The lack of nutrients aggravated and accelerated their malaria, dengue fever, blackwater fever, diphtheria, and pneumonia, and left them suffering from a host of painful, and lethal, conditions: wet beriberi (with its gross edema), scurvy (which made their noses bleed and their teeth fall out), pellagra (a feeling of pins in their skin accompanied by severe diarrhea), nyctalopia (night blindness), amblyopia (day blindness or loss of vision), tinnitus (ringing in the ears), vertigo (severe disorientation), burning feet, conjunctivitis (severe itching and burning in the eyes), and gross peripheral neuropathy (their limbs went completely numb).
Far and away, however, the worst of their maladies was dysentery. So many men had come into camp with it (a third? half?) the slit trenches they dug—and they dug them regularly—filled within days. And like the foul holding pens of Balanga and Orion along the route of the march, Camp O’Donnell started to look and smell like a sewer. Men who were too weak to walk fouled themselves wherever they happened to be when the urge seized them.
Without enough sulfa drugs to stop it, dysentery was soon epidemic. The barracks became so noxious, men started sleeping outside on the ground, if they could find an unsoiled patch of dirt for a bed. Coming up the road from Capas some weeks after the camp opened, Medical Corps Captain John H. Browe of Burlington, Vermont, caught wind of O’Donnell miles before he ever set eyes on it.
“This,” he thought, “must be the smell of a charnel house.”13
Within a week of the prisoners’ arrival, O’Donnell was aswarm with bluebottle or blowflies, a great buzzing mass of them, and their eerie vibrato filled the camp day and night.
[Poweleit Diary, April 26] Sunday morning was clear and nice. The chaplains held services but many who attended last Sunday were not there to attend this one.
[Poweleit Diary, April 27] A number of our doctors were sick with malaria and dysentery. Actually we have only about twelve medical officers who were able to work. The rest were sick. Each time a [new group of men arrived] with a doctor, the doctor was as sick as his men so the workload was not eased . . . I was called over to see a couple of men who were having difficulty breathing. I looked in their mouth and saw what appeared to be a large black membrane. I am sure that this was diphtheria . . . A tracheotomy was attempted using a piece of rubber tube and a safety pin, but these cases were so far gone that it was impossible to do much for them.
[Poweleit Diary, April 28] Tuesday morning we tried to get some diphtheria anti-toxin but it was a useless attempt—a waste of time. The Japanese did not care. They were busy trying to win the war.
[Poweleit Diary, April 29] Nothing much to do but try to comfort the sick without medicine, giving them guava tea which did not do much good. We attempted to enforce some sanitation rules but made little progress.14
Every man was forced to look inward. Those who saw nothing—and there were many of them—abandoned all hope of ever seeing home again. It was almost as if death itself had become contagious, and men who should have survived, men in halfway decent shape, lost their will to live.
Men of faith found themselves praying for their lives. Every night Second Lieutenant Philip Brain of Libby, Minnesota, slept outside on the ground with his canteen for a pillow (so no one would steal it), staring at the stars and thinking of “a different world” and the loving God he believed was looking down on him.15
In that miserable place, however, many a man mislaid his religion. Mormon Gene Jacobsen, an Air Corps supply sergeant from Montpelier, Indiana, lost his capacity for forgiveness. “I’m going to do everything I can to survive,” he promised himself, “and then I’m going to get even with these sons of bitches.”16
Zoeth Skinner, who had grown up relying more on his wits than on his parents, believed in himself. Lying in a camp hospital hut with malaria, he noticed that most of his ward mates were too sick to feed themselves.
“Hey, buddy,” he’d ask, “you going to eat that chow?”
“I can’t eat nothin’,” they’d always say, too weak even to raise themselves off the floor. “I just can’t.”
So Skinner ate the food, ate it right there in front of them.
“I’m going to do what I need to do to live,” he told himself17
SOME MEN WERE SELFLESS, buddies from the same unit looking out for one another, keeping an eye on the sick and weak, giving a bit of comfort to the dying. Empathy, however, and the altruism that sometimes accompanied it, was the exception that proved the crudest of rules: In prison camp, more often than not, men revealed what Darwin called “the indelible stamp of [their] lowly origin.”18
When his malaria got worse, infantryman Richard Gordon dragged himself to one of the huts in the hospital compound and encountered a short man wearing a white armband with a small red cross, sitting at a wooden crate, a makeshift ward desk.
“I’m sick,” Gordon told the American medic. “I need something.”
The man could see Gordon’s tremors, hear his teeth chattering.
“We don’t have any quinine for you,” he said. “Sorry.”
But there in front of him on the crate Gordon could see a brown bottle of white tablets, medicine Gordon recognized from his visits to the field hospitals on Bataan.
“That’s quinine, isn’t it?” Gordon said.
“Yeah, that’s quinine,” the medic said, “but that’s my personal stock.”
“Your personal stock? What the hell—”
“Yeah, mine, pal. And you can buy it, two dollars apiece.”
Gordon thought, “You little son of a bitch!”
“I’ll see you in hell first,” he told the man and dragged himself away.
He could feel himself failing and he staggered around the compound, not knowing where to go or what to do. At length he wandered into the kitchen shack, where he’d been assigned to work, and curled up in a corner. He was conscious, he could hear and see what was going on around him, but he was shaking so violently all he could do was lie there.
“What’s the story with that guy?” he heard someone say.
“Don’t worry about him,” someone else answered. “He’s had it.”
He thought, “I’m right here next to them and they’re talking about me dying.” Was he really that bad, that close to the end? Then he felt someone cover him with something, empty rice sacks. Were they trying to keep him warm or drape him with a winding sheet, a shroud?
“Dick? Dick?”
He knew that voice. It was Fred Pavia, a comrade from the 31st Infantry. Pavia was from New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan where Gordon had grown up, and fighting together the two had become close.
“I looked for you in the barracks, Dick. Figured I might find you here. You don’t look good. I’ll be right back.”
A while later Pavia returned and held out his hand. In his palm were two capsules. Quinine, Gordon guessed.
Next morning his fever broke, and he was back on his feet. Some weeks later, looking at a list of the dead, Richard Gordon spotted Fred Pavia’s name. Cause of death: complications of malaria.19
BEN STEELE tried not to think ahead. No daydreams, no ideas but in things. Food, water, medicine. Survive, exist. Another hour and day.20
He’d walk by a barracks hut and see a man sitting in the dirt sobbing, and he’d think to himself, “The hell with you. What a waste of goddamn energy. Where the hell is crying going to get you?”
Then, maybe that afternoon or the next, he’d be wandering the compound and hear shouting coming from a hut and see another man miserable and in despair, and he’d feel something, an impulse.
So he’d go into the hut and up to the men who were shouting at the man in despair and say, “What’s going on here?” And they’d tell him, “This guy’s shitting all over the place and we’re going to throw him out.” And then they’d grab hold of the man, drag him from his sleeping shelf and across the rough bamboo floor, and Ben Steele would say to them, Stop! Please stop! “That’s a helluva way to treat a sick man.” And now the
pack would turn on him. “Keep your goddamn mouth shut,” they’d say. “And get the hell out of here.”
[Potveleit Diary, May 7] We learned this Wednesday that Corregidor had surrendered along with all the Philippine islands . . . Corregidor’s surrender had a depressing effect on everyone in camp in spite of the Japanese rumors that there would be peace. No details of the surrender could be learned.21
The Japanese had been bombing and shelling Corregidor since late December. Many of the big guns on the tiny island fortress had been knocked out, but not all of them. And from deep in Malinta Tunnel, General Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur’s successor, still led what was left of his command—scattered combat units in northern Luzon and in the southern Philippine islands. So General Masaharu Homma, eager to end the campaign, issued orders to reduce the fortress to rubble and “exterminate its garrison.22
On May 5, Homma sent two thousand hohei ashore. At that point the island’s beach force of four thousand marines, sailors, and Filipino soldiers had been bombed and starved to the breaking point. They fought
the invaders fiercely, fought them for nearly a day After that, the Japanese landed tanks, and without the weapons to stop those armored cannon, American commanders knew the fight was finished.
More than a thousand wounded lay in the hospital lateral of Malinta Tunnel, and Wainwright, worried about flame-throwing infantry and tank cannon wreaking slaughter in the tunnel, radioed President Roosevelt that further resistance was pointless.
With broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame I report to Your Excellency that today I must arrange terms for the surrender of the fortified islands of Manila Bay . . . With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander.23
When word of Wainwright’s decision reached MacArthur, the “hero” of Bataan—on April 1 in Australia he had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for “conspicuous leadership”—refused to meet with reporters. The next day, May 7, MacArthur’s press aide issued a brief written statement from the general:
Corregidor needs no comment from me . . . I shall always seem to see the vision of its grim, gaunt, and ghostly men still unafraid.24
In Washington, the commander in chief seemed to understand something MacArthur did not: the Philippines command had always been expendable. Roosevelt radioed Wainwright that those who had stayed behind in “complete isolation” had turned “a desperate situation” into “a heroic stand.”
On May 6, 1942, the nine thousand Americans and two thousand Filipinos on the island also became prisoners of war, guests of the emperor.
TOWARD THE END of April, O’Donnell’s hospital was more a death house than an infirmary, a place for only the sickest of men, the terminal, the half dead. Its crude, unfinished huts, set up on stilts, formed a quadrangle in the northeast corner of the camp—five wards, long open buildings of wood and bamboo. No beds, furniture, blankets, pillows, or sheets. Patients lay shoulder to shoulder in rows on the rough, hard plank floor.
The surgeons, physicians, and medics who tended the hospital’s eight hundred patients had few supplies and almost no medicine, only a trickle of pills and patent cures from the Japanese (a bit of quinine, sulfa, iodine, and slaked lime for sanitation) plus what they had carried into camp from the field hospitals on Bataan—adhesive tape, gauze, plain old aspirin.
Roughly a third of the patients suffered from malaria. Doctors, pooling the quinine on hand, calculated they had only a quarter of a tablet per patient. Not even a palliative. So rather than “waste the drug,” as one of them put it, they decided to practice pharmaceutical triage. Only patients with a chance of survival or remission were given a dose. And when the potential survivors outnumbered the supply, doctors staged a quinine lottery to see who might get lucky and live.25
Most of the hospital’s other patients had dysentery, O’Donnell’s black plague. And the worst of these were gathered together in one building, “Zero Ward.”
Zero Ward patients had long since stripped off their clothing and now lay naked on the hardwood floor in pools of filth. Without soap or water to bathe the patients or scrub the ward, medics could do little to improve the place. They tried to trowel the filth out the door, then spread lime to mitigate the stench, but the lime splashed on men with open sores, and their screams soon made the medics stop.
In the end, the patients of Zero Ward just lay there, waiting to die, two long rows of living skeletons side by side along each wall from one end of the ward to the other, half conscious, most of them. The flies found them, of course, and it wasn’t long before maggots were spotted in their mouths, ears, and noses. Then the ants arrived.
Army Captain Merle Musselman, a doctor from Nebraska City, attended Zero Ward during the late April rains when a leaky hospital roof left the patients wet and shivering. At night, seeking warmth, they would “worm together across the floor in an unconscious effort to share body heat.” And in the mornings when Musselman and his colleagues entered the ward, the doctors would come upon “a large mass of intertwined bodies,” the living snuggled up to the dead.26
HIS MALARIA WAS SO BAD he could barely get to his feet, so Humphrey O’Leary found himself on his way to Zero Ward.
The ward was full when they carried him in, and since he looked half gone, they took him back out again and laid him on the ground in the crawl space beneath the building, among four other hopeless cases. In the morning when he awoke, he was cold, very cold. One of the men lying beside him was holding his hand, and the man was dead.
Since he’d survived the night, the medics gave him a spot on the ward floor. At least he was off the wet ground. That morning, a man he knew well, Bill Young from Manila, was also brought into the ward. Bill was in bad shape too, worse than Humphrey. His back was covered with suppurating sores and the ulcers were infested with maggots.
“You guys have got to clean this man up!” O’Leary shouted.
“We’re too busy for that,” one of the medics said. “Besides he’s—”
“Just give me the stuff,” O’Leary said. “I’ll do it.”
With a basin and some filthy rags, O’Leary did the best he could. His friend seemed to revive a bit, then around noon, Young became delirious. O’Leary yelled for the medics again. The medics called for a priest.
“What’s the matter here?” Army chaplain William Cummings said when he arrived.
“Father, this man is really delirious,” O’Leary said. “You better give him extreme unction.”
The priest anointed the dying man and turned to O’Leary.
“I’d better give you last rites, too,” he said.
“Shit, Father! I look that bad?”
“Yeah, soldier, you do.”
That afternoon Humphrey O’Leary happened to catch the glance of the man lying against the opposite wall. The man was staring at him, giving him the eye. Probably trying to put a name with a face, O’Leary guessed.
“I know you?” O’Leary asked.
“No,” the man answered. “I’m looking at your boots,” cavalry boots O’Leary found on the side of the road during the march.
“What about my boots?”
“When you die,” the man said, “I’m gonna pick them up.”
“Fuck you, you son of a bitch,” O’Leary said.
He grabbed his boots and wedged them between his head and the wall behind him. He hardly slept that night, watching his property, a waste of time, as it turned out. The next morning the vulture was dead.
“Goddamn,” O’Leary thought. “Now I feel sorry for the son of a bitch.”27
IN SHORT ORDER the ground beneath Zero Ward became the camp’s de facto morgue, the place where they stacked the bodies for burial.
At first the numbers were modest, four Americans dead one day, three the next, nine a few days later. Then on April 28, twenty-two Americans died; on May 11, thirty-two; on May 19, forty-three. The Japanese wanted to cremate the bodies but agreed to the Western custom of
burial. Now, with a death rate between twenty-five and fifty a day, the camp required standing burial details, one group to dig the graves, another to bear the bodies to the cemetery. Barracks chiefs picked men at random for this work, but most of the men on the burial details were volunteers.28
They were burying friends, many of them, and they reckoned that if it came to it, they too would want to be put in the ground by those who’d known them, those they could count on to carry their memory, whisper their good name.
Many signed up for the grim duty day after day. Like the Samaritans who shared their food and water, the gravediggers and pallbearers were also trying to hold on to their humanity. For them the will to live sprang from impulse rather than instinct, the impulse to be human and do human things—tend the ill, inter the dead.29
The burial parties formed up after dawn. The gravediggers collected their tools (old spades and makeshift shovels fashioned from truck parts and discarded metal) and headed up a rise to the American cemetery, a flat piece of ground outside the main camp, some eight hundred yards from Zero Ward. The pallbearers, meanwhile, gathered with a graves registration officer in front of the morgue and began to bring out the bodies.
Grizzly work, collecting those corpses. Many had lain around the compound for days before they were hauled to the morgue, and in the tropical heat these derelicts had started to decompose. To Army medic Sidney Stewart, they were “no longer recognizable as the bodies of men,” just “yellow balloon-like forms,” stacked in the dirt, some with their limbs frozen at grotesque angles. The “horrible smell” of these “shrunken skeletons . . . hung in the air” and “clung to the ground” like a “thick, pungent gas.” It stung the nostrils and made the eyes water. Grabbing a limb to pull on a body, a pallbearer might come away with a sleeve of skin and a month’s nightmares.30
Tears in the Darkness Page 27