Belly of the Beast

by Judith L. Pearson

  The prison grounds had a variety of ancillary buildings. The main hospital building was in the center of the prison compound, south of the guardhouse. Less critical patients and transients stayed in what had previously been a two-story administration building. When overcrowding made it necessary, some of these men lived in the former prison hospital, which was also used as a dispensary. It was without a roof. An old chapel became an isolation ward. The prison’s smallest building was the old execution chamber. The Japanese never used it, although they never let the prisoners forget it was there.

  The rules for POWs that had been in place at Pasay were enforced at Bilibid as well. They were typed in English and posted around the prison camp. The rules ranged from irritating to deadly:

  Anyone trying to escape will be shot. If he escapes, all other men will be shot. Anyone trying to communicate with persons on the outside will be shot. Men notifying a Japanese sentry of anyone trying to escape will be rewarded!

  All Japanese sentries and soldiers will be saluted at all times except when men are working. Officers and Room-masters will be saluted at all times.

  Sick men will notify their Room-master of their ailments. He will turn in a list to the officer each night with the name, room number, prison number, and ailment of each man concerned…. Men feigning sickness will be severely punished by the Japanese authorities.

  Violations of the above orders will be punished according to the seriousness of the offence committed.

  It was the bowing and scraping to these repulsive enemies that most infuriated Myers. All POWs, regardless of rank, were expected to salute or bow to all Japanese soldiers. American generals and colonels, men whom Myers admired for their strength and leadership, had to salute Japanese privates or face brutal and sometimes fatal consequences. Additionally, POWs in all the camps were divided by rank. Thus, with the exception of patients in the hospital, the officers were separated from their units. It was a derivation of the “divide and conquer” theory. The Japanese hoped it would cause confusion among the men and make escape or insurrection less likely.

  Perhaps the greatest insult to Myers and the other medical personnel was the absolute disregard for any of the agreements the civilized world had made among themselves with regard to the rules of warfare. Under the Geneva Convention of 1929, the signatories agreed that should chaplains and medical personnel fall into the hands of the enemy, “they shall not be treated as prisoners of war.” In addition, the convention established guidelines to insure the humane treatment of prisoners of war. But the Japanese were not signatories to this or any other agreement regarding warfare and had no intention of adhering to any such conventions.

  The Japanese did, however, have tremendous pride in their navy—kaigun, they called it. They felt somewhat magnanimous toward other navies as well, even those of an enemy. Thus, when Myers and the rest of the naval staff from Canacao arrived at Bilibid, they were placed in charge of the prison hospital. The task before them was enormous. Initially, there were one hundred and sixty-two patients in the hospital. By June 7, the number had risen to two hundred and one. By the end of June, seven hundred and sixty patients were hospitalized.

  The first order of business for the doctors and pharmacist’s mates was to improve the sanitary conditions inside the buildings as well as in the camp in general. The monsoon season was at its peak, and the waste from the dysentery cases that filled the latrines soon ran over and mixed with the mud in the main compound. The Canacao staff dug new troughs and crude but workable urinals and latrines that even had a flush system constructed from large gasoline drums. When filled with water and overturned, the contents of the latrine was washed down the trough and into the camp’s main drainage system.

  Not every problem was solved as simply, though. The Japanese had furnished the camp barracks with three or four hundred wooden bunks covered with straw mattresses. These mattresses were heavily used in the hospital and the medical staff could never clean them off sufficiently between patients. They soon became filthy and crawled with vermin.

  Medical supplies were practically nonexistent, and the staff had only been able to bring a few things with them. There was plenty of surgical equipment, but very little plasma, and only questionable methods of sterilization. The chief medical officers determined that only men in the direst need received surgery. Of the pharmaceuticals, quinine was in the greatest demand, used in the treatment of malaria. The Japanese provided an amount that would save the seriously ill, most of which had been confiscated from the Americans in the first place, but there was never enough for prophylactic use. Even the medical staff became victims of malaria, and Myers soon fell ill along with the others.

  The hunger, filth, and illness struck Myers deeply. Even at his family’s lowest point when they lost their farm, he had never witnessed the kind of hopelessness he encountered during those early days in Bilibid. One fact stood out with blazing clarity: the Japanese culture and history were so completely foreign to that of their Western prisoners that all of the enemy’s actions were beyond comprehension.

  A case in point arose from the ancient Japanese warriors of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Known as the bushi, their doctrine espoused preparedness in all things, including one’s own death. Willingness to die for one’s lord was required.

  When the American generals surrendered to the Japanese in order to save the lives of soldiers who surely would have been massacred had the fighting in the Philippines continued, the enemy was dumbfounded and then disgusted by what they perceived as an act of cowardice. The bushi believed that men who surrendered were men disgraced, unworthy of soldierly treatment. This philosophy became a code called bushido and was witnessed firsthand by the Allies immediately when Bataan capitulated.

  Simultaneous with the capitulation, a new chief of staff arrived to serve under General Homma as he finished mopping up the Philippines. Colonel Masanobu Tsuji epitomized the American caricature of the Japanese: he was small of stature, bald, and bespectacled. He had an unwavering belief in his own immortality and claimed a direct line to Japan’s minister of war, Tojo. Prior to his arrival in the Philippines, he had successfully led campaigns aiding in the capture of Malaya and Singapore. He had absolutely no tolerance for Japan’s newly acquired prisoners of war in Bataan.

  Tsuji believed that all prisoners should be executed, the Americans because they were colonialists and the Filipinos because they had betrayed their fellow Asians. Evidently convinced by this logic, a division staff officer phoned a Colonel Imai, who was involved in rounding up the Bataan prisoners, telling him: “Kill all prisoners and those offering to surrender.” At the time, Imai was holding more than a thousand Filipino and American prisoners and demanded that the order be put in writing.

  A similar order was received by a garrison commander in Bataan, a Major General Torao Ikuta. Another staff officer called Ikuta and told him that his own division was already executing prisoners. Ikuta also asked for a written order. There were other officers, however, who carried out Tsuji’s oral instructions with no request for a written directive.

  Similar ideals were reinforced by the Japan Times & Advertiser newspaper on April 28, 1942. It wrote of the white soldiers:

  “They surrender after sacrificing all the lives they can, except their own … they cannot be treated as ordinary prisoners of war. They have broken the commandments of God, and their defeat is their punishment. To show them mercy is to prolong the war…. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Hesitation is uncalled for, and the wrongdoers must be wiped out.”

  “My God, this is awful!” Myers’ voice broke in frustration at the sight of all the filthy, gaunt men prostrate on the bare concrete floors. “The flies are walking in and out of these guys’ mouths and across their eyeballs. They’re just lying there, so weak they can’t even swat ’em away.”

  Tarpy wiped off his hands and moved toward another patient. “The guy over there in the corner”—he nodde
d his head toward the man in question—“he’s got a wound so full of gangrene you can smell his flesh rotting from twenty feet away.”

  “Hey, Doc,” a feeble voice to Myers’ left called. “Can you help my buddy here? He won’t eat or drink anything. I been tryin’ to help him, but I plumb ran outta juice, too.”

  Myers looked down at the man speaking and then at his friend on the floor next to him. The soldier who had spoken had huge sores on his lips, caked with blood. They looked like raisins to Myers.

  “Sure thing, I got some water right here.” Myers shooed at the flies and knelt down between the two men. “Where you guys been, anyway?”

  “Bataan. We held out as long as we could. Damn Japs just kept comin’. We were on quarter rations; half the guys were real bad off with malaria and jungle rot of some kind. We kept waitin’ for help, but it never came. General MacArthur went to Australia, General Wainwright went to Corregidor to replace him, and General King was in command in Bataan. He had to surrender before they massacred us all.”

  “How’d you get here?” Myers looked closely into the semi-conscious soldier’s eyes while his buddy continued.

  “We marched. Stumbled, really. Japs lined us up and started us off before the ink was dry on the surrender papers. Anybody tried to rest got hit with a rifle butt if the Jap that hit ’em was in a good mood. If he wasn’t, the soldier got shot or bayoneted. They were killin’ us off left and right.”

  “Holy God!” Myers whispered. “How long did it take you to get here?”

  “I dunno, about a week, I guess. They wouldn’t let us stop. Nothing to eat or drink. I had some Australian potted meat called Camp Pie. Ate it before we took off. Tin can said it was mutton, but I think it was everything but horns and hooves. That’s the last food I had the entire week, except for the grass and leaves I ate along the way.”

  A major who was strong enough to walk had been making the rounds, talking to his men. He stopped in front of Myers and the two patients on the floor. After listening for a few minutes, he picked up the story.

  “Homma never figured on capturing so many. I heard he was expecting twenty-five thousand or so. And he expected we’d have our own rations and medical supplies. Shit, we left most of that behind while we were runnin’ for our lives. Wasn’t any twenty-five thousand soldiers, there was seventy-six thousand of us combined with the Filipinos. Japs didn’t have any extra food or water. They told us not only were we worthless for surrendering, but dumb asses for trying to fight a war without any supplies.”

  The first man spoke again. “But that wasn’t the worst of it, Major. What was worse was the way they treated us. They got a big laugh out of our suffering. It was like a game to them. Some of the guys were so weak to begin with they were zombies from the start. My buddy and me”—he motioned to the man Myers was examining—“we tried to help another fella who didn’t look like he was gonna make it. Japs hit us both with rifles and kept screaming, ‘Speedo, speedo!’ The guy finally fell down and the Japs were all over him, stickin’ him with their bayonets like they were checking a pork chop to see if it was done and laughin’ their fool heads off.”

  As Myers talked to more of the nearly dead patients around him, more of the story began to unfold. They’d heard that Homma had planned to march the men nineteen miles at most. They’d stop in a town called Balanga, halfway up the peninsula, at a field hospital and from there be issued Japanese army field rations. Homma had arranged for two hundred trucks to take the men another thirty-three miles to San Fernando, where they’d have another field hospital. After that the prisoners would be carried by freight train the thirty miles to Capas, near Clark Field, and marched the final eight miles to a prison camp called O’Donnell. That was before Homma realized he’d captured so many demoralized, starving, and disease-ridden men.

  The first staging area for the march, which the prisoners described as the Death March, was Balanga. Men poured into the town for days after the surrender and were herded into groups like cattle. The Japanese destroyed every semblance of command among the prisoners, just as they had done to the troops arriving at Bilibid. There was no shelter, no food, and no water.

  “Men dropped over like dried twigs and the Japs didn’t even care,” one man told Myers. “I decided I just was not gonna die. I wanna get back to the States. But some of them other guys,” he said shaking his head, “they said they figured this was only the beginning of bad times ahead. They just gave up the ghost right then and there.”

  Once the Death March got underway, the men packed the road to San Fernando, staggering step by step for the next ten days. Some groups were forced to make that entire march in a single nonstop ordeal, except for an occasional ten- or fifteen-minute halt. Other groups made overnight stops along the way.

  “I seen a group of Jap guards come into the pens where they had us divided up,” said one man with an enormous bayonet slash in his leg. “They’d herd out a group, drive ’em down to the beach of the river nearby, and make ’em stand in the burning sun six, maybe eight hours. Then they’d herd ’em up again and get ’em started on the march. It just made no sense what they was doin’ and nobody could stop ’em.”

  A man with a broken leg told Myers, “Japs kept stopping us along the way and taking anything they wanted from us. They took watches and rings, anything that caught their eye. Some they let keep their mess gear, others didn’t even have any to start with. No canteens, either.”

  One Marine sergeant told about seeing a soldier’s body run over so many times by the trucks carrying Japanese guards that it was completely flattened into the dusty road. Another Marine had seen a Japanese soldier cut off an American’s ear with his sword. “The Jap stuffed the ear into the American’s mouth and told the guy to eat it. Can you imagine that? Being made to eat your own ear? The guy started gagging and the Jap lost patience with him. He stabbed him a bunch of times with his sword and moved on.”

  “I started counting dead Americans I passed by the side of the road,” an Army corporal said. “I lost count after I got to seventy-two. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet we lost a couple thousand men on that march.”

  Men were beaten for walking too slowly, for falling, and for being unable to get up. Sometimes they were beaten for no reason at all. Those who’d been wounded in the fighting prior to the surrender were ordered to march along with the uninjured ones. And if they were too weak to move, they were left behind to be executed by a Japanese cleanup squad.

  By the time the march arrived at the halfway point to San Fernando, the men were desperate for food and water. If they tried to drink from muddy carabao wallows along the road or pull bark off a tree to eat it, the nearby guards mowed them down with rifle fire. Other guards didn’t seem to mind if the men around them ate as long as they kept moving. In those groups it was a common sight to see men chewing on stalks of sugar cane torn from a field as they passed. In that way they were able to get both food and something to drink from the cane’s juice.

  Myers heard stories about men being kicked in the head and face by heavy Japanese boots, many to the point of death, and having their hands tied so tightly behind them that their circulation was cut off at their wrists. Men were stabbed with bayonets or shot, not fatally, but just enough to cause excruciating pain and misery. And all the while the Japanese guards jabbered commands in a language that was entirely foreign to their prisoners and therefore impossible to obey.

  An Army corporal finished the story. “When we finally reached San Fernando, they took us to the town’s train station and packed us into narrow-gauge boxcars. It was so hot and we were so dehydrated that any of the guys who’d had dysentery weren’t even shittin’. Nothin’ in, nothin’ out. Some of the guys in the back of the cars couldn’t get any air at all and started to pass out.”

  Myers shook his head. The stories he’d heard were so horrible, he simply couldn’t digest them. “Almighty God, what makes men do something like that to other men?” he asked
no one in particular.

  “These ain’t other men, son,” an older sergeant told him. “They’re animals. The ones who could speak English screamed things at us like, ‘Go you to hell!’ and ‘Yanks insult Nippon many times. Now we get even!’ We didn’t even know what they were talking about.”

  The sergeant wasn’t far off base. Myers knew that many Japanese guards in general, especially prison camp guards, had come from the dregs of their society. Some had previously been prisoners themselves. Some were mentally unstable and couldn’t pass the entrance requirements for any other type of work in the military. And some were half Chinese, called Taiwans. They were treated as inferiors by the “pure bloods” so they vented their shame and anger on the POWs. None of them wanted to be there. But the Japanese military chain of command was busy winning control of the Pacific and had neither the time nor the inclination to monitor the guards’ behavior.

  Myers had made the rounds in his little sector of the Bilibid hospital and was back near the man with the sores on his lips.

  “So, Doc, what do you think about my buddy?” the first man asked. “Anything you can do for him?”

  Myers knelt down next to the semi-conscious man again and shook his head. “He’s in a pretty bad way and we don’t have any medical supplies to speak of. He’s burning up. I’d bet the farm he’s got malaria. His fingers are shriveled; that means he’s really dehydrated. Malnourished, too.” Myers couldn’t begin to fathom how most of these men were even still alive.

  He looked around the room and said, “I’ll see if I can find some quinine for the malaria, and we’ll give him plenty of water. At least he’s cleaned up some.”

  Tears welled up in the first man’s eyes. “Thanks, Doc. I don’t want him to die. I don’t wanna die, either. We worked so hard to get here.”