Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  They started on Parks first. One clown hit him on the head with a rifle butt and sent him sprawling, and the rest joined in with their fists and boots. Now it was Gordon’s turn.

  The first blow caught him in the face and filled him with fury. He had come of age in the streets of New York, a rangy kid from Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, and when the punch landed square on his nose, he thought, “Son of a bitch! I’ve never put up with this kind of crap in my life and I’m not going to start now.”

  They hit him again, and again, and he thought, “Okay, so you take a beating, you take a beating and you live.”

  THEY SEEMED to go off without warning, stoics one moment, lunatics the next.

  They beat the prisoners as viciously as their sergeants and lieutenants beat them—slapped them, punched them, kicked them, boxed their ears, bashed their skulls, broke their bones.

  They beat them for looking this way or that, for moving or not moving fast enough, for talking or keeping still—beat them for everything and for nothing at all.

  It was their duty to beat the prisoners, and for some their pleasure as well. The same sadists who had turned the training barracks back home into crucibles of cruelty roamed the lines of helpless horyo, inveighing them with orders they did not understand then slam-banging them for being bakana, stupid.

  ARMY MEDIC Sidney Stewart, standing in the ranks at Mariveles waiting to be searched, watched a guard coming down the line punch a soldier in the face. The soldier was young, a fledgling, and afraid, and he cried out in pain—a form of protest, as the Japanese saw it, that always invited more punishment. The guard raised the butt end of his rifle and bashed the soldier in the head. The boy sagged to his knees, groaning, and the guard raised his rifle for another blow. This time, he split the boy’s skull. The American twitched and shuddered in the dirt for a few moments, then he was quiet and did not move again.

  Watching this, Sidney Stewart felt a “black hatred” begin to “boil” in his brain. He had thought himself a Christian man, small town (Watonga, Oklahoma), and full of faith. His religion had carried him through the bombing of Manila and the battle of Bataan, but this, standing there watching a guard bludgeon a comrade to death, this seemed to mock and reprove his piety, and the urge “to tear” his enemy “limb from limb,” to “kill for the sheer pleasure of killing,” overwhelmed him.11

  APRIL 10, the day after surrender, the Japanese started their prisoners walking.

  Groups of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred and more were herded into lines or loose formations (sometimes flanked by a brace of guards at either end, sometimes not) and told to get on the road. The ragged, disorganized groups of men set off at intervals. Half the 76,000 captives began the trek April 10 near Mariveles, at the tip of the peninsula, but every day for some ten days thereafter at various points along the thirty miles of road between Mariveles and Balanga, the provincial capital, roughly halfway up the peninsula, yet another rabble of Filipinos or Americans would come down from the hills or emerge from the jungle, and the Japanese would gather them into groups and head them north up the Old National Road.12

  To label the movement a “march,” as the men took to calling it, was something of a misnomer. During the first few days of walking there were so many men on the road, one bunch following closely behind another, they appeared a procession without end, prisoners as far as the eye could see, mile after mile after mile of tired, filthy, bedraggled men, heads bowed, feet dragging through the ankle-deep dust.

  They walked the sixty-six miles in stages. For those who started at the tip of the peninsula, stage one was a stretch of road that ran east nine miles to Cabcaben. There the road turned north and proceeded along Bataan’s east coast some twenty-seven miles, passing through the town squares of Lamao, Limay, Orion, Pilar, Balanga, Abucay, Samal, Orani, and Hermosa. At Hermosa the Old National Road turned west toward Layac Junction, then northeast for eleven miles across a torrid, sandy plain to Lubao, then continuing northeast to San Fernando—in all from Mariveles 66 road miles, 106 kilometers, 140,000 footfalls.

  Some days the prisoners trekked ten miles, other days fifteen, twenty, or more. And hard miles they were. More than half the Old National Road on Bataan was a rural road—its base stone and crushed coral, its surface fine sand—built for the light traffic of the provinces. Four months of army convoys had churned up the hardpan, leaving potholes and sinkholes that tripped the men and shards of gravel that sliced up their shoes and boots.

  They walked in the most torrid time of year, tag-init, the Filipinos called it, the days of dryness, the season of drought. From March to May the sun hung flame white and unshrouded in the Philippine sky, searing everything under it. By early afternoon the air was an oven, the hardpan as hot as kiln bricks.

  ______

  LIEUTENANT SAMUEL GOLDBLITH of Lawrence, Massachusetts, started walking at Mariveles with a full pack—an extra uniform, underwear, socks, blanket, raincoat, shaving kit, stationery, mess kit, canteen, and a pink cotton towel, a keepsake from his wife’s trousseau. It wasn’t long before he had pitched everything save his canteen, mess kit, and Diana’s pink towel, which he used as a mantilla to keep the sun from baking his head.13

  Goldblith guessed he was bound for a prison camp somewhere in the islands, but where he could not say. One rumor had them being interned in Manila’s Bilibid Prison, another had them bound for the railhead at San Fernando, but this information was of little use or comfort since few men were familiar with the local geography and had no real sense of the distances involved or the difficulty traversing them. They were walking, that’s all they knew, walking in the heat and dust, eyes burning and throats parched, wondering where they were going and when they would get there.

  Richard Gordon happened to be walking in a group that included Brigadier General Clifford Bluemel. Gordon had seen Bluemel in action and remembered him as “a spicy little bastard.” Somewhere between Mariveles and Cabcaben, the Japanese had grabbed the general and started him walking, and along the way some of the guards decided to have a little fun.

  They circled the general, then made him squat with his fingers locked behind his neck and started turning him in circles. When he lost his equilibrium and toppled over, they laughed—oh, how they laughed—and when he fought to keep his balance, his poise (“The man is a tough nut,” Gordon thought), they kicked his feet out from under him and howled that much harder.14

  The looting went on as well. Units of Imperial Infantry were encamped beside the Old National Road, awaiting new orders and watching the parade of prisoners. Though most prisoners had been stripped clean by the time they reached Cabcaben, now and then a hohei resting along the road would get curious.

  Sergeant James Gautier, an Air Corps mechanic from Moss Point, Mississippi, felt a hand grab his shirt and pull him out of formation. Another shakedown, he reckoned. All he had left was his wallet, and the Japanese was flipping through the folds, looking for something of value when he came upon a snapshot of a woman.

  “Waifu, Waifu?” the Japanese soldier said. Gautier nodded, then the soldier dropped the picture in the dirt, stepped on it, and ground it with the heel of his hobnail boot.15

  So this is what it meant to be a prisoner of war, thought Robert Levering, a Manila lawyer from Ohio who had volunteered to serve on Bataan. This is what it felt like to “come to the end of civilization.”16

  PAST MARIVELES that first day, the highway ran flat for a few miles, then rose sharply in a series of steep switchbacks that had been cut into the side of an escarpment. The precipitous switchbacks were known as “the zigzag.” Unfolded, this accordion section of road was less than a mile, but its angle of ascent—520 feet in less than two-tenths of a mile—was so acute that the back-and-forth climb was a tough one, especially at the height of the hot season. And for men left weak and exhausted by disease, hunger, thirst, and fear, the ascent was torture.

  One hairpin turn after another blocked the marchers’ view and made the climb seem endle
ss: another incline, another turn, another incline, up, up again, up some more.

  On the outside turns, the road dropped off sharply into deep ravines, stories deep, many of them, with boulders, stumps, trees, and tangled underbrush waiting at the bottom.

  The labor of climbing the switchbacks under a tropical sun left the men gasping with each step, and it was not long before some of them began to collapse and crawl to the shoulder of the road.

  The guards accompanying the first columns climbing the zigzag seemed to ignore the dropouts, but prisoners in later columns began to spot bodies at the bottom of the ravines, bodies wearing familiar uniforms.

  PROM THE TOP of the zigzag the road ran flat and east, seven and a half miles to the seaside town of Cabcaben on Manila Bay. Along this stretch the marchers now began to encounter an increasing number of Japanese trucks, tanks, and horse-drawn artillery, all moving south to stage for the invasion of Corregidor.

  Many of these trucks carried troops, and as these vehicles passed the columns of prisoners, Japanese soldiers would lean out with a bamboo staff or a length of wood or the butt end of a rifle and, like a polo player bearing down on a ball, swing their cudgels at the heads of the men marching along in the crowded ranks on the road.

  They fractured a lot of skulls, smashed a number of jaws, dislocated scores of shoulders. Now and then a truck would swerve sharply toward a column, and the Japanese riding shotgun would throw his door open to catch a marcher flush in the face.

  “Let’s stay on the inside row in the column,” Humphrey O’Leary told his friend Phil Murray. “If we march on the other side, the Japs will bash us in the head.”17

  Here came a truckful of soldiers holding lengths of rope as long as whips, lashing laggers on the road. One whip caught a prisoner around the neck, and the Japanese in the truck started to reel him in as the truck kept going. The poor man was twisting this way and that, dragging through the cinders. About a hundred feet later he was finally able to free himself, and he got to his feet, clothes shredded, skin lanced and bleeding, and looked back down the road.

  “You bastards!” he yelled after the truck. “I’ll live to piss on your graves.”18

  A MILE beyond the top of the zigzag, the columns of prisoners passed the entrance to one of the large American field hospitals, part of the headquarters and service area that had been tucked in the American rear. The Japanese had bombed and shelled the service area often during their second attack, fire that left the hospital in ashes. Now wandering among its charred ruins were scores of wounded Filipino soldiers who had been treated there. Many were still in their hospital pajamas or bathrobes, grimy now with dirt and soot. Their wounds and stumps were beginning to suppurate and their bloody bandages and dressings needed changing.

  Major William “Ed” Dyess of Albany, Texas, an Air Corps pilot in the line of march, watched Japanese guards herd the sick and wounded Filipinos out of the hospital grounds and set them walking. To Dyess these “bomb-shocked cripples” had a look of “hopelessness in their eyes,” and they stumbled along stoop shouldered for more than a mile before “their strength ebbed and they began falling back through the marching ranks” and to the side of the road.19

  Zoeth Skinner of Portland, Oregon, came astride a Filipino amputee hobbling along on crutches. Japanese infantrymen camped along the way yelled and laughed at the cripple, poked him with sticks, tried to make him stumble. A while later farther up the road, Skinner noticed a tail of white gauze dragging in the dirt ahead of him. At the other end of the tail, twenty feet forward, was a man with a bandaged leg, struggling against his wound, his dressing unraveling as he walked.20

  AT FIRST the marchers tried to keep their sense of society, their culture of comradeship, and help one another. The lucky ones, men like Humphrey O’Leary and Phil Murray, were able to “buddy-up” and watch out for each other, but in the chaos of the surrender and the first commotion of captivity, friends became separated, and men like Ben Steele and Richard Gordon and Dominick Giantonio of Hartford, Connecticut, found themselves in the ranks of strangers, lending a hand when a hand was needed.

  “Get up!”

  “Let’s go!”

  “Don’t fall, they’ll get you.”

  Against despair, however, each man had to struggle alone. Ed Dyess got a “sort of sinking feeling” every time he saw a Ford or Chevrolet truck bearing Imperial Japanese Army insignia, prewar American exports (or a little piece of home, as Dyess saw it) packed now with enemy troops who jeered at him as they passed by.21

  Colonel Richard Mallonée from Utah was a veteran of the old horse-drawn artillery, and when he felt low he distracted himself by studying the equipage of his Japanese counterparts. Each time a horse-drawn limber and caisson came along, Mallonée noted the condition of the animals—Were they in good flesh? Well-groomed and properly harnessed?—and the bearing of the men riding them.22

  Lester Tenney of Chicago set goals for himself. Make it as far as “the next bend in the road,” he thought, or up to that “herd of carabao in the distance.” He also had a dream—“Without a dream,” he figured, his “resolve would weaken”—a dream of home. He held hard to the image of his wife, Laura, his reason, he told himself, for living. And to keep his dream safe, he tucked a picture of her in his sock, telling himself it gave each step purpose.23

  THE SUN was inescapable. It blistered their skin, baked their shoulders and backs, beat on their heads. Some men had managed to keep their helmets, some wore hats or caps or took rags and handkerchiefs and knotted the ends to fashion a sort of cap, but many men had no cover at all and walked bare-headed under the blazing sun.

  The sweat soaked their clothes and streamed down their faces. It mixed with the thick dust and created a kind of gray sludge that ran into their eyes, stuck in their beards, caked on their clothing. They looked like ghosts of themselves mantled in gray, tramping along in a pall.

  As each ragged group of men reached Cabcaben, the southernmost town on the peninsula’s east shore and the place where the Old National Road turned north up the coast, they were halted and put in a holding area—a dry rice paddy, field, or section of runway at Cabcaben’s jungle airstrip. From what the men could tell, there were a number of these marshaling yards in Cabcaben, places where the disorderly processions of prisoners from Mariveles were reorganized.

  In the holding areas, the men were made to sit feet to back for hours at a time before moving on (the “sun treatment,” they came to call it). At last, when they were ready, the guards rushed in among them, screaming, kicking, and flogging the men to their feet, then herded them onto the road where they were arranged into regular marching columns, three or four ranks across, a hundred to four hundred men in each column, with a handful of guards assigned to walk the flanks and bring up the rear.

  By now the prisoners’ hunger was starting to gnaw at them. They had been half starved before surrender and most had not had a scrap of food since. Even more pressing was their thirst. In the chaos at Cabcaben, only occasionally did the Japanese allow the prisoners to fill their canteens from a nearby stream. Most went without water and they rapidly dehydrated and began to suffer heat exhaustion: their temples pounded with pain, their heads felt afire, they became disoriented and wobbly with vertigo.

  Back on the road, the guards yelled at them to pick up the pace.

  “Speedo,” they shouted, walking or riding bicycles beside the formations. “Speedo! Speedo!”

  Some guards, laughing, started their columns running.

  BEN STEELE was watching for socks.

  Men were starting to blister. Big blisters, the size of a half-dollar, blisters in clusters, breaking and bleeding with every step. Some men used sharp rocks to make slits in their shoes and boots, makeshift sandals, but their feet were so swollen the skin just bulged painfully through the openings. Others removed their footwear and walked barefoot, wincing with every step.

  He had to find dry socks or soon he too would be hobbled. Ben Steele pawed through
packs and bags abandoned along the road. Finally, somewhere north of Cabcaben, he saw what he’d been looking for.

  A corpse lay on the shoulder just ahead. The dead man was wearing garrison shoes, low quarters instead of work boots, and the laces were untied and loose.

  Ben Steele removed one of the shoes, stripped off the sock, and was reaching for the other foot when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a guard headed his way and dashed back to his place in the column.

  “What the hell were you doing back there with that dead guy?” said one of his fellow marchers.

  “You gotta take care of your feet,” Ben Steele said, “or you’re not going to get very far.”

  MEN HAD BEEN PALLING by the wayside since the zigzag, but the guards had been so busy collecting all the captives and getting them on the road that they had paid the dropouts little attention. After the prisoners were put in columns at Cabcaben, however, the guards in charge of each formation started watching their prisoners more closely, and now when a man went down, a Japanese was soon standing over him.

  “Hayaku täte!”

  The order was unintelligible but the meaning of the kick that followed, the hard toe of a hobnail boot, was clear. Get up! Get up immediately or . . .

  The fallen tried to raise themselves, tried to pull their knees under them, push up on all fours, but their heads, thick from fever, pulled them down, and their muscles, wasted by months of malnutrition, collapsed under them.

  “Hayaku! Hayaku!”

  THE JAPANESE type 30 bayonet was twenty inches long, overall, with a fifteen-inch blade. The weapon looked more like a Roman sword than a knife-bayonet, and when it was fixed to the end of a fifty-inch Arisaka rifle, it gave the hohei a kind of a pike, a five-and-a-half-foot spear.