Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  By then, of course, the sun was up and the boxcars were beginning to bake. In the hot, smothering dark some men lost control and began to claw, punch, and grab at one another, anything to get from the middle of the car to the sides where they might find a crack in the wooden slats and suck some fresh air.

  A number of men in the middle fainted, and a number of others died. (The cars were packed so tight that the lifeless figures were often left standing for the three-hour trip.)

  Ben Steele was lucky. One of the last men in the car, he found a spot on a side wall and could breathe between the slats. A man standing behind him tried to muscle him out of the way—“Move, you fucker, or I’ll break your fucking neck”—but Ben Steele was willing to take punishment, and return it, to keep his spot. Behind him men were dying—he could hear their death throes, for Christ’s sake!—but he held his ground and his pity and fought for his sliver of light, his few breaths of fresh air.

  SOME GUARDS kept the doors closed all the way, but others opened them as soon as the trains picked up speed, and they allowed the men to take turns in the open doorways.

  In the towns and villages down the line, people had gathered along the tracks with food and water. Many of the trains were driven by Filipino engineers, and they slowed their engines as they passed through the stations so the locals could toss their gifts into the open doors or run alongside the platform holding up cans of water. Most prisoners shared what they shagged, but in every car there was at least one man who turned his back and a deaf ear to the pleas of his comrades.

  After twenty-two slow miles of this, the trains finally stopped at the station at Capas, Tarlac and the prisoners spilled out and onto the platform. The living were ordered to drag out the dead, and they set the bodies alongside the tracks, shoulder to shoulder, faceup in the sun. Then the prisoners formed up again and started walking on a road that ran west toward the Zambales Mountains in the distance.

  Most men wondered whether they were about to make another march—“Where the hell are we going now?”—but officers who had worked in the province before the war guessed they were headed just down the road about three miles to the site of what was to have been a temporary cantonment for a division of the Philippine Army—a steaming 617-acre tract of abandoned rice paddies and rolling grassland with rows of partially completed barracks and buildings, Camp O’Donnell.

  WHEN BEN STEELE SAW BARBED WIRE and watchtowers, he was relieved.

  “At least,” he thought, “this is where we’re going.”

  They entered the camp through a main gate then walked up a rise in front of a two-story headquarters building. Beside the building was a watchtower topped by a large Japanese flag (“the flaming red asshole,” the men called it). To the right of the tower, facing the headquarters building, was a makeshift parade ground. Here the arriving columns finally stopped.

  Japanese guards in fresh white shirts and wielding wooden cudgels scooted among the prisoners shoving them into ranks.

  “Narabe!” they shouted. “Line up!” “Kiotsuke!” “Attention!”

  They searched them again (yet another shakedown) and after a long wait (another sun treatment), the door to Japanese headquarters opened, and a middle-aged officer appeared on the porch, followed by a much younger man. The two descended the steps, crossed to the front of the parade ground, and mounted a raised platform.1

  “Watashi wa Tsuneyoshi Yoshio Taii de, kono shyjo no shocha da.” “I’m Captain Yoshio Tsuneyoshi and I’m the commandant of this camp,” he said through his interpreter.

  “Kimitachi wa meiyoaru horyo ja nai,” the commandant continued. “You are not honorable prisoners of war; you are captives! So don’t expect to be treated well.” It was a shame, he said, that he couldn’t kill all of them, but the code of Bushido demanded that true warriors show mercy, and as a true warrior he was bound by the code. Still, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a man if he disobeyed any of the camp rules or, of course, if he tried to escape. Let any man try to slip away, he said, and nine of his comrades would be executed. Obedience, that was the key; if they obeyed orders and instructions, he said, they might go home, and if they didn’t, they would die. Then he delivered a harangue on race and politics that varied somewhat from one group of prisoners to the next but, essentially, went something like this: America was finished in East Asia; Japan had seen to that. And Nippon would keep fighting till it had won the war, even if the war lasted a hundred years. “You will always be our enemies,” he said.3

  Since April 11, when the first two hundred prisoners reached O’Donnell, Tsuneyoshi had made it his practice to address each group of arrivals. Colonel Michael Quinn of Kansas City, Kansas, among the first men in O’Donnell, thought the commandant a “funny-looking creature, dressed in a white shirt, like our sport shirts, a pair of very baggy shorts, [polished] riding boots with spurs,” and a sword that hung loosely from his belt.2

  Some men were dispirited by the performance, but most, like Air Corps mechanic Cletis Overton of Rolla, Arkansas, stood there watching the commandant “just a-screamin’ and a-carryin’ on” and thought to himself, “this guy’s crazy.”

  Afterward, the new arrivals were turned over to their officers. Tsuneyoshi had appointed General Ned King “prisoner commander,” which made him responsible for the maintenance of the camp and the behavior of his men. King was ordered to instruct all prisoners on the camp rules, and while he later delegated this job to subalterns, when the first groups of men came shuffling and staggering through O’Donnell’s front gate, King was there to greet them.

  You men remember this—you didn’t give up, I did. I did the surrendering. I surrendered you; you didn’t surrender. I’m the one that has the responsibility for that. You let me carry it. All I ask is that you obey the orders of the Japanese so we do not provoke the enemy any more than he already is.4

  He believed what he told them, and no amount of sophistry from his staff could convince him otherwise. His army was the largest army under American command ever to have been captured, and the dark dishonor of that act belonged to him. Everything that followed from his surrender—the bodies that still littered the Old National Road, the bodies they pulled from the boxcars, the bodies beginning to pile up in this hellhole of a camp—all of it was his responsibility. He was sure, he told them, his career was over. He’d be cashiered, court-martialed, maybe even jailed when he got home. It was up to him to carry the blame, he said, suffer the censure and disgrace.

  And his men loved him for that. They loved him because he was sharing their fate, their misery, their stinging loss. Whenever he addressed them in O’Donnell, they would afterward talk of his eyes, so heavy with sadness.5

  BEN STEELE didn’t like all the bowing (“Like this, from the waist,” the interpreter instructed). It made him feel like a slave. And to the Japanese, that’s what he was. Tsuneyoshi had chosen his words carefully. To be a horyo, a prisoner of war, was indeed a disgrace, but a horyo at least was still considered a soldier, a failure of a soldier to be sure, but a man-at-arms nonetheless. But a toraware no mi, the commandant’s phrase, was a captive, and a captive was nothing more than chattel, part of the spoils of war, like a horse or a cow, something to be used, then discarded. And the same idea was behind all the bowing. In Japan one bowed atama o sageru, as a sign of respect. Here, however, the guards in the clean white shirts weren’t looking for respect; they wanted kuppuku suru, a bow of complete submission, something a Montana boy found hard to give.

  He was hot and tired, one of 1,188 Americans that came out of the boxcars that day, April 18, 1942. After the speeches and instructions, the men were turned loose to find their barracks, and as Ben Steele wandered away from the formation toward a group of prisoners who had arrived earlier, he noticed a familiar face.

  Q. P. Devore was astounded. His pal Ben Steele had lost so much weight the guy looked like a walking cadaver.

  “Goddamn, Ben,” Q.P. said. “I can hardly recognize you.”

  They settled dow
n to talk. Q.P. had been lucky. He’d been taken prisoner midway up the peninsula and had been part of a small group of men that had been picked up by a truck on the way to San Fernando. The ride had spared him many of the deprivations of the march, and compared to many others, he seemed in good shape, better shape at least than his emaciated buddy.

  Don’t worry, he told Ben Steele. “The word around camp is we’re gonna be out of here pretty soon. They say thirty days. The Americans are gonna clean the Jap plows in thirty days. They’ll be back.”

  THE JAPANESE had divided O’Donnell into two prison camps. The Filipino camp sat on one side of the road from Capas, the American compound on the other. The facilities, if they could be called that, were the same: open-air barracks buildings constructed of bamboo poles and rattan lashings with half walls of woven sawali and roofs of nipa leaves or corrugated tin. The men slept on shelves that ran the length of the buildings. The barracks were organized by units, the Air Corps here, the artillery there and so on.

  As a cantonment for a division of 20,000 native troops, the camp might have been adequate, but the Japanese jammed more than 56,000 (9,270 Americans and almost 47,000 Filipinos) into that small square mile of steaming grassland and jungle scrub.6

  [Diary of Captain Alvin Poweleit, prison camp doctor, April 17, 1942, Camp O’Donnell] The medical situation [is] disastrous . . . I wonder how long a person can stand this situation. I know I’m losing weight, but I’m still in better condition than most of the other men. I finally got to sleep and woke up about daybreak as the Japanese guards tramped through the area.

  [Poweleit Diary, April 18] As more prisoners poured into camp, more sick were placed in the hospital. Already the [hospital] area was filled with [sick] prisoners milling around defecating anywhere, until there was nowhere to stand that was not defiled by human waste. Men were lying, sleeping and dying in their own waste . . .

  [Poweleit Diary, April 19] A large group of prisoners [1,188] came in [yesterday]. They were more pitiful than the previous group. Practically none of them had blankets. Only a few had towels. Some wore shorts, and many were bare-footed. These prisoners had swollen legs which were covered with sores, some with maggots crawling over them . . .

  Shortly after midnight a storm broke . . . The rain came down in sheets. The men who were able, ran into the various barracks, while the rest just laid on the ground. Each time the wind died down, you could hear the men coughing and moaning. In the morning all over this one area (between our barracks and the main hospital) were the dying and the dead.7

  The 617-acre site had only one artesian well with a working pump in its reservoir. The pump pushed the water through a narrow pipe, five-eighths of an inch in diameter. The pipe delivered water to both camps, but with only a few spigots for each side, the men had to queue up for a drink. On the American side, one of the faucets was reserved for the exclusive use of the hospital huts, and that left just two faucets for general use, two water faucets to slake the thirst of nearly nine thousand men.

  To make matters worse, the Japanese, always short on petrol, issued restrictions on the number of hours the well pump could run. So the water lines were often more than half a mile long—two thousand men standing in line for twenty hours or more, standing there from well before dawn till well after dark to get just one canteen, one quart, of water.

  Before long, some of the men in the barracks organized themselves into water brigades, eight to ten prisoners taking turns fetching water for the others, especially those too weak to walk. The designated Gunga Din attached the canteens to a bamboo pole and took his place in the long queue that wound its way through the camp.

  [From the notebooks of Colonel James V. Collier] As [the water line inched forward, thousands of empty aluminum canteens] striking [against one] other tinkled like bells . . . The tinkle of the canteens could be heard almost any hour of the day or night. I believe I shall hear that doleful tinkling—a mournful sounding of the doom of the damned—as long as I live. On many more occasions than I like to remember, a man who was told to move along as the line had started to move [again] was found to have quietly passed-on.8

  Army medic Sidney Stewart looked at the men in the water line and thought of the catatonics he’d seen in hospitals back home. “They [stood there looking] at the ground, shuffling their feet. None of them talked . . . Out of their blank eyes came a stare of detachment, of receding within themselves, trying desperately not to be a part of all that was around them.”9

  When the pumps were broken or the Japanese shut them down, the line would stop, and Marine Irwin Scott would sit on the ground where he was, take a nap, and dream, the same dream each time: He was stretched out “in an old enamel bathtub with claw feet . . . under a waterfall,” his “head back, mouth open, catching the clearest blue water” anyone had ever seen.10

  BEN STEELE started praying.

  He’d never asked God for anything, but he’d been having one malaria attack after another, terrible chills followed by long sweats that left him dry, dry as an alkali flat. He’d been thirsty on the march, thirsty on the train, thirsty waiting on the water line.

  He tried to distract himself, think of something else, anything else, but his mind was fixed on water—the cool, crystalline spring at Hawk Creek, the April rains along the Yellowstone.

  In the barracks he tried to lose himself in sleep, but the sleeping shelves were made of split bamboo and the planks dug into his hips and back, keeping him awake. His throat felt raw, his tongue swollen.

  “God,” he prayed, “please help me find a drink.”

  He begged his bunkmates to share their canteens. “Come on, just a sip. What the hell’s the matter with you guys?” Finally, one man relented.

  “Here,” he said, watching closely. “Remember, fella, just a couple of swallows.”

  On the third day of his thirst, Ben Steele returned to the water line. Two hours, five hours, eight hours. In the afternoon, the Japanese shut down the line and he walked away thirstier than before.

  His malarial attacks were becoming more frequent. Sometimes he shook so violently he thought he could feel his brain rattling against his skull. One day, he fainted.

  When he came to, he was facedown in the dirt, and men were stepping over him, walking around him.

  He eased himself up on his elbows, looked around. Nearby was an officers’ barracks. He crawled there on his hands and knees and propped himself up under a window.

  He could hear men inside, talking. He could also hear a canteen cap clanking against the side of the flask. The officers had water! (He remembered some of the men saying they’d seen officers hoarding five-gallon cans.)

  “Please, sirs!” he yelled, as loud as he could. “Please, can I have a drink?”

  No one answered. Maybe they didn’t hear him.

  “Please, sirs! I need water!”

  He passed out again, came to, passed out a third time. It was late afternoon now. He waited for the sun to set, and with great effort dragged himself back to his barracks.

  “Damn, Ben, you look awful,” Q.P. said.

  “I’m sick,” Ben Steele said.

  From somewhere his friend fetched him a few gulps, then, glancing furtively around the barracks, Q.P. reached into his pocket and took out a small brown bottle.

  “Quinine,” he whispered. “Here, take one. Found ’em in a medic’s bag along the road on the march.”

  At the edge of the camp was a small stream polluted by runoff from nearby barrios. American officers tried to keep their men from washing and bathing in, and drinking from, this viscous brook—only the camp kitchens were authorized to draw water there, water they boiled to cook rice—but many prisoners, Ben Steele among them, were so crazed with thirst they would volunteer to haul water for the camp mess just so they could sneak a drink from the pestilent creek.

  [Potveleit Diary, April 20] The sick were crammed shoulder to shoulder [in the hospital] buildings. Most of them had no clothes on, nor blankets . . . Coughing,
groaning and moaning were continuous.

  [Potveleit Diary, April 23] Most of our cases were malaria, dysentery (bacillary and amoebic) and beriberi . . . We had all kinds of undiagnosed cases. Some are possibly dengue fever, yaws and tropical ulcers . . . Practically all the men had some type of scurvy (Vitamin C deficiency). Their gums were bleeding and their teeth were loose. Some of the dysentery patients developed corneal ulcers which perforated and collapsed the eye globe. There was nothing that could be done for these poor souls.11

  THEY ATE RICE. Rice with stones, dirt, and weevils. They steamed it, stewed it, made it into soup. Sometimes they supplemented the rice with vegetables—camotes, a poor-man’s sweet potato, kangkong, a spinachlike vine commonly known in America as swamp cabbage, as well as other assorted, and often unidentifiable, leaves and weeds. Once in a while they got meat (beef or carabao), but the ration was so small—one pound twice a month for every fifty men, or a third of an ounce per prisoner—it appeared as nothing more than flecks floating in the dirty rice.

  Starving men will eat anything, and much of the camp was picked clean of weeds and cogon grass. Army Corporal Johnny Aldrich told himself, “If cows and horses can eat grass, I can eat grass, too.” He tried it raw first but couldn’t get the bitter stuff down, then he took his forage to a friend in the camp kitchen, who boiled the long blades into a brown and green stew.12

  They ate in the open, sitting or squatting in the dirt, spooning or fingering their food with one hand and swatting away the flies with the other. On the average they were given eighteen ounces of food a day (fifteen hundred calories and thirty grams of protein), half of what a healthy adult man (under ideal conditions and doing moderate work) needed to live. For sick men—and almost all of the Americans and Filipinos at O’Donnell suffered from something—this prison-camp “diet” was a disaster.