Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  In the parcel his mother had packed some personal items, including socks, red socks, and in one of the socks she’d stuffed candy, hard candy that had melted into the fabric. Ben Steele filled his canteen cup with water, added the socks, and gulped the sweetened liquid down, red dye and all. Then he tore into the letters.

  In one was a black-and-white photograph of the entire family that had been taken during an outdoor birthday party for Gert’s daughter, Sandy at the folks’ house in Billings. They were all there—his parents, brothers, and sisters—smiling, but it was not the faces that caught Ben Steele’s eye, it was what was on the table behind them—the platter of fried chicken, the chocolate cake, the large wedges of watermelon.

  “Holy God!” he thought. “They don’t have a clue. They really don’t know what we’re going through here.”

  He had tried not to think about them. Easier that way. During the battle, on the march, and at Tayabas Road, each time a memory of home worked its way up from his subconscious, he’d force himself to think of something else. Then the bundle of letters and the package arrived. Now he missed them, missed them a lot, especially his mother, and he read her letters over and over until the paper started to tear at the folds. She was “concerned,” she said—that was the word she used in almost every letter—she was concerned about him.

  BY THE BEGINNING of 1943, the Axis powers had started to lose ground in both the Pacific and European theaters of war. In January the British Royal Air Force bombed Berlin, and the Allies in conference at Casablanca agreed that their goal was nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy.

  In February, in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, the Americans, after six months of combat, had defeated the Japanese at Guadalcanal. Meanwhile, troops under the command of American Admiral William Halsey were advancing rapidly through New Guinea to Bougainville.

  That June, submarines from the U.S. Pacific Fleet started a campaign against Japanese shipping, and by September they had sent more than 160,000 tons to the bottom.

  Through the fall of 1943, U.S. Marines moved deeper into the central Pacific and defeated fierce Japanese garrisons on Makin and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.

  In his Fireside Chat on December 24, President Roosevelt told his fellow Americans that at last he could “do more than express a hope.”

  Increasingly powerful forces are now hammering at the Japanese at many points over an enormous arc . . . [The Allies] are all forming a band of steel which is slowly but surely closing in on Japan.

  These setbacks put pressure on Japanese lines of communication and supply, and in all Japanese-held territories, especially in the southwest Pacific, there were shortages of men, matériel, manufactured goods, and food.

  For the prisoners of war at Bilibid hospital, the shortages were proof that America was at last winning, but after a year and more of captivity, they no longer expected the cavalry to come riding over the hill at any moment, and “We’ll be free in ’43” and “Mother’s door in ’44” gave way to “Keep alive till ’45” and “Golden Gate in ’48.” In his notebooks, Hayes wrote, “General change in attitude can be noted. The war is no longer expected to be over next month or next week.”27

  A few thinking men, Hayes among them, also began to worry about how the enemy, so seemingly indifferent to the fate of their captives, might behave in losing.

  “I have never been able to convince myself that the Japs would [just] move out of here in the face of attack and leave us to be relieved by our own forces,” Hayes wrote. “I can’t be convinced they would . . . allow us to continue [on] our way unmolested.”28

  In a war driven by ideas about race, which is to say, hate, the threat of extermination was ever present. And the Japanese hated white men such as Hayes as much as Hayes and his comrades hated the Japanese.

  “Shades of the days of the Tripolitan Pirates,” he wrote, “days of the Moslems and Turks when our seamen died & rotted in Oriental prisons! The white man is sure as hell serving in bondage to the Yellow boys today . . . The American people back home can’t realize yet what it means to [be] . . . reduced to [an] animal existence with less care and attention than animals in our zoo.”29

  Japanese military leaders made no attempt to hide their animus, either. To hate the ketōjin, the hairy white foreigners who had denied Nippon its due, was part of the propaganda at every army training camp in the Japanese home islands. But as a practical matter—and the Japanese, a most practical people, were always looking for something that was jitsuyō, “capable of being turned to use”—prisoners of war were an obvious source of labor, especially in a country where every man, woman, and able-bodied child was either pressed into military service or put to work in the fields, rice paddies, and overburdened factories.

  Not long after the fall of Bataan in April 1942, the bureau chiefs at the War Ministry in Tokyo met to decide what to do with the 192,600 Dutch, British, and American POWs they’d captured in their conquest of the southwest Pacific. The generals reminded one another that Japan had not ratified the Geneva Convention and thus was not bound by the proscription against using prisoners as slaves. So, “all prisoners of war [will] engage in forced labor,” they decided. First they would set up work camps in Japan proper, then in Formosa, Korea, China, Manchuria, and throughout the occupied territories of the southwest Pacific, 160 camps in the home islands, 367 camps overall.30

  The commanders of these labor camps were ordered to keep their chattel busy. Do “not let them remain idle for even a single day,” Hideki Tojo, the war minister, said.31

  And work them they did. By the fall of 1942, in a brief on labor conditions in the home islands, the Japanese Prisoner of War Information Bureau was able to report, “The use of [POW] labor alleviated in some measure the labor shortage” in the country at large. The ketō, of course, were not as efficient as Japanese workers, only “60–70 percent [as good] in special labor such as coal unloading,” the brief said, but “it is generally admitted by all the business proprietors alike that the use of P.W. labor has made the systematic operation of transportation possible for the first time, and has not only produced a great influence in the business circles, but will also contribute greatly to the expansion of production, including munitions of war.”32

  In the Philippines, the first draft of American prisoners to leave for Japan, five hundred men, set sail from Manila aboard the Nagaru Maru on September 5, 1942, some five months after surrender. These innocents, still filled with hope and perhaps a little hooey handed out by the Japanese, boarded their ship convinced that the Red Cross had negotiated a prisoner exchange. Later drafts either knew better or the Japanese dropped all pretense. Whatever the case, no one wanted to go. They knew that the Allies, their liberators, were fighting their way north from the Solomons to the Bismark Sea, from the Marshalls to the Marianas, and simple geography told them that the Philippines would likely be liberated long before America would be able to push north of the islands and mount an invasion of Japan.

  THE JAPANESE captured some 20,000 Americans in the Philippines, and from that first day of captivity forward the victors used their prisoners of war as slaves. Several of these work details and labor gangs, especially the ones building airfields, were quartered in self-contained camps, places with bamboo barracks, barbed-wire enclosures, and permanently assigned guards, but most work details—cleanup parties, road gangs, field crews, and the like—drew their labor from the central American prisoner of war camp, a large, flat, open piece of land on a treeless plain outside the city of Cabanatuan in the central Luzon province of Nueva Ecija.

  Camp Cabanatuan had replaced Camp O’Donnell. At first it had all the same ills—appalling living conditions, feeble and corrupt army leadership, feculent Zero Wards of dying men. Then the Japanese put Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Curtis T. Beecher of Chicago in charge. Beecher, a decorated hero of World War I and by every account one of the most competent field officers in captivity, set about turning a cesspool
into a place of survival. He ordered the sprawling camp cleaned up, organized the men, lobbied his Japanese overseers for more medicine, supplies, and food, and the monthly death rate dropped from several hundred to a handful. In 1943 the camp census averaged between three thousand and four thousand men. And everyone, including the officers, worked. Prisoners drove trucks, repaired machinery, performed various chores and menial labor. Every day two thousand men tilled and tended the fields of a two-hundred-acre plot adjacent to the camp, a farm that grew vegetables exclusively for Japanese mess tables on Luzon.

  It was from Cabanatuan, for the most part, that the Japanese drew their cargoes of prisoner chattel to ship north to the slave labor camps in the Japanese home islands. Five hundred this month, eight hundred the next, a thousand after that. And as the calls for more men increased, the doctors in Bilibid came under pressure from the Japanese to move as many patients as possible off the sick lists and into Cabanatuan, patients the doctors knew would likely end up on drafts designated for Japan.

  BEN STEELE wasn’t well yet, but at least he was on the mend. The beriberi was under control and his malaria was in slow remission. Christmas was coming, Christmas 1943, his second in Bilibid Prison. Services were scheduled in the chapel in the compound and the ambulatory planned to serenade the invalids with carols. Maybe Santa would deliver a Red Cross treat or two.

  For weeks the doctors had been discharging men from the hospital, sending them to Cabanatuan. Some of the men in Bilibid were so desperate to stay in the hospital they were buying stool samples from comrades with dysentery and passing them off as their own. Ben Steele just sat and waited and sketched.

  Sitting cross-legged on his bunk with a makeshift drawing board in his lap, he usually attracted an audience. One day a short, gruff Japanese sergeant, a man the prisoners called Captain Bligh, sat down next to him. For a moment, Ben Steele worried he’d made trouble for himself. The sergeant was pointing to the drawing—a generic sketch of a Japanese guard—and going on and on, yammering about something. Finally someone summoned an interpreter. Seemed the artist had misdrawn the guard’s leggings, and the sergeant was trying to get him to do it right.

  His drawings were getting better, the subject matter more varied—portraits, prison scenes, landscapes. Meanwhile, some of the officers approached him with a secret project. The cruelty they’d all suffered was criminal, they said, and no one was “taking any photographs of this stuff,” so maybe he should start drawing it, create a record of atrocities for the reckoning that was sure to follow the war.

  He’d never thought of art as documentary, as an accounting. To him a drawing should aim to capture the raw energy of the world, the mysterious force of life. Like someone looking at a well-drawn picture of a horse and feeling the animal under him, feeling its muscles, its natural aversion to having anything on its back. That was the kind of art he wanted to create.

  Still, he understood. In their secret diaries and reports, a number of American officers had already started a chronicle of the enemy’s misdeeds. Now, here was a young artist who could help record that malfeasance, a man who could make his comrades’ misery come alive.

  So with an eye out for the guards, he started drawing scenes of suffering, scenes he remembered. He drew men on the long march off Bataan falling to their knees and begging for water; he drew the Japanese guards who answered those entreaties with a bullet or bayonet. He drew the daily death parade and burial details at O’Donnell. He drew the rocky hell of Tayabas Road.

  This was dangerous business, and everyone knew it. As soon as each drawing was finished, Ben Steele would give it to Father Duffy, who would hide the young artist’s growing body of work in the false bottom of his Mass kit.

  Ben Steele produced more than fifty such scenes and, from time to time, kept sketching his West as well. He drew every day, drew his pencils down to the nub. Rather than sharpen them and waste precious lead, he carefully picked the wood away from the core until, at the end, he was left holding nothing but a short rod of lead between his fingertips. At some point during all this drawing, he got the idea that “this is what I want to do when I get home, go to art school.” Art, after all, had saved him, sustained him. It distracted him from his constant hunger and gave shape to his days. To almost everyone else in prison, the sameness of the days produced a numbing apathy. They woke to the bell, stood bangō, ate lugao, went to bed. Then they got up and did the same thing all over again, day after leaden day. Ben Steele got up and started to draw.

  HE GOT THE WORD from the doctors right after the New Year in 1944: they had reclassified him from convalescent to well, and he was listed to go to Cabanatuan. He knew that Cabanatuan was the staging point for drafts to Japan. Everyone said it was going to be cold in Japan, very cold. And he didn’t want to go.

  He arrived at Cabanatuan in the middle of January, a huge hot and dusty place, six-tenths of a mile long (roughly the length of eleven football fields end to end) and half a mile wide, all surrounded by three high barbed-wire fences that formed a no-man’s-land, a kill zone for the guards. Same sawali shacks as O’Donnell, same rice slop as everywhere else, men in the same rags and loincloths.

  He worked the farm, digging, planting, hoeing with homemade tools. Camotes, corn, eggplant. He thought he might steal something and smuggle it back to camp under his hat or waistband. Then he saw what happened to the skeletal men who got caught doing that, and so like everyone else, he picked pigweed for himself and choked it down with his rice. Sometimes, when he thought the guards weren’t looking, he’d sneak a bite of a corn stalk near the base. The stalk was kind of tender down there, at the bottom, his nose in the dirt.

  In July 1944, his name appeared on a draft of eleven hundred men listed for shipment to Japan. The draft was taken by train, boxcars, back down to Manila and put up overnight in the transient section of Bilibid, across from the hospital. That night, quite by accident, Ben Steele ran into Q. P. Devore, who was on his way to Cabanatuan from a work farm in Mindinao.

  Ben Steele thought Q.P. looked good; he’d been treated well at the camp in the southern islands. Q.P., on the other hand, thought his friend looked awful—his cheekbones were showing and his eyes were sunken in his head. He’d lost so much weight (he was down to 110 pounds) his skin sagged on his bones, and his knees looked like doorknobs, his ribs like a washboard. Q.P. handed him a small mirror from a Red Cross package. Ben Steele was shocked by the image in the glass.

  Still, they were delighted to be together again, if only for a night passing through prison. They shared a coconut, traded tales, wondered what was ahead.

  The next day Ben Steele and the rest of the draft were assembled in the prison compound. They marched out the front gate and through the streets of Manila to the docks by Manila Bay. There they were loaded aboard an old freighter, the Canadian Inventor, for the long trip north, a trip into the heart of the enemy’s homeland.

  * * *

  ELEVEN

  July 2,1944, Pier 7, Manila Bay

  BEN STEELE was waiting in a long line of men queued up to board the Canadian Inventor. Since surrender, the Japanese had been shipping boatloads of American prisoners from the Philippines to Japan and its occupied territories as slave labor. The first groups of prisoners had left Manila in 1942 in the gloom of defeat, liberation the last thing on their minds. Now, however, in the summer of 1944, America was winning the war, and the eleven hundred men lined up to board the Inventor felt thwarted. The Allies were gaining ground, getting close, and the men on the dock had hoped to be free in a matter of months. Today they were getting on a ship for Japan, and they knew it might be years before America could mount an invasion of the enemy’s homeland to save them.

  From the end of the pier, it was possible to look out on the bay, and that grand sweep of scene must have been a bitter vista to Ben Steele and his comrades. To the southwest, they could see the spit of land called Cavite—from there in December 1941, Admiral Thomas Hart’s Asiatic Fleet had fled south to save itself.
And looking due west across the bay through the haze hanging over the water, the prisoners could make out a dark silhouette of mountains, the ghostly promontories where they had fought for ninety-nine days, the peninsula of Bataan.

  The Inventor was empty, riding high in the water, and every so often Ben Steele glanced up at the dark hull and grimy white superstructure. The ship looked like she’d been steaming constantly with no time to put in for refitting or repairs. A real rust bucket.

  The line of men began to file slowly up the gangway to the main deck. As Ben Steele passed a forward bulkhead, he spotted a brass plaque with the name of the ship, then passed across the deck to an open hatch and ladderway leading down to a hold. Wafting up from the hold was the scent of hay and the stale smell of horses and manure. Okay, he thought, pausing at the open hatch, if horses had survived this old tub, so could he.1

  As he started to descend the ladder, he could see that the space below was already so crowded with anxious and perspiring prisoners, he would barely have enough room to squat or sit, even with his legs drawn up tight against his chest. The only light was from the open hatch, and back in the far reaches of the hold, it was dark, choking dark.

  AMERICAN PRISONERS of war were carried back to the Japanese homeland in the same spaces, the same airless holds, the Imperial Army used to transport its own troops. Japanese generals stuffed these troop ships so full of hohei that headquarters (in a 1941 handbook passed out prior to sailing) warned the average soldier he would be “sleeping side by side on the mess decks [with his comrades] like sardines in a tin.” By “mess decks” they meant the wooden or steel shelves that had been built into the ship’s storage holds between decks, sleeping platforms to double or triple the number of troops that could be carried in the spaces belowdecks. The shelves and tiers were stacked so tightly there was barely three feet between them, just enough room to squirm in and wriggle out. “Silkworm shelves,” the hohei dubbed them. A level down, meanwhile, in poorly ventilated bottom decks, horses and their hostlers sweated out the journey. Life at every level belowdecks was so miserable (in tropical waters the holds reached temperatures of 130°) the Japanese troops complained bitterly among themselves, and headquarters, apparently getting wind of the grousing, tried to put the troops’ predicament into perspective. In the 1941 handbook (“Read This Alone and the War Can Be Won”), the hohei were told, “Never forget that in the dark and steaming lowest decks of the ship, with no murmur of complaint at the unfairness of their treatment, the Army horses are suffering in patience . . . Remember that however exhausted you yourselves may feel, the horses will have reached a stage of exhaustion even more distressing.”2