As Good As Dead

by Stephen L. Moore

  The Americans had little to do in the Bilibid prison yard but sit together, talking and singing as a cold rain fell that night. The men took cover within four ancient prison buildings, huddling next to those with blankets as rain leaked through the roofs. Their stay at Bilibid was short. On May 27, the Americans were awakened by guards who, screaming in Japanese, herded them into another long column and again hiked them through Manila toward a train depot. More sick and wounded dropped during the long march, but the local people once again lined the streets to pass goods to the prisoners: rice balls, lumps of brown sugar, and balutes (partially incubated chicken eggs).7

  The parade reached a Manila train depot during the late-morning hours and was lined up alongside a freight train. Doug Bogue estimated that each of the fifteen boxcars—only about one-third the size of those in America—could feasibly hold about forty men in close proximity, yet the Japanese brutally forced in a hundred men per steel car. With the prisoners packed so tightly that no man could move or even raise his arms, panicked shouting and screaming commenced as soon as the doors were slammed shut.

  McDole was fortunate. He was among the last shoved into his car, leaving him near the door. The heat quickly became suffocating and the screams so deafening that the guard in McDole’s car finally cracked the door enough to let some air in as the prisoners cursed him soundly. Smitty, McDole, and Henderson tried to fan air to the others packed farther in the car, but their efforts were in vain. Dozens of men in each boxcar passed out from the heat and soon began dying. Gene Nielsen—unable to sit or stretch out—felt like he was in an oven as the midday sun baked the train cars.8

  The train inched its way north from Manila toward the POWs’ next destination—Cabanatuan, a newly opened prison camp about sixty miles away on the Pampanga River. The journey took most of the day at slow speed, forcing the sweating men to relieve themselves as they stood shoulder to shoulder. The stench soon became unbearable. Fortunately, kindly Filipinos crowded near the railroad tracks at each village and threw rice balls, cookies, eggs, and bread into the open boxcar doors as the train rumbled slowly past. McDole managed to catch a large block of brown sugar, which he dutifully shared with Henderson and Smitty as part of their survival pact. Smitty in turn caught some rice bread, shared it with his two buddies, and passed the rest to other prisoners.

  That evening the train finally came to a jerking halt in Cabanatuan, where Japanese guards appeared, screaming and cursing at the delirious, excrement-covered prisoners. McDole received his first wound when a guard jabbed his bayonet deep into the left side of his back as he tried to exit his boxcar. As blood spurted from the incision below his rib cage, McDole angrily turned to attack the guard who had stabbed him. He was physically restrained by Smitty, who pulled him away.9

  “Your temper is gonna get you killed, Dole!” he snapped.

  McDole reluctantly joined the long march toward his next detainment area. Along the way, another prisoner tried to help by using a block of salt tossed to him by a caring Filipino villager. He lifted Mac’s shirt and wiped salt into the open gash to clean out the wound. Despite the pain, McDole was at least more fortunate than the 130 men estimated by Doug Bogue to have suffocated to death during the train ride.10

  The filthy procession of bloodied, stinking men stumbled northward through Cabanatuan along a nearly fourteen-mile route. They drank no water save what they could sneak from mucky brown ditches along the way. Once again, those who slowed to rest were kicked, beaten, and even murdered. The fifteen hundred men were allowed to sleep that night at an old school yard in which the Japanese placed a huge kettle to boil rations. Those who endured the long chow line each received a meager rice portion as the only meal of the day, although many simply gave up and declined to eat.11

  A heavy rain fell during the night. The water was a blessing for parched throats, but as the temperatures dropped, Mac McDole had to huddle under a blanket for warmth with Smitty as he nursed his throbbing back wound. Daybreak came with screaming, cursing, kicking guards and more marching. The Japanese rode in trucks while the sick, weary, and wounded POWs shuffled down the dusty road under an increasingly hot sun. Gene Nielsen, suffering greatly from thirst, noted at one point a large artesian well right alongside the road. Water flowed steadily from a ten-inch pipe, but the guards would not allow any Americans to drink from its basin or to fill their canteens. Hundreds of marching feet and overnight rain had turned the road to mud, and Nielsen watched as desperate men bent down and drank from the stagnant puddles.12

  Outside the city of Cabanatuan, the prisoners finally reached the gates of the newly opened camp, a rotting former Philippine army training camp with dilapidated barracks known as Cabanatuan Camp 3. The long hike had caused some men to fall out, but Nielsen admired the grit of one poor man who seemed determined to endure. Once inside, Gene saw the man lie down under a tree to rest, appearing tremendously relieved. He never awoke again.

  Encircled by an eight-foot barbed wire fence, the camp’s interior contained numerous rustic nipa huts built of palms, bamboo, and thatched roofs. The larger huts, roughly eighteen feet by fifty-five feet, could house between one hundred fifty and two hundred men while the smaller ones—about eighteen feet by forty feet—could hold a hundred each. All around the edges of the camp were guard towers, manned by Japanese soldiers armed with machine guns, rifles, and spotlights to prevent anyone from trying to escape to the distant mountains.

  Doug Bogue slept on the bamboo floor without a mat as water dripped from the leaky hut roof. His first meal in the new Cabanatuan prison compound was dirty rice and a thin soup that tasted like nothing but salty water. By morning, Bogue noticed several men in his hut had died from dysentery and malaria. His group was then marched another twelve-plus miles to a prison between Laur and Bongabong Stock Farm, while other work parties were sent out under armed guards to gather wood for the camp’s cooking fire. McDole waited in line near the two hefty black pots in order to receive a small portion of rice laced with the extra nutrition of bugs and worms. Bogue considered the daily ration, a weak cup of tea served with two half mess kits of rice per day, to be poor in quality and insufficient in quantity. The prevailing dysentery and malaria caused several deaths each day as work parties unloaded supplies for the Japanese, cleared rocks and debris, or gathered firewood. Those not assigned to work had little to do but sit around the compound, telling stories of their former home life as they sweated in the broiling tropic sun.13

  *

  BY MAY 30, the American and Filipino population at Cabanatuan Camp 3 had swelled to six thousand POWs. Untreated battle wounds festered, became infected by the unsanitary conditions and meager diets, and claimed more lives daily in alarming numbers.

  The few camp doctors could offer only the most primitive first aid to those suffering from pellagra, dengue fever, dysentery, malaria, beriberi, and scurvy. Mac McDole, Roy Henderson, and Smitty were fortunate enough to have a bottle of quinine pills Mac had smuggled with him from Corregidor, keeping them in better health than most as others around them succumbed during the first weeks at Cabanatuan. Doug Bogue benefited from medicine obtained at great risk by a daring few who slipped away from the guards to purchase goods from the Filipinos with pooled money.14

  The camp was the perfect breeding ground for all types of diseases. For toilets, the prisoners had “straddle trenches”—crude latrines dug about fifteen feet long, six feet deep, and several feet wide. A constant line of men waited their turn to squat over the trenches, but many of the sick simply could not make it in time and their bowels let loose. Each rainfall mixed human waste into the mud, further spreading filth and the ever-present humming swarms of green flies into nearby cooking areas.

  Joe Barta was put to work in the camp galley for two months. He enjoyed one little luxury of being able to take a bath each night from a five-gallon can of water, maintaining at least some hygiene while his comrades had only a river to bathe in when allowed. Marine Joe Dupont was assigned to a vegetable
farm where at harvest time he watched the fruits of his labor go entirely to his Japanese captors.15

  The camp commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Masao Mori, organized his Cabanatuan prisoners into groups of ten to prevent escape attempts. At any hour, his guards could hold a roll call in which every member of the ten-man groups was required to be present. If anyone was missing, the other nine were subjected to torture or even execution. In one case witnessed by Doug Bogue, the “guilty” were four U.S. soldiers accused of trying to escape while on a work detail on May 30.16

  The Americans, who claimed they had become lost while foraging for food, were returned to camp, beaten severely, and hog-tied in such a manner that any movements caused near strangulation. They were left squatting in the prison yard for two days under a merciless sun while the Japanese forced local Filipinos who passed by the camp to beat the Americans with clubs and ax handles. The bloodied men begged for water, but no one was allowed to help them. On the third day, the guards ordered the prisoners to dig their own graves up on a small bank, while the rest of the POWs in camp were lined up to watch. After declining blindfolds and final cups of tea, the four accused were shot and crumpled into their shallow, fresh graves. A Japanese officer stepped forward and fired a final bullet into each head.17

  In mid-July, a prisoner lost his temper and got into a fight with a guard. For punishment, the Japanese cut off the man’s ears and nailed his hands to the camp gate. Each time guards passed through the gate, it would swing the poor man into a barbed wire fence, which cut repeatedly into his legs. He was left nailed to the fence for three days without food or water before he was removed and buried in a trench. McDole, Smitty, and Henderson heard from the men assigned to the burial detail that the victim was still breathing as dirt was shoveled on top of him.18

  The horror of such executions—coupled with sun exposure, thirst, disease, and starvation—caused many men to lose the will to live. The fair-complected suffered the most from excessive sunburn. Joe Dupont’s hot, sweaty underarms became covered with pus-filled tropical ulcers the men came to call “Guam blisters.” Insufficient food caused bodies to shrivel until some men resembled walking skeletons, their tight skin stretched over protruding bones. McDole could soon look at a man’s face and tell whether he would live much longer. Those who had given up hope wore a dim expression about their eyes, and they usually did not survive many days longer. Men with a certain burning glow in their eyes still had the will to live.

  Gene Nielsen was most troubled by the lack of sufficient food. He had watched friends die at Cabanatuan, and his gnawing hunger made him consider eating the local vegetation. Having read how cows lived off the many minerals in grass, Nielsen picked the greenest blades near water sources but found they tasted like straw and were impossible to choke down. He next began sampling leaves plucked from a small tree, just small bites at first. It’s not good, but it’s not too bad, he thought. It has a little bit of a citrus flavor to it.19

  He ate tiny bites of a leaf and waited to see whether it had any adverse effects on his body. Within days, he progressed from a quarter leaf to a half leaf and finally an entire leaf. Soon he was picking handfuls of leaves and eating them. The local trees gave him something to add to his meager rice-and-soup diet, but Nielsen was concerned as he watched the growing number of Americans falling deathly ill with malaria, dysentery, and other tropical ailments.

  Smitty noticed that Japanese guards periodically entered camp looking for stronger prisoners to assign to special work details. Willing to assume any opportunity that would take him away from the hell of Cabanatuan, he recognized his chance in July when he heard rumors that the Japanese were looking for healthy men for a special project. Smitty quizzed the American officers to see how he could volunteer. When the work detail list was posted, he was pleased to see his name, along with buddies Roy Henderson and Mac McDole. They heard that the assignment involved a three-month project, but they knew little else. It did not matter. Joe Dupont, still suffering from his painful Guam blisters, was happy to make the cut as well.20

  Hundreds of volunteers were marched out of the front gate on July 24, 1942, with their scant possessions. Ensign Bob Russell was sorry to be leaving his friends, but he was optimistic about becoming part of a small group going somewhere—anywhere—outside of Cabanatuan Camp 3. Many of those selected—including Beto Pacheco, Willie Balchus, Bruce Elliott, Mo Deal, Joe Barta, and Doug Bogue—had all been captured on Corregidor in April. The American prisoners were marched toward town and loaded onto waiting trucks, a merciful change from the previous deadly train ride.21

  Balchus counted 442 total Americans in the work detail that departed Cabanatuan. After a three-hour truck ride along bumpy roads to Manila, the men were detained briefly at the old Bilibid Prison, where those suffering from malaria or too weak in any way were culled out. By late afternoon, the final group was moved to the Manila Harbor docks. There, Balchus and his comrades were put to work loading two small transport ships with construction supplies: wheelbarrows, shovels, picks, tons of bulk cement, rice, salt, and other food supplies. They were clearly preparing for an extended work project on one of the other Philippine islands.22

  The final group numbered 340 Army, Navy, and Marine enlisted men, plus 6 officers. The ranking officer was Marine Captain Ted Ernest Pulos. There were two Navy officers: Ensign Bob Russell and Lieutenant (junior grade) John Janson, the man who had sent his wife out on the submarine Spearfish just days before the surrender of Corregidor. Filling out the officer ranks were Warrant Officer Glenn Turner and two U.S. Army doctors.

  The senior medical officer was Captain Harold Samuel Hickman, a twenty-nine-year-old former medical intern originally from Winnipeg, Canada, who had joined the U.S. Army’s Medical Corps in 1941. Hickman, promoted from second lieutenant to captain in February 1942, was a Bataan Death March survivor who had most recently been interned at Camp O’Donnell. The other doctor included in the work program was First Lieutenant Carl Louis Mango. Hickman also selected several junior medics, including Bataan survivor Phil Brodsky and his friend Private First Class Everett Bancroft, to be on the work detail.23

  The men labored on Pier 7 in Manila Harbor for several days as they loaded the ships, most working with no shoes and little clothing to protect them from the sun. Toiling below decks in intense heat, inhaling cement dust, Mac McDole could scarcely breathe as he worked. On July 29, the men were marched on board the two transport ships, the last “cargo” to be loaded. Most of the prisoners were placed on board the rusting 5,461-ton merchant ship Sanko Maru. They huddled together on deck as their vessel sailed out of Manila Harbor, passing within clear view of Corregidor, now blackened and blasted with thousands of bomb and shell craters.24

  The voyage from Manila was less severe than what other Allied POWs would later endure on so-called hellships used by the Japanese to move prisoners over the ocean. Some were put to work in Sanko Maru’s galley, where Smitty was excited by a change of menu: rice, seaweed soup, and mongo beans. He hoped that his prospects were looking brighter. One Japanese guard, who had spent time in the United States and spoke good English, enjoyed American music, so he prompted Joe Dupont and other prisoners to sing popular dance songs such as “Star Dust” as they lay on deck at night.25

  The POWs were unaware of their destination during the first day at sea. The ranking Japanese officer in charge, Captain Kishimoto, finally pulled two American officers—Captain Pulos and Ensign Russell—aside to tell them via his interpreter that they were bound for the island of Palawan, where they would be consigned to work on a farm. Kishimoto said he realized that his prisoners were unhappy, but that he would like to make their new camp as pleasant as possible under the circumstances.26

  Around 1000 on July 30, Sanko Maru dropped anchor off Culion, a small island of the Philippines chain north of Palawan. Bruce Elliott was ready to make a break for it. He had no intention of living out the war as a POW if he could help it. He had found a twenty-foot length of rope in the hol
d and coiled it around his body beneath his shirt, hoping to slip over the side and escape to the island during the stopover. A work party was organized from among the American prisoners to load a barge with supplies for the island’s inhabitants, all patients of the Culion leper colony. Once Elliott learned the island was inhabited only by lepers, he quietly canceled his escape plans.27

  McDole, Smitty, and Henderson were among the group that went ashore with the barge. When they reached land, the Japanese guards—fearful of catching leprosy—refused to advance until the American prisoners had sprayed the landing area with a disinfectant. The island’s Catholic priest greeted the prisoners, who began unloading the barges while many of the lepers—men, women, and children—came forward with curiosity to watch the newcomers and offer prayers. McDole felt great pity for the people, all covered in oozing sores and some horribly disfigured by their disease.

  The prisoners unloaded stores throughout the afternoon and into the next morning before they were herded back onto the barge and returned to the Sanko Maru. They waved at the priest and the lepers as they departed, wondering why the Japanese had bothered to help these poor people when they treated the American POWs so terribly. As the ship began to get under way around 1630, the prisoners were told what Captain Pulos and Ensign Russell had already learned: They would be part of a road-building detail on one of the larger Philippine islands, Palawan. A guard told McDole that the men could expect better treatment there and American food.28