Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  After the eye doctor, he headed east on Broadwater Avenue to a branch post office to mail something to his adopted son, Sean, then he turned the truck back up toward the rimrocks, looking for KEMC, Billings’s public radio station, where he was scheduled to give an interview on his life and work.

  Artist and educator Ben Steele was born November 17, 1917, in Roundup Montana to Benjamin Cardwell Steele and . . .

  It was just before 10:50 a.m. and Elizabeth McNamer was taping her show Speakers Corner in studio B at KEMC radio. McNamer was something of a personality in Billings. An Irishwoman educated in England, she had lived long in the American West but had held hard to her Anglican intonations. An odd voice for cowboy country, but then Billings was a town where the word “character” seemed to apply to a lot of folks.

  Ben grew up on the family homestead south of Musselshell on Hawk Creek. He attended school . . .

  McNamer had known Ben Steele for years, which is to say that like most who claimed his acquaintance, she really knew his work.

  In forty years of days, Professor Steele had trained hundreds of painters and draftsmen, a handful of whom enjoyed some renown: Clyde Aspevig, Jim Reineking, Elliott Eaton, Kevin Red Star. Outside the classroom, their teacher had developed something of a reputation as well. In forty years of nights and weekends, Ben Steele had holed up in the studio behind his house in the lee of the rims producing his own work, art that reflected his life.

  Ben volunteered for the United States Army Air Corps and served from 1940 to 1946. Present at the bombing of Clark Field in the Philippines . . .

  He painted the West and he painted the war. And though his “war stuff,” as he liked to call it, was in every sense art, almost everyone tended to look at it as testimony, an affidavit of the suffering of those days.

  Elizabeth McNamer described that work for her listeners, then asked her interviewee what it had been like to make the infamous death march. Ben Steele leaned forward.

  We were so thirsty on the death march that we would . . .

  Seven or eight minutes into the interview, Elizabeth McNamer noticed that her guest seemed suddenly unsettled. The bright brown eyes, usually so relaxed, looked distressed.

  “What’s the matter, Ben?”

  He sat very still for a moment.

  “I’ve got this pain in my back,” he said.

  McNamer reckoned he was getting stiff from leaning forward at the microphone.

  “Why don’t you stand up for a minute,” she suggested. But he could not raise himself, and the pain was getting worse.

  “Lois,” said Elizabeth, “can you get Ben a glass of water? He’s not feeling very well. And maybe someone should call an ambulance.”

  Lois Bent, the producer, was sitting on the other side of the glass window that separated studio B and the control room. When she came around the corner into the studio, she found Ben Steele slumped forward in his chair.

  “Mm-my back . . . ,” he mumbled.

  “Ben! Ben!” Lois was bending over him, yelling.

  “Oh my God!” said Elizabeth.

  She was just about to make a second call for an ambulance when two paramedics, Michelle Motherway and Julia Johnson, rushed into the room.

  To Motherway the man looked ashen, “like the color of the wall.” And his blood pressure was low, “eighty over sixty,” she told Johnson, dangerously low. His symptoms suggested a ruptured aortic aneurysm. He had “that look,” as paramedics say, that “impending sense of doom.”

  They picked him up in his chair and hustled him into the ambulance.

  “We’re fighting time,” Motherwell told the emergency room doctor, Ron Winters, on the radio, then, turning to the driver, Alicia Kraft, she said, “Get going . . . and go as fast as you can.”

  The ambulance raced down Twenty-seventh Street to Deaconess Hospital. Dr. Winters was waiting at the emergency room door. Motherway had been right, it was an aneurysm. This guy is in trouble, Winters thought, and he grabbed for a phone and summoned a surgeon.

  Meanwhile, in the shadow of the rimrocks, in their gray clapboard house on Cascade Avenue, Shirley Steele had just returned from her own errands and was standing at the ironing board in the laundry room downstairs when the phone rang.

  “Shirley, it’s Elizabeth McNamer. We’re taking Ben to the hospital. He’s very ill.”

  When Shirley Steele arrived at the emergency room, she found her husband in cubicle 13, lying on a gurney surrounded by doctors and nurses. His face and head were swollen out of all proportion. He was screaming and moaning. She should leave, a nurse said, ushering her to a small waiting room.

  A few minutes later a doctor appeared in the doorway.

  “Excuse me, are you Mrs. Steele?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Scott Millikan.”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s bleeding badly and we have to stop it,” the doctor said.

  The rent in his aorta was pouring blood into his viscera, drowning his organs and driving his blood pressure down to forty and sending his body into a deep and dangerous state of shock.

  “If I do nothing,” Millikan continued, “he will be dead in ten minutes, and if I do something he may still be dead in ten minutes.”

  “Go ahead,” Shirley Steele said.

  The surgeon sprinted for the operating room. He had an hour—“the golden hour of trauma,” clinicians call it—sixty minutes from the onset of bleeding to arrest the flow or lose the patient.

  Studying the ambulance log, Millikan calculated that the aneurysm had ruptured around 10:55 a.m.; Motherway was at the patient’s side by 11:02; Winters received him at 11:18; Millikan was attending by 11:32; and at 11:45 Ben Steele was on an operating table, saline solution dripping into one arm, plasma in the other, and an oxygen tube down his throat. Scott Millikan was leaning over the patient, a scalpel in his hand and ten minutes left.

  He cut the patient lengthwise from the sternum to the pubis. Five minutes to find the fissure. They saw the aneurysm almost immediately, a balloon in the aortic wall three and a half inches wide, the largest the surgeon had seen. And there was the rent with blood pouring out of it.

  It was speed work, a kind of medical sprint, and after they had clamped the aorta and cut off the bleeding, the surgical team paused before beginning their distance run, the hours it would take to remove the aneurysm and try to repair the damage.

  “All right,” said the anesthesiologist, taking a breather, “who is this guy? What’s the story here?”

  A nurse said, “This is Ben Steele.”

  “Wait a minute,” Millikan said. “I know that name.”

  “He was an art professor,” the nurse said, “and he was in that death march of Bataan.”

  The surgeon turned to his assistant. “This is great, ’cause now I know this son of a bitch is tough. He’s already proved he’s a survivor.”

  Five hours later Millikan wandered into the waiting room and flopped into a chair in front of the family—Shirley, Rosemarie, and Julie. The doctor had changed into clean green scrubs and was wearing hospital slippers but no socks.

  “Sorry about the bare feet,” he said wearily. “It got a little deep in there.”

  Then he gave them the news: the patient had lost a lot of blood; they had given him thirteen units during the operation. His main worry now was Ben’s blood pressure: a sudden or sustained drop would likely cause a brain hemorrhage, and if that happened, it was unlikely the patient would survive.

  And there was more: Ben’s kidneys or heart might fail; his lungs might fill with fluid and he might drown; a blood clot might form and shoot to the brain; his internal organs, which had been swimming in blood, might have been damaged and could shut down.

  Adding it all up, Millikan said, the patient’s prognosis was no better than “minute to minute.”

  Julie asked a few questions, Rosemarie was too frightened to speak, and Shirley shut her eyes and took several deep breaths.

  “Hold it together,�
� she said to herself. “You have to hold it together.”

  The next day, Friday, Millikan revised his prognosis. Now it was “hour to hour.” By Saturday Ben had improved to “day to day.” He could manage a few words at that point, and early Saturday morning Shirley was able to speak with him.

  She stood by his bed in the intensive care unit, her left hand on the bed rail, her right hand wrapped around two of his fingers.

  “How ya doin’, kid?” she said and touched his cheek. “Hey! You need a shave.”

  He looked at her and blinked.

  “I thought—” He blinked again. “I thought they had killed me,” he said.

  Then he turned his head and smiled.

  * * *

  NOTES

  All Japanese names are presented given name family name.

  GHOSTS

  1. Hohei, literally translated, is “foot soldier.” The Japanese used the word to refer to infantry. All soldiers, including infantry, artillery, armor, communications, and so forth, were called heiti, “soldier” or, in modern translation, “serviceman.” We use hohei throughout to mean both infantryman and common soldier in all branches of the Japanese military.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Schlesinger, Almanac of American History, 481–82. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act on September 16, 1940. The first draft took place on October 29.

  2. Gallup, Gallup Poll, vol. 1, “December 23—Threat to America’s Future,” 312.

  3. “May 14, 1939—Most Important Problem,” ibid., 154; “May 10, 1940—Neutrality,” ibid., 222; “July 7, 1940—European War,” ibid., 231; “October 14, 1940—European War,” ibid., 245.

  4. Roosevelt, “For a Declaration of War Against Japan,” in Copeland, World’s Great Speeches, 531. Morton, Fall of the Philippines, and Watson, Chief of Staff, go into great detail on the meetings of the various war plans boards and committees in the War Department. These boards gathered regularly throughout the 1920s and 1930s to draft military plans and policies based on the periodic shifts in American foreign policy. The planners tried to anticipate potential enemies and attacks and plan a defense, both on American soil and American possessions overseas.

  5. Interviews with Q. P. Devore and Ben Steele. All conversations are as the principals remember and report them, sometimes in whole, sometimes in fragments. In either case, nothing in quotation has been either reconstituted or imagined.

  6. Gleeck, Over Seventy-five Years, 22–37, for poem, preceding details, and quotations.

  7. Miller, Bataan Uncensored, 59.

  8. Ibid., 63.

  9. From the accounts of many officers and from Sayre, Glad Adventure, 221, who says MacArthur held to this fiction as late as November 27, ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the same day Washington sent him a “war warning” that “hostile action” was “possible at any moment”; also Watson, Chief of Staff, 507. A number of officers on the command staff had read the same intelligence reports and worried that the Japanese were marshaling troops for a move on the Philippines. The strike would surely come in December or January, not April, the incendiary prelude to the rainy season and, as even the most insouciant second lieutenant knew, the worst month to launch an attack. Hersey, Men on Bataan, 19.

  10. “Monkey men . . . ,” Lee, They Call It Pacific, 10; the “eyeball” quotations come from an interview with Zoeth Skinner, 2002, but the subject is a familiar one, explained fully and well in Dower, War Without Mercy, 94–180. See also Johnson, Japanese Through American Eyes, 19, 145–54; “We’ll knock . . . ,” Zoeth Skinner, interview, 2002.

  11. Rogers, The Good Years, 93.

  12. Miller, Bataan Uncensored, 63.

  13. Frank Tremaine (UP correspondent in Honolulu), interview, 2000.

  14. Frank Bigelow, interview, 1999.

  15. Rita Palmer, Army Nurse Corps, interview, 1984.

  16. Zoeth Skinner, interview, 1999.

  17. Ind, Bataan, 64.

  18. Here too there is controversy. Ind, ibid., 101, an air intelligence officer, said he had photos showing some planes “lined up neatly” on the runway; Shimada, “Opening Air Offensive Against the Philippines,” 93, writes that Japanese pilots found their targets “lined up on the target fields.”

  19. For the Shinto myth of creation, see Sansom, Japan, 22ff; Storry, History of Modern Japan, 25ff. For the Japanese view, see Sakamaki Shunzo, “Shinto: Japanese Ethnocentrism,” in Moore, The Japanese Mind, 24–26. For a wider view, see Holtom, Modern Japan and Shinto Nationalism. Embree, The Japanese Nation, 165–75, provides the best context in Western terms. Ballou, Shinto, is the single best source for Shinto as a basis for nationalism and war, and all quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this text, 19–25ff.

  20. Holtom, National Faith of Japan, 15, 23. The Zero was a new and revolutionary fighter plane. Formally it was designated the A6M2. Zero—Reisen or “Zero fighter”—quickly became its nickname, which was intended to commemorate the year 1940, when its trials were finished and it went into full production.

  21. All the quotations that follow are from Sakai, Caidin, and Saito, Samurai! Sakai, now deceased, is the only Japanese character in our book we did not interview or for whom we did not have primary sources—notes, letters, transcripts of interviews with other writers, and so forth. Saito gave Caidin Sakai’s notes and transcripts of his interviews with Sakai. Caidin’s papers, from his many books, are archived at the University of Wyoming. A search of that archive failed to turn up Saito’s transcripts. There are letters referring to the work, but not the vital transcripts themselves. Nor were these documents in other archives, private or public. Permission to quote at length from the memoir was given by DeeDee Caidin, executor of Caidin’s estate. A subsequent book on Sakai claims to have found errors in the memoir, but these turn on one or two combat incidents. Sakai became a public figure after his memoir, Samurai! was published in 1957, and he was interviewed many times. We could find no interview in which Sakai challenged or disputed Caidin’s account of his life or the details of his part in the attack on Clark Field.

  22. A British Officer “Literature of the Russo-Japanese War,” 509.

  23. McClain, Japan, 407.

  24. Erfurth, “Surprise,” 355, 367; Musashi, Book of Five Rings, 48; Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS), Japan’s Decision to Fight, 10.

  25. Erfurth, “Surprise,” 361.

  26. Sakai, Caidin, and Saito, Samurai! 48–52. Sakai’s times are at variance with the most authoritative Japanese account in English on the attack: Shimada, “Opening Air Offensive Against the Philippines,” 90–91, and Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 79–90. We have followed Shimada and Morton.

  27. Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 79–90.

  28. Sakai, Caidin, and Saito, Samurai! 51.

  29. ATIS, Japan’s Decision to Fight, 31.

  30. There are many conflicting accounts of the circumstances that led to destruction of the Far East Air Force at Clark Field. Various historians, biographers, and writers hold, or at least suggest, that the principals are accountable. Some point the finger at MacArthur or Sutherland or Brereton or certain subalterns at FEAF (Air Corps) headquarters at Nielson Field or on the communications staff at Clark Field. Taking a wider or more historical view, others cite the actions of the army and navy chiefs in Washington, indeed, even President Roosevelt, who waited so long to reinforce a protectorate then so clearly in harm’s way. The wider view from within the War Department, where admirals and generals regularly changed their war plans to reflect the constant shifts in national and foreign policy, can be seen, in careful detail, in Watson, Chief of Staff, and, in much broader context, in Kennedy, Freedom From Fear; Morton, Strategy and Command; Dumond, America in Our Time; and Kennedy, Cohen, and Bailey, American Pagent. The most balanced and likely most accurate view of what led to the calamity at Clark, which includes the colloquy between commanders, is Watson, “Pearl Harbor and Clark Field.” He concludes that “general confusion and
bad luck” were responsible for the debacle (209). Edmonds, They Fought with What They Had, a smoothly crafted and moving book that adds extensive interviews to the few logs and records that survived that day, seems to suggest the same thing. This much is clear: news of the attack on Pearl Harbor reached Manila sometime after 2:30 a.m.; the Japanese bombed small bases in the northern and southern Philippines around dawn; the enemy hit Baguio, 105 miles north of Clark Field, at 9:30 a.m. and Clark sometime between 12:15 and 12:40 p.m., a full ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  31. Fifty-three bombers attacked the field, 27 Mitsubishi G3M “Nells” and 26 G4M “Bettys.” Their combined payload was 636 sixty-kilogram bombs. Figures supplied by Ricardo Trota Jose, correspondence March 12, 2002, who cites Osamu Tagaya, Mitsubishi Type 1 Rikko “Betty” Units of World War 2 (Botley, Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2001), 22.

  32. Bartsch, “Was MacArthur Ill-Served,” 72–117, mentions many of the these details, which were confirmed by the authors in interviews with veterans.

  33. Helen Cassiani Nestor, interview, 2002.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Steele and Devore see one another regularly and have replayed that conversation in the barracks many times across the years. This part of the colloquy is drawn from multiple interviews with both men.

  36. No reliable figures exist in extant medical records. This estimate is based on calculations made from figures in Morton, Fall of the Philippines, and Edmonds, They Fought with What They Had.

  37. Some interviewees report the base “nearly abandoned,” though that seems an exaggeration. Edmonds, They Fought with What They Had, 111–12, and Watson, Chief of Staff, 212, suggest that the force “disintegrated” and that a “substantial portion . . . took off” during and after the attack.