Samuel Bookman was a part of America’s medical elite, and his family enjoyed the privileges of German-Jewish aristocracy. His wife, Olga, modeled their home after the furnished period rooms she so admired in the Metropolitan Museum of Art down the street. Their daughters, Edith and Virginia, wore clothes fashioned by seamstresses. Debutante parties were thrown at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. All of the children attended private schools, vacationed in Lake Placid, New York, and spent some summers in France, where the family kept an apartment in Paris overlooking the Place Vendôme and was chauffeured around the countryside in a 1924 custom Cadillac Landaulet. John’s sisters were encouraged to mix in German-Jewish circles, where friendships were fickle and morals were lax, especially during Prohibition. Parties were frequent, quarts of champagne were stowed beneath banquet tables, and young debs frequently “came home with the milkman” or nonchalantly slipped the house keys to their boyfriends. Virginia wasn’t like that; she simply eloped. She knew that permissiveness had its limits and that her parents were apt to frown upon her marriage to Sam Saffro, who was of Russian-Jewish descent and lived on the West Side.
John went to the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, the second-oldest boys’ school in the country, and in 1931 graduated from Storm King, a prep school in the Hudson River valley. He had been left back one grade, missed another due to illness, and would suffer repeated bouts of mononucleosis. He was premed at Brown University, worked at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory on Long Island during the summer, and after graduating from NYU’s College of Medicine had a rotating internship at Lincoln Hospital in New York City until July 1, 1941.
In choosing a medical career, John was following in his father’s footsteps—until he found himself in the steaming jungle of Bataan.
Twenty-five miles long and twenty miles at its widest, the Bataan peninsula is punctuated by a series of volcanic peaks 3,000 to 5,000 feet in height, from Mt. Santa Rosa in the north to Mt. Bataan in the south. The rocky west coast plunges down to the China Sea, while the east coast eases into Manila Bay. The entire province of Bataan was formerly a military reservation, and each year Philippine Scout regiments would go there to build ammunition bodegas or bridges, or to stockpile artillery shells right out in the open. Military planners drew a main battle position for Fil-American forces across the northern part of the peninsula, from Mauban in the west to Mabatang in the east. A rear battle position was established that stretched from Bagac to Orion.
Towering monkey pod, mango, and acacia trees lined Bataan’s ridges. Talahib and cogon grass grew waist high in its ravines. Stands of talisay offered cover and shade near open ground. The interior was so dense with ipil-ipil trees, bamboo thickets, and molave plants tangled with rattan vines that visibility was reduced to ten yards while the brightness of midday turned into twilight’s gloom. Soaring balete rose from buttress roots that could shelter three or four people, but the natives feared they were haunted by evil spirits. You learned not to be surprised by the wild boars and wild chickens crashing through the underbrush in Mariveles. Occasionally you came across a five-to-eight-inch track in the dirt left by a python slithering down from the mountains in search of water.
The climate is brutal. In the dry season, the temperature averages 95 degrees during the day and 86 degrees at night, but it feels hotter because of the high humidity. In the rainy season, which begins in early June and lasts until November, monsoons fan across Manila Bay and over Luzon, flooding rivers, washing out roads and bridges, and leaving quagmires of mud. It is a striking landscape inhabited by a people who lived in abject poverty yet were remarkably friendly to their American “brothers.” Dewey himself had fallen in love with Luzon, whose peaks, he wrote in his autobiography, reminded him of the Green Mountains of Vermont.
On the southern slopes of the Mariveles Mountains was “Little Baguio,” where the quartermaster, construction, supply, and defense works engineers were stationed in the sector known as the Service Command Area. The Navy Section Base was carved out of the 100-square-mile Service Command Area, which fell under the aegis of General Allen C. McBride, MacArthur’s deputy from the Philippine Department. As far back in the rear as you could go, the Section Base was still within the “ultimate defense area.”
The Section Base hospital was a modest two-room clinic that had been slapped together with four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood half an inch thick, nailed to two-by-four-inch wooden frames, and it was here that John worked as the medical officer. He was conscientious, resourceful, and affable. He made friends easily and quickly established his authority. If his thoroughness was a thorn in the side of MTB Squadron 3, he had won the respect of his peers.
At last John had emerged from his father’s influence to become something very different from the man he was in New York City. Samuel was proud of him for it. He kept a picture of John at the Navy Section Base dressed in his whites and wearing a smile as wide as a sunflower.
Mariveles combines the beauty of the jungle with bluffs that drop down to the ocean, beyond which rise jagged pinnacles of rock. Two miles away, as if it had broken off from the tip of Bataan, lies the diminutive island of Corregidor, so close it seems as if you could skip a stone across the water and hit it.
The spur on the pincer of Bataan, Mariveles was once a strategic sentry at the easternmost point of Manila Bay. Under Spanish rule, ships sailing to Manila from Philippine and foreign ports had to stop off at a rambling, one-story concrete building so crews could be checked for cholera and smallpox. Mariveles became the site of the U.S. Public Health Quarantine Service Hospital. The old Quarantine Station, as it was now called, served as the administration building for the Section Base commander, who felt a special connection to Mariveles history because whenever he sat at his desk, he found himself staring at an erstwhile bidet fastened to the floor in front of it.
Legend has it that in the early seventeeth century a young friar from Bataan fell in love with a nun named Maria Velez. They fled from their orders by horse and carabao, only to be captured and turned over to the local magistrate, Corregidor, who sentenced them to eternal separation. Angered by the judge for assuming a divine role, a merciful God intervened. While he took pity on the young lovers, they had violated their vows, so he decreed they would stand as monuments to fidelity as well as divine justice. Maria Velez would lie for eternity atop the mountain on Bataan that bears her foreshortened name. The friar could gaze at her forever from across the channel, his frown fixed in stone on the isle of El Fraile. And the magistrate who came between them was frozen in time as the island of Corregidor, with two islets, representing the horse and carabao—Caballo and Carabao—behind him.
Mariveles was little more than an impoverished barrio near the finest natural harbor on the Bataan peninsula. For its Section Base, the navy had acquired 150 acres of land that were rich with rice paddies and mangroves and allowed the natives, for whom a mango tree amounted to an annual salary, to work as tenant farmers. Construction was undertaken by Pacific Naval Contractors, which was owned by Morrison, Knudsen of Boise, Idaho, the same firm that had built up Wake Island and Sangley Point. But the work on the base was never finished, which meant that it could never serve the purpose for which it was intended: a shallow-water port for the maintenance and repair of destroyers.
On December 8 MacArthur privately acknowledged to Sutherland the need to “remove immediately to Bataan.” By December 10 the general was mapping a retreat for Fil-American forces, falling back on the very strategy he had criticized for being a “passive” defense: War Plan Orange-3. The logistical hurdles were enormous. There were 66,000 Filipino and 12,000 American troops in Luzon. Moreover, since WPO-3 had been suspended at MacArthur’s insistence, 18,000 tons of supplies had been moved north to prepare for MacArthur’s plan of holding the beaches, and additional supplies were sent south to support defense positions there.
When G-3, MacArthur’s operations section, had proposed that Bataan be stocked as “a safety measure,” MacArthur had adamantly ref
used. A troop withdrawal to Bataan was inevitable, but MacArthur had nonetheless demanded that Corregidor be supplied first.
Once Corregidor was stocked, the priorities for Bataan were clear: ammunition and food, matériel and fuel, and medical supplies, in that order. Fifteen thousand tons of ammunition and truckloads of tank replacement parts were already on the peninsula. The army procured huge amounts of canned meats and fruit from Armour, Swift, and Libby and stocks of polished rice from Chinese merchants. There were 2,295,000 pounds of canned salmon; 152,000 pounds of canned fruit and vegetables; 8,000 pounds of fresh beef; 100,000 dry rations; and large stores of clothing and equipment. By agreement with the oil companies, the army took over the distribution of commercial gasoline.
The quantities were prodigious, but given the number of meals that were necessary to sustain combat troops at an average daily intake of 4,000 calories, they were alarmingly low. Commonwealth regulations forbade the transfer of rice and sugar across provincial lines. With the fall of Luzon imminent, the government feared that the Philippine people wouldn’t have enough food under Japanese occupation. Five thousand tons of rice sitting in the Cabanatuan Rice Central depot, in addition to 2,000 cases of canned fish, corned beef, and clothing in Tarlac, were off limits to the military. The rice alone could have fed the troops on Bataan for nearly a year.
There were enough field rations for only thirty days, enough rice for twenty. WPO-3 had anticipated a holding action on Bataan lasting up to six months, but for a considerably smaller force than actually moved to the peninsula. So there was another invisible enemy the men would face on Bataan: hunger. And hunger only made them more susceptible to disease.
Then there was the problem of time, for even under the best of conditions it was projected that supplying 43,000 men on Bataan, as called for by WPO-3, would take a minimum of two weeks. MacArthur didn’t even broach the idea of retreat to President Quezon until December 12, the day Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and he wouldn’t officially implement it until the beach defense was tested on December 22. The delay would have disastrous consequences. Tons of supplies would be shipped from Manila to Bataan by boat, barge, lighter, and rail, but there was only one two-lane overland route, and tons more would be left behind.
John Bookman wasn’t the first doctor to be concerned about the problem of malaria on Bataan. A malaria survey had been undertaken in the Philippines in the early 1920s at the instigation of the International Health Board and Governor General Leonard Wood. Attempts at malaria control were made at the major sugar mills and haciendas of Pambanlag, La Mitra, and Carmencita and in the municipalities of Florida Blanca and Porac. First applied in 1927 at Fort Stotsenberg in Manila with seemingly beneficial results, Paris green (copper arsetoarsenite) was the larvicide of choice. But rigorous studies weren’t conducted until Henry L. Stimson became Governor General in 1928. His keen interest in the health and welfare of the Filipino population led to the creation of the Advisory Committee for Malaria Control.
From 1924 to 1929 the Philippine Health Service, in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation, commissioned field studies of malaria, but the data and reports obtained by the sanitary engineer, J. J. Mieldazis, were deemed inadequate. Victor Heiser, an associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation, then sought a doctor and scientist who was up to the challenge of malaria in the Philippines and the “outstanding problems” of bacillary dysentery, typhoid, and intestinal parasites. The man who filled that role and embarked on new, scientifically controlled studies was a young doctor then living in Owls Head, Maine, by the name of Paul Russell.
Russell arrived in Manila in January 1930 and began to study malaria in birds while keeping an eye on ways to reduce the cost of malaria control. He found that 1 percent of Paris green could be mixed with 99 percent charcoal and effectively eliminate mosquito larvae. He developed an automatic paddle-driver that could float on streams and evenly distribute the larvicide. And he experimented with fish (gambusia) as a means of naturally disposing of mosquito larvae.
But Russell’s early findings didn’t solve the larger issue of malaria control. Having visited thirty-six provinces over two and a half years in the Philippines, he proposed a new set of recommendations: treating streams breeding Anopheles minimus with Paris green; supplying local barrios with bed nets; making quinine “available to the people of malarial regions as freely as possible”; and removing the 50 percent duty on plasmochin, a compound developed by I. G. Farben in 1926 that was more effective than quinine but turned out to be highly toxic. The plan hinged on the revolutionary step of carrying out “anti-larval measures” at the local level under medical supervision instead of under a centralized Malaria Control Division, “because doctors in this part of the world will not get their feet muddy expect [sic] in cases of urgent personal necessity,” he confided to Heiser. Even schoolboys who built fences, dug ditches, and planted vegetables as required by their curriculum, he argued, could engage in malaria control in their biology studies.
Russell visited Bataan in July 1931with Major Rufus L. Holt of the U.S. Army Medical Research Board, as part of a general sanitary survey for a proposed army base south of Limay. Bataan was mostly jungle. There were “few foot trails, even fewer pack-trails, and no roads,” as Colonel Richard C. Mallonée, adviser to the 21st Division of the Philippine Army, described it.
The problems Russell found on Bataan were numerous. Malaria as well as dysentery and typhoid—a scourge among Americans at the onset of the Spanish-American War—were common. The jungle on either side of the trail from Limay to Bagac was nearly impenetrable. Medical evacuation of the sick and wounded “would be extremely difficult,” as would communication between army units. Sand fleas and mosquitoes plagued the lower elevations, while above 2,000 feet there were “myriads of leeches.” The lumber company Cadwallader Gibson had had an extensive concession in Limay but folded up its operation in large part due to malaria, moving to Camarines Norte.
Malaria control in the 145-square-mile area selected for the line of resistance would involve treating 155 miles of streams with Paris green, 30,000 yards of irrigation ditches on either side of the peninsula, clearing stream banks, relocating an already infected native population, and spraying barrios. “Costly and time-consuming,” Russell admitted, but malaria control was “absolutely essential to the continued operation of troops in this area.”
That said, he came to the unsettling conclusion in April 1932 that “no practical control can be achieved anywhere in the islands in less than 10 years.” Quinine bisulfate, derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, was effective for routine treatment, but “drugs alone,” Russell warned, “will never control or materially reduce malaria in the Philippines.”
Russell’s pleas fell on deaf ears. In the decade since, the U.S. Army had made virtually no attempts at preventing malaria on Bataan. Quinine prophylaxis was favored over an antimosquito program. Back in 1917 when he was U.S. food administrator, Herbert Hoover saw an urgent need to “raise quinine” in the Philippines. Nothing was done, however, until four years later, when Governor General Wood, a Harvard-educated doctor who had watched a forest ranger in the Philippines die from the disease, procured the seeds of Cinchona ledgeriana from Java and turned them over to Arthur Fischer, director of the Philippines Bureau of Forestry. In six years Fischer was cultivating plants in Baguio. But Fischer found a more favorable climate for cinchona in the southern islands, and in 1927 he relocated the plantations to Mindanao. By 1936 Fischer was shipping bark to Manila, where he set up a factory that as of December 1941 was producing five and a half pounds of totaquinine daily.
Three months earlier Lieutenant Commander Thomas Hirst Hayes, who held the title of chief of sanitation for the Manila and Subic Bay areas as well as chief of surgery at Cañacao Hospital, attended a conference of visiting and resident medical officers. Hayes pointed to a circle he had drawn on a map of Bataan and said: “There lies our disease threat in this war.” A survey conducted fro
m September to December 1941 on Bataan uncovered malaria in all of the coastal villages. The disease would peak during the dry season from February to May. Thus far there was only one case of malaria among naval personnel in Mariveles.
As he collected mosquito larvae from the ponds and streams of Bataan looking for Anopheles minimus, John Bookman wondered what the health consequences of War Plan Orange-3 would be. Would there be enough quinine to treat infected troops and prevent others from falling ill? What would happen in the event of a malaria epidemic?
Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Thurston Beecher “didn’t exactly relish the idea of being shot at again.” Beecher was well acquainted with war. He had served with the regiment in France during World War I. But in the wake of Pearl Harbor, there was a job to be done, which was to augment the marine guard at the Navy Section Base in Mariveles with the 1st Battalion, 4th Marines from Olongapo.
Because there were few facilities in Mariveles, the Dewey dry dock was hauled down from Olongapo. Submerged during the day to avoid enemy bombers, it was floated 200 yards off the beach on the western shore for the repair of PT boats and small craft. A barrier net was towed across the harbor entrance, moorings were put in for submarines and destroyers, and the surrounding waters were protected by a network of mines. Clockwise as you faced the harbor were the Quarantine Station, behind which was an emergency airstrip; the Section Base camp, positioned above Sisiman Cove, where Bulkeley’s MTB Sqadron 3 made its home; and the Canopus, camouflaged in green and khaki to blend into the tropical foliage around Caracol Cove on the eastern shore. The Maryanne, now the flagship of the Inshore Patrol, escorted submarines through the minefields. Every time the Japanese tried to bomb the Canopus and missed, the crew treated itself to the newly killed fish that floated to the water’s surface from the explosive impact.
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