Belly of the Beast

by Judith L. Pearson

  The Myers family came together around the radio the next day as well. From coast to coast, Americans listened to President Franklin Roosevelt’s unsettling report of the Japanese military campaign. It was a radio announcement of tremendous complexity, which spread across the International Date Line and seven time zones:

  Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.

  Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

  Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.

  President Roosevelt then asked Congress to declare war on the Empire of Japan. Congress immediately complied. As the next few days passed, the President made more speeches heard on radios in homes and places of business, impressing upon the nation the importance of every man, woman, and child having a part in the fight. Never before in the existence of the medium of radio had it been such a lifeline. It was used to move and inspire, to educate and inform an electrified nation and prepare them for the long struggle ahead.

  As the Christmas season approached, a second Myers son went overseas. Scarcely a week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Orville was assigned to the U.S. Rangers and would eventually be sent to the battlefields of North Africa. In an effort to achieve normalcy for the family, Mrs. Myers baked her traditional molasses cookies and made her famous peanut butter and chocolate fudge. The family Christmas tree was decorated as usual with strings of popcorn and homemade ornaments, and the stockings were hung from the mantel.

  But in 1941, the family’s living room had a new decoration: a small red and white flag hung near the door, emblazoned with blue stars, one for each of the Myers boys serving in the armed forces. Only through the will of God would the stars remain blue. Gold stars were issued for the servicemen who would not be coming home. Although she pretended to be adjusting the Christmas tree’s popcorn strings, Lena Mae Myers frequented the living room, weeping softly for her sons so far from hearth and home.

  Chapter Five

  The Japanese Tidal Wave

  Prior to December 8, Myers hadn’t yet formed a solid opinion of the Japanese. But others in the military clearly had, as Ernest Hemingway profoundly wrote as the world around him careened toward war.

  “All through the Pacific and the Far East in 1941 I heard about the general incapacity and the worthlessness of ‘those Little Monkeys,’” Hemingway said. “Everywhere I heard what we would do to [them] when the day of the great pushover came. One cruiser division and a couple of carriers would destroy Tokyo; another ditto Yokohama. No one ever specified what the ‘Little Monkeys’ would be doing while all this was going on. I imagine they were supposed to be consulting oculists trying to remedy those famous defects in vision which kept them from being able to fly properly.”

  This sarcastic theory did not prove true. In reality, the Japanese had been preparing assiduously for what became the most resounding series of defeats ever suffered by the American military. It was glaringly clear to even the most inexperienced military observer that Japan’s goals were to dominate the Southwest Pacific, overpower the resource-rich Dutch East Indies, and create a defensive perimeter around Southeast Asia. To do so, Imperial forces had to eliminate American naval power in the central Pacific and British naval power in the Far East.

  Capture of the Philippine Islands was vital in order for Japan to achieve her goals. The job of securing the islands had been given to Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma. A career military man, Homma was fifty-four years old when he launched the attack on the Philippines. He had spent much of his career on foreign soil, first as an observer with the British forces in France during WW I. In 1925, he became the resident Japanese officer in India, and five years after that he was made a military attaché to London. As the war with China escalated, Homma returned to Asia to command the Japanese forces before receiving his orders for the Philippines.

  Homma had at his disposal sixty-five thousand troops, the entire 14th Army. This included the 16th, 48th, and 61st Divisions and the 65th Individual Brigade, two tank battalions, two regiments and one battalion of medium artillery, three engineer regiments, five antiaircraft battalions, and a large number of service units. Air support would come from Formosa (now known as Taiwan) in the form of Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obatas 5th Air Group. The nearly 400 planes included 144 bombers and 110 long-range Zero fighters, 54 light bombers, 17 heavy bombers, and 72 fighters. On the seas, Vice Admiral Ibo Takahashi, who commanded the 3rd Fleet, made available to Homma the carrier Ryujo, five heavy cruisers, five light cruisers, and twenty-five destroyers.

  Homma’s attack was scheduled to the last detail. On the first day, army and navy aircraft would establish air superiority by destroying American aircraft and air installations. Advance air bases would be established on Luzon, Bataan Island, north of Luzon, and other neighboring islands. Then the press toward Manila would begin. Military strategists assumed that the fall of the capital would mean the destruction of the vast majority of U.S. and Philippine forces.

  Imperial Japanese Headquarters had given Homma all the necessary tools. They also gave him an exact timetable to accomplish his objective: Luzon was to be conquered in fifty days. After that, half of his forces would be deployed to operations occurring elsewhere.

  On behalf of the Allies, General MacArthur had far less to work with. There were thirty-one thousand troops available from the Army and another fifteen thousand from the Air Corps. Most of the scant number of planes located in the Philippines were at Clark and Nichols Fields. Some of them were ancient. Seventy-five brand-new B-17 Flying Fortresses were due to arrive by spring, but as of December only thirty-seven had been delivered. Naval power was also minimal. Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the United States Asiatic Fleet, had two cruisers, seventeen subs, and thirteen destroyers left over from the previous war, along with six motor torpedo boats. The Allied military forces would have an enormous task ahead of them to survive the deadly Japanese tidal wave.

  Amid the thunderous chaos of the attack on the Philippines, bombs fell and bullets spewed from the Japanese aircraft. At the outset of the attack, the American soldiers had been simultaneously excited and nervous. They were green and undertrained. Many of them had never fired their rifles. After ten minutes, they became veterans in their own minds, interested only in killing before they could be killed.

  When one man’s ammunition ran out, Myers saw him take off his boot and throw it at a low-flying fighter. Another man could be heard yelling over the cacophony: “Get those bastards out of the air!” And several others were so awed by the sight of the Japanese planes in the air overhead, they insisted on exposing themselves to the firepower just to take pictures. Myers decided that evidently the devil takes care of his own because not one of the amateur photographers was hit.

  He and Tarpy made trip after trip to Canacao in their commandeered truck, loaded with as many patients as they could manage. Once at Canacao, the patients were further triaged and taken by ambulance to Sternberg Hospital in Manila ten miles away.

  Carnage punctuated the scenery around the young corpsmen. Charred human forms lay in every direction, sometimes in a collection of two or three, entangled beneath the skeleton of what had once been a truck. It appeared as though these men had sought cover beneath it, but when a bomb blast exploded the truck, the men were instantly i
ncinerated.

  Death was everywhere, and often the dead appeared to be the lucky ones. A man missing an arm refused to lie still long enough for Myers to apply a tourniquet. He insisted on going off in search of his missing limb. Other men, their bodies laid open from shrapnel as if by a giant can opener, were for the most part beyond help. They screamed out in pain, whimpered for their mothers, and watched their lives flow out of their bodies into red puddles beside them.

  Some men had been hit by flying debris that was so precisely implanted in their bodies, it looked as if it belonged there. One man had been impaled on a piece of metal two inches wide and several feet long. It had passed completely through his body and into the body of the man standing behind him. The first had died instantly, but the second was still alive, although too terrified to extract himself from the corpse for fear he might do more harm to his own body.

  Myers stood looking from one direction to another, not sure which way to go next. A thought floated into his head: this gruesome bloodbath created by the Japanese attack was beginning to resemble slaughtering day back on the farm. Just as he had watched his father quartering a hog, he could see at least four different severed human body parts right from where he was standing, the blood-sodden ground spongy beneath his feet.

  Tarpy had just left with a truckload of patients when a Filipino soldier walked up quietly and stood beside Myers as he knelt over a man taking his last breaths.

  “Excuse me. Doctor?” the soldier asked in a soft voice. Like most Filipinos, he was small in stature and reserved, clutching his hands in front of his chest.

  “No, no, I’m not a doctor. Do you need a doctor?”

  “I think so,” the man replied. He moved one arm from his chest. The other arm remained on his chest, but his hand dropped limply, suspended only by a thin string of tendons at the wrist.

  Myers was surprised at the sight of the man’s hand dangling like a fish at the end of a line. But he was long past being sickened at the sight of such injuries. By his calculations, it had been three hours since the Japanese first attacked. During that short time he’d checked hundreds of bodies. He’d seen men missing legs, men whose heads had been split open like ripe melons, soldiers whose ragged corpses no longer even looked human.

  The Filipino was bleeding badly, and it was obvious to Myers that his mangled hand could never be reattached. The man was clearly in shock and would probably die if they waited for Tarpy to return.

  Myers talked the man into lying down and dug through his medical bag.

  “Are you in pain?” he asked him.

  The patient looked at him blankly. Myers decided on giving him morphine to relax him for what was coming next.

  “The hand has to come off, buddy,” Myers told him. “I’m really sorry, but there’s just no way to salvage it and I don’t think we have enough time to wait for my pal to get back with a truck.”

  The man continued to stare into Myers’ eyes, not saying a word, but nodding his head in understanding.

  “So first I’m gonna stop the bleeding with a tourniquet.”

  Myers continued speaking while he made a few twists on the tourniquet, then he wiped away the sweat running into his eyes. “Now, I’ve never done anything like this, but I don’t think it’ll be too hard. Just relax.” Myers looked around and picked up a piece of wood lying nearby. “Bite down on this.”

  The man did as he was told. Myers pulled a scalpel out of his bag, set his jaw, and quickly cut through the tissue still attaching the hand to the arm. The whole process took less than a minute. Myers stared down at the severed hand he held in his own. Why, it wasn’t any harder than pulling my kid brother’s tooth, he thought.

  “Myers! Hey, Myers!” Tarpy was running toward him, wild-eyed. “Run for cover! Here they come again!”

  The roar of Japanese Zeros grew louder as Myers and Tarpy grabbed the one-handed patient and dragged him into a nearby foxhole with them.

  The nightmarish routine continued nonstop. Dead men, wounded men, Japanese bombers, diving into craters. It seemed to be a never-ending circle of horrifying events. Long after the sun had set, the still-burning fires illuminated the Navy Yard like the light of day. Myers and Tarpy continued throughout the night, transporting the wounded to Canacao and returning to the Navy Yard for more.

  As the wounded were evacuated from the target areas and then re-evacuated to Sternberg Hospital in downtown Manila, it became obvious almost immediately to the chief medical officers that although it was a large facility, Sternberg was not going to be able to handle all of the casualties. Added space was needed and there was no time for a major construction project.

  Several of the officers and their staff members began scouting around Manila in search of large buildings that could be converted into hospitals. Eight such locations were found. Collectively they were known as the Manila Hospital Center; individually they were called “annexes of Sternberg.” They included the popular nightclub the Jai Alai Club; Estado Major, an old Army barracks; the Spanish Club and Girls’ Dormitory, used together as a single hospital unit; the Philippine Women’s University; Santa Escolastica, a school; Fort William McKinley; and the Holy Ghost College. The Army and Navy pooled the medical teams to staff these facilities.

  On the morning of December 11, final steps were taken to completely evacuate Canacao Hospital. All remaining patients were moved to whichever annex was handling their particular need, as determined by the diagnosis tag each wore. Following that, the medical staff was in a sense told to loot their own hospital. Myers and Tarpy were ordered to collect all movable equipment and supplies and relocate them to a staging area where they could be loaded onto trucks and taken into Manila for distribution to the annexes.

  Each time the Japanese returned on yet another bombing run, the scavengers ran for cover. But one group of five corpsmen from Canacao that Myers had gotten to know weren’t quick enough. From where he crouched in a trench, he watched as Japanese airmen swooped down and let loose their destruction. The corpsmen were blown to eternity.

  While they waited for the enemy fighters to finish their strafing, a couple of the men in the trench with Myers swapped stories.

  “One guy told me about something that happened up at Clark Field. He said an anti-aircraft gun knocked down one of our own planes. The pilot was rescued, but he was pretty burned up.”

  “Yeah, well, get this,” a second shouted over the gunfire. “I heard a piece of shrapnel stamped ‘U.S.A.’ fell onto one of our boats.”

  “You mean we’re bombing our own Navy?” the first man asked.

  “Naw, the guy that told me said we’ve been selling scrap metal to the Japs for years. They’re turning it into shrapnel and sending it back to us in dividends!”

  The storytelling would continue until the fighters had left and the party could resume their hunt for usable equipment.

  When they got back to Canacao with their loot, the men were given their new assignments. Myers was assigned to Estado Major, the old Army barracks, while Tarpy went to Santa Escolastica.

  Estado Major was just a few blocks from Sternberg, on the adjacent Arroceres Street. The two-story frame buildings were old and dilapidated, and perilously close to the Quezon Bridge, which, judging from the amount of bombing it took, was considered a primary military objective by the Japanese. The medical officers had determined that the convalescent, ambulatory patients would be housed here, along with overflow convalescents from Sternberg and most of the patients from Fort William McKinley. The military had managed to set up five hundred beds in this makeshift hospital, but time did not allow extensive renovations to occur, and they neglected to designate adequate space for a mess hall. This was not as big a problem as it might have seemed; with the constant air raids, not having a place to eat seemed a trivial problem.

  Myers set to work immediately, changing dressings and checking splints. One seaman who had been hit at Cavite was in particularly good spirits, considering the w
hole country was under attack.

  “Doc, I’m so happy I could just shit,” he confided to Myers.

  “That so?”

  “Yep, two nights ago I signed a hell of a big chit at a club downtown. Seventy-five bucks worth. I saw the Japs blow up the damn club, and my chit along with it. My friends and I got crocked free of charge!”

  “Hey, Doc!” another patient called. “Got a smoke?”

  Myers reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette for the guy before noticing both of the patient’s hands were bandaged.

  “Got caught with my hands in the cookie jar,” the soldier joked. “Mind holdin’ it for me?”

  “Sure thing,” Myers told him. “Time for a break anyway.”

  Myers lit two Lucky Strikes, put one in the soldier’s mouth, and inhaled deeply on the other. The soldier spoke again, squinting through the smoke.

  “I hear we got a little problem up in northern Luzon.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, just before I grabbed a hot anti-aircraft gun, I was receiving a message from up there. Seems the Japs have already landed at the towns of Vigan and Aparri. What d’ya suppose their next move’ll be?”

  “Hard to say,” Myers answered him. “But I heard some good news a little bit ago. We scored hits on a Konga-class battleship. Pretty heavy damage.”

  The soldier nodded and squinted some more. A doctor rushed up and cut the conversation short.

  “Corpsman, they’ve hit Nichols again. More casualties. Grab a couple guys and head over there. Take whatever vehicle you can find.”

  Myers stubbed out his cigarette and ran off in search of other corpsmen. It wasn’t until he was outside that he remembered he hadn’t extinguished his patient’s cigarette. The guy was just going to have to fend for himself.