Belly of the Beast

by Judith L. Pearson

  Fresh from their victory in the Battle for Leyte Gulf, the aircraft from the American carriers continued their attacks on Manila. On one particularly successful day, they were able to damage or destroy over forty enemy ships in Manila Bay.

  Since then, Bilibid had become one of Emperor Hirohito’s busiest prison camps. The Japanese conducted a panicky spasm of withdrawal; already nine drafts of prisoners had been assembled and loaded onto ships in the harbor to be sent to Japan to augment the labor-hungry Home Islands. Since all able-bodied Japanese men had been made into soldiers, the enemy was in desperate need of slave labor to work in their mines and factories.

  The Japanese used Bilibid as the clearinghouse for these drafts, and men were sent there from other camps like Cabanatuan, O’Donnell, and Davao. The task of organizing the prisoners once they disembarked at Bilibid was under the direction of an officer named Momata. Each time new men arrived at the camp, Momata demanded that the prison medical staff assemble groups of the strongest men. Had they not been so exhausted and disease-ridden, the order would have given the POWs a big laugh: they would have been hard-pressed to pick out even one strong man from amongst them.

  Since August, Myers had seen thousands of men afflicted with a myriad of diseases, despair evident in their tortured eyes, move through the camp. Some died immediately upon arrival, the move from their previous camp being more than they could physically withstand. Other newcomers were allowed a brief respite in the Bilibid hospital before being shipped out. But most were herded into an area on the prison grounds like worthless chattel. There they would spend a day or two before being herded back out again, evidently on their way to the docks and their awaiting ships.

  Trying to save the pitifully broken-down prisoners who were gradually losing the will to live provided an unending dilemma for Myers. He wanted to do his best to keep as many men as possible alive and well. But the more a man improved, the closer he came to being yanked away for chain-gang work or slave labor in Japan.

  Myers’ strong faith and compassion for his fellow man provided scant comfort, particularly when he was confronted by a patient who asked Myers to help him pray for death and a release from his suffering.

  Myers’ performance in his onerous duties did not go unnoticed by the senior medical officer at Bilibid. In a letter of commendation written in November of 1944, he described Myers as possessing “loyalty, competency in the discharge of duties and maintenance of excellent morale under adverse conditions of prison life in the hands of the enemy.” Still, Myers would have traded all those glowing words for just one hot meal consisting of anything but rice.

  The POWs’ daily rations had been cut to about a cup of rice and another one of corn. The mortality rate in Bilibid from malnutrition had skyrocketed. The Japanese commandant’s office issued orders that malnutrition could no longer be used as a cause of death and ordered that the Americans change eight recently drafted death certificates to reflect something else. Malnutrition, he told the doctors, made it appear as though the Japanese weren’t taking sufficient care of the prisoners. That would, in turn, cause the Empire embarrassment and humiliation.

  Shortly after, another ridiculous order was issued. The Americans were to make room for the sick and injured Japanese to be moved into the Bilibid hospital. Tex commented that if that were to be the case, they’d need a ten-story building, since the POW patients were already practically lying on top of one another.

  Throughout November, Allied aircraft peppered the skies above Manila, their bombs and bullets thundering down on enemy ships, planes, and troops. The POWs could see camouflaging and foxhole-digging going on outside the prison walls. And the Japanese held what seemed like non-stop air-raid drills for those living in the city.

  There were no foxholes in Bilibid, however. Just a dilapidated, unfinished building dubbed the Big House into which the prisoners were herded for the air raids. It was ludicrous to think that the feeble walls and partial roof would somehow protect the men from any falling ordnance.

  In early December the Japanese authorities at Bilibid issued another proclamation. It was announced that the Allies’ “stupid resistance to the will of the Emperor could be tolerated no longer.” Therefore, every prisoner in camp who could walk on his own accord, and those needing only a small amount of assistance, would be shipped out to Japan. This group was to include all officers, doctors, and corpsmen.

  The enormity of the proclamation did not escape Myers. It was beyond reason to assume that the Japanese doctors and corpsmen would care for the remaining POW patients. If the medical personnel left behind those who were so sickly that the Japanese didn’t even want them for slave labor, they would surely die. As bad as not having enough supplies to care for patients was to Myers, abandoning them was completely unbearable.

  Furthermore, Myers knew that the Allies were closing in on Manila. He’d heard the distant rumblings of the big guns and the reports of plane sightings each time a group of prisoners came back from work detail outside the camp. But if they were shipped to Japan, out of the grasp of the returning Allied troops, God only knew how long it would take the Americans to rescue them. The only thing left to do was what he’d been doing all along: keep believing that help was on the way.

  As they lay on their mats the stormy night of December 11, Myers, Tex, and Tarpy talked about when, not if, General MacArthur would return. They argued over how many days were left in their current three-month block, the measurement they’d used for nearly three years as the timing for their liberation. Myers said if he had to put his money on a date, he was sure it would be within the next few days.

  By 1800 hours the next day, however, Myers’ hopes began to fade. A runner had arrived from Japanese headquarters in Manila with orders to ready the final draft of prisoners for Japan. Each prisoner was issued soap, toilet paper, and “dobie” cigarettes and told to be ready to move out the next morning. The prisoners were also issued various and sundry articles of clothing for a colder climate. Eighty cases of Red Cross medical supplies were set aside to be loaded on the ship, six of which were designated for the prisoners’ use.

  The POWs’ chief medical officer protested vigorously to Nogi. He wrote the Japanese doctor a letter stating that moving the men at this late date in the war was rife with risk. But Nogi’s reply was that there was no danger involved; otherwise the Japanese would never have suggested the move in the first place.

  Sleep was out of the question that night. All of the prisoners had the impending journey to Japan on their minds. The night was heavy and, as usual, alive with mosquitoes.

  “I’ll bet the Jap ships in the bay have taken quite a beating from our planes,” Tarpy said quietly.

  “Yeah, ain’t it a bitch!” Tex said. “All along we’ve wanted our boys to give the Japs hell, and now we want ’em to hold off ’cause we’re gonna be riding on their targets.”

  “If MacArthur’s as close as I think he is,” Myers told them, “he’s sure to step up the bombing again, probably before the Japs can get us loaded. A few good bombing runs will scare ’em back into foxholes. We just need to buy a little more time.”

  It almost happened that way. At 0400 hours on December 13, the men were rousted off their mats, given their breakfast ration of repulsive and slimy rice, and at 0800 were told to fall in. The 1,619 POWs, which included 37 Brits, were forced to line up for the march out of Bilibid. They would leave behind approximately eight hundred prisoners who were so physically incapacitated that they couldn’t be moved. Myers knew without question that they would suffer slow starvation. It truly seemed that at this point, a quick mercy killing at the hands of their captors was a gruesomely attractive alternative.

  The guards roughly shoving the men into place were of a grim pedigree. They were mostly Formosan and included a lance corporal named Kazutane Aihara. The men from Cabanatuan knew him all too well. He had a penchant for sneaking up behind a prisoner and then beating him relentlessly with a bamboo staff. Once
he acquired his reputation at Cabanatuan and came near a group of prisoners, someone would yell “air raid” and all of them would take cover to avoid being beaten. Thus they had nicknamed him Air Raid.

  The guard commandant was Lieutenant Junsabura Toshino, who was never without his hunchbacked dwarf, Shusuke Wada. Wada served as interpreter. The two had a record of savage brutality at Davao Prison Camp.

  Under the watchful eyes of the brutish guards, the columns of POWs were about halfway out of the prison yard when the air raid alarm sounded. They were quickly reversed back into the yard and rushed to the Big House.

  The men, crouched in a tight knot and looking through the building’s cracked shutters, could see American planes peel off over the prison rooftops and let go of their ordnance, stick by stick. The Japanese answered with anti-aircraft fire, and that, combined with the bombs falling and shells exploding, created a deafening clamor. Although the men were terrified of dying from their own country’s bombs, the anticipation of an ensuing battle and maybe even freedom was overwhelming.

  “The port area is catching hell!” somebody shouted. “Our Yanks are back!”

  A short time later, however, the POWs watched dejectedly as the Allied planes flew away. Around 1030 hours, the columns of four were re-formed and the march began again, first out the prison gate, then into a continuous line around the prison walls, and finally out onto the streets of Manila.

  When the half-naked columns reached the waterfront, Myers saw the masts of Japanese ships poking through the surface of the bay, evidence that the American bombers had done their job. Three or four ships had been sunk while tied to the piers and several others floated on the water like soulful apparitions, their fire-gutted hulls gaping at the newly arrived POWs. Despite the fact that nearly ninety percent of the port area installations had been destroyed, the Japanese were able to protect seven ships in Manila Bay, including troop transports, a cruiser, several destroyers, and the passenger-cargo vessel named the Oryoku Maru.

  The Oryoku Maru had no markings to distinguish it as carrying prisoners of war; the Japanese claimed that their shipping losses didn’t allow them the luxury of designating ships for the exclusive purpose of carrying POWs. The ship’s size and shape reminded Myers of the Henderson. He calculated that her top speed would probably be around twenty knots. That would have them on Japanese soil in five days.

  The men also took notice of the fact that she had been outfitted with anti-aircraft guns. This sight brought with it the terrifying realization that the ship they were about to be forced onto could very well be a target of their own air force. The men scanned the skies, hoping for the sight of American aircraft that might prevent their loading, but no winged messengers of reprieve appeared.

  A large group of Japanese women and children, Imperial seamen, and stevedores were milling around the pier waiting to board. From the looks of the miscellaneous bundles, packages, and suitcases piled around the gangplank, it appeared to Myers as if the Japanese were leaving in a big hurry. He couldn’t tell exactly how many people there were in total, but it must have been well over a thousand, and he figured they were going to fill pretty much all the space topside. The only remaining space was in the cargo holds.

  The prisoners were divided into three groups and then ordered to wait some more while the Japanese boarded. Around 1700 hours, it was the POWs’ turn. The first group consisted of about eight hundred men, most of them high-ranking officers. The same men who had courageously led troops in the defense of the Philippines were now being driven at bayonet-point like worthless vermin. They were crammed into the aft cargo space through an eight-by-ten-foot hatch opening and down a decrepit ladder. These holds had no ventilation system, and this one had no air circulation because of bulkheads fore and aft. The hatch was the hold’s only source of air and light.

  A man is capable of holding his breath for two or three minutes, maybe more if he’s well practiced at it and in good physical condition. These men were neither. They had watched so many from among them die, and had lived such wretched lives the last three years, what remained were only shells of the men they once were. They weren’t prepared to be shoved into the bowels of a ship with little oxygen, and the feeling of near-suffocation panicked them immediately.

  The second group of POWs had six hundred men. They were pushed into the forward cargo hold with ruthless efficiency. These men faced a lack of oxygen, too, although it was somewhat less acute than in the aft hold. Nonetheless, the guards kept driving the men down into the hold as if they were a herd of animals, ignoring the protests that there was no more room. As he watched both processes, Myers heard the guards yelling and the distinctively familiar crack of wood and bamboo thrashing against human bodies.

  The final group of 219 men was somewhat better equipped both medically and spiritually. Myers, Tarpy, Tex, and the majority of the medical crew, along with seven chaplains, were herded into the amidships hold. The space had been previously used to transport horses, and on three sides, the compartments still held grain. The foul-smelling space had an air conditioner that had been used to make the animals as comfortable as possible, but Lieutenant Toshino refused to turn it on for the prisoners.

  The last man to be jammed in had to perch on the edge of a shelf suspended from the bulkhead. It was immediately evident that if the other men on the shelf had inhaled and expanded their chests at the same time, or moved collectively in any other way, this last man would have been shoved off the edge onto the men crowded below him. Suddenly the whole structure gave way, crushing the men below them. No one was seriously hurt, but the episode provided an apocalyptic beginning to the journey ahead. Around 1900 hours, the convoy shoved off, sailing out of Manila Bay and into the China Sea under blackout orders, hugging the coastline.

  The masses of humanity were packed into the holds so tightly that one man’s bones ground against his neighbors’ if he tried to reposition himself. Some of the men made arrangements to take turns in positions, trading between four hours of sitting and four hours of standing. The example caught on and spread to other areas of the hold. Many of the prisoners struggled to find a position that would afford them more air. But none of them gained anything, and the whole group suffered: the movement increased the temperature. The heat from the men’s bodies, along with the heat outside, brought the holds’ temperatures to more than one hundred and twenty degrees. Dehydration and suffocation competed for supremacy. Those commanders who were able shouted for the men to remain calm and hold still, but they were powerless to manufacture oxygen, and hysteria began to build.

  The men farthest from their hold’s hatch openings began to panic and were well on their way to being crazed from the oxygen deprivation even before the ship was out of Manila Bay. They all begged and screamed for water and more air. The cacophony enraged Wada, who threatened to close the hatches if the noise didn’t subside. Finally, in retaliation to his orders being ignored, he slammed the cover over the aft hold.

  Just before dark, the guards lowered buckets down to the men, some containing a seaweed-rice mixture, and some for benjo use, as much-needed toilets. Those who had mess kits or containers scooped up what they could of the food. But in the dark, it was impossible to determine what a bucket might contain. Myers heard several men near him tell another prisoner they were handing him food. When the man scraped up a mess kit full of excrement, the jokesters’ laughter sounded more like rabid animals’ howls than anything resembling human mirth.

  The cries of men who were half mad from suffocation and claustrophobia jarred the nerves of those who were still fairly mentally intact. Wada shouted down threats that he’d order the guards to shoot into the holds or lock up the hatches, making them airtight, if they didn’t quiet down. The wailing, he insisted, was frightening the women and children on board.

  In the inky black space, the men lost all track of time and direction. They were so hot that they stripped off all of their clothing. They argued savagely about taking o
ne another’s food or space. They begged the Japanese and one another for something to drink. Some realized they could drink the blood of those who had already suffocated to death. Others saw this and, not willing to wait for their neighbors to die, slashed the throats and wrists of living men who had drifted off to sleep. Still others, maddened by their desperate circumstances, drank their own urine after which they choked and vomited.

  Almost every man suffered from diarrhea or dysentery. Those who weren’t able to move quickly enough to get to the benjo buckets soiled themselves and their neighbors. It mattered little, because even those who did reach the buckets soon found them overflowing. The guards resolutely refused to empty them or send down more. The stench from excrement was intense. But the stench of death was even greater. Nearly fifty men died that first night.

  As daylight came slowly on the morning of December 14, Myers looked closely at Tex and Tarpy. They were both alive but their skin was wrinkled as if they’d been in water all night. Looking at his own hands and arms, Myers saw his skin resembled a prune, too.

  “Must be from the humidity of us all sweating and breathing cramped into such a small space,” Myers said, his breath shallow. The other two feebly agreed, watching men lick condensation off the bulkhead like rabid dogs lapping up a mud puddle.

  The commanding officers who still had a presence of mind tried desperately to restore order. They enjoined that every effort be made to separate the men who were still alive from those who were dead, and that the latter be put under the hatch opening. As soon as possible, they planned to ask the Japanese for permission to haul them up on deck and give them a burial at sea.

  The prisoners did as they had been commanded. Two men hauled a dead buddy through the masses and laid him out. The area underneath the hatch had more air circulation than the back of the hold where the men were so tightly packed. Given this chance at a little oxygen, the man who had been presumed dead revived and crawled back to his former spot in the hold.