Belly of the Beast

by Judith L. Pearson

  For the first time since he’d left his younger brothers and sister back in Kentucky, Myers remembered what it felt like to have someone look up to you and count on you. He’d prodded his siblings through rough spots on many occasions. That might be what the young soldier in front of him needed.

  “Now listen,” Myers told him firmly, “nobody’s gonna die. The way to keep you and your buddy alive is to just plan on living through it. You guys have made it this far; don’t give up now. Besides, we’re not gonna be here long. I’ll bet the Yanks and tanks are already on their way.”

  The major had finished making his rounds and was standing beside Myers again. Myers turned to him. “Guy over there told me they put you guys on a train. You come all the way to Manila in those boxcars?”

  “Nope. They unloaded us at Camp O’Donnell. We stayed in that hellhole for a week until Corregidor surrendered. Then they brought us here.”

  Tex came by and handed some dampened rags to Myers, who asked him where the quinine supply might be. Tex told him that the corpsmen from Corregidor had brought some medical supplies with them. Myers went searching for the Corregidor contingent and didn’t have far to go. This group seemed a little bit less physically abused than the group from Bataan, but no less haggard looking. A corpsman stood in the middle of another group of patients relating his story.

  “So I arrive at Corregidor in this boat that’s been runnin’ supplies back and forth to Bataan. We dock, and there sits a black piano. There’s a couple seamen standing around, arguing with a soldier. The soldier wants to put the piano on the boat headed for Australia. Says it’s the general’s piano and it’s goin’ to Australia with the general. I says to myself, ‘Great—we’re gettin’ our asses kicked by the Japs and the general’s takin’ a pleasure cruise to Australia with his piano.’”

  “I hate to break up the party,” Myers interrupted. “Did you guys bring any quinine in with you from Corregidor?”

  The corpsman pointed to a chief pharmacist’s mate in the corner and continued regaling his patients with his stories. Myers headed toward the man the corpsman had indicated and got some quinine from him. He also found some ointment for the lip sores. He had no idea what time it was or even what day it was. He hoped his prediction about reinforcements coming to liberate them wasn’t far from the truth.

  “You aren’t gonna believe what I just heard.” Myers was laughing for the first time in a long time. It was August 1942 and he’d been at Bilibid for three months.

  “One of the guys over there speaks a little Japanese. He said he overheard a Nip guard talking to another one about a letter he’d gotten from home. The guard’s relatives were complaining. They were losing face because they couldn’t brag about anyone in their family being killed in the war. The letter told the guard he’d better regain the family’s honor by finding himself some fighting and die, or there’d be hell to pay when he got home.”

  “Damn, that gets me right here.” Tex pointed to his heart. “What say we give the little fella a hand, boys.”

  “Wouldn’t I like to,” Tarpy muttered through gritted teeth. “You know, boys, I think it’s gonna take our troops a couple of years to get back here. That’s an awful long time. And I don’t mind telling you guys, I’m scared.”

  “I’m scared, too, Tarpy,” Myers said soberly. “The last orders we had were to carry on our hospital duties. I guess if we keep doing that, the time’ll pass quicker.”

  Myers, Tex, and Tarpy were part of the main cadre of POW staff at Bilibid. Their chief medical officer told the corpsmen that when a fighting man is captured, he’s through working for a while. But for a hospital corpsman, the work becomes even more taxing. Inconceivably, despite the workload and the oppressive fear that dwelt in all of them, they kept one another going, never relaxing the structure that is an integral part of a United States naval hospital.

  For months, the prisoners and patients continued to flow in and out. They arrived from the province work camps near death, plagued with injuries, disease, and malnutrition. It was Myers’ job, and that of the other medical personnel, to patch them up as best they could with their minimal medical supplies and an ever-diminishing food supply. Bilibid was nothing more than a human scrap yard, where the unusable remains of men were put back together into somewhat usable men who were returned to work details.

  The Japanese insisted a daily schedule be followed without exception. Reveille was at 0600 with the morning muster—bangou, the Japanese called it—and ten minutes worth of exercise beginning at 0630. The men were given thirty minutes for breakfast at 0700, and at 0730 the work details formed for the day. Since Myers’ work was in the hospital, he never left the camp. Other men based at Bilibid who weren’t hospital patients worked on scavenging supplies for the Japanese among the rubble of Manila or working on the grounds of Bilibid. The medical staff created shifts that ran simultaneously to the other work details, plus they had a contingent of doctors and corpsmen on duty through the night as well. Lunch was taken at 1200 hours, and work resumed at 1300 hours and lasted until 1630. Dinner was at 1800 hours, and everyone was required to be back in the barracks at 2000 hours. No talking was allowed after 2100 hours and bed checks were taken. At sunrise, the whole process began again.

  Men flowed in and out of Bilibid every week. One group, having recently arrived from the prison camp called Cabanatuan, talked about an experiment their medical staff had tried that seemed to meet with some success. A dose of yeast was given to those patients who suffered from vitamin B deficiencies. The corpsmen propagated the yeast using whatever bits of food they could find that contained sugar.

  This gave Tex the idea to collect all the additional sugar foods he could find in the barracks and turn them into hooch.

  “All we gotta do is add a little water and let it ferment,” he told the men as he made the rounds, collecting the ingredients. “My daddy an’ his daddy—shoot, my whole family’s been doin’ this for generations. Any man who donates gets a share of the finished product. The rest of ’em get a swig only for life-saving medicinal purposes.”

  Tex found a couple of unused demijohns. The large, short-necked bottles had previously held alcohol or other liquid supplies, and he now stuffed them full of the fruit-sugar-water mixture. A few weeks later, he pronounced it ready for consumption. It was the first drinking liquor the men had tasted in ages and it tasted pretty good. The episode also escalated Tex’s image in the eyes of his fellow prisoners. Innovation was a highly admired trait amid so much deprivation.

  For the most part, though, Myers’ days flowed one into another, caring for men who, once they were well and moved back to their respective prison camps, he’d likely never see again. One day Myers was helping a patient who had suffered a raging, malaria-induced fever. While the man ate his meager morning ration of rice gruel, they swapped stories.

  “Where were you when the war broke out?” Myers asked him.

  “Olongapo.”

  “I had a friend at Olongapo. Name of Stover. He was a pharmacist’s mate, too. Ever hear of him?”

  “You know, Doc, I’d only been there a few days when the Japs attacked. I didn’t know very many guys. It was a real pretty little mountain village before they bombed the hell out of it. If your friend was anywhere near the bay area, he wouldn’t have had better than a fifty-fifty chance of making it.”

  “Another seaman I met comin’ over from the States was one of the guys ordered to report to Pearl Harbor. I’ve wondered if he made it out okay, too.”

  “That’s the crummy thing about war,” the patient said feebly. “You meet people, and then you never see them again. You start workin’ on something, and then you get sent someplace else. You never get a chance to see things through to the end; you never get a chance to see how things turn out.”

  The men who passed through Bilibid talked about the deterrents to escape used in the other camps. Men were arranged in groups of ten, which became known as execution squads.
Each man was responsible to the others; if one escaped, the other nine would be executed in reprisal. Often when group executions did take place, the men were forced to dig their own graves and kneel over them, whereupon their heads were cut off with the razor-sharp samurai swords. The heads would tumble into the hole, soon followed by their bodies.

  The stories of Japanese brutality never ceased to amaze the medical staff. One man described having his hands tied behind his back and his eyes blindfolded. The guards, tai-sas, the Japanese called them, burned him with cigarettes and branding irons. All the while the camp commander and the other tai-sas watched and laughed.

  But the incessant squalor and lack of food seemed to be killing more men than anything else. An air corps pilot newly arrived from Cabanatuan told Myers that in one day alone, he knew of sixty men who had died.

  “The fellas on the burial detail were so weak,” the pilot told him, “that they weren’t able to dig the graves very deep. As soon as the rainy season started, those shallow graves turned into mud holes and the corpses rose to the top. Like a big jumble of arms and legs and skulls, some of ’em partially decomposed.”

  Another place Myers heard about was called Tayabas, a town eighty miles or so southeast of Manila. The Japanese were forcing the POWs to build a road through the swampy jungle outside of town. Most men volunteered for work details outside of their camps, hoping that the treatment might be improved.

  “We had to live in a river bottom. It rained constantly,” a cadaverous soldier who’d been on the Tayabas detail told Myers one day. “We knew the river water was polluted because the Japs watered their horses upstream from us. But we had nothing else to drink or cool off with. The place was thick with mosquitoes and flies. We had no medical supplies and nothing to keep the rain off us. Guys had pneumonia and malaria and dysentery. You name it. The Japs sent about two hundred fifty of us down there. Me and a hundred and fifty other guys made it out alive.”

  In the first months, it was hard to fill the little free time the men were given. But one day during August of 1942, a volleyball appeared in camp. When the Japanese made no move to confiscate it, someone brought out a basketball, and another guy produced a base-ball. As each ball appeared, teams were formed, courts and infields were crafted, and the games began.

  Myers had been athletic all his life. His natural ability made him one of the guys everyone wanted in a game. Occasionally, the prison guards would come to watch. That was when the prisoners had the most fun. The Japanese had no comprehension of any of the rules of the games, and weren’t sufficiently proficient in English slang to understand the hooting and hollering along with ball playing. The prisoners took full advantage of these opportunities to shout crude insults, seemingly at one another. The insults’ real targets, however, were the guards themselves. It seemed this was one of the few chances the POWs had to vent their rage and loathing for the enemy.

  Another great deception that occurred at Bilibid was the product of a prisoner who was a former ham radio operator. He crafted a radio inside a box beneath the seat of a short stool. The creation was a painstaking operation, as each part of the radio was pilfered from under the Japs’ noses. The power source was flashlight batteries, taken out of lights given to the American officers who were forced to make nightly bed checks. The Japanese were forever trying to understand why the batteries wore out so quickly, which was the line the officers gave them.

  The radio operator listened to the news surreptitiously on San Francisco station KGEI almost every night. When a new draft of POWs would arrive from another camp, he’d mention some news items to a few of them. They’d spread the word to others, and everyone, including the guards who might have understood bits and pieces, thought the new men had brought the stories in with them. That was how Myers and the others heard about some of the battles that were turning the tide of the war.

  Chapter Eight

  Protein for Nicotine

  By August 1942, the Americans interned at Bilibid Prison had pretty well pieced together the story of the destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Between the POWs who had received direct radio information that day and those who had brought supplies to the Philippines from Australia prior to the capitulation, the story they had was that America had been caught flat-footed and a great deal of the Pacific Fleet was sunk or damaged.

  “But ain’t it great them Japs didn’t get our carriers?” Tex chuckled. “And one of these days, they’re gonna catch hell from us.”

  Myers and the rest were listening to the rehash of December 7 one night before lights out. They nodded in silent agreement.

  “My grandmother used to say ‘revenge is a dish best eaten cold,’” one of the men nearby said softly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Tarpy asked him.

  “It means, stupid, that sometimes you gotta wait to get back at somebody. But if you get ’em good, it was worth the wait,” the man replied.

  Another voice spoke up in the darkening barracks. “I heard we got revenge.”

  Replies of “The hell you say!” and “You’re nuts!” rumbled around.

  “Yeah, and we heard a month or so ago that the Japanese had shelled the Washington and Oregon coasts,” Tex said. “You gonna tell me you believe that, too?”

  “Hey, don’t get mad at me, buddy,” the voice replied. “I’m just the messenger. But I heard it on pretty good authority. And from a couple guys pretty high up, too. There wouldn’t be any reason for ’em to lie.”

  This was met with a considerable number of opinions as well, none of them very positive. But a few men, including Myers, encouraged the man to spill what he knew.

  “What I heard about happened at Midway Island. It’s fifteen hundred miles from Pearl and twenty-four hundred miles from Tokyo. So it’s midway between the two.

  “It don’t take no genius to figure out that Midway’s important to both sides. We’ve got a beefed-up base there to defend against another attack on Hawaii or someplace else in the United States. The Japs saw it as a stepping stone for pullin’ off just that kind of attack.”

  At about the same time that Myers and the others had arrived at Bilibid, Japanese reconnaissance had determined that the American fleet was so crippled from the surprise attack of December 7, that it would be a very long time before most of their ships would be seaworthy. The Japanese submarines sent to scout the repair operations in Hawaii confirmed the fact that there were no carriers, nor anything else of significance being prepared to re-enter the war. They concluded that the time had come to take Midway. What the Japanese didn’t know was that the subs’ reports had come too late. The U.S. carrier task forces were already at sea.

  American intelligence had discovered that the Japanese were planning an attack somewhere. There were several possibilities, and Midway seemed likely, but all the American cryptanalysts in Pearl Harbor could discern for certain from decoded Japanese radio traffic was that the location had been given the code name “AF.” So the Americans deliberately set a trap, sending a message they knew would be intercepted by the Japanese. The message related a water shortage on Midway. Japanese radio responded by reporting on the same water shortage, substituting the code name AF for Midway. That was the confirmation American Admiral Chester Nimitz was looking for. He got a bonus when the cryptanalysts were also able to come up with an approximate timetable for the attack.

  Nimitz and his staff guessed at the size of the fleet the Japanese would use. Judging from the importance of Midway, they surmised the enemy would commit just about everything he had. Nimitz had fewer ships than the Japanese in every category except for the most important category of warfare: aircraft. The Japanese had four carriers with a total of 272 aircraft, while Nimitz had three carriers with 233 planes and another 115 aircraft on Midway Island itself.

  The Japanese planned a diversionary battle off the Aleutian Islands, the object being to draw the Americans away from Midway. But Nimitz was aware of this diver
sion and wasn’t fooled into sending his entire fleet elsewhere. When an American seaplane happened to spot the enormous fleet twenty-six hundred miles west of Midway, the Japanese thought it was just bad luck. But that wasn’t the case at all; Nimitz had ordered that sweeping searches be made and he deployed his two task forces under Admirals Spruance and Fletcher to meet the Japanese armada.

  The morning of June 4, 1942, a thick fog hid the Japanese strike force approaching the island. At 0430, Japanese search planes were ordered out for final intelligence. The catapult on one of the carriers was malfunctioning and her planes went out thirty minutes later. The consequence of this delay was that the American carriers were within the area that those planes were supposed to survey. Once the battle began, it raged for three days, and the two fleets never got within a day’s sailing distance of one another. Nearly the entire clash was fought by aircraft. Through planning, courage, error, and pure chance, the Americans prevailed. The Japanese suffered an enormous defeat and lost four carriers and a heavy cruiser.

  When the voice in the darkness paused, Myers asked him, “You’re not pullin’ our legs, are you, pal?”

  “Nope,” came the answer.

  “Damn, then maybe they’re on their way to get us right now,” Myers said.

  The thought buoyed him and some of the other POWs. But there were those who had begun to give up. More disease had hit the camp, including the highly contagious dengue fever. Besides backache and headache, dengue also causes mental depression and a loss of appetite. Men who gave up and wouldn’t eat were then more susceptible to other diseases, if the dengue didn’t get them first.

  Every day the hospital corps seemed to be getting a new lesson in epidemiology. Many of the diseases were brought on from nutritional deficiencies. Thiamin deficiency caused “wet” beriberi, from which men’s legs would balloon before the swelling would move to other body parts, potentially damaging vital organs. Then came “dry” beriberi, which caused their legs to ache and nerve endings, particularly in the feet, to give them shocking jolts each time they touched anything. Lack of niacin also caused pellagra, a disease that began as a skin rash and a blackened tongue, then progressed to include diarrhea and dementia, and often even death. The men lacked vitamin A, too, which caused night blindness, corneal scarring, and in extreme cases, complete blindness. The absence of riboflavin brought about dry, cracked skin and light sensitivity in the eyes.