Irwin Scott noticed that a few of the dead lay facedown, one arm outstretched, one knee drawn up as if they had crept to the morgue to die.
“I swear to God,” he thought, “they crawled under that building to save us the trouble of having to carry and drag them there.”31
The bodies were put on litters fashioned from wooden doors and shutters or blankets strung between bamboo poles. Many had no dog tags, and the graves registration officer, Captain A. L. Fullerton, did his best to identify and make a record of each body and the plot of ground where it was to be interred. Then four men would pick up the litter and join the line of other bearers, and the silent procession, in the company of a guard, would pass through the camp fence behind the hospital, down a slight incline, and work its way slowly along a streambed toward the cemetery.
The graves were six feet wide, ten to twenty-five feet long, and three to four feet deep, communal graves for five, ten, fifteen men and more. After several days of rain, the water table would rise and the holes would be half full of liquid mud. By the end of May, the burial parties had to weigh the bodies down with stones to keep them from floating up before the diggers could cover them.
The first burial parties treated their dead comrades with tenderness and respect. They lowered them carefully into the holes, laid them respectfully side by side. Later, as the death rate rose—in May, the diggers seemed to be burying men from dawn to dusk—the burial parties tossed the bodies into the holes as if they were piling up firewood, one recumbent form pitched on top of another. At first Richard Gordon, a regular on the detail, was horrified by the “crack” of skull hitting skull, but by his third time out he too was tossing corpses and turning quickly away.
JOHNNY ALDRICH volunteered for the burial detail almost every day. He wanted to keep busy. Men who didn’t, he’d observed, seemed to just “lay down and die.”32
Aldrich grew up a Catholic in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the fifth of thirteen children born to two bookkeepers. He left school after the eighth grade and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. He liked the job, the life—the barracks, the discipline, the company of men—and in 1940 enlisted in the army and was assigned to the Quartermaster Corps as a carpenter and electrician, then sent to the Philippines and stationed at Nichols Field.
Every Sunday he went to Mass in Manila with a group of other Catholics. After church they enjoyed a meal together, bought candy for the local children. Before long Johnny Aldrich had a pal, Tom Wolfington of Norristown, Pennsylvania. The two went hiking and bowling, drank beer together. On base they often found themselves paired on the same job. So when Wolfmgton fell desperately ill in O’Donnell and was hauled off to Zero Ward, Johnny Aldrich went to see him right away.
He found his friend in “real bad shape,” pale and gray and “skinny like a rail.” Worse, the sick man was hacking and coughing constantly, “like he had tuberculosis or something.”
The next day, when Aldrich returned to the ward, the medics told him that Tom Wolfmgton had died during the night and his body was waiting in the morgue to be buried.
Johnny Aldrich got himself on the burial detail that morning. He helped pull his friend from under the hut, helped put him on a wooden-door litter, helped carry him the eight hundred yards to the graveyard. “With three other men he lowered him, ever so gently, into the wet hole.
He wanted to say a prayer over him, some short requiem for his repose, but the Japanese had forbidden such rituals, so Johnny Aldrich stepped down into the grave and slipped his hand under Tom Wolfington’s neck, lifted the head a little, and gave his dead friend a kiss.
“When he climbed out, the guard rushed up furious and slapped Aldrich, slapped him hard, then hit him again.
Johnny Aldrich looked down at the hole, took out a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil, and noted its location: row X, column Y, “fourth or fifth man down in the hole.”
Then he said to himself, “Forget about it. Worry about tomorrow.”
THE FILIPINOS were dying at the same rate, and since their overall numbers were higher, so was the number of their dead, six Filipinos for every American. One hundred a day, two hundred and fifty, three hundred.
At first Filipinos volunteered by the score to bury their dead comrades. A Catholic people, they were determined to keep the sacraments. (Sometimes a Filipino chaplain would sneak into a burial party and in lieu of last rites surreptitiously recite the Twenty-third Psalm.) Whenever a burial procession left camp, Filipino soldiers standing by the entrance would snap to attention and salute the litters as they passed the gate.
Later when the death rate climbed into the hundreds and the corpses became commonplace, the men stopped taking notice, stopped saluting. Officers had to comb the camp to come up with even a handful of men willing to dig graves and carry the bodies down the road. They were refusing the duty, they told their officers, because they were afraid of being contaminated and made sick by the touch of the dead.
BEN STEELE hated going near Zero Ward. The moans and cries of the dying, the stink of the sick, the morgue with its stacks of the dead. But he’d been assigned to the burial detail by his barracks chief and, thinking the work worthwhile, he went willingly. The next day he volunteered for the duty again, same thing the day after that.
Some days his detail would get to the graveyard only to discover that ravenous dogs had gotten to the bodies, and the diggers would have to scrape a new hole and reinter the corpses. At that point, the third week in May, burial parties might put thirty bodies in one hole, put them down in layers, walk on each layer to compress it, then toss dirt on top and stomp the dirt down.
Ben Steele, gravedigger, buried two friends, Bob Schope from Billings and Walter Mace, a married man from Spokane. Mace was an Air Corps buddy, and when he came down with dysentery and was taken to Zero Ward, Ben Steele went to see him and was shocked.
Doctors had been giving their patients charcoal (an absorbent) from the kitchens to try to control their diarrhea, and poor Mace had soiled himself so often his legs and lower torso had turned black.
“Listen, Ben,” he said, “I’m not going to make it out of here, so when you get home, if you get home, go see Peggy. Talk to her. Tell her. You promise?”
“I will, Walter.”
Then Ben Steele helped bury him.
He’d been on the detail two weeks, and he thought he should volunteer for some other work, work that might get him out of camp and perhaps something to eat.
“Work parties were leaving camp all the time now, a hundred, two hundred men in each group, working in nearby fields cultivating crops, doing one kind of labor or another. And often when they returned, the men smuggled back vegetables or extra rice or even a bit of meat.
On the afternoon of May 21, word spread that a large work detail, three hundred men, would be leaving the next morning. To where and for what, no one could say. Ben Steele didn’t care.
“There’s got to be a better place than this,” he thought. “If I can get on that detail, I’m going to go. I’ve got to get some food, some water. I’ve got to get away from all this shit.”
In the barracks that night he convinced Q. P. Devore to join him.
“We’ll get something to eat,” he said.
Early the next day, the two men signed up, and when the trucks rolled in they climbed aboard together. From the truck bed, Ben Steele could see the men already queuing up for the water line. And he told himself, anything would be better than that. But Q.P. had this queer look on his face. He seemed nervous, unsure. And now he was getting off the truck. He couldn’t say why exactly. Just a feeling. He didn’t like the look of it.
“That’s okay,” Ben Steele said. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring you some food. We’ll probably be back tonight.”
* * *
“A FINAL DETERMINATION”
B ILLINGS, MONTANA, early summer 1942. Waiting for word has been hard on them both. Bess goes long periods without saying much. And the Old Man, he seems tired all the time. Th
ey read the papers. They listen to the radio. They hope for news.
Since December and the attacks on Clark Field, they’ve had only two pieces of mail from him. The first was a Christmas card, sent, they guessed, before the Japanese attacked. On the front was a photo of a farmer walking behind a plow hitched to one of those Philippine oxen. It read, “A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year from the Philippines,” and it was signed “Love Bud” in big script.
A few weeks later, a telegram arrived, a “Holiday Greeting by Western Union.” At the top was a drawing of a Santa next to a Christmas tree with a small boy peeking out from behind a fireplace. Message: EVERYTHING OKAY NEVER PELT BETTER IN MY LIFE MERRY CHRISTMAS LOVE BENJAMIN STEEL [sic].
ACROSS THE LATE WINTER and through the spring, they followed the story of the fighting. April was the crudest month. Its headlines left them anxious and alarmed. “Bataan Forces Lose Ground” . . . “Desperately-Pressed Bataan Forces Battle Jap Hordes and All Types of Warplanes” . . . “36,853 Americans, Filipinos Slain or Face Captivity”1
In June the Old Man’s heart broke down. The family knew he was sick, but the “old fool,” as Bess called him, had refused to see a doctor. “When it finally happened he was out working on a government road crew. He started to sweat and sat down on the road. Just some pulled muscles, he told the crew chief. The chief called a doctor; the doctor told Bess it was a coronary.
He’s got to stop working, the doctor said, stop reading the papers, stop all the worrying about Bud.
They worried all the time, Bess told the doctor. There hadn’t been any word from the boy since December. How could they stop worrying?
Then, two weeks before Labor Day, a letter arrived from the War Department.
August 14, 1942.
Dear Mrs. Steele:
According to War Department records, you have been designated as the emergency addressee of Private Benjamin C. Steele, 19,018,989, who, according to the latest information available, was serving in the Philippine Islands at the time of the final surrender.
I deeply regret that it is impossible for me to give you more information than is contained in this letter. In the last days before the surrender of Bataan there were casualties which were not reported to the War Department. Conceivably the same is true of the surrender of Corregidor and possibly of other islands of the Philippines. The Japanese Government has indicated its intention of conforming to the terms of the Geneva Convention with respect to the interchange of information regarding prisoners of war. At some future date this Government will receive through Geneva a list of persons who have been taken prisoners of war. Until that time the War Department cannot give you positive information.
The War Department will consider the persons serving in the Philippine Islands as “missing in action” . . . until definite information to the contrary is received. It is to be hoped that the Japanese Government will communicate a list of prisoners of war at an early date . . . In the case of persons known to have been present in the Philippines and who are not reported to be prisoners of war by the Japanese Government, the War Department will continue to carry them as “missing in action.” . . . At the expiration of twelve months and in the absence of other information the War Department is authorized to make a final determination.
Very Truly Yours,
J. A. Ulio
Major General,
The Adjutant General
The letter left Bess undone. Her sister, Sue, sent a note to Gert in Bremerton, Washington. Come quick, it said. Gert drove straight through. The doctor was there waiting at the house on Broadwater Avenue when she finally arrived.
It was all too much, the doctor said. The war news, the Old Man’s heart attack, the letter from the government—“in the absence of other information the War Department is authorized to make a final determination.”
Bess had stopped eating, cooking, taking care of the other kids. She had told the doctor she was sure her son Bud was dead, and she blamed herself for losing him. She was the one who’d urged him into the army, who’d told him to get a new life.
The doctor had put her on tranquilizers and sleeping pills but, he told Gert, there had been no improvement. All she did was sit in the parlor and stare at the walls. Maybe Gert could get through to her, the doctor said.
“Look, Mother,” Gert began, “it isn’t your fault. You understand? You didn’t realize what was going to happen. How could you? Even they didn’t know. He was just like all those other boys who joined the army.
“Do you hear me, Mother? Are you listening? It’s not your fault, Mother. They all went to war. Nobody made them. They just went.”
* * *
NINE
TEN TRUCKS loaded with prisoners rolled slowly out the front gate of Camp O’Donnell and down the asphalt road toward Capas. Glancing back, the men could see a wall of dark gray thunder-heads gathering above the Zambales Mountains and the camp.
“I’m damn glad to leave that death trap,” Ben Steele thought. “Anything is going to be better than that.”
Where the work detail was going, none of them knew. A couple of men guessed they’d be put to work salvaging armaments and equipment from the battlefield, but others thought the detail had been assembled for more arduous labor. Guards had come through the barracks the day before looking for men who were “fit.” “Maybe get eat,” the guards said, knowing they would fill the quota with anyone who could walk.
Rolling south, most of the prisoners in the trucks thought themselves lucky to be leaving O’Donnell. No more water line or burial details. Gone were the flies, gone was the filth. And for the moment that was enough.
Down the main highway on the central plain, past Clark Field (a grim sight for the Air Corps boys), through San Fernando and east around Manila Bay into the city itself, stopping for the night at a one-story white-stucco school building on Park Avenue in the suburb of Pasay.
The Japanese were using the school as a way station for prisoners being transported between prison camps and work sites throughout the big island. A handful of captured Navy doctors were in temporary residence at the school. And a small group of Air Corps mechanics captured in the southern islands and brought to Luzon were also being quartered there that night.
The mechanics were in good shape—they had been treated well since their capture—and now, as they stood on the porch of the Pasay schoolhouse watching the grimy and ragged men from O’Donnell slowly get off the trucks and stumble into formation in the courtyard, they were shocked at the sight of them.
“They’re more dead than alive,” thought Sergeant Louis Kolger of Richmond, Indiana. “Their eyes—they’re vacant. And look at their ribs, you can see their ribs!”
Kolger and his comrades from the south could not understand what the hell had happened to the men in the trucks. They seemed to walk listlessly around the schoolyard or just stand there staring into space. Hard to get anything out of them except a yes or a no or a passing glance, an empty look.
“It’s like, they’ve resigned,” Kolger thought, “like they’re a bunch of sleepwalkers.”1
The Navy doctors in temporary residence were also shocked by the men from Bataan and asked the guards to let them examine the prisoners. It didn’t take long to see they were quite sick—not one seemed fit enough to work—and the doctors tried to convince the Japanese to take the most serious cases off the detail.
The guards refused. Their orders, they said, called for a work party of three hundred men, and in the morning three hundred men were going to get back on those trucks. At least, the doctors pleaded, hold back the five with highest fevers and replace them with men who’d come up from the south. To this their keepers agreed, and the next morning, 3 officers and 297 enlisted men, Louis Kolger newly among them, were rolling south under a tropical sun.
They drove for hours along the western shore of Laguna de Bay, then stopped for the night at a lime kiln outside San Pablo. The next afternoon they boarded railroad flatcars, heading south and east, a
cross the neck of land that connects the main part of Luzon island to the wild uplands and jungle wastes of the rugged Bicol peninsula.
The train rolled slowly through the lush countryside, across the day and into a bright moonlit night, a good night, Louis Kolger thought, to escape.
“That guard is going to be nodding off and I’m going to jump this train,” he told himself. He watched and waited, one hour, two, three. Then he felt his eyes get heavy. Suddenly it was morning and the guard he’d been watching was yelling for the prisoners to get off the train.
They had been traveling for almost three days. Half the men appeared weaker than when they started. And now, the Japanese were ordering them to start walking.
Five men were so sick their comrades had to carry them on litters fashioned from old doors. Other men, meanwhile, were made to shoulder sacks of rice and crates of canned goods. And the guards ordered a score of prisoners to carry their bulky packs and heavy equipment.
The prisoners had no idea where they were, no idea where they were going. Just before they got off the train, one of the men had seen a road sign for the town of Calauag. Calauag? That was in southeastern Luzon off the main part of the big island, more than 155 miles from Manila on the way to nowhere.
BEN STEELE had a temperature of 103° (the navy doctors at the school would have held him back had it been two degrees higher). Walking north on a winding one-lane dirt-and-gravel road through the thickly wooded jungle of southern Luzon, he could feel his temperature spiking, his temples throbbing, his face burning with fever.
They walked through the afternoon and into the night. The moon came up and turned the jungle silver, a place of dark shapes and shadows. They were in hill country, that much they could tell. Up one slope, down the next, then up another. Waves of hills.
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