Belly of the Beast

by Judith L. Pearson

  The hardest part of all this for Myers and the rest of the medical staff was that they were absolutely powerless to do anything to help these wretched men. They had no drugs to treat disease, and they weren’t certain whether the Japanese had any, either. But they were certain that the Japanese had more food than the prisoners were being given. Most of these diseases were related to nutrition, and with just a little more food many of the men Myers pronounced dead could have been saved.

  Their diet consisted of a cup of putrid, boiled rice for breakfast, while another cup of rice and a bowl of mucus-like rice soup, called lugao, was doled out for lunch and again for dinner. The rice stunk; it was moldy and combined with stones and the floor sweepings from warehouses. The stones played havoc with the men’s teeth. The rice was rolled out to them from the central galley in fifteen-gallon gasoline tins.

  Occasionally, a few greens were thrown in with a meal, and only rarely were spoiled carabao meat or fish added. The Japanese never cleaned the fish; they fried them up whole. Initially, the POWs tried to pick out the bones, but when hunger overcame them they ate the entire fish.

  Myers, Tex, and Tarpy contracted all the diseases at one time or another. So did the rest of the medical staff. When one fell sick, the others picked up the slack in the workload until the man who was ill could return to his duties. The extra work usually exhausted the others so much that one of them would fall ill next, and the never-ending circle continued.

  The inhumanity continued as well and Myers witnessed most of it. One day, Tarpy was ordered to go over sick reports with one of the Japanese guards. According to Imperial standards, a man was only sick if he was unable to work or in danger of dying. The Japanese accused the Americans of deliberately playing sick so they could get out of their work details.

  The meeting was held in the hospital ward where Myers and several others of the medical staff were working. It started out with Tarpy bowing to the guard as was required before he was invited to sit down on a cot. The guard sat down next to him. Tarpy began to go through the reports when suddenly the guard pointed at a line and jumped up. Tarpy jumped up, too, as regulations demanded and stood at rigid attention. The guard hauled back and slapped Tarpy across one cheek and then the other. Then without a word he sat down, and Tarpy followed. The report reading continued for a few minutes and the scenario was repeated. The guard jumped up, Tarpy jumped up, the guard slapped both his cheeks, and they both sat down again.

  Myers could see the hatred in Tarpy’s eyes, but he gave the man credit. Tarpy never made a move against the guard. To do so would have meant possible death. The hospital staff dealt with the aftermath of punishments to their fellow POWs every day. Tarpy wisely restrained himself so as not to be added to the list.

  One of the few elements of normal life the Japanese allowed the prisoners was the ability to hold regular religious services. They were conducted at several different times on Sundays so that those on work detail would be able to attend after they had finished for the day. The Army and Navy chaplains took turns officiating, reading sermons that had to be written in advance and passed by Japanese censors.

  At the end of August 1942 a new commandant arrived at the camp, a lieutenant by the name of Dr. Nogi. With him came the promise of better things, but for many men he hadn’t come soon enough. Up until this point the Japanese guards exhibited schizophrenic behavior toward their prisoners. Most of the time they were monsters, exercising horrors unknown to soldiers captured in other parts of the world. The variety and extent of the Japanese brutality was something no soldier could have been prepared for. Prisoners were clubbed at the slightest infraction of rules. Sometimes large groups, regardless of their innocence, were hauled out to the prison yard at night and lined up for a mass beating. The men suffered shattered teeth, broken bones, lacerations, and humiliation.

  Myers and others were forced to witness what they called the “water cure.” A man who was thought to deserve punishment was stretched out on the ground with a rubber tube shoved down his throat. A cask of water was emptied into the tube until the man’s abdomen became distended and water seeped out of his pores. At that point, a guard jumped up and down on the man’s bare stomach until he was dead.

  Eyes were gouged out and men were hung by their thumbs or their heels. And then there was the “hot plate.” The prisoner was stripped and made to stand on a metal plate that had been wet down. The guards took turns pricking the man’s flesh with live electrical wires.

  There were a few Japanese who were almost humane, actually expressing feelings for the Americans’ position. Myers overheard a doctor suggesting to a Japanese officer that the prison hospital needed better medical equipment. The Japanese officer replied, “You are unfortunate. You are the prisoners of a country whose living standards are much lower than yours. You will often consider yourselves mistreated, while we will think of you as being treated well.”

  Oftentimes, the ill treatment of the prisoners by the guards was due to a lack of communication. It became the duty of the corpsmen, including Myers, to report to the prison’s front gate whenever a truckload of provisions arrived. One day, the corpsmen were late. The guards who had had to wait for them were livid, thinking the Americans had deliberately been slow, and beat them for it. The fault rested with the camp interpreter, a Japanese soldier named Herri. He was a low-class, rancorous brute, whose English was pitifully limited. He had given the prisoners the wrong information, which often happened. Then, to protect his own hide, he blamed the prisoners for being lazy.

  So it was with good reason that the POWs hoped the new camp commandant might mean changes for the better. One night soon after Nogi’s arrival, the men were sitting in their barracks, sweat pouring off their half-naked bodies. Manila had been built in a marsh. Along the city’s outer edges, where Bilibid stood, the marsh and its humidity were more in evidence. Every time rain fell, as it had the day before, most of the prison flooded, with two to three feet of water remaining for days afterward.

  “I don’t know which is better”—Tex said, as he swatted a mosquito on his forearm—“having enough clothes so that you got the luxury of takin’ ’em off when you’re hot, or not havin’ any so you don’t have to bother takin’ ’em off.”

  “Listen, sourpuss, we’re gonna do some quanning tomorrow night,” Myers told him. “That oughta cheer you up some.”

  Quan was the Japanese word for stew. The POWs took grammatical liberties and concluded that quanning would be the word used for making the stew. That led to the holding of quan parties, which occurred when several groups shared their quans with one another. Desperate for something to look forward to, some kind of diversion from the incredible monotony of their lives, the quan parties became as important to them as their first stolen kiss had been at a Saturday matinee.

  “I swear, Myers, you’re the happiest son of a bitch I ever met. I could hit you in the head with a rifle butt and you’d be glad ’cause I didn’t hit you with a bullet instead.”

  “Hey, somebody’s gotta keep a smile on your ugly mugs!” Myers defended himself.

  The men launched into a discussion of what each had to add to the quan. Early on in their imprisonment, a “store” had begun operating inside the camp. The prisoners could buy items like beans, garlic, or bananas to add to their quans. The POWs sold their remaining personal items—those that the Japanese hadn’t taken when they were captured—to get a little cash and then bought what they could afford. The Japanese weren’t happy about the store; they felt they lost face by not giving the prisoners enough to eat. So the prisoners explained that the store was actually operating to provide supplemental nourishment to the sick, and that made the captors feel better about it.

  Demand soon outgrew the supply. Prices rose and most prisoners were unable to afford much of anything and the store quietly died. After that, the men tried cooking and eating any vegetation they could find, including kang-kong, calla lilies. Although it was generally recognized that
they contained no food value, like so many trivial things, they made life a little different.

  The men’s conversations next turned to another favorite topic, memories of home.

  “You know, I was a pretty good cook back home,” Myers told his buddies. “When my mother would go off to tend to Mammy Klinglesmith, that was my grandmother’s name, she’d leave me in charge of making the family meals.”

  “Yeah, so what do you know how to make?” Tex asked him.

  “Well, I know one thing I don’t know how to make well and that’s rice. I can’t believe we actually ate the stuff of our own free will, but that was a long time ago. Anyway, I’d seen my mother make it and figured I could do it, too. We were havin’ pork chops for dinner and I thought some rice would go good with it. I filled a kettle with water and put it on the stove. Then I took the sack of rice and poured some in.

  “Well, that rice looked pretty puny in the bottom of the kettle and I didn’t think I had enough. So I added some more, and then I added just a little bit more. I figured if there was any left from dinner, we could have it for breakfast. Well, that water started boilin’, and the rice started to swell up. It rose up to the top of that kettle like a volcano and started spillin’ everywhere.”

  The men were smiling now. “What did you do?” Tarpy asked him.

  “Well, I got another pot and then another. My brother Kenny came into the kitchen just then, so I had him fetch anything he could find to put this rice in.”

  Their group had gotten larger, and now all the men were laughing at the mental image of this Myers being swallowed up by an avalanche of rice.

  “We had rice comin’ out our ears. I didn’t dare throw any of it away. Daddy would have skinned me alive for wasting food. So we ate rice for every meal for a week. Every time I heated it up, it swelled some more. We couldn’t even get the dog to eat it. Guess I shoulda known there was gonna be rice in my future.”

  More laughs and chuckles from the group around Myers. “Hey, Myers!” one of the Army privates piped up. “You think our rice would swell up if we heated it up?”

  “Son,” an Army doctor in the group spoke up. “This rice wouldn’t swell up if Betty Grable herself walked by.”

  This was followed by hoots and shouts from the other men.

  “Rita Hayworth!”

  “Lana Turner!”

  “Sorry, boys,” the doctor told them. “Your sex drive takes a back seat when you’re not getting enough to eat. I doubt one of us could get it up, even if we wanted to.”

  Tex nodded. “Ya know, Doc, the funny thing is I’d rather think about food than sex these days. My mama’s specialty is chicken fried steak. She’d take a great big old slab ’a T-bone, flour it up, and fry it in this big of iron skillet, then she’d whip up some potatoes and pour sausage gravy all over everything on your plate.”

  “My mother makes the world’s best biscuits and gravy,” Myers told his pals. “And once Christmas comes, she’ll start making her peanut butter fudge. It melts away in your mouth.”

  “Every time I eat some of that mashed up camote I pretend it’s my mama’s mashed potatoes,” Tex commented.

  “What are those?” one of the prisoners who had recently arrived from another camp asked.

  “Camotes? Why, they’re kinda like yams. We got a garden out back outside the execution chamber.”

  The new man looked surprised.

  “Japs don’t use the execution chamber,” Myers told him. “Anywhere in the camp works just as well.”

  Tex continued. “Anyway, we grow mongo beans, little pea-sized beans, and okra and a little corn. Used to have some ducks, too. Japs ate some of ’em, but the rest just up and died.”

  The men thought about this for a while.

  “Hey, who’s got a smoke?” Myers asked. One of the men produced a Philippine cigarette made from picadura, which was locally grown, loose tobacco. Often the men got handouts through holes in the prison wall from the Filipinos on the outside. Sometimes they’d get cigarettes, other times some coffee or a tin of meat. The prisoners had to be extremely careful; if the guards caught them communicating with the outside, a severe beating was sure to follow. But the risk seemed worth it. These items had tremendous bargaining power, depending upon the camp’s market situation at any given time. Even after the camp store shut down, trading went on between the prisoners, and sometimes the guards even got in on the act.

  Men had to be careful, though. It was one thing to trade an occasional helping of rice for a cigarette, but some men traded it routinely. Soon, trading “protein for nicotine” made them too weak to smoke or eat. Their next stop after that was the Zero Ward, the part of the hospital where men were taken to die.

  Another commodity the POWs used for trading with the guards were medical drugs. The Imperial Army took its own prostitutes on their campaigns for a little relaxation after a tough day at war. They did not, however, take along enough sulfa, the treatment of choice for VD. It was common knowledge among the prison hospital corps that nearly one hundred percent of the Bilibid guards had some form of venereal disease.

  Dr. Nogi issued strict instructions that none of his guards were to use the Americans’ medical supplies. But the enticement of treatment in exchange for cigarettes, coffee, or meat was too great for either side to resist, and the guards even fought one another for the privilege of stealing food to trade for drugs. This arrangement worked pretty well for the POWs until all the sulfa was gone.

  So an enterprising ring of prisoners began creating fake sulfa tablets using some plaster of paris, sugar, and a little water. They combined the mixture in a carabao horn and poured it into molds made from .30-caliber shells, which were the appropriate size. They even stamped their tablets with a “W,” for Winthrop Chemical Company, a drug firm familiar to the Japanese. One hundred and fifty tablets traded for nearly a bushel of mongo beans, providing the POWs with badly needed protein. An unknown number of men were saved because of the sale of the fake sulfa pills.

  In the spring of 1943, a day arrived that Myers and his pals had been looking forward to. It was yasumu, the one day a week that the guards didn’t force everyone to work. A day of liberty was a small blessing in their pitifully sorry lives, but this one was special. This yasumu was also Tarpy’s birthday, and they’d planned a special breakfast for themselves in honor of the occasion.

  The bangou bell rang as it did every morning and the men fell out. Bangou was a check by numbers. At all times each man wore a three-by-five-inch wooden placard bearing his prisoner number painted in red. Since numbers are the same in Japanese and English, it made bangou easier to facilitate. And the Japanese loved to call a bangou, going through the exercise several times a day for no obvious reason that the prisoners could see.

  Although the sun was not yet up when the bell rang on this particular day, the Japanese took so long with their inspection of the prisoners that it had risen by the time they’d finished. Steam rose from the damp ground as soon as the sun hit it. Finally the men were dismissed to enjoy their tiny bit of liberty.

  The bill of fare for Tarpy’s celebration included pancakes, syrup, and coffee. Of course, achieving this feast required a little resourcefulness and a lot of imagination. The pancake flour was made from rolling a bottle over uncooked rice and pulverizing it. One of them had a culture of yeast growing in a bucket, and they added a little to the flour along with some water. They had arranged to use the griddle in the camp galley and while Myers cooked, Tarpy heated up water to melt their precious stash of sugar for syrup.

  Meanwhile, Tex was in charge of procuring the coffee. He had saved up enough money to buy coffee from a hospital patient who had made it his cottage industry. The patient bought the grounds from the guards and made five-gallon drums of coffee every day, usually early in the morning before sunrise. He then sold it to the other POWs for whatever he could get, always pricing it so that he could make a small profit plus renew his raw materials. The entrepr
eneur also merchandized tobacco, and he kept both commodities in identical tins saved from Red Cross boxes.

  By the time Tex returned with their coffee, Myers and Tarpy had finished their cooking, and the three sat down to their feast. They all bit into the pancakes and congratulated themselves on the flavor. Being gray-beige in color and paper-thin, they weren’t much to look at. They then moved on to the coffee, taking small sips so that it would last as long as possible. Tarpy noticed the flavor immediately.

  “Hey, what is this stuff? Whatta ya trying to do to a guy?”

  Within seconds, Myers’ and Tex’s taste buds had caught up.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! This stuff tastes like shit!” Tex sputtered, examining the brown liquid and the small bits of something that had now floated to the surface.

  “My God!” Myers choked. “This is awful!”

  “Well, if that mooch thinks he’s gonna get away with this, he’s got another think comin’!” Tex jumped up off the floor and headed toward the hospital barracks.

  The entrepreneurial patient was right where Tex left him.

  “Taste this and tell me what you’re tryin’ to pull, you son of a bitch!” Tex commanded.

  The astonished patient took a timid sip and spat it out on the floor. He reached under his bed and pulled out his supplies, checking first one of the Red Cross tins and then the other. He looked up, dismayed.

  “Keep your shirt on, pal. I’ll give you your money back. But I’m out two ways, see? It was dark when I made the coffee. I grabbed the wrong tin and wasted perfectly good tobacco because I thought it was coffee. Now I gotta give everybody their money back for the coffee and I don’t have any tobacco to sell, either!”