were now the constant target of Kempeitai patrols operating based on intelligence reports from advance teams and turncoats and interrogations of villagers in the mountains.
Boone was now on Japanese military intelligence search lists as a leading guerrilla chief, and Ramsey, who spent weeks at a time in the camp with Boone, was regional commander of ten thousand men. At this point Boone and the other guerrillas focused on organizing and training their recruits and gathering material, gearing up to undermine the Japanese occupation any way possible. All of them were making contact with intelligence operatives in Manila and other cities. They also were sending Filipino infiltrators to work inside the occupation government in any capacity they could. Ramsey had been making one of his periodic visits to strategize with Boone and was now ready to move on.
“As I was preparing to start north,” Ramsey said later, “two prisoners [most likely Filipino collaborators with the Japanese] from Boone’s camp escaped. An alarm went up, and as the two darted past the outpost, shots were fired. One of the prisoners was hit several times and killed, but the other got away.”