Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  “This is Humanity Calls,” began the program after an opening jingle, “bringing you messages from your missing men in Japanese prison camps. We know that when you hear these messages, you will help us by relaying them to those for whom they were intended.”

  The Japanese considered Humanity Calls so successful that it was followed later by a full half-hour segment, The Postman Calls. Reviews in the States were mixed. The Prisoners of War Bulletin advised listeners that the U.S. government could not vouch for the authenticity of any Axis broadcasts (the majority of which later turned out to be accurate). At Kōbe, recording equipment was actually brought into the hospital camp so POWs could tape their own messages, although the topics were preselected and there was a 150-word limit apiece.

  In spite of its best intentions, the Prisoners of War Bulletin played an unwitting role in abetting Japanese propaganda efforts. Published by the American Red Cross, it provided information on American POWs and civilian internees in the Pacific and European theaters. Such information, however, was tightly controlled by Axis powers and derived from visits made to a select number of camps by delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Swiss, Swedish, and Vatican legations. Between 1942 and 1945, the Japanese permitted slightly more than half of the sixty-five visits to POW camps requested by the protecting powers. No ICRC representative, for example, was ever allowed into Ichioka. That would merely have confirmed the reports of brutality and inhumane treatment of prisoners of war that began to appear in the American press ever since the Chicago Tribune broke the news of the Bataan Death March. As Dr. Marcel Junod, chief delegate of the ICRC in the Far East, later remarked: “In Germany particularly we were perfectly free to talk to the prisoners. With the Japanese it was entirely different.”

  The first of its kind in Japan, the Kōbe POW Hospital would show the Japanese in a different light. The November 1944 issue of the Prisoners of War Bulletin dutifully reported Harry Angst’s August visit to the camp, stating: “Although the caloric value was stated to be 3,000 neither eggs, milk, fat margarine, cheese, sweets, coffee, nor canned foods were given to the prisoners. . . . food was the main problem.”

  The figure was an exaggeration. Three thousand calories was a third more than the average diet in prewar Japan. Even at Colonel Murata’s “shop window,” as Page called it, the sick received less food than the “heavy workers” down at the docks—about 2,000 calories daily. Fish and meat were supplied twice monthly “in ridiculously minimal quantities” of eleven to fifteen pounds per 150 men, Page quipped. Doctors and patients alike were on reduced rations because the higher command insisted, as Ohashi explained to Fred, that they weren’t contributing to Japan’s war effort. Barley and millet seed replaced rice, supplemented by squash and occasionally dried fish heads. Soybeans were undercooked because of the lack of fuel and quickly passed through the digestive tract. Fred countered that the sooner patients had more food, the sooner they’d recover and be able to return to their work camps. The Allied medical staff tried to redress the imbalance by once again redistributing rations, but they were only partly successful.

  By contrast, the POWs at Kōbe House were in robust condition. The reason was simple: they were stealing food from the ships that arrived in Kōbe Harbor, from the godowns along the waterfront, and from the Yoshihara vegetable oil processing plant, where some of them worked, about ten miles to the east. They forged keys so they could loot at their leisure the gigantic Mitsubishi warehouse that housed army supplies. Some of the companies they worked for provided meals. Occasionally Fred was able to cart some food and supplies back to the hospital—a little extra barley, some charcoal for the braziers they used to heat their upstairs quarters. He kept up the pressure on Ohashi, and before long, miso and seaweed were added to their diet.

  Jack Hughieson took matters into his own hands and became adept at snaring birds, using the vomit from patients as bait. Some of the bedridden were so sick that they had to be force-fed, an opportune moment for a corpsman to steal, though no such incidents were reported at the hospital. There were cases, however, where patients stole food from one another once their appetite returned. Fights broke out in the wards, which lasted but a short time due to the weakened condition of most of the men.

  In October 1944, Ohashi informed the medical staff of the Kōbe POW Hospital that a very important inspection was to take place. It must have been special, Stan Smith thought, because of the secrecy that surrounded it. More telling were the sides of beef the quartermaster delivered to the galley. When the Swiss delegate from the ICRC, Dr. Erwin Bernath, and the Swedish delegate, Per Bjoerstedt, arrived at the hospital on October 4, 1944, they conferred with Colonel Murata and Dr. Ōhashi at length. The conversations Bernath and Bjoerstedt had with Page, Fred, Murray, and Stan Smith were more limited in scope and were closely monitored by Japanese translators.

  The ICRC representatives failed to note that one of the American corpsmen, Bernard Stradley, was nowhere to be seen because his face was black and blue from a beating Katō had given him the previous day. As for the feast of beef, it was “hurriedly removed,” Smith said, “almost before the gate had closed” on the ICRC delegates. If such visits were staged at Murata’s instigation, Page worried that the most urgent medical cases in the Ōsaka-area POW camps weren’t even being sent to Kōbe. That way the colonel could boast of the hospital’s impressively low mortality rate.

  In the coming months prisoners in Kōbe received a flurry of mail. On several occasions the Japanese allowed POWs to pen hundred-word letters home. Bernath had passed along Murray’s request to send his best wishes to his parents, which reached Lewis and Sophie in the form of a letter from Lieutenant Commander H. B. Atkinson, the officer in charge of the Casualty Notification and Processing Section. The missive didn’t quite express the warmth a son might feel for his parents, but it was welcome nonetheless: “The Navy Department joins in your pleasure over this favorable indication of your son’s welfare. . . . You may be assured that any further information received will be furnished you promptly.” “Promptly” usually meant three to four months.

  Packages from home were manna from heaven, a sign that you hadn’t been forgotten, that someone was not only thinking of you but thinking of what you needed and what you might want. They were answers to wishes, responses to questions, hugs to kisses that immediately lifted the spirits of those who received them and aroused the admiration—and envy—of fellow POWs. It was odd that Murray hadn’t heard from Laura in such a long time but not entirely unusual. Ernie Irvin had yet to receive a single letter from his family, much less a package.

  In late December 1944, Ohashi took another extraordinary step when he escorted the POW medical staff into downtown Kōbe for a little Christmas shopping. The mood on the streets was hardly festive. Restaurants were closed. Entertainment was restricted. The geisha houses were empty of women because they had been assigned to work details. Fish and beef were rationed about once a month now, daikon once a week. A Kōbe city circular recommended eating pumpkin leaves and stalks. The dregs of soybean milk were added to rice. For years rayon had been used as a cotton substitute in civilian clothing; then even rayon was diverted to the war effort. Rough fiber from wild plants was harvested for the manufacture of work clothes and school uniforms, but some children were too hungry to go to school. There was nothing for the POWs to buy, so Ohashi shepherded them to a friend’s house, where they were treated to persimmons. Being outside the hospital and in the city of Kōbe, tasting the air of freedom, was gift enough.

  The Japanese allowed the POWs to send holiday greetings back to the States via Radio Tōkyō. POWs exchanged their own greetings among themselves. The “Boys of the Royal Navy at Kōbe Hospital” gave the “Boys of the American Navy at Kōbe Hospital” a handmade card cheerily acknowledging their maritime rivalry:There’s talk about the two great lands

  Who has the greatest Navy

  And each one tells the other

  They always get the gra
vy

  But today’s the day we all forget

  To snap at one another

  And hands across the ocean lads

  As brother should meet brother.

  The Australians presented the Americans with a Christmas card designed by medic R. A. Wickens showing their respective flags crisscrossed above hands clasped in solidarity. Wickens composed a song for the occasion, “Waiting, Only Waiting,” that concluded:We will tell of our dreams where we sailed the seas

  And we came back home elating,

  And we met those dear, with a hearty cheer, but we wake To find we’re just waiting;

  Waiting, only waiting

  And every hour debating

  The times we’ve had together

  While waiting for the day.

  Ōhashi found a piano in Kōbe that some White Russians put up for sale, and he let the POWs purchase it with their pay. They placed it in a hallway and organized a little holiday show for piano, concertina, and harmonica, with John Quinn on vocals. Then the Japanese camp commandant joined them on his flute.

  Jan 1, 1945

  Hello Murray,

  Season’s Greetings. Happiest Possible Birthday. Received your message.We’re all well, hopeful. Regards from my wife and the four Ziffs. Spiritual handshake across world.

  Charlie

  Good old Charlie. The years unreeled at the thought of him. Charlie standing outside the building on East Houston Street, whistling for Murray to come outside and play. Charlie and Murray dressed in knickers, argyle sweaters, and caps as they hitchhiked up to Lake George, where they purchased an eighteen-foot canoe for a dollar per foot and camped out on Turtle Island, just across from Bolton Landing in the southern Adirondacks. Charlie and Murray ogling the girls at Coney Island, strolling down the esplanade to the sound of hawkers, calliopes, laughter, and thrill-seekers, the air sticky sweet with the smell of cotton candy, or sharp with the salt scent of the sea. Charlie, who was exempted from the service on medical grounds, had married his sweetheart, Anne, and was about to start a family.

  For the POWs at Kōbe, there was always enough hope. They might not have enough food or medicine, but hope was never in short supply. And there was a lot to be hopeful for, as Charlie knew well.

  “M’ARTHUR INVADES CENTRAL PHILIPPINES,” headlined The New York Times on October 20, 1944. “FOOTHOLD TO SPLIT ISLANDS FIRMLY HELD; ROOSEVELT PROMISES JAPAN A LESSON NOW.”

  The invasion of Leyte Gulf was launched with an armada of awesome strength. Two hundred thousand troops from General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army were transported by Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet to landing beaches on the east coast of Leyte in the central Philippines. A total of 738 Allied ships and amphibious vessels were involved in the operation, and more than 1,000 planes. U.S. naval forces outnumbered and outclassed the Japanese in every category—large carriers, small carriers, aircraft, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. But the Japanese were setting a trap. In the SHO-GO (Victory Operation) plan, Admiral Toyoda hoped to lure Admiral Halsey’s larger Third Fleet to the northeast of Luzon with Vice Admiral Ozawa Jisaburō’s decoy force. Meanwhile, Vice Admiral Shima Kiyohide’s weaker Second Strike Force would boil down the west coast of Luzon and slip into the Surigao Strait, as Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo’s powerful Central Force penetrated the San Bernadino Strait to lock the American landing forces and the Seventh Fleet that guarded them in a deadly pincer movement. The Battle for Leyte Gulf, MacArthur had told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would enable his forces to invade Luzon on December 20.

  On the afternoon of October 20 MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte Island’s newly won Red Beach dressed in crisp khakis, a braided hat, and signature sunglasses. It was the moment he had been waiting for since his nighttime escape from the Rock. By his side was Sergio Osmeña, who had assumed the presidency of the commonwealth after Quezon died the previous August. Speaking into a Signal Corps microphone, MacArthur announced: “People of the Philippines, I have returned! By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil. . . . Rally to me! Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on.”

  Yes, Charlie Lipsky had reason to be hopeful. And truth be told, in an official Japanese photograph of the Kōbe POW medical staff taken in late November, the men looked reasonably healthy. There was Fred Berley in Captain Davis’s uniform, John Page in his, and Murray Glusman sporting a white navy cap, flanked by a slightly off-kilter John Akeroyd in an Australian slouch hat. Behind them stood the Javanese pharmacist Evert Manuel Gonie, Louis Indorf of the Royal Dutch East Indian Army, and gangly John Bookman. They were pale, somewhat drawn, and sunken-cheeked, particularly Stan Smith, off to the far right. But they were alert before the camera while Ohashi stood squarely in front them, the stolid Japanese commandant in service dress, incongruously wearing a field cap, as if trying to convince the Japanese authorities that his sympathies were more martial than medical. The propaganda photograph doubled as a family portrait of a group of men from wildly disparate backgrounds bound by circumstance, bad timing, and good luck.

  There was only one person missing: George Ferguson.

  20

  “Action Taken: None”

  LIFE AT CABANATUAN had gone from bad to worse. “Many are the lessons to be gained from having experienced and seen our fellow men stripped of that thin veneer of convention, custom, and culture,” Carter Simpson wrote in his diary on March 8, 1944, just a few days after the draft of 200 medical personnel departed the Philippines for Japan on the Kenwa Maru. “Few of us will come through this unchanged.”

  All of the POWs were losing weight. By early May daily rations had plunged to 1,700 calories at Cabanatuan. Most men had dropped twenty pounds since January. Riney Craig, Cabanatuan’s medical director, had shed twenty-five. The POWs were not alone. Thousands of civilians died from malnutrition in 1944, when the food supply hit an all-time low in the Philippines. For Manileños, the typical daily diet consisted of little more than rice gruel, small portions of camote or cassava, even smaller amounts of dried fish (tuyo, tinapa, or daing), and kangkong leaves. Fresh meat and fresh fruit were rarities; beriberi, xerophthalmia, avitaminosis, and anemia were common.

  Japanese quartermaster depots, meanwhile, were stocked with Red Cross supplies from the Teia Maru, which had rendezvoused with the Gripsholm at the port of Mormugao, India, in mid-October 1943 and delivered parcels in Shanghai and Yokohama. On November 6 the Teia Maru finally arrived in Manila, where it was unloaded by POWs from Bilibid. Japanese officers could be seen smoking Camel and Lucky Strike cigarettes. Japanese hospitals in the Philippines were soon flush with Johnson and Lily gauze bandages and absorbent cotton. As G-2 noted at Southwest Pacific Area Command (SWPA) headquarters in Australia: “Evidence is accumulating from distinct sources to demonstrate that little of the Red Cross supplies dispatched on the Gripsholm reached the intended destination.” Also included with the ship’s relief supplies were 3,403 bags of next-of-kin packages and mail for POWs and civilian internees in the Far East.

  George would put conditions only in the very best light for Lucy. He was in comparatively good health. He was working now on the wood detail and, like Fred, benefited from the fresh air and exercise. In a fifty-word postcard dated May 6, 1944, he described his health as “excellent”:Dearest Lucy—your package well selected and greatly enjoyed during last month. Still eager concerning orthopedic residency at Wisconsin General Hospital or any place you would like. Please write family and give my love. Camp receiving books, letters now and I’m anxiously awaiting picture from you.All my love.

  George T. Ferguson

  In mid-May the skies darkened, and then came the rains. Rations were cut again after Memorial Day to 300 grams of rice and 50 grams of vegetables. Prices on some commissary items had risen 100-fold. What you earned from working seventeen days on the farm would buy you a single egg. “We are now approaching rock bottom,” Simpson declared. “Starvation is no longer just an expression.” The food that men could scrou
nge from their gardens or the vitamin pills they had hoarded from Red Cross medicines they received in 1943 were all that kept some of them alive. By August the diet slimmed down to 1,600 calories. Men were hungry, said Craig, “all the time.” Morale hit an all-time low, and POWs resorted to one of the few options they had left: theft.

  The Japanese were equally suspicious of their behavior. To prevent escapes, they forbade POWs from wearing shoes on work details. The Japanese forced medical personnel to work on the revetments at the Cabanatuan airfield to defend it against an aerial assault by the Americans.

  For months huge drafts of POWs had left Manila for Japan. They came from all over the Philippines—Baguio and Bataan, Pas Piñas and Pasay, Clark Field and Palawan. The Taikoku Maru departed on March 24, 1944, with 308 men, followed by the Canadian Inventor on July 4 with 1,100, the Nissyo Maru on July 17 with 1,600, and the Noto Maru on August 27 with 1,135 men. The Japanese were emptying the Philippines of all able-bodied prisoners.

  At Cabanatuan the enlisted men went first, leaving officers behind to perform their tasks—working on the farm, on the wood detail, in the galleys. By early September, the population of Cabanatuan was down to roughly 4,000 POWs. Then Japanese doctors began to examine those POWs listed by the American doctors as permamently disabled—men suffering from heart disease, hernias, impaired vision—and most of them, as Colonel Beecher remarked, were “now pronounced fit for duty and available for transfer.”

  “So long, see you later,” George Ferguson waved to Al Smith as he was leaving Cabanatuan. It was cloudy, thundering at noon on September 3, 1944, when George was trucked out of the camp along with 211 other POWs. Among them were twenty doctors, two chaplains, and thanks to Hutch Hutchinson, the partial components of a shortwave radio. At 1700 they found themselves in Manila’s Bilibid Prison, where they stayed in the Old Back Building. For George, it was a step back in time, but conditions at Bilibid had deteriorated greatly since he had been there with Fred, John, and Murray, even beyond what they had been at Cabanatuan.