Lunch was at noon, dinner at six, rice and rice, just like breakfast. The Japanese insisted they were supplying the prison with enough raw grain to yield two cups of cooked rice for each man every day, but the daily ration was usually less, closer to ten or twelve ounces. Other than carbohydrates, rice has few nutrients. Filler food, for the most part.
The prisoners got the worst grade of rice, the dregs of each shipment. The grains were often spoiled or moldy, each sack laced with worms, weevils, small rocks, dirt, rat droppings. Everything, of course, went in the pot. There were men who couldn’t stomach the worms. They’d sit hunched over their ration, meticulously culling them out, white worms about as long as a finger joint, with two tiny black spots near the head. Paul Reuter ate it all, the whole squiggling mush, but he always took a moment to flick off the worms on the surface. Just couldn’t look ’em in those two black eyes before they went down.
The rice tasted “moldy and musty,” “dirty and soggy,” “like raw dough,” “like wallpaper paste,” “like dishwater.” Some men found it so vile they had to “choke it down.” To others it tasted like nothing, a meal that left the American palate sour and unsatisfied. Still, they ate every ounce. Especially the men from O’Donnell and work details. They licked their cups clean, then checked in the dirt at their feet for any grains that might have dropped there.
Twice a day the cooks served soup, which is to say hot water with a bit of meat (“a sliver,” “a ribbon,” “a thread”) or a tiny piece of fish (always rotten) and a “vegetable,” usually worthless thistle, muddy water lilies from the nearby Pasig River, or other weeds of unknown origin. Almost every day the men found scraps of garbage in the soup, the tops of carrots or camotes or radishes, refuse from a restaurant or Japanese army mess.
Pappy Sartin and his doctors tried to supplement this subsistence ration with extra food from local merchants. (The doctors pooled the little money they’d smuggled into prison with the $10 to $12 a month the enemy paid them for “working” in the hospital.) Some of this fund went to set up a special diet kitchen for the heavy sick that procured foods high in protein or other nutrients—peanuts, duck eggs, most of all, mongo beans. Mongo beans, about the size of small lentils, were cheap, ubiquitous, high in thiamine. Some men ate them raw or stewed or let them soak in a wet towel to sprout, then boiled them and served them over rice. Every ward had a mongo bean garden, tins and jars and buckets growing the beans.
[Hayes, “Notebook”] This mongo bean is a life saver to us and as long as we can get them we can stomach the rice and eat a sustaining quantity as well as acquire a vitamin intake of which we are so much in need. We buy these beans at 45 centavos a cup (canteen), about one centavo’s worth [in prewar prices]. But they go a long ways and so long as I live I will always attribute my survival to this lowly bean.10
Everyone was hungry all the time. Men picked through the garbage outside the galley for scraps—scraps of scraps, really. They chased after the dogs, cats, snakes, and rats that wandered into the compound. The Catholic chaplains had contacts outside the walls who from time to time would smuggle in peanuts and chunks of crude horse sugar, and for a while an unusual number of Bilibid’s patients expressed an interest in converting to the Church of Rome. “Son,” Father John E. Duffy told a would-be catechumen, “you don’t want to be a Catholic. You’re just hungry.”11
They dreamed about food, dwelt on it night and day. Men formed “food clubs” to trade recipes—Brandy Pottage, Virginia Brunswick Stew, French Apple Pie—or talked about their favorite restaurants.12
“Prison life goes on,” Tom Hayes often wrote. “Mongo [beans] night & morning, lugao, dry rice, & watery soup . . . days of scratching for existence, groups gathered about open fires with improvised utensils fashioned from tin cans, gasoline tins, pieces of wire, parts of galvanized roofing, cooking up odd concoctions of all possible edible combinations of anything edible and available . . . At night one lies courting sleep and looks at the reflection on the stony floors of the cold black bars that stand between us and the moon.”13
BY NOVEMBER 1942, Ben Steele was doing better. He was still sick with malaria, beriberi, dysentery, and jaundice, but after three months in Bilibid he seemed on the mend. The spike of protein in a duck egg Dr. Lambert had given him had activated his kidneys, and the terrible swelling that had distorted his body had slowed. He was still an invalid, but against all odds and his doctors’ expectations, he had survived. As they say in Montana, he’d been near enough to hell to smell the smoke and was happier than a kid pulling on a dog’s ears, just to be breathing.
Meanwhile, he’d made a new friend, a landsman, or as close to one as Ben Steele would find in Bilibid, a man named Merrill Lee. Raised on a ranch in Lincoln County, Nevada, Lee too had been a working cowboy. A double hernia had landed him in Bilibid’s hospital, and since the Air Corps had trained him as a cook, the doctors put him to work in Bilibid’s galley. It was a good job—the cooks always looked suspiciously healthier than the rest of the prison’s company—and Merrill Lee was hoping to finish the war in Bilibid, whenever the war was going to finish.
The two men met by chance. Lee had gone to Ward 11 in search of a doctor, and glancing around the room, his eye happened to fall on one of the patients. The man was swollen with wet beriberi, and he was lying next to a filthy old mattress, scratching lines on the floor with a chunk of charcoal.
Lee, curious, wandered over to take a look, and there, taking shape on the floor, was the drawing of a cowboy—the broad-brimmed hat, the boots, the bowed legs, a corral, a snubbing post, two horses.
“Damn!” Lee said to himself. “That’s my life.”
“Hey there, I’m Merrill Lee.”
The man on the floor looked up. “Oh yeah, I’m Ben Steele.”
“Where you from, Ben Steele?”
“Montana, out the Bull Mountains way, north of Billings.”
“Well, I’m from Panaca, Nevada, Lincoln County. And what you’re drawing there, that was my life. That’s what I’m living for, to get back to that kind of life.”
It was like two men meeting on the open range, two solitary horsemen coming upon each other in the middle of nowhere after days or weeks riding the benches and badlands and waves of buffalo grass alone.
“What kind of outfit you got?” Merrill Lee asked.
“Well,” Ben Steele said, “the Old Man used to run about three hundred head on six sections.”
“Funny thing,” Lee said. “I was up in Montana working in Yellowstone Park just before the war.”
“By God, that’s just down the road,” Ben Steele said.
Nearly every day thereafter, Merrill Lee visited Ward 11. And every day he brought Ben Steele a canteen cup brimming with stewed mongo beans and a nice crust of burned rice as a side dish.
Lee would sit down on the mattress while Ben finished the snack, then he’d watch Ben draw, watch him for hours and hours, day after day. Sometimes, in the torpor of a tropical afternoon, Merrill Lee would get drowsy, and he would lie back on Ben Steele’s mattress and shut his eyes and lose himself among the sorrels and bays, corrals and snubbing posts.
BEN STEELE’S LIFE as an artist began in the dark interstices of his disease, the periods of waking rest when he was left to lie on an old and moldy mattress on the concrete floor of Ward 11. He’d never felt so helpless, useless, and low. Propped up slightly against a gray adobe wall, he spent most of the day staring at his bloated limbs and balloon of a body.
The more he took stock of himself, the mound of flesh he’d become, the more he thought about his life, the life he’d lived at Hawk Creek and in Billings. He kept drifting back to that day in the studio when the great Will James invited him in and started drawing. He knew that James was largely self-taught, and as he lay on the thin mattress on the floor day after day, Ben Steele wondered whether he too had the talent to make magic. After a while, he could imagine himself drawing, and he started drawing horses in his head. Then, sometime in early November, when
he began to lose some of his aqueous bulk, he dragged himself across the floor to the ward’s stove and grabbed a burned stick from the woodpile and started to scratch on the concrete floor.
His scratches didn’t look like much at first, just rough black lines on the gray concrete. This drawing business was difficult, more to it than he’d thought. “I have to make something that looks like something,” he told himself. Finally, after weeks of scratching, a memory started to take shape—a horse straining against a halter in a corral.
Every day after that, after bangō and breakfast, he would settle down to draw. His new friend Merrill Lee started bringing him paper, old government record sheets the cooks were using as kindling for their fires. Some of his bunkmates brought him pencil stubs and twigs of charcoal. He drew in the morning, he drew in the afternoon, he drew under the yellow lights. Horses, cows, sheep, ranch buildings, his beloved hills at Hawk Creek. He sketched the contours of the land, the prairie architecture, the animals and objects of his youth, but since he knew nothing of the geometry of composition, his renderings were all surface, pictures on one plane with animals and men that looked more like cutouts, paper dolls, than the animated figures he’d watched Will James create.
One day, one of the prisoners who occasionally wandered over to watch (the “artist” from Montana had become something of an attraction) started going on about “angles” and “edges” and “lines of convergence.” Ben Steele asked the man what he was talking about. “Perspective,” the man said. He was an engineer, and like all engineers he’d been trained as a draftsman. Every sketch, he said, needed depth and distance, and the way to create the feeling of depth was to find a drawing’s “vanishing point.”
Okay, vanishing point. What was that?
By mid-December Ben Steele was able to stand and take a few steps. Pretty soon he could make his way across the compound to the ward where the engineers slept. Every few days he took another lesson in “picture planes” and “eye level.” His teachers were patient. They explained that all the lines in a sketch should run to a point of convergence, the point where the lines vanish from sight. Vanishing point, they told him, was the secret to creating perspective, and perspective was the magic he was looking for.
He practiced every day. One day, sitting cross-legged on his new bunk, a sleeping platform fashioned from scraps of wood, he decided to draw the interior of Ward 11. The ward was an L-shaped building with plenty of angles and vanishing points. He drew them all, every pillar, crossbeam, joist, rafter, and brace. And afterward, sitting back and looking at what he’d wrought, he thought, “Hell, everything worked! Worked beautifully.” It was like, well, “a revelation.”
He kept at it, one sketch after another, convinced that it was art (along with a timely duck egg, many cups of mongo beans, and doses of quinine, carbasone, emetine, and sulfa powder) that had saved him. Here, he thought, was “a way to put all this other misery aside.” All he had to do was take up a pencil and start to draw, draw his way around his disease, past the guards, over the wall, and across an ocean home.
[Hayes, “Notebook,” December 6] Some lousy rumors got abroad today—of no value whatsoever. Usual hooey . . . They are the same rumors [we] have heard a dozen times before, and each time proven childish banter. But each time hope springs in the human breast that “this time, it may be right.”14
“The hope of ultimate release” is “part of the will to live,” wrote Terrence Des Pres, a chronicler of survival. And every day in Bilibid, every single day, this particular hope got a boost from rumor.15
Every prison, barbed-wire pen, and work site in the islands had a rumor mill. The grist for these grinders came from any number of radios hidden in Filipino homes and tuned either to KGEI in San Francisco or other distant English-language stations. Civilians with news would throw messages wrapped around rocks over Bilibid’s outer wall. Merchants allowed to trade with the prisoners, Filipino clergy visiting Bilibid, and other interlopers also passed along the latest bruit and buzz. Occasionally this “news” had some truth to it, but the mongers in Bilibid who purveyed scuttlebutt could not resist the temptation to embellish it. Many men, desperate for the least bit of light, hung on every word of this nonsense. Tom Hayes, Bilibid’s resident cynic, listened and laughed.
The dope is “Big things to happen in Luzon in a matter of hours,” implying arrival of an American Force. Of course that is plain unadulterated hooey . . . To bed before I begin to think.
Scuttlebutt began to flow about hearing bombings about midnight last night . . . If the [rumors] keep on as they have in the past few days they will have MacArthur calling up from the Manila Hotel and inviting us to lunch in about a week.
The last wild rumor of the day comes in that Wall Street bets 2 to 1 the war will end in November, Lloyd[’s of London] bets 29 to 1 it will end in December.
Gobs of rumors . . . Formosa has fallen and Hirohito is asking Roosevelt to permit Tokyo to be an open city. My! My! [Or] Hirohito has requested that Roosevelt keep Tokyo an open city and Roosevelt is supposed to have replied “Get out of Manila.”16
Just beyond their ken, of course, the actualities of war were playing out across two oceans. For the first six months of 1942, the Tripartite Pact countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan, the so-called Axis powers, had pushed the Allies, the Americans, British, French, and Dutch, off their colonial possessions and out of their overseas bases. Allied losses were heavy: 894 ships sunk and more than 192,600 American, British, and Dutch soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen captured (along with at least another 100,000 native troops under their command).
Then, in May, as General Wainwright was surrendering to the Japanese on Corregidor, the American Navy, steaming in the waters between Australia and New Guinea, won a strategic victory at the battle of the Coral Sea, the first serious challenge to Japanese advances in the Pacific. In Europe, meanwhile, the British increased their air raids over Germany, and a thousand Royal Air Force bombers raided Cologne.
In June, Germany and the Axis rolled over the British in North Africa, but in the Pacific at the sea battle of Midway, a tiny atoll held by the Americans, the American Pacific Fleet sank four Japanese aircraft carriers in a dramatic victory.
The next month the Japanese consolidated their position on New Guinea, but again the Americans were able to mount an offensive and bomb Japanese possessions in the Solomon Islands, including Guadalcanal.
In August, the Allies suffered a setback as six thousand British and Canadian troops tried to conduct a surprise raid on Dieppe in occupied France; half were slaughtered and the survivors were lucky to escape. Meanwhile, U.S. Marines in the Pacific landed on Guadalcanal, built an airfield, and held it.
The year ended with the Japanese being beaten and pushed back in the South Pacific. On New Guinea and Guadalcanal, hohei fell in great numbers.
[Hayes, “Notebook,” January 2, 1943]. Thirty eight Jap bombers went over today. Couldn’t tell from our site, of course, whether they were coming in or going out. Probably for the south. Cold in the early mornings now. We stand bango long before day break . . . I am reminded that this is 1943, and as I recall, the year Mr. Churchill had decided upon as when Britain would make her offensive.
The greens, the water lilies and pechay [Chinese cabbage] are still shoveled out of a truck on delivery to our galley. And they still stink and are cluttered and mixed with egg shells and other debris that plainly tell its source as being some slop chute or hotel garbage barrel. It makes no difference if we refer to it as “greens in the garbage” or “garbage in the greens” it is still garbage, but they are still greens—and we eat it.17
They had been prisoners of war, most of them, for more than half a year now, and like all convicts across time, they had come to accept what Dostoevsky called the “drab, sour and sullen aspect” of life behind bars and barbed wire. They lived on hope because hope was all they had. And they sat around all day speculating about the date of their deliverance and composing anapestic epigrams to
cheer themselves.18
We’ll be free in ’43
Mother’s door in ’44
Men lost hope, of course. In the squalor of prison life and throes of disease, a number of the sick just gave up. Irwin Scott could see it in their eyes, “dull eyes,” he and other patients used to call it, eyes that went “blank.”19
“It’s like you can look right through them,” Scotty thought, “and you know they are going to die.”
So Scott and some of his comrades tried to cheer the cheerless, sit and talk with them, tell them anything—MacArthur has landed on Mindanao and will be in Manila in a week!—“all kinds of lies” just to get their comrades to continue. All the talk “seldom did a damn bit of good,” however. Once a man had lost his will to live, he usually surrendered his life. “Three days,” Scott discovered. “Every damn one of them dies in three days.”
Friends never let friends die alone. Steve Kramerich’s Air Corps buddy Kenny O’Donald was debilitated by dysentery and could not shake the disease. And when O’Donald died in the Isolation Ward, Kramerich was sitting at his side.
“He looks like a hide stretched over a skeleton,” Steve Kramerich thought. “If his mother and father could see him, they would never stop crying.”20
SOMETIMES camaraderie is based on compassion, one man seeing his suffering, or abject loneliness, in another.
Zoeth Skinner struck up a friendship with Bobby Robinson, an aging civilian who had been in the Philippines most of his adult life and was a patient with Skinner on Ward 1. Robinson had served during the Spanish-American War and had stayed in the islands, working as the manager at one of Manila’s most famous gin mills, the Legaspi Landing. By 1941 he’d survived two Filipina wives, married a third, and had a handful of children of various ages. Despite nearing his dotage (some of the men guessed he was going on seventy), he reenlisted at the beginning of the war, reassumed his old rank as a first sergeant in the 31st Infantry, fought in the battle for Bataan, and made the march off the peninsula, the sixty-six-mile trek that killed men a third his age.21
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