As Good As Dead

by Stephen L. Moore

  As the POWs were assembled to watch, Wilson and White, their faces already bloodied and bruised from severe beatings, were lashed to coconut trees. Japanese guards took turns beating the two while others thrust bayonets into their flesh. Some guards stuck hot needles into White’s eyes. Kinoshita passed by several times during the session but made no attempt to halt the torture.24

  When the prisoners were summoned to morning roll call at 0700 the next day, White and Wilson remained slumped against the coconut trees, and their torment continued. When the airfield work party returned that evening, the two prisoners were nowhere to be seen. Deguchi had had them untied and dragged back into the brig, where they remained for three days without food or water. They were held in company with Corporal George Craft, who had been hauled out of the barracks at 0200 on June 29 and held in the brig for the next week under suspicion of aiding the escapees.

  On July 5, Wilson and White were marched from the compound and loaded onto a truck by Deguchi’s Kempei Tai guards. Testimony would eventually reveal that Kinoshita accompanied a six-man unit into a coconut grove east of the airfield to dispose of the grievously wounded Americans. Later, he called the other prisoners to attention to inform them that their friends had been put to death for escaping. During the days that followed, further details were leaked to the POWs by both their Filipino contacts and the Japanese guards. One guard said that the two Americans were very brave and had refused blindfolds for their execution.25

  *

  KINOSHITA INSTITUTED A new policy after the execution of Wilson and White. Retaining his predecessor’s ten-man squads, he raised the stakes—if any portion of a squad escaped, the remainder would be executed. The men in Mac McDole’s group made a solemn pledge that no one would take flight unless all ten should agree to do so together. Soon after Kinoshita’s decree, Corporal Charles Street became lost while returning to the barracks from the airfield. The Japanese assumed that he had tried to escape, so the other nine men of Street’s work group were thrown into the brig to await their fate.26

  Navy prisoner Frank King, one of the nine, was told that his group would be shot at sunrise. When morning came, he was somewhat relieved when his work party was instead taken out for vicious beatings. That night, Sergeant Tomioka, “the Bull,” entered the brig, pulled out King, and made him stand at attention while he worked him over first with his fists and then with the riding quirt he always carried. Once satisfied with the number of cuts his whip had cut into King’s body, the Bull told his prisoner to return to his cell. “My back is all bloody,” King said. “Could I go wash it off first?” Another guard slammed a two-foot chunk of iron pipe against King’s skull, knocking him unconscious.27

  King and his companions endured similar punishment until Street found his bearings and wandered back into camp. Kinoshita did not follow through on his execution threat; instead, he had the Kempei Tai hold the squad for two weeks of punishment, with only one salty rice ball and one cup of water per day. Such severe treatment did not go unnoticed by other prisoners. Mac McDole, upon hearing three men discussing their own plans to escape, became irate. He put an end to their scheme by threatening to kill each of them with his bare hands before he would allow them to put the lives of other prisoners in jeopardy.

  In desperation, some men decided their only way out of Palawan was to sustain a work-ending injury. Marine George Burlage was dubbed “the Arm Breaker,” as he charged extra food or cigarettes to smash a comrade’s dominant arm with a pick handle while the limb was held against a log or between rocks. The men who were able to convince the Japanese that their injury was accidental were shipped out after Doc Mango set their broken limbs and fashioned a sling.28

  Kinoshita still did nothing to prevent guards like the Bull and Nishitani from abusing the prisoners. During early July, Doug Bogue and several POWs were assigned to boil and carry tea out to those working the airfield. Nishitani asked Navy prisoner Cordell Bingham if he preferred Japanese food or the American goods brought in by the Red Cross, to which he casually replied that fish and rice were not popular items back in America, where his people preferred meat and potatoes. Nishitani exploded in rage, seized a five-gallon can of boiling water, and threw it on Bingham’s leg.29

  Bogue and another prisoner chased him down as he ran away in agony. They removed his shoe and found that his reddened skin was already peeling off. He was taken to Doc Mango, who applied bandages to Bingham’s badly burned foot and lower leg, which became so swollen and infected during the next few days that Mango feared he would have to amputate. He eventually won the battle by cutting away large portions of dead skin and draining the large blisters that formed. About a week later, Bingham was forced back to work, hauling more boiling tea while limping along on his lame foot.

  *

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS Ed Petry finally made his way out of Cabanatuan in August 1943.

  The Texas-born soldier had endured a full year of hell after surviving the Bataan Death March. During his first three months at Cabanatuan, he had witnessed many severe beatings and even murders of his fellow prisoners. Standing only five foot four, he noted with some selfish relief that the Japanese guards enjoyed tormenting the larger Americans. He learned to wear a shirt when possible to avoid drawing undue enemy attention to the large American eagle and stars tattooed on his upper chest. He was severely stricken by malaria that kept him in the hospital for seven months before he was well enough in January 1943 to return to working on a farm and chopping wood. On August 15, Petry was among the men picked up from their barracks, moved by train to Manila, and shipped out as replacement airfield workers for the ongoing Palawan project. He arrived at Puerto Princesa on August 27 with sixty-nine other men—the last shipment of fresh laborers to be transported to Palawan Island.30

  Also arriving that day was Private Tommie Daniels, who had survived the Death March only to suffer the next year in Cabanatuan Camp 1. The ruddy, blue-eyed East Texas native looked like the perfect specimen for construction labor. Although he stood only five foot seven, Daniels was 185 pounds and powerfully built, with a bulldog stance and a barrel chest.

  The Army Air Corps veteran had turned to the military in 1923 as a way to escape his tough rural upbringing. After three years in the regular Army, Tommie returned home to help his mother—who raised eight children from different fathers—on the family farm. When she passed away in 1929, Tommie reenlisted and spent the next decade working on airfields in Texas and Louisiana, and in the quartermaster corps in Hawaii. Daniels never knew a father figure, and his closest relative, half brother Walter Blalock, was working at the Red River Arsenal as a guard when Tommie headed for the Philippines in June 1941. Raised on the Blalocks’ Sugar Hill community farm near Talco, Texas, Daniels had attained only a fourth-grade education, and he could not read or write.

  He was approaching his fortieth birthday when he reached Palawan, and his sandy brown hair soon turned gray due to the stress of being a POW. Daniels, one of the oldest privates in the military, had been nicknamed “Pop” by fellow soldiers young enough to be his sons. After several older prisoners were returned to Manila, Pop Daniels shared the forty-year-old age bracket with just two other soldiers and two officers, Warrant Officer Glenn Turner and Captain Fred Bruni. He would prove to be more resilient than many men half his age.

  Among the newbies were some familiar faces. Mac McDole was reunited with Marine Richard Packer—together the two had gone through boot camp, crossed the Pacific on the USS Chaumont, and taken liberty during a brief stopover in Honolulu. Soon after reaching Palawan, Packer became deathly ill with malaria that left him in the barracks, shivering under threadbare blankets. His fever spiked so high that McDole resorted to desperate measures, carrying his friend out to a rainwater vat near their barracks. Mac held him in the cool water for ten minutes, against the protests of Doc Mango. To the doctor’s surprise, Packer stopped shaking and his body temperature began to drop. He eventually recovered. It soon became common practice to submerge prison
ers with high fevers in the water tank to cool their bodies.31

  On September 1, 1943, the first accidental POW death occurred. A Japanese dive-bomber was forced to make an emergency landing on one of the adjacent new dirt strips, but the pilot side-slipped his plane off the runway and plowed into a temporary shack. Jack Burton Flynn of Conroe, Texas, resting in the little structure, was unable to evacuate before the aircraft smashed right through, slashing him with its propeller and carrying his body another fifty feet.32

  Officers Mango, Harry Hickman, Fred Bruni, and Bob Russell were called to be witnesses for the burial held that evening at 1700. Father Reyes, a priest from the Catholic church at Puerto Princesa, offered a few words in a brief ceremony before Flynn was buried in the town cemetery. Several men used a mess kit to form a simple wooden cross, and they attached an identification tag to it with his name.33

  *

  MAC MCDOLE GOT a brief respite from the cement dust when his ten-man crew was assigned to once again run pipes down from a mountainside stream to bring in more water, this time for mixing cement at the airfield. Their guard, an older man who spoke little and had a constant tic in a flickering eye, was nicknamed “Blinky.”34

  Blinky was not particularly intelligent. He enjoyed playing a game in which one person guessed how many fingers another was going to use to slap against his opponent’s wrist. Marine George Burlage laughed each time Blinky lost and was left with a red wrist when the challenging American fooled him. “Sorry, I was thinking four fingers,” said Burlage when Blinky would guess the number three. Some of the men came to regard Blinky—who, they learned, had been injured while serving in tanks during the Lingayen Gulf landings—as something like the prisoners’ mascot, as lovable as a dog.35

  Blinky’s ignorance was enough that the Americans began whispering about making an escape as their work truck churned up the mountainside one day. Camp barber John Warren decided they could easily kill Blinky, steal the truck, and take off. The men thought about it for a moment, and then Smitty grabbed the Japanese guard and put him in a choke hold. The terrified Blinky, his eyes batting rapidly, did not resist. Smitty held him until he realized that Clarence Clough and other members of his work crew were back at camp. Knowing that his friends would be murdered if the men turned up missing, he released his hold on the mild-mannered guard. “You better watch it from now on,” Smith said. “’Cause we can still get to you anytime we want!”

  The men completed their work detail without further thoughts of escape. Blinky, apparently happy to be alive, never reported the incident to his camp superiors.

  9

  CODE NAME “RED HANKIE”

  JOE BARTA LEARNED that even taking a bath could bring on severe punishment.

  In the past year, he and the Puerto Princesa prisoners had been allowed to wash themselves once a week in the ocean, but during the fall of 1943, Kinoshita abruptly suspended this privilege. Barta’s loose skin began developing sores from the cement dust, island grime, and salt accumulated from perspiration. He was not alone. One night in September, a group of thirty-one prisoners—including Smitty and Mac McDole—decided to slip out of the barracks under cover of darkness for a bath.

  The men eased into the barracks’ galvanized steel rainwater tank—used for cooking and drinking—and a thin film of residue spread across its surface as they washed away weeks of stench and filth. When Sergeant Nishitani discovered them midway through their cleansing, he angrily ordered the prisoners out of the water tank at rifle point and ushered Barta’s large group to the Kempei Tai brig, where a guard detail pounded their backs with a club and a piece of firewood. Two days of confinement in dark cells without food or water was the price for taking a bath.

  Some guards employed creative punishment. Corporal Lee Moore’s entire work group was beaten across the legs with two-by-fours when one man held up their progress. The group was forced to do push-ups during its morning and afternoon work breaks, with beatings rained down on anyone who became exhausted. One private, unable to maintain position for the full forty-five minutes, was struck so severely by a guard known as “Black Jack” that he suffered a spine fracture. He lay paralyzed in sick bay for two weeks, during which time Black Jack would pay visits to slap him around.1

  In September, another POW was spotted by Private Oguri as he tried to smuggle bananas back from his work detail. John the Bastard used a chair leg to pummel the prisoner’s legs, and within two weeks the resulting cuts became infected ulcers. Doc Mango eventually put him on the transfer list, and he was shipped out on December 15 as part of a sixty-man group that reduced Palawan’s Camp 10-A population to 354 Americans. Other men, such as George Burlage, were returned to Luzon in the fall after suffering recurring rounds of malaria.2

  The most severe punishment during late 1943 occurred in early November after camp guards caught wind of another planned prison break. Marines Walt Ditto and Bob May had hatched up a scheme to escape in a small canoe with the help of three friendly Filipinos. Ditto, severely beaten in June just for spilling gasoline, was more than ready to go. Guards Oguri and Watanabe had taken it out on him again in August when someone in his ten-man group reported late for roll call.3

  Ditto discussed his escape plans with his buddy May. Ditto was serving as a driver to the military stone quarry at Magaruwa one day when he hailed Vincente Pipori—a seventeen-year-old Filipino engaged in loading stones—to ask for assistance in escaping. Pipori agreed, and thereafter made contact with Ditto during October by leaving messages handwritten on rolled balls of paper in the road. On other occasions, Pipori put a note in an empty cigarette package and dropped it alongside the road, or tossed it out a truck window as he passed Ditto’s work group. Pipori met with two other Filipino laborers, who made contact with Ditto on the night of November 7 to share the plans. They told him that on the night of November 15, the Filipinos would tow a banca to the rear of the Puerto Princesa camp and escape with the two American prisoners to either northern or southern Palawan.4

  Within days, the scheme was foiled. Pipori sent another note to Walt Ditto on the afternoon of November 10. “Unfortunately, I can’t meet you in the stone quarry,” he wrote. “Ordinary citizens aren’t allowed to enter the Iwahig Prison Area. If possible, at Magaruwa, if not by letter.” Ditto understood that he must meet with his conspirators again to further discuss the plans. That evening around 2155, camp guard Private First Class Kajii observed Ditto quickly slip a note into the bottom of his left shoe. When Kajii asked to see the shoe, Ditto offered only his right foot. Before the guard inspected the left shoe, Ditto managed to hand off the note to Bob May.

  Kajii cornered May and quizzed him. When May was ordered to undress, the note was found tucked into his underpants. The two Americans were taken to the brig for examination by Deguchi, who had them strung up by their wrists and severely beaten. The next morning, Deguchi’s military police tracked down and arrested the three Filipinos who had conspired to help them escape.5

  The two marines were beaten in a public demonstration before their fellow prisoners and returned to the Kempei Tai brig, where they would remain for the next ninety-two days. Nearly every day of their internment, they were brought out with their hands tied behind them and lifted over a rafter, their feet dangling helplessly above the floor. Japanese guards took turns pounding them with clubs and lead-filled hoses, kicking them in the stomach and kidneys, spitting on them, and smacking them in the head with sabers. The torture endured by Ditto and May was the longest running of any Palawan prisoners, and May was told on a daily basis that he would be shot or beheaded. Few could understand how they maintained the will to survive on inadequate food and water and the near-daily beatings.6

  Somehow, they remained there until February 14, 1944, when both men were dragged from the brig and placed on board one of the transport ships. They were sent back to Bilibid Prison, then placed on a hellship to Japan to suffer through the remainder of the war working in coal mines. Ditto had been kicked in the lower intestin
es to the point that he could not pass urine for days. Afterward, he could only do so from a sitting position for another year.

  *

  THE SECOND ACCIDENTAL prisoner death at Palawan occurred on December 10, 1943. Army Private Alton Conrad Burson of Crockett, Texas, fell from a moving truck, struck a post, bounced under the vehicle, and was crushed as the rear wheels passed over his chest. Camp doctors pronounced him dead at 1055, and Burson was buried in another simple ceremony that afternoon by Father Reyes.7

  Continued abuse from the guards would further dwindle the number of effective workers in the weeks that followed. Supplies for the Palawan camp arrived regularly from Manila on two small interisland steamers, and fights broke out on occasion among American POW stevedores as some were willing to rob their fellow prisoners by pilfering the Red Cross parcels. Most outside stevedores thought of the men held on Palawan as their brothers, and they often smuggled notes of encouragement into the outbound supplies. On some occasions, they even received notes back from the Palawan prisoners, helping the separated Americans keep track of one another.8

  There was reason to celebrate on Christmas Day 1943 when some Puerto Princesa prisoners received packages from home through the Red Cross. Mac McDole’s mother sent him a box containing Colgate toothpaste and new white T-shirts. Knowing the shirts would quickly lose their crisp look if he wore them on the airfield, Mac kept them tucked away at his pallet in the barracks, taking them out only to admire their freshness and remember his home. The men found that their care packs had been rifled through, and some of the contents, including any medicines, had been stolen by the guards. Smitty’s Christmas package from East Texas contained only new white bedsheets and a shiny blue pair of swimming trunks. His fellow prisoners howled with laughter as he quipped, “Where in the hell do they think we are, at a Boy Scout camp for a week?”9