Colonel Beecher described the scene on the night of May 22, after he returned from a day of interrogations by Japanese officials:It was like plunging into a swimming pool. We slid and slipped down to the road in the Stygian darkness, cursing our luck and getting soaked to the skin. We found the camp a morass; as many as could had taken shelter in the wrecked buildings of the 92nd Garage; our pitiful shelters of blankets and shelter halves afforded no protection—we and our few salvaged possessions were drenched.
All night long we stood or sat in misery, wet and cold. With dawn the rain ceased and a bright sun revived our drooping spirits. A rumor had been circulated through the camp during the night that we were to move the next morning. About 8:00 o’clock the rumor was proved correct, we were ordered to leave the area by 9:00 that morning.
Saturday, May 23, was a soggy, gray morning. Hayes ordered Fred and John to the 92nd Garage with a group of twenty-five corpsmen, where they took their place at the end of a long line of POWs. By 0900 a column began marching up a steep hillside path on the way to the South Dock. The sky soon cleared, and by afternoon the sun beat down relentlessly as they waited for hours in an old rock quarry. The prisoners were under guard, and launches shuttled them in groups of forty out to three Japanese naval transports that had anchored in San José Bay. The loading continued until darkness began to fall, when inexplicably the Japanese ordered the medical contingent back to Malinta Tunnel. By then nearly 12,000 men had been packed onto three vermin-infested vessels 5,000 to 8,000 tons in size.
It was raining up on deck but stifling in the hold. The men spent the night “in the most suffocating condition imaginable,” said Major Stephen Mellnik. There was no food, no medical care, and no relief for the dysentery patients. On the morning of the twenty-fourth they sailed across Manila Bay and dropped anchor south of Manila, several miles off Parañaque. Landing barges went out to meet them, gangways and Jacob’s ladders were lowered, and the captives were crowded into the boats in groups of roughly 100. But the barges stopped short of the Manila shoreline in about four feet of water. Men tied their shoes around their necks, held their belongings over their heads, and slogged the rest of the way through the surf.
Once on land, they were paraded north on Dewey Boulevard toward Manila in columns of 4 and groups of 1,000. They were wet, and their feet blistered horribly. It was a calculated attempt to publicly humiliate those captured on Corregidor. The invincible Japanese had liberated the poor Filipinos from the arrogant Americans. They kept their prisoners in line with mounted cavalrymen and soldiers, who prodded stragglers with bayonets or whacked them with rifle butts. The Filipino citizenry were not so easily cowed. Some flashed V for Victory signs; others sneaked the bedraggled men food, cigarettes, and candy, at the risk of being slapped or beaten. Garden hoses were stretched across Dewey Boulevard at the Admiral Apartments so a lucky few could could rehydrate themselves, after which they continued on past Intramuros, east around the Metropolitan Theatre, across Quezon Bridge, and onto Quezon Boulevard before entering Bilibid Prison.
May Harries, an American on a sick pass from Santo Tomás Internment Camp, watched the procession:From twelve o’clock that noon until six I watched what the Jap newspapers called the “March of Humiliation”; watched my countrymen, ragged and barefoot, weary and defeated. . . . But it was mistaken propaganda on the part of the Japs, for the Filipinos watched with sympathy and tears for the defeated . . . not cheers for the victors.
Back on Corregidor, Fred and John had no idea where the others had been taken, and no idea why they had been held back. The uncertainty was unnerving. There were rumors that they were moving to Topside, being transferred to Manila, even repatriated to the United States!
“Absolutely impossible to discover our destiny,” wrote George, who was tired of being cooped up in Malinta Tunnel.
31st May 1942
I would give anything to get established in some sort of a normal life again but guess this mass living is compulsory. It really gets annoying to have every smallest action witnessed and even questioned by a few. . . . Allowed no one to go outside tunnel from 6 PM to 10 PM. Got slapped by an officer on 29th for not snapping to attention faster.
They were also wearying of the daily diet, which had fallen under 2,000 calories. The “seconds racket” had become increasingly difficult. Corned beef hash and rice were the bulk of the day’s chow. George was delighted by the arrival of cracked wheat, which came in sacks emblazoned with a Red Cross and the words “a gift of the American people.” The sacks must have been intended for China before they were seized by the Japanese in Manila. Rich in thiamin and niacin, the cereal was teeming with weevils, but the men wolfed it down in a thin porridge for breakfast and sometimes for dinner as well. Fred thought it was fine so long as you ate it in the dark. Consider the bugs protein, he told himself. Roast it, and you could brew coffee. It was amazing how quickly tea and canned tomatoes could seem like haute cuisine.
Captain Burton C. Thompson of the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps, whom Fred knew from his periodic inspections out at Wheeler Point, was mess officer at the Malinta Tunnel hospital. Thompson stockpiled food to distribute to the wounded. One afternoon, Private Halbrook found several cases of peaches and brought them out of the tunnel. That evening Sergeant John David Provoo asked a navy corpsman if Thompson could get him some dessert for the Japanese officers.
Provoo was a former G-2 clerk for the army in Manila. He had lived with a Japanese family in California, became fluent in the language, and in 1940 visited Japan to be ordained a Buddhist priest. Provoo had once been considered for counterintelligence in the Philippines, but the Army Counter Intelligence Corps rejected him on grounds of suspected homosexuality and sympathizing with the Japanese. After the surrender, Provoo shaved his head and took to wearing a kimono.
Thompson told the corpsman that Provoo could go to hell. As Fred was sitting down to his evening meal in the hospital mess, he saw two Japanese soldiers march past him. Within minutes they returned with rifles fixed and bayonets pointed at Thompson’s back. He was quickly tried, sentenced, and tied up by the hands and feet. Corporal Everett R. Waldrum drove a Japanese corporal and several soldiers out to Monkey Point, where Thompson was shot five times in the head. The next morning Halbrook went out to the execution site with the Japanese officer of the day to bury Thompson. By the time Halbrook returned to Topside, the Japanese had already broken into Thompson’s footlocker. The officer grinned as he stepped into Thompson’s boots while wearing his own shoes. Afterward Hayes called the navy doctors in for a conference to stress the importance of caution in dealing with the Japanese. But Hayes was missing a crucial point: Thompson had been betrayed by an American.
On June 25 the army nurses and some 200 patients in the Malinta Tunnel hospital were moved to Topside. The old Fort Mills Station Hospital was in the process of being restored. Its roof was blown off and its walls were blown out, but the center of the cross was partly intact. Shell holes had been repaired, and more than a dozen unexploded shells had been removed. Fred was ordered to transfer medical equipment and supplies from the Malinta Tunnel hospital.
Life at Topside was a pleasant break for the medical staff, “1,000 percent better than that damn tunnel,” noted George. “I don’t see how the Army Medical Corps stood it for 6 mos. Glad I’m in the Navy Medical Corps and lived outside.”
Colonel Cooper agreed. “A holiday atmosphere prevailed. We had an ‘it’s good to be alive’ air about us.” They had a radio as well, and a pledge from the Japanese commandant that no soldiers would be allowed to enter the hospital without prior authorization. Anna Williams, an army nurse, helped decorate the compound with fresh-cut gardenias. On one visit the Japanese commandant made the extraordinary gesture of presenting the staff with “a large iced cake of which he was very proud, some small cakes and some beer.”
As well-intentioned as he may have been, the level of medical knowledge among his doctors quickly raised eyebrows. After the fall of Corregidor, the
Japanese had set up a whorehouse in Middleside. One Japanese doctor demanded a vaginal speculum so he could examine the “comfort women” for venereal disease. None was to be found, though some joker turned up a nasal speculum from a veterinary medical kit intended for a horse—to the Japanese doctor’s delight and the amusement of the Americans.
Their holiday at Topside was short-lived. One week later Colonel Cooper was ordered to evacuate the old Fort Mills Station Hospital. Almost the entire navy contingent—fifteen medical officers, five dental officers, one pharmacist, forty-seven corpsmen, and two chaplains—and all of the American and Filipino Army nurses were to be transferred to Manila. Hayes summoned the navy doctors.
“All right, now who’s the junior medical officer here?” Hayes asked.
He knows damn well who the junior medical officer is, Murray thought. Was then, am now, always will be, at least in this group. Hayes’s name took on another meaning entirely. Murray began to feel like the perennial freshman whose fraternity hadn’t quite finished “hazing” him, as if the command to go behind enemy lines at Monkey Point hadn’t been test enough.
“I am,” he said.
Murray was ordered to remain at the station hospital on ward duty, along with Army Captain Thomas Hewlett and navy corpsman Loren E. Stamp. They were responsible for the 200 men who were held in a camp down at Bottomside and were used for salvage and work details. George, Fred, and John were to secure as much medical equipment as possible and arrange for the transfer of 280 patients to Manila.
On July 2 the 7,000-ton Lima Maru anchored in the North Channel off Bottomside. Fred enlisted a group of Filipinos to help move medical equipment out onto a small boat, then carry it—an X-ray machine, an operating table, an autoclave, instruments, water sterilizers, and a complete dental outfit—up an old plank used as a gangway. Nonambulatory patients were taken aboard by stretcher. Once in the forward hold, Fred could tell immediately what the vessel had been used for: cavalry. It was hot, stank of manure, and then men were packed in “like sardines,” said George. They spent a restless night on the Lima Maru. George finally fell asleep up on the steel deck, curled around a capstan.
In the morning fifty-seven American army nurses and thirty-one Filipina nurses along with seven Filipina women boarded the Lima Maru, bringing the total number of passengers, including refugees, Chinese cooks, and others, to 1,277. It was early afternoon by the time the ship pulled into Pier 3 in Manila. Some of the nurses had been given tea and rice cakes during the voyage by “a nice Jap,” as army nurse Madeline Ullom put it. Otherwise the only food they were issued since leaving Corregidor was a can of salmon apiece.
The city was eerily quiet. All but the smallest shops were closed. The American nurses were taken by bus to Santo Tomás Internment Camp. The nonambulatory patients and the Filipina nurses were driven to nearby Bilibid Prison, where the women were separated from the men by a fourteen-foot-high wall. Those who could walk followed on foot.
It was strange to see Japanese flags flying over familiar landmarks such as the High Commissioner’s residence, where General Homma now had his headquarters. Occasionally a Filipino flashed a V for Victory sign or tried to slip one of the men some food. At 1500 they arrived at Bilibid, “a sweaty, tired and squalid gang,” said Hayes. George felt like he had stepped into “a dirty filthy mess of humanity.”
To their families, friends, and loved ones, their whereabouts may have been unknown, their status in limbo. But to the Japanese they were horyo—prisoners of war.
14
Horyo
AS THEY FILED THROUGH the massive iron gates of Bilibid, they carried with them their personal belongings, the medical supplies they could manage, and the images conjured up by prison: of a one-room jail, a municipal cell block, a state penitentiary. Fleeting notions assembled from a glimpse of Rikers Island, the Chicago jail, or the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. Pictures of suffering from Sunday school sermons, stained-glass windows, Dumas, Dostoevsky, and Malraux. They carried with them their individual visions of hell as surely as schoolboys were haunted, Wordsworth wrote, by “shades of the prison-house.” But nothing could have prepared them for Bilibid.
Bilibid looked like something out of the late eighteenth century, a decrepit version of the all-seeing Panopticon that the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham had envisioned as a model prison. The name means “to wind round, to coil up,” or “to be bound” in Tagalog. The original structure was built under Spanish sovereignty in 1865 and housed Filipino criminals as well as political prisoners. The rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo had been held there in chains. In the early twentieth century the Americans reconfigured Bilibid as a radial prison, and by 1924 Ramon Victorio, director of the Bureau of Prisons in the Philippines, could assert in a lecture before the American Prison Congress in Salt Lake City: “I sincerely believe that the standard of civilization and culture of a people is measured not only by the sum total of its material wealth but also by the character of its penitentiary institutions.” Bilibid, he said with pride, was “one of the best public edifices” in Manila. It had survived seismological shocks and weathered floods. It also occupied seventeen acres of prime real estate in the heart of the city. By 1939 most of Bilibid’s inmates were transferred to New Bilibid Prison in Muntinglupa, and the old facility fell into ill repair.
Like the spokes in a wheel, eighteen one-story buildings roughly 20 feet by 120 feet radiated out from a low central guard tower, creating a circle of surveillance. Nine of the buildings were occupied by the Americans and used as hospital wards. The windows were open, barred, and shaded with hinged shutters. In the so-called outer compound was the Old Back Building, an unfinished three-story structure without plumbing that served as a holding pen for POWs in transit. Bilibid was enclosed with a whitewashed brick wall fourteen feet high, capped with an 1,800-volt electrified wire. Sentries were posted at each corner. The effect of the Panopticon’s design, as Bentham had written, was “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”
Captain Robert G. Davis, director of the old Cañacao Naval Hospital unit, no doubt intended to carry out the last order he received from Rear Admiral Rockwell, before headquarters of the 16th Naval District was moved to Corregidor on December 21, 1941. But maintaining a naval hospital in the Manila area proved to be more pipe dream than possibility. Since their capture in Manila on January 2, 1942, Davis and his staff could do little at Santa Scholastica as Japanese guards as well as doctors systematically stripped the hospital annex of quinine, cots, tables, chairs, clocks, cars, and trucks. Over the next few months detachments of doctors, corpsmen, and patients were transferred to the POW camp at Pasay Elementary School in Rizal. By May 9 the evacuation of Santa Scholastica was nearly complete.
Five hundred men were crowded into an eighteen-room schoolhouse in Pasay that had a one-room dispensary. After the Japanese robbed Davis of the icebox he used to refrigerate vaccines, he tried keeping them cool by burying them in the ground. The problem was the heat. One evening the temperature hovered around 100 degrees an hour after sunset.
When some 300 POWs from Camp O’Donnell landed at Davis’s doorstep on May 23 suffering from malaria and beriberi, “weary, undernourished . . . some abused,” they found a hospital unit without equipment and doctors with only meager amounts of medicine. “The Japanese suggested that if any patients were near death we might help them along,” Davis smoldered. “Think of that for humanity.”
One week later the Cañacao group was transferred to Bilibid, where 8,000 POWs from Corregidor had been funneled into a facility with a maximum capacity of 5,200. Most of the men captured on the Rock were shipped out to the prison camp at Cabanatuan in central Luzon within a few days. The sick remained behind in Bilibid. Their care, said Captain Kusamoto, director of the hospital, would fall to the navy doctors.
The top brass were dispatched to a POW officers’ camp in Tarlac, eighty-five miles no
rth of Manila, en route to Karenko in Formosa. Davis departed Bilibid on June 3. Wainwright would soon follow and be reunited with Generals Moore, King, Parker, Jones, and Beebe. “Anything,” said Davis with a sigh of relief, “will be better than Bilibid.” Before leaving, he appointed Commander Lea B. Sartin chief medical officer. Commander Maurice Joses was executive officer, and navy corpsman Edward F. Haase, who spoke Japanese, served as camp interpreter.
Prison conditions at Bilibid were appalling. Guards shouted commands and waved bayonets for men to fall in line in groups of fifty. They stole whatever “souvenirs” hadn’t already been filched from them on the Rock. Dinner was a tin of watery rice. POWs were pressed into quarters where they slept on concrete floors. Plumbing and electrical fixtures had been ripped out, the roofs leaked, and the windows were unscreened. There was one shower, one three-quarter-inch pipe that supplied water, and a ninety-foot-long latrine that pulsed with maggots and oozed into an open cesspool 200 feet from the galley. In the dry season it stank like a city zoo, and in the rainy season the grounds flooded with two to three feet of water. The old chapel was used as a temporary infectious diseases ward, but it had no water or toilets. Dysentery cases lay covered with Guam blisters. Bilibid was more like a charnel house than a prison. The Japanese euphemistically called it an “accommodating place.”
Sartin’s men could have despaired when they saw patients splayed on cell block floors, too weak to move, lying in their own excrement. They could have been overwhelmed by the masses of men, many of them malnourished, who slept outside without beds or blankets and with only a foot of space between them. Instead, they turned this field of misery into a functioning hospital.
Conduct Under Fire Page 29