Hyōjirō became a skilled swordsman and talented calligrapher as well as a respected surgeon. Periodically he retreated to an inn in Nishinomiya so he could write haiku in solitude. He was particularly interested in religion and history. When Kazuko was a little girl, he used to tell her stories of the Battle of Tsushima, in which the Japanese decimated the Baltic squadron of the Russian fleet during the Russo-Japanese War. His knowledge of the West derived in part from his medical student days, when he had been a protégé of the German professor Fritz Hartel. Later, when he began to practice English with his son, Hisamichi, he spoke with a German accent. He became an ardent fan of American movies starring Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Rudolph Valentino that were hugely popular in Japan until the mid-1930s. Someday, he vowed, he would visit the United States. But would he be able to eat rice there? he wondered.
In 1943 Hyōjirō was scheduled to depart on a hospital ship heading south, but he developed a fever and a subordinate went in his place. After leaving port, the ship was hit by a torpedo and sunk. Hyōjirō remained in Ōsaka, pressed into service as a POW camp medical officer. The city famous for its tenth-century Temman-gu shrine, dedicated to the patron saint of learning, had become, by the mid-twentieth century, a monument to military production and the incarceration of prisoners of the Japanese.
The four navy doctors left Bilibid at 0400, stuffed themselves with food they had purchased from a Filipino vendor at the Tutuban station, and were herded onto a train: sixty-six POWs per boxcar, windowless, airless, so crowded it was impossible to move, much less sit down. They left as conditions were deteriorating rapidly at Bilibid, “mostly closing down on outside contacts,” said John, “limiting money, and limiting spending at the store.” It took eight hours to go by narrow-gauge railroad a mere sixty miles north of Manila. The “Carabao Railway Express,” the POWs called it. Once they arrived in Cabanatuan City, the capital of Nueva Ecija Province, they were transferred onto trucks and hauled four miles northeast to POW Camp No. 1, Military Prisoner of War Camp of the Philippine Islands, otherwise known as Cabanatuan.
Cabanatuan sat on a vast, treeless plain that soaked up the sun like a giant clay pan in the heart of Luzon’s rice-growing country. To the west rose the Caraballo Mountains, out of which flowed the Pampanga River, one tributary snaking east. The Sierra Madres curled down from the northeast, while the volcanic peak of Mt. Arayat marked the horizon to the south. The air shimmered with waves of heat. Natives tilled the earth with carabao-drawn plows and harvested rice by hand. They moved through the landscape as if in slow motion. When the rains came, Cabanatuan turned into a sea of mud.
“The place looks like a glorified hobo camp,” John wrote in his diary. But instead of tents and cardboard shacks, dozens of one-story nipa-roof buildings with sawali sides were laid out into a large rectangle surrounded by three rows of perimeter fences up to ten feet in height. The Japanese posted armed soldiers in four-story guard towers that were interspersed with pillboxes at the camp’s midpoints and corners.
The navy doctors had heard stories of life at Cabanatuan from their patients in Bilibid, and they weren’t pretty. The Japanese had seized Cabanatuan City on December 29, 1941, terrorized the Filipinos, and established Cabanatuan at Camp Pangatian, formerly a barracks of the Philippine Army, and before that, a U.S. Department of Agriculture station.
Cabanatuan originally consisted of three facilities. Cabanatuan No. 3 was situated fifteen miles from the city and received the first group of POWs from Corregidor, via Bilibid, on May 27, 1942. By May 30 the prison census had swelled to 6,000. On May 31, another 1,500 POWs arrived at Camp No. 2, which was nine miles from town. The water supply there proved inadequate, and on June 3 the men were moved to Camp No. 3. In the meantime, prisoners from Camp O’Donnell straggled into Camp No. 1, pushing its population to 7,000. When two large drafts departed Camp No. 3 in October 1942, the remaining POWs merged into Camp No. 1, which was thereafter the only POW facility operating in Cabanatuan.
Main Street divided the camp into two parts, the northeast corner of which was occupied by POWs. The center of the American sector was called Times Square, bounded by Fifth Avenue—where the dispensary, chapel, library, and shoe and tailor shops were situated—and Broadway. The camp’s westernmost side would house the hospital facilities, opposite the “Jap Area,” as one map described it.
The barracks were open and raised off the ground, with two center planks as walkways. Each bahay (Tagalog for house) had been built to accommodate forty Filipino soldiers, but the Japanese jammed as many as 128 POWs inside them. The walls were hung with two tiers of wooden bays for sleeping. The lower bay was one and a half feet high; the upper bay was only three feet higher. As a rule, four men slept in each bay. Few of the new arrivals had mattresses, so they spread shelter halves or blankets over the bamboo slats. Width-wise each man had only a foot of space. You knew the boundaries of your area intimately, invisible property lines that you guarded zealously. You slept on your side and lay like a spoon to avoid breathing in another man’s face. If you were five foot ten or taller, your feet dangled over the walkway. And if you had to go to the bathroom at night, you climbed over a mass of bodies and bumbled through the darkness to the saddle trench outside. Flashlights, lanterns, and candles were prohibited. There was no water in the bahays, except what was rationed for cooking, so you bathed in the rain; later, barrels of water were hoisted up on stilts and operated as lever-controlled showers.
The Americans organized Cabanatuan according to service branches. There were two groups of army personnel, and one of marine and navy men. Until September 1942 Colonel Boudreau was commanding officer, and Colonel James Gillespie was medical director. On August 31 both men were transferred to Karenko, the officers’ camp in Formosa, and were replaced by “the mad marine,” Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Beecher, and Lieutenant Colonel William Riney Craig, respectively. Lieutenant Colonel Jack Schwartz and then Lieutenant Colonel Gaskill handled dispensary services. Colonel Mori was the Japanese commandant until November 11, 1942, when he was replaced by Major Iwanaka, who in turn was succeeded by Major Takasaki on July 8, 1944. The Japanese medical officer in charge was 2nd Lieutenant Konishi Shoji until Suehiro Satoro took his place.
Camp conditions, said Captain William E. Dyess, “while better than those at O’Donnell, were nevertheless terrible.” In the early months, the average daily diet “rarely reached 1,000 calories,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Jacobs, the former regimental surgeon of the Philippine Army at Camp John Hay who was chief of the medical service at Cabanatuan. Polished rice and kangkong were the staples, with white or yellow corn as a substitute for the green swamp weed. Fuel to run the well-pump engine was insufficient, and at one point there were only three spigots for 9,000 men. Overflowing pit latrines that swarmed with flies and mosquitoes caused an outbreak of dysentery of near-epidemic proportions. There was no quinine to treat malaria or antitoxin for diphtheria.
The sight of the “battling bastards” who were transferred from Camp O’Donnell brought tears to Colonel Gillespie’s eyes:Inching their way along the road came a ragged formation of dirty, unkempt, unshaven, half-naked forms, pale, bloated, lifeless. They staggered and stumbled, some plodded, others uncertain of their balance and strength lay down only to be urged by attendants who in many instances were only slightly more able than those they were assisting. Limbs grotesquely swollen to double their normal size. Faces devoid of expression, form or life. Aged incredibly beyond their years. Barefeet on the stony road. Remnants of gunny sacks as loin cloths. Some stark naked. Bloodshot eyes and cracked lips. Smeared with excreta from their bowels. Thus they came . . . to the end of the road, the strong, young and alert men of the 31st U.S. Infantry, the Air Corps, Artillery and supporting services.
The hospital—with an operating room, surgical ward, clinic, mess, dysentery unit, and morgue—was set up under Gillespie’s direction. Operations were performed for emergencies only; there was no elective surgery. The operating
table was cut from scrap lumber, and the OR was without lights or running water. There was no post-op care. Either you returned to your bahay, or you lay on a bare floor. Next to the clinic was a commissary, run by Lieutenant Colonel Harold K. Johnson, where orders were filled by Tomás de Guzman and a Japanese mestiza, both of whom were pro-American. In all, 250 medical officers and corpsmen worked in the hospital, which opened in June 1942 with a patient census of more than 1,500.
Thirty wards designed to hold forty men apiece would be used to accommodate as many as one hundred patients each. When the buildings were originally numbered, the dysentery unit was skipped, so it became known as the Zero Ward. Isolated from other cases, the patients in Zero Ward were a study in collective misery: naked, skeletal, sprawled on a wooden floor. They were covered in feces and coated with vomit; their bodies twitched with bluebottle flies. They had no blankets, and initially there was no water for them unless it was collected from rooftops or ditches. Brooms were made from cogon grass and, later, soiled clothing. The stench was unbearable. Some couldn’t make it to the latrines, 50 to 100 yards away; others died in the grass or expired beneath the barracks. Zero Ward took on another meaning entirely, remarked army doctor John Bumgarner: those who were admitted to it had virtually zero chance of surviving. The Japanese wouldn’t set foot in it for a month. Bilibid looked like a university medical center by comparison.
In June 1942 Colonel Gillespie requested 750,000 five-grain tablets of quinine to treat 1,600 cases of recurrent malaria. By early August the Japanese had issued only 25,000 three-grain tablets, which had been salvaged from the Dutch East Indies. Doctors and corpsmen turned to native and natural medicines to treat other maladies. To control diarrhea, they combined charcoal from the mess-hall stoves and cornstarch with guava leaf tea. They advised dysentery patients to lie on their right sides so as not to upset the sigmoid colon. They cultivated soybean sprouts, which were rich in vitamin C, to combat scurvy. They fermented rice to produce vitamin B1 and applied mud poultices to Guam blisters. They made dental fillings from silver pesos and false teeth from carabao teeth. There were even two POWs who shared one set of dentures, taking turns to eat. One doctor had found that alcoholic extracts of grass helped improve the coats of his pet rabbits back in Arizona; Paul Ashton used the concoction on patients suffering from scurvy and corneal ulcers, and “in every case” he noticed “marked improvement.” To reduce the spread of dysentery, the Japanese ordered every man to catch fifty flies per day, and soon flies became currency. Loren E. Stamp, Pharmacist’s Mate 2nd Class, charged twenty flies for a haircut or a shave. Perhaps the most important innovation came from Major Emmet C. Lentz, who was trained in military medicine. Lentz designed a ten-hole latrine and a self-irrigating septic system with water supplied by a bucket detail. To Ralph Hibbs, it was the eighth wonder of the world, “the Taj Mahal of Cabanatuan.”
Fifteen hundred men—nearly all of whom were survivors of Bataan—died in the first three months at Cabanatuan from June to August 1942. Some of the POWs who succumbed to gastrointestinal diseases were subjected to autopsies by the Japanese, a process that began, bizarrely, with removal of the testicles. The final insult was to conceal the cause of death. If a man entered the hospital with hemorrhoids and contracted diphtheria, the Japanese listed the initial diagnosis as the reason for his demise, thereby completely distorting the medical picture.
John Nardini, who had arrived in June 1942 from Hospital No. 2 on Bataan and was one of the few navy doctors with a medical role at Cabanatuan, saw the worst of it. In the absence of medicine, all the doctors could do was instill hope, a will to live. “A kindly word and easy handling will do as much good as medicine,” said army doctor Jack Schwartz, whose weight would drop to ninety pounds.
In the early months at Cabanatuan, a slow, steady stream of burial parties began arriving at the morgue each day just after breakfast. The bodies lay on wooden-frame pallets covered in sawali. It took four men to carry one corpse to the horseshoe-shaped cemetery three-quarters of a mile away. They buried the deceased in a hole they had dug the day before, and then they dug another hole for the next day’s detail. Four men who were themselves ill, emaciated, struggling through the 100-degree heat to shoulder the burden of a lost buddy, staring into the abyss that awaited them. It was a parade of the dead, said John Bumgarner. During the torrential rains of summer, the odor of decomposing flesh hung over Cabanatuan like a cloud. “Pits were always full of water, and I have seen prisoners who . . . found it necessary to push arms, legs and heads down to keep them from floating long enough to cover them with earth,” remarked Walter Waterous, chief of the EENT ward. Roving dogs tore at the exposed flesh. In the early months at Cabanatuan, the chaplains were prohibited from holding religious services; nor would the Japanese let them attend an interment.
Some prisoners appeared to choose their own deaths. One POW asked Captain Cecil M. Sanders to carry him outside.
“Why?” Sanders queried.
“I don’t want to die in this stinking bahay,” he replied. “I want to get out in the air.”
Sanders refused. The man crawled outside and died.
Then there was the old soldier who announced, “I’m going to die tonight.”
He held on to Sanders, who told him at 0300, “You’d better hurry up if you want to die tonight. The night’s pretty short.” He was dead at dawn.
Men gave up psychologically before yielding physically. The youngest POWs, between eighteen and twenty-two, fared the worst, perhaps due to inexperience and shock at their circumstances. Next came the forty-five-to-fifty-five-year-old group. Those between twenty-three and thirty-three years old had the best chances for survival.
Quanning boosted morale, reinforced group identification, and helped men get over “bahay fever”—irritability due to extreme overcrowding. Religious belief had minimal import as a survival factor. But placebos, which the Japanese culled from raids on Filipino drugstores, had a positive effect. Nardini stocked Dr. Carter’s Pink Pills for Pale People and Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound as part of his personal dispensary. The idea of medicine, the belief that something might help you and that someone cared enough to try, was a palliative in itself. “Self-pity,” as Private 1st Class Ernest Bales remarked, would “put you in your grave.”
As on Bataan and Corregidor, there were an unusually low number of psychiatric cases (which flared up as conditions deteriorated), and only two reported suicides. But as Gillespie wrote in his notes on Cabanatuan, composed while he was a captive in Formosa:Men generally degenerated; finer qualities of honor, fortitude, honesty and fair play disappeared. There was petty squabbling over trifles. Some stole, others secured additional food through fraud and cheating. Many engaged in mindless criticism and disrespect for those in positions of responsibility. Some of the officers were little or no better than the worst of the men. Under normal conditions most of these individuals would not have been classed as psychopaths, but they evidently had a potential for inadequate behavior under the conditions of stress and privation, which was strikingly in contrast with that large body of men who conducted themselves with dignity, fortitude, honor and forbearance, through the long periods of captivity.
Doctors faced their own moral and ethical dilemmas. If you’re responsible for 100 sick men, half of whom have their lives at stake, but you have only ten sulfa and ten quinine pills a day to give them, whom do you treat? A certain amount of triage was inevitable, though it wasn’t publicly discussed among medical staff or chaplains. Nardini made the decisions himself. He chose those who were trying hardest to survive, those who understood that they had to adapt to conditions beyond their control yet never gave up hope of going home.
The Japanese made POWs at Cabanatuan sign a declaration that was printed both in English and Japanese to the effect: “I swear that I will not attempt to escape or assist others to escape, under penalty of being shot.” They forced the Americans to guard themselves, which was a violation of international law. In spite
of the fact that Cabanatuan was fenced, isolated, surveilled twenty-four hours a day, and miles from the nearest barrio, forest, or stream, some prisoners found freedom a temptation too sweet to resist.
Around September 1, 1942, three POWs—Lieutenant Colonel Biggs and Breitung and Navy Lieutenant Gilbert, a mining engineer John knew from the Section Base in Mariveles—were caught in a drainage ditch trying to sneak under the fence. The Japanese stripped them down to their undershorts, tied them with wire to an entrance post, and beat them at every changing of the guard. Filipinos who passed by on the road were forced to bow to the Japanese and then club the POWs. A typhoon struck, the first of the season. After forty-eight hours without food or water, the escapees were driven off in a truck toward a small schoolhouse, where two were reputedly shot and one was beheaded.
One night Beecher was called to the main gate, where a Japanese doctor and adjutant told him through an interpreter that a prisoner had been shot while trying to escape. They wanted Beecher to see the body, which was lying in the middle of the main road, bordering the hospital area. He had scaled the fence, the interpreter explained. But the corpse was emaciated, and the grass alongside the road was trampled down, as if a body had been dragged out of camp to its present location. Beecher learned later that the POW was a psychiatric patient who had wandered out of his ward undetected, only to meet his death.
In April 1943 two POWs, Stobaugh and Kelly, successfully broke out of Cabanatuan and sent a note back via the underground postal service urging their pals to join them. The Japanese were furious and soon made Private John B. Trujillo of the 200th Coastal Artillery Corps an object lesson.
Trujillo was a perimeter guard who traded regularly over the fence with one of the Japanese sentries, who was eager to acquire watches and fountain pens, cigarette cases and jewelry. But one day the Japanese officer of the day appeared unexpectedly, and since barter was prohibited between prisoners and their guards, the sentry viciously turned on the American, held him at bayonet point, and claimed he had just attempted to escape. Trujillo was quickly tried and, over Beecher’s objections, convicted and sentenced to death. First he was belted, clubbed, and kicked in the head. Then his hands were tied with barbed wire behind his back, and “three distinct sounds crashed through the silence of the plains as he paid the crime of being patriotic. A coup de grâce revolver shot followed a few sounds later,” Calvin Chunn recorded in his notebook. POWs working the farm watched the scene in horror. Executions became public spectacles.
Conduct Under Fire Page 35