“We used to say in Shanghai that we may be eating fish heads and rice one of these days,” said Jack Hawkins. “The whole trouble is [in Cabanatuan], we didn’t even get the fishheads.” Some prisoners augmented their diets with lizards, frogs, and dogs. The Marines, however, made it known that they would skewer any man who dared look at their mascot, Private Soochow, with hungry eyes. Watching the dog share the Marines’ meager chow pained many of the more commonsensical prisoners, but the protein-poor menu at Cabanatuan, tasteless, soggy rice, served thrice daily and infrequently flavored with wormy camotes or tiny bits of dried fish, was in itself another form of torture. “The artful Japs,” said Ed Dyess, “gave us just enough food to keep us in agony of hunger at all times.” Food thus became an obsession that dominated their thoughts, their conversations, and even their dreams. Each night, Hawkins dreamed of fried eggs, crisp bacon, and buttered toast. And each morning, he woke “with a drooling mouth and a pain in my empty stomach.” While Dyess’s cravings made a circuit, from Hereford steaks to eggs and chocolate milkshakes, Sam Grashio remained fixated on ice cream and lemonade.
Dysentery prevented them from keeping what little food they did get in their systems: the buildup of gas caused them to prematurely expel their bowels before their bodies could collect vital nutrients. Avitaminotic diseases like scurvy and pellagra tormented the men, the former characterized by painful, bleeding gums and the latter by scaly sores and hallucinatory delusions. Elephantiasis, encephalitis, and tuberculosis, sicknesses that most medical personnel had only read about, appeared. Mosquitoes were responsible for the exponential increase in cases of malaria, the bane of every prisoner, and dengue fever, known as “breakbone fever” because one felt as though his bones were being pounded by a hammer. It was therefore hardly any great surprise then that at any one time, one-fourth to more than one-third of the camp’s population was crowded into the sawali-sided nipa shacks that masqueraded as a hospital. “The hospital was a place without beds, the men lying on raised bamboo shelves,” said Dyess. “There was a primitive operating room that almost never was in operation and a dispensary that seldom dispensed
anything.”
Many ultimately ended up in “Zero Ward”—so named because should one land there, his chances of leaving alive were zero—a larger version of O’Donnell’s St. Peter’s Ward. The Japanese did issue some antitoxin when a diphtheria epidemic threatened their own personnel, but they remained largely indifferent to the prisoners’ suffering. “Buried 52 today,” read one of Mellnik’s late June diary entries. “Camp is gloomy morgue. Dead men lie on streets until noon.” Hawkins recalled bulldozers aiding in the disposal of the corpses, but most of the details remained dependent on human labor. Likewise, the dwindling number of living prisoners relied on the only individuals that they been able to count on since the war began: each other.
When Hawkins was stricken with acute diarrhea and began to lose the will to eat, Dobervich waited in line for hours to fill Hawkins’s canteen and forced rice, as well as a bitter black charcoal paste, a homemade remedy that produced positive results for some dysentery patients, down Hawkins’s throat. He also resisted efforts to admit Hawkins to the so-called hospital. Hawkins turned the corner after ten touch-and-go days.
Not long after Hawkins’s recovery, it was Shifty Shofner’s turn. A gruesome tropical ulcer in one of his feet had bored its way to the bone, becoming so painful that he could not walk. Hawkins and Dobervich dutifully served as human crutches, helping their buddy to the latrine until some salicylic crystals and rest healed the sore.
Ed Dyess felt he had someone looking out for him, too, after jaundice and dengue fever had rendered him almost bedridden. Bank and Grashio helped nurse Dyess back to health—or what passed for health at Cabanatuan. After six weeks, Dyess emerged from his ordeal weighing only 120 pounds, nearly one-third under his normal weight of 175. He explained how his unique perception of God had kept him alive: “I never thought of God or addressed Him as a distant, awesome being somewhere in the sky. I felt much closer to Him than that…. I thought of Him as ‘The Old Man’—the affectionate, respectful title soldiers apply to a commanding officer…. I would say to myself: ‘I have nothing to worry about. The Old Man will see me through.’ ”
Dyess’s understanding of predestination and fatalism had been formed during his youth, but “it was a Jap bullet that crystallized these teachings into belief.” He had been flying over enemy lines on Bataan when a slug ripped into his P-40. Had he not been leaning to one side, the bullet would have plowed into his brain, killing him instantly. His recent illness, therefore, was no different from the bullet incident: it simply had not been his time.
Mellnik noticed that the prisoners reacted to their predicaments in various ways. Heavier men, he observed, were unable to endure the starvation diet and succumbed to death earlier than smaller prisoners. “Those who had imbibed a great deal and exercised rarely did not survive either,” he said. Others convinced themselves that it was their time, demonstrating that survival was as much a mental and spiritual battle as it was a physical one. Shofner learned a valuable lesson in motivation when a fellow Marine entered his bay for a chat.
“Shof,” the officer told him, quietly, “it’s easy to die.”
“What do you mean, easy?”
“Last night I was awake when Joe died. It was real peaceful. No struggle, no pain …”
“Hey,” replied Shofner, angrily. “Knock it off. That’s no way to talk. You got to live, boy, live. Think about your wife and kids. This won’t last forever; and remember, you’re not alone here, not by a long shot.”
“Shof, we’re not going to get out of this, you know that. Every day just prolongs the agony. It’s senseless, Shof. I’m going to die.”
And he did; Shofner helped bury the Marine four days later. Sam Grashio had made up his mind, too—he was not giving up. “It is hard to kill a man by mere ill treatment if he is determined to live, and I was … I wanted to see my wife, family and friends again. I wanted to let the American people know what we and the Filipinos had endured.”
Grashio credited his reflexive retreat into his Catholic faith for his outlook. He had developed a strong conviction that he had no explanation for, a powerful belief welling inside of him that “somehow, God would not let me die in a Japanese prison.”
• • •
War had, at the very least, kept them busy. Weapons needed to be cleaned; paperwork shuffled. But prison camp was different. There were few distractions from their dull, miserable existence. Making matters worse, the forced intimacy that accompanied sharing a crowded prison camp with thousands of other sick, smelly, and disgruntled men, oddly juxtaposed with feelings of loneliness and abandonment, frayed nerves. “The strain of captivity and prison life can snap the tiny threads of reason,” noted Shofner. To preserve their sanity and to prevent menticide—the death of the mind—those that chose to live became combatants once more.
Their Yankee humor and ingenuity proved powerful weapons. Inspired by the omnipresent mud—the ruthless sun might have taken a sabbatical, but the rains of the monsoon season had mired Cabanatuan into a giant bog—the rank stench, the swarms of flies, and their inability to bathe, the Marines founded a fraternity of filth called “Skunk Patrol, Alpha Chapter.” They greeted each other with a sign and countersign ritual: a lifted leg was acknowledged by a handclasp of the nose. Because Shofner possessed a notebook, he held the office of “stinkitary.”
The mucky roads and alleys that connected Camp One’s compounds soon had familiar names like Main Street, Michigan Avenue, and Broadway. “A Milwaukee man had named a path for himself,” noted Dyess. “It was Buboltz boulevard and led to the latrines.” And there was a hustler on every corner. Since many guards suffered from venereal disease and were willing to trade anything for sulfa tablets, some resourceful POWs took Japanese-issued tooth powder, formed it into tablets with a spent cartridge, stamped the pills with a “W,” the trademark symbol of the Winthr
op Company, which made the drugs, and then sold the product back to their unwitting captors. Their racket did not last long, but the sight of a wretched guard slinking off to take a dose of phony pills was more enjoyable than the cigarettes the men received in payment.
Prisoners produced shows and musical performances, or focused on practical pursuits such as fly-killing contests or compiling rosters and death lists. Some signed up for labor details to escape the drudgery of the camp, but they soon learned to avoid anything that involved close contact with the Japanese, namely to avoid contact from the Japanese. Language courses were popular, too; Steve Mellnik, for example, practiced his Russian with other officers. In a bizarre act of benevolence, the Japanese issued, of all things, softball equipment. It was an absurd gesture. “I couldn’t have run around a baseball diamond if the devil himself had been chasing me,” said Hawkins.
Some prisoners taught classes in subjects relating to their civilian careers or special interests. Hawkins remembered seeing Melvyn McCoy sitting on the ground, twitching his mustache while reciting logarithms, from memory, to a circle of pupils. But Hawkins skipped McCoy’s lectures to sit in on the ubiquitous card games. Gambling was the favorite prison camp pastime. Prisoners bet on everything, from whether a POW rushing to the latrines in a broken gait would make it in time, to the number of worms in their rice. The stakes usually involved cash or cigarettes, the latter an emergent form of camp currency. Many bet their rice rations, mortgaging their meals and their futures. Outside of food wagers, most bets were made on the cuff—if a man died, his debts were forgiven. That was good for Shofner, a regular in the camp’s high-limit poker game—a regular loser. “That guy McCoy is a shark,” he often complained, disgustedly, to Hawkins. There also was the matter of the bet that he had made with a friend on Corregidor in February, for $10, that the United States would recapture Manila by the Fourth of July. Marking the date in Cabanatuan, Shofner had to settle the wager, scoring it as “Lost. (Pd).” Nevertheless, he continued making bets and the prisoners refused to snuff their few flickering flames of hope, for which rumors served as so much emotional kindling.
Germany’s surrender was among the first rumors “reported” at Cabanatuan, but the most popular ones naturally revolved around phony tales of America’s great Pacific offensive. Considering that their conversations focused on food, they hoped to eat “Thanksgiving turkey in Albuquerque.” “In ’43 we’ll all be free,” they also liked to say. Some believed that Uncle Sam was arranging a prisoner exchange; Dyess had heard that a steamer in Manila Bay was being readied to transfer the prisoners to Ecuador. According to another universally accepted rumor, FDR had deposited $50 million in Swiss banks to help the Red Cross care for American prisoners. One officer kept track of all the rumors to have circulated Cabanatuan, reportedly collecting more than 2,000. None was ever confirmed.
Since Cabanatuan was almost hermetically sealed off from the outside world, they had no way of separating fact from fiction. Most of the rumors had come from the guards or from hurried conversations with Filipinos during a work detail. Some, no doubt, had been invented by well-meaning men who simply wanted to boost camp morale. There was, in fact, a secret homemade radio that picked up station KGEI in San Francisco, but possession of a radio was so risky that its existence, as well as the news it supplied, was not widely known. The Marines, however, were treated to their own nightly “broadcasts” courtesy of Lt. Leon Chabot. Though Chabot’s broadcasts usually possessed more style than certifiable substance, the 4th Marines’ very own Walter Winchell (Chabot often waited at the gates to speak with truck drivers returning from Manila) occasionally landed a scoop. “Well, gentlemen, this is the latest from Manila,” Chabot declared one memorable summer night before humming his own sound effects, a few bars of “The Marine Hymn.” “The United States Marines have landed on Guadalcanal!” The skeptics in his audience shrugged off the news, but Chabot was vindicated a few weeks later when they read between the lines of an article in the Manila Tribune, a pro-Japanese propaganda organ, that claimed the Japanese were mopping up remnants of the U.S. Marine Corps at a place called Guadalcanal.
It was heartening to know that their countrymen were fighting somewhere, but after learning that Guadalcanal was nearly 3,000 nautical miles from the Philippines, “we could judge that the United States truly was making little or no progress in the Pacific war,” said Hawkins. As the rains muddied the weeks into months, new rallying cries revealed their sagging spirits: “ ’45 if you’re still alive”; “ ’47 if you’re not in heaven.” For the canteen half-empty crowd, “the Golden Gate in ’48” seemed more accurate.
One sure sign of the war’s progress was the arrival of the Iwanaka Educational Unit on August 14. Named for the unit’s commanding officer, Maj. Yasuaki Iwanaka, the unit’s mission was to train 600 Formosan conscripts for guard duty, a significant development in that it betrayed the fact that Japanese combat troops were needed elsewhere.
The Americans observed the recruits drilling in the adjacent compound. “All day long they would march up and down, goose-stepping, and practicing with the bayonet, to the accompaniment of their weird marching chants, which they howled at the tops of their voices,” recalled Dyess. Unaware that these browbeaten recruits were being trained as their overseers, the prisoners found the exercises humorous. “The bayonet practice put us in stitches,” added Dyess, “those of us who were strong enough to laugh, that is.” These laughs were much needed morale boosters, but at Cabanatuan it was the Japanese who most often enjoyed themselves at the Americans’ expense.
Guarding prisoners was not honorable or coveted duty. The assignment usually fell to the dregs of the Imperial Army, xenophobic alcoholics, sadists, and mentally unstable soldiers—and now, colonial conscripts considered social inferiors—deemed unfit for combat. Consumed with venomous hatred, they rejoiced in reminding the prisoners of their pitiful station. Dyess could not forget the “futile rage” the prisoners felt upon seeing an American flag used as a rag or mop in the Japanese kitchen.
The guards beat the prisoners at the slightest provocation—for failing to salute, for presenting a poor appearance at inspections, and sometimes just on a whim. One POW was ordered to masturbate by a guard. When he refused, remembered Sam Grashio, he was beaten “so mercilessly he went mad and died two or three days later.” On one occasion, Bert Bank and several others were lined up face-to-face and ordered to slap each other. “[The guards] were mean, really mean,” said Motts Tonelli. “Another thing they’d do is come up behind you and slap your ears, you know, and you’d get dizzy. They’d step on your feet; we didn’t have shoes.” One guard, described by Dyess as “a stocky, evil caricature on the human race,” gained infamy for brutalizing prisoners on a building-moving detail. As laborers slid poles under a nipa structure and struggled to raise it to their shoulders, the guard ran alongside, screaming maniacally and beating them with the shaft of a golf club. Fighting back or resistance of any kind meant certain death, so the prisoners had no choice but to absorb both the blows and the humiliation.
For the Americans watching through the barbed wire, one of the new arrivals stood out, a veritable Japanese giant with a muscular, six-foot, 190-pound frame. Handsome and immaculately attired in clean, sharply creased uniforms and shiny leather boots, this towering officer was a noticeable contrast to the sloppy guards whose fatigues, observed Grashio, “usually looked slept in.” “He looked more like an Occidental than an Oriental,” commented another prisoner. His adamantine luster, noble presentation, and tyrannical parade ground demeanor suggested that impressions were important to 1st Lt. Yoshimasa Hozumi. It would take but a few weeks for him to make an indelible impression on the prisoners.
After a guard had been killed, presumably by local guerrillas, Hozumi led a punitive expedition to a nearby barrio. The prisoners heard the echo of gunfire and saw plumes of smoke laze across the sky. The detail returned later that day, several hundred soldiers singing and shouting while triumphantly paradi
ng through the gates in a display, according to one witness, reminiscent of a “college snake dance after a football victory.” One could call it a victory: the barrio had been razed and fifty of its inhabitants, including women and children, were rumored to have been killed. Hozumi rode at the head of the riotous procession on horseback, followed by two soldiers who carried aloft a severed Filipino head, which, according to the same startled witness, “stared wildly in transfixed and sightless terror as its murky juices oozed down the pike on which it was impaled.” The grisly trophy was transferred to a fence post near the gate and a sign affixed, an inscription in English and Japanese, which read, “A Very Bad Man.”
As if the wanton cruelty of their captors was not enough, the men were also forced to deal, in the operative sense of the word, with the greed of their own countrymen. Even as prisoners were dying by the dozens on a daily basis, there were some Americans trying to turn a profit in the camp’s burgeoning black market. It was a strange partnership, yet a highly lucrative one. The Japanese bought canned goods, cigarettes, and candy bars from Filipinos and then distributed the items to the Americans to peddle around the camp. The exorbitant prices—a can of corned beef purchased for 80 centavos, or 40 cents, for example, sold for 10 pesos, or
5 U.S. dollars—separated many prisoners from what little money they had. A few frugal, future-minded individuals held on to their money. Hawkins remained relatively affluent because of his foresight to sew $200 in cash, along with his Annapolis ring and his watch, into the seams of his uniform. Dyess secreted his cash between his toes. “While it rubbed blisters and sometimes made walking painful, I held on to it,” he said. The alternative—poverty—was potentially much more painful.
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