Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  The news slowed, the letters ceased, and then came the cables from the Bureau of Navigation identifying the missing. What it meant, as Murray’s younger sister Estelle put it simply, was that “life stopped for the family.”

  By 1700 on the afternoon of May 7 the captured officers were assembled in Malinta Tunnel. American and Filipino enlisted men were gathered around its west entrance under a blazing sun. As tired and weary as they were, they rose to their feet when they saw the Japanese escorting Wainwright and his staff outside. The general looked to the right, then turned to the left, his head slightly bowed. Private Everett D. Reamer, who had served as a rifleman with Battery F of the 60th Coast Artillery, could see tears on Wainwright’s cheeks. The Japanese forced the enlisted men back to the tunnel entrance and ordered them to raise their hands for a propaganda photograph. A guard flung the dogtags off of Reamer’s neck with the tip of his bayonet. He didn’t dare pick them up.

  Wainwright was on his way to KZRH’s studio in Manila to broadcast the surrender message he had written to General Sharp, to Colonel John P. Horan in the mountain provinces of northern Luzon, and to Colonel Guillermo Nakar of the Philippine Constabulary in the Cagayan Valley. It was almost midnight by the time he delivered his address. His voice was uncharacteristically husky and laden with emotion. The transmission was picked up by commercial radio in San Francisco, retransmitted to the War Department, and analyzed by the psychological warfare branch of Army Intelligence as well as Wainwright’s family and friends. They were convinced that the voice was not Wainwright’s.

  No American or Filipino wanted to believe that the entire archipelago had fallen to the Japanese. In Santo Tomás, internees hoped USAFFE commanders elsewhere in the Philippines would disregard the order or that it would be countermanded by MacArthur. But MacArthur no longer had communication with Corregidor. Sharp abided by Wainwright’s orders, though thousands of Filipinos left their units in northern, central, and southern Luzon to join American-led guerrilla operations or organize their own. Wainwright and his staff were confined to the University Club at the corner of Dewey Boulevard and South Avenue in Manila. He never saw Corregidor again.

  The Japanese interrogated captured American officers throughout the day at their bario San José headquarters. They wanted to know about the rumored tunnel between Bataan and Corregidor, the whereabouts of the Philippine bullion, and the two-year cache of food they had heard about on American radio reports.

  “How many airplanes are there on Corregidor?” they asked Major General Moore’s operations officer, Colonel William C. Braly.

  “If you can find one, you’re smarter than we were,” he quipped.

  The aftermath of battle was gruesome by the light of day. Burial details were organized for the Americans and Filipinos killed in action at shoreline defenses and inland positions. Corpses were piled like sandbags outside Malinta Tunnel, coal-black from decay, bloated to three times their normal size from the tropical heat until they split open like overripe fruit. The stench of putrefying flesh was nauseating. Some were burned at the tunnel’s east entrance. Others were removed to Kindley Field, where they were stacked into huge funeral pyres, doused with gasoline, and ignited.

  Traditionally the Japanese sent home the ashes of fallen soldiers (eirei or “heroic spirits”). One American work detail was organized and ordered to chop off the hands of the dead so they could be returned to the families of the deceased. Leland Bartlett asked his chemical department “to clean up the battlefield and to disinfect the grounds” with chlorinated lime. Meanwhile, he gathered “all the quinine, all the sulfathiazole, all the narcotics” he could from the aid stations.

  On the evening of May 7 another request for medical assistance was relayed from the Radio Intercept Tunnel. “Japanese treated us very well in the hospital tunnel and made no effort to hinder us at all,” noted George. But it wasn’t until 2200 that Murray was able to take an ambulance out to Monkey Point.

  On the way there a Japanese soldier stopped him and politely removed his gold wristwatch.

  “Thank you,” he said in English.

  It would have been foolish for Murray to resist. What he wanted to say was, “Take your goddamned hands off of me, you son of a bitch.” But it was dark, he was unarmed, and all too easily he could have been another dead American by the side of the road. The watch—a gold Wyler-Incaflex—had been a present from his buddy Charlie Lipsky, and while he regretted its loss, more troubling was his inability to defend himself, being robbed of his authority, stripped of his choice.

  “You’re welcome,” Murray replied.

  The casualties in the Radio Intercept Tunnel had been well tended and bedded down by corpsmen Daniel MacDougall and Robert Clark Crawford. Murray tagged them, rendered assistance where necessary, and arranged for their evacuation.

  The next day a long line began to snake east from Malinta Tunnel down to the 92nd Garage Area, an old army seaplane station converted into the motor pool of the 92nd Coast Artillery Regiment on the island’s South Shore. The Japanese set up a “registration center” where the captives provided name, rank, and serial number. Each man was assigned a number that was painted on the back of his shirt or trousers. Filipinos were separated from Americans, and officers from enlisted men.

  Then roughly 12,000 American soldiers, sailors, marines, Philippine Army troops, and civilians from the fortified islands were concentrated in an area 1,500 feet long by 500 feet wide: the concrete apron that enabled seaplanes to land on Corregidor. A sprawling mass of humanity lay broiling in the sun. Temperatures were in the high 90s. Some 800 cases remained in the Malinta Tunnel hospital, but even ambulatory patients were forced to assemble in the 92nd Garage. Men were so cramped for space, they could hardly turn around. For the first three days there was no shelter and little food. Water was stored beneath the concrete seaplane ramp and could be hoisted up by rope and bucket. Shell holes were used for human waste. Flies crawled over bodies and into ears, noses, and mouths while men slept.

  Soon order was forged from chaos. Officers and enlisted men were organized into groups of 1,000 under the command of an American colonel, with sub-groups of 100 each. Filipinos were separated from the Americans “by an imaginary line.” You were required to salute your captors if you still wore your hat, or bow from the waist if not. Anyone who left the compound unescorted by a Japanese guard, it was threatened, would be shot.

  Alton Halbrook saw the consequences of disobeying the Japanese. His friend Jack Kirkland was a big strapping fellow with a handlebar mustache and an eagle tattoo on his chest that spread from shoulder to shoulder. The kind of guy who didn’t take orders lightly. Kirkland refused to bow. When several Japanese soldiers approached him for his infraction, he lashed out at them. They struggled with him until they were able to tie his hands behind his back. Then they beat him until Kirkland seemed to get the message. But the Japanese weren’t through with him. With his arms still pinned to his back they strung him up by his thumbs and hung him from an A-frame high enough so his feet were just touching the ground. By the time they let him down, Kirkland couldn’t move his limbs. The Japanese worked him over again, and all Kirkland could do was charge blindly like a bull. They beat him nearly into unconsciousness. Finally they let him go, but not before breaking both of his arms between the elbow and wrist.

  “This was the example that they set for us,” said Halbrook. “This guy was a tough Marine. He was the meanest mother going, and they broke him.”

  Another American soldier was in agony from two broken legs and a mutilated arm. He had refused medical treatment from the Japanese, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to shoot himself. He begged Private John R. Brown, Battery A, 60th Coast Artillery, to end his misery. Brown obliged, and the Japanese soon escorted him down to the beach along with another man from the 803rd Engineers accused of insubordination. The reports of a submachine gun followed. They were never seen again.

  The Japanese took what they pleased—watches, wallets, money rolls, colle
ge rings, wedding bands, fountain pens, pencils, eyeglasses, even forks from mess kits. Officially the practice was forbidden, but in the first few hours after the surrender, Japanese officers made a point of staying outside the Radio Intercept Tunnel while their enlisted men tried to steal everything of value in it. All of the captives were shaken down, not once but repeatedly. Some Japanese soldiers were literally up to their elbows in wristwatches, and “numerous scuffles” broke out between them over their prized possessions. Aside from watches, they delighted in fountain pens, and to the Americans they seemed just “queer for boots.”

  They just as quickly raided the Quartermaster lateral, leaving the food they didn’t want. They loved sweets, but they couldn’t stomach tomatoes, corned beef, or abalone. The Americans were forbidden to take anything without the guards’ permission.

  Compared to the conduct of the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, in which soldiers from the Malay Brigade seized the Alexandra Hospital and bayoneted to death patients and Royal Army Medical Corps personnel, the occupation of Corregidor was orderly. As one American remarked, “They dreaded coming onto Corregidor as much as we dreaded seeing them.” Some had actually served as assault troops in Hong Kong and Singapore. When they entered the headquarters of the 16th Naval District in Tunnel Queen, armed with bayonets and grenades only to encounter no resistance, they became “almost jovial,” said Lieutenant Commander Melvyn H. McCoy. But you could never predict their behavior. They had met no resistance at the Alexandra Hospital in Singapore, either, and they turned it into a bloodbath.

  The Japanese initiated work details, forcing prisoners to remove food stocks from Malinta Tunnel, dismantle radio transmitters, reconstruct gun positions, repair the island’s roads, rebuild the airstrip, and retrieve brass shells that were then shipped back to Japan for scrap. On one detail Corporal Robert E. Haney was collecting shrapnel when he saw something glisten in the red earth: a small human hand dried almost to transparency.

  As George described the activities of May 10:We raked a lot of small branches together for burning and unknowingly raked a lot of unexploded small arms ammunition in too. Some commotion for a few minutes much to the amusement of the Japanese sentry and consternation of Commanding Colonel.Well anyway started the clean up drive.

  That same day, the Japanese reenacted the invasion of Corregidor for a propaganda newsreel. They ordered the Americans to fall into two lines with their hands raised while soldiers shouted “Banzai!” and bayonets glittered in the sunlight. The newly captured looked authentic enough, “exhausted, dirty and ragged,” said 2nd Class Petty Officer Frank Hoeffer, a former cook for the Oahu, except that they were laughing, “which probably didn’t look so good on the screen in Tokyo.”

  The men scavenged for food, clothing, cooking utensils, and fire-wood. They slipped into Malinta Tunnel, where they stole preserved peaches, and Vienna sausage, and played catch with the canned abalone that the Japanese wouldn’t touch. Soon thousands of shelter-halves were pitched side by side in the 92nd Garage like butterflies in the sand. Planks, boards, corrugated iron, and rags were used as shade against the sun. Latrines were dug in the hillsides. Philippine pesos were used as toilet paper. The Americans bathed on their section of beach, but upstream the Filipinos used theirs as an open latrine, causing a stream of sewage to run down the shoreline and leading to an outbreak of diarrhea and dysentery. A system was devised for distributing rations, which the Japanese finally began to supply. Water was chlorinated and doled out from an old well until it could be piped in. There was one spigot for nearly 12,000 men.

  They peeled off in twos, threes, or fours. Better to have a buddy stand in line for hours to fill a canteen while you guarded the few things the Japanese hadn’t stolen from you. Better to have somebody watch your back as you nosed around for food. Better to have someone who would share his food with you if you came up empty-handed.

  Powerless against the Japanese, they now fought a daily battle that brought out the best and worst in human nature. Rank and the privileges it conferred were fast becoming quaint appurtenances. Street-smarts and intuition often triumphed over reason. The victorious won not by vanquishing a common enemy. They won, simply, by circumventing death. The game was survival, and the rules changed during the course of its play. The men had stepped into a limbo of morality, and limbo, of course, was the first circle in Dante’s hell.

  Major Bradley had been in no hurry to leave his position at Wheeler Point on the morning of May 6. A sheer wall of rock separated him from the Japanese above, their guns raised, shouting “Banzai!” Enemy planes flew low overhead.

  “Let them come and find us,” he said to Fred. But the men of the 2nd Battalion were without food, and as the day wore on and the fighting subsided, Bradley agreed to use a white sheet as a flag and march to Bottomside. The Japanese stopped them, shook them down, then allowed them to proceed. Fred managed to hide a watch and a ring in his shoes.

  The marines were being steered to the 92nd Garage Area, and Fred began to follow them. A Japanese soldier, seeing his Red Cross brassard, pointed a bayonet at his stomach and motioned toward Malinta. Fred marched to the hospital tunnel.

  There he found George, and together they made a campsite near the tunnel entrance, complete with firepit. But it was Murray and John who had a larder of food. The junior medical officers had lifted flour, corned beef, canned fruit, and canned vegetables from an unfinished lateral, almost from under a Japanese sentry’s nose.

  “You know,” said Fred, “I’m a pretty good cook.”

  Murray remembered the meals Fred had prepared in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters in Cavite after coming back from a day’s hunting with Ken Lowman in Bataan. He remembered that he was a damn fine surgeon. And he would never forget that he had saved his life by getting him assigned to the battle aid station in the old paint locker instead of in the Cavite Navy Yard dispensary.

  “Should we let him in?” he teasingly asked John.

  “Of course we should,” John replied.

  It was only natural that the four navy doctors should become a team and that the friendship among them would rise from common bonds. George and Fred were midwesterners, Catholic, and had two years’ seniority because of their tours in the Far East. John and Murray were New Yorkers, Jewish, graduates of NYU’s College of Medicine who saw themselves not as career naval officers but as civilians in the navy. There were differences in upbringing, outlook, and temperament, but their wartime experience—Cavite, Bataan, Corregidor—united them. They had seen men die in the field and in hospital, and in the interests of self-preservation they subscibed to a single ethos: “All for one, one for all.” They even had an adopted father, Carey Smith, who at the ripe old age of forty-three had seniority over all of them.

  They worked together and ate together, at night they slept together, and they took turns stealing food. None of them had ever stolen before—it would have been inconceivable back home. But they were as far from home as possible, in a situation more foreign than any they could have imagined. Besides, they reasoned, they were merely taking what was rightfully theirs. They knew where the guards were stationed, and they saw how to sneak around them. So they alternated shifts. Murray and John went foraging the first night; Fred and George went the next. They ferreted out food in the darkness, stuffed it into pillow cases, and divided their spoils.

  On one occasion, Hayes caught Murray with a stack of flapjacks he had made with flour and a little mineral oil on a hot plate.

  “Would you like some?” he asked the regimental surgeon.

  Officers and gentlemen didn’t comport themselves that way, Hayes replied. He had seen how quickly discipline had broken down after the surrender, how enlisted men ignored authority and officers relinquished it.

  Officers and gentlemen, Murray thought, also weren’t supposed to be wasting away. He and his buddies had no interest in abdicating their responsibilities as navy medical officers, but they couldn’t carry them out if they went hungry. So the hell
with protocol, so long as the Japanese didn’t catch them. They’d take their chances and risk the consequences.

  Down at the 92nd Garage Area they set up an aid station with a rotating service and were joined by some army doctors. There was a line twenty-four hours a day. Men crumpled from heat stroke, their bodies broke out in Guam blisters, and tropical ulcers chewed at their flesh. Malaria resurfaced, and the inequitable distribution of rations led to more cases of malnutrition. The doctors had no medicine for diarrhea and practically no bandages to change dressings. About the only thing they did have was argerol, a mild antiseptic used to treat venereal disease.

  After a few days Fred approached Sergeant John David Provoo, who served as an interpreter for the Japanese, and asked to be taken back to Malinta Tunnel. He demanded to see the commanding officer and insisted that the Japanese provide some medication, which they did: aspirin, sulfanilamide, bismuth, and Mercurochrome.

  With a little medicine, the navy doctors, said Colonel Cooper, “performed almost impossible feats . . . in their efforts to keep alive the thousands who were suffering from prostration, dysentery, and malnutrition.” Stretcher cases were carried up the hill to the Malinta Tunnel hospital. Two of the doctors became the latest admissions: Murray was hospitalized with fever, and George had another bout of amoebic dysentery.

  When the rains came, the heat lifted over Corregidor and spirits rose at once. The skies opened like giant sluices, and a chorus of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” rose spontaneously from the huddled masses in the 92nd Garage Area. But then misfortune assumed another shape.