1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Group Four

  (Cabanatuan Concentration Camp Cemetery)

  We’ll have our small white crosses by and by

  Our cool, green lawns, our well-spaced, well-cared trees

  Our antique cannons, muzzles to the sky,

  Our statues and our flowers and our wreaths.

  We’ll have our bold-faced bronze and copper plaques

  To tell in stirring words of what we saved

  And who we were, with names and dates; our stacks

  Of silent rifles, spaced between the graves.

  We’ll have our dedications by and by

  With orators and bands to set us free—

  And shining, well-fed troops. Above will fly

  The planes with stars we never lived to see.

  We’ll have our country’s praises, here below

  They’ll make a shrine of this small bit of Hell

  For wide-eyed tourists; and so few will know

  And those who know will be the last to tell

  The wordless suffering of our lives as slaves

  Our squalid deaths beneath this dripping sky

  The stinking tangle of our common graves,

  We’ll have our small white crosses by and by.4

  Everyone knew that if it kept up this way they would, all of them, be dead in a year or so. Yet through some unfathomable mercy it did not. By the autumn of 1942 the death rate began to level off, first to fifty a week, then to ten. The ones who were so sick and weak from the death march and Camp O’Donnell had pretty much already died off. The deadly epidemic of diphtheria had subsided. Finally, too, they had begun to get some medicines, clothing, and food—much of it through a very unlikely source.

  She called herself High Pockets but her real name was Claire Phillips, and she became, over time, a true angel of mercy to the men in the POW camp. Her remarkable story is worth telling here, at least in brief.

  Claire Phillips was a young, pretty actress and dancer who had toured the Philippines in the late 1930s with an American musical stock company and while there met and married a man by whom she had a child. The marriage did not last and she returned to the United States only to sail back to the Philippines, bringing her infant daughter with her, at the end of September 1941, barely two months before war broke out.

  She quickly got a job singing at several of Manila’s fancy clubs and hotels and lived a fairly comfortable life, with a nice apartment and servants. One night during a performance she met a handsome sergeant named John Phillips, from the Thirty-first Infantry, fell in love, and was soon married. When the Japanese began bombing Manila, Sergeant Phillips rushed from his post and told Claire to take all their money in the bank and exchange it for U.S. currency, then go to town and buy all the canned food she could, as well as medicines and anything else that might be needed for an extended trip, and pack it into the car. Then, as the Japanese bombing reached unbearable proportions, she loaded up her baby girl and took to the hills.

  There she stayed, hiding out in the jungles north of Bataan, eating monkey meat with rural families, until the Japanese conquest was complete. At one point a Catholic priest told her that her husband John Phillips was alive and a prisoner of war in Cabanatuan. With few other options, Claire sneaked back into Manila and, with her dark good looks, managed to get phony papers from a Philippine authority she knew, stating that she was an Italian citizen. As she later wrote, “I spoke no Italian, but neither did the Japanese.” She reinstated herself in her old apartment building and collected her former nurse to watch her baby while she found a job singing in a nightclub “owned by a German Jewess,” which was presently being patronized almost exclusively by ranking Japanese officers. Then, using her remaining money, plus her jewelry, she managed to borrow enough from a Chinese merchant and moneylender to open her own nightclub, the Club Tsubaki, which, in Japanese, means “camellia.”

  Club Tsubaki was an instant hit; several of the best singers from her old music company joined her. She made it “as high hat and snobbish as possible,” complete with a five-piece orchestra playing Hawaiian music. Before long it became Manila’s hot spot of the moment for Japanese military elite. Soon she made contact with a German priest who often visited Cabanatuan and he agreed to take with him a few articles of clothing for her husband. But because there were so many prisoners, the priest could only leave the package and hope it arrived at its destination. Then one day, while walking her daughter in a Manila park, Claire saw several American POWs on a work detail being guarded by Japanese soldiers. She quietly approached one and told him who she was and asked about her husband.

  “You are Mrs. Phillips?” he asked. “I’m sorry. Phillips died last July in Cabanatuan.” It turned out the soldier had been in Phillips’s outfit. Claire staggered away in tears, which, after a period of grief, soon turned to anger, then to rage, and she vented her fury by organizing a spy-and-supply ring both to get desperately needed items into the POW camp and to probe Japanese officers for any interesting intelligence information. Soon Claire’s ring, operating out of her office at the Club Tsubaki, became the center of Manila espionage, with operatives who had code names such as Looter, Sassy Suzie, Zig-Zag, Boots, Rocky, Morning Glory, and Sparkplug. In addition to the hostesses of her club, some of the members of this remarkable organization were among the elite of Manila prewar society, among them wealthy Europeans who had operated utilities and shipping companies in the Philippines, as well as a network of Catholic priests, some of them in fact German. They assumed identities like Fancy-Pants and Swiss, and so long as they weren’t American or British the Japanese usually left these people alone.

  High-ranking Japanese officers who patronized the Tsubaki, such as naval captains or army generals and some colonels, were plied into a jovial mood with booze and flattery by the hostesses, then pried for information about shipping or troop movements. This news was vital, since Manila had become one of the great staging and stop-off areas for the Japanese army and navy, funneling troops and supplies en route to the many conquered islands in the Southern Area. One Japanese aircraft carrier captain divulged that in a few days his ship was sailing for Singapore, then to Rabaul, in the Solomons, where the Guadalcanal fight was at its hottest. Another, an army man, revealed that he was taking a force of 30,000 men north to the shores of Lingayen Gulf to strengthen defenses there. These crucial pieces of information were immediately passed on to MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia via a shortwave radio located in the mountains.

  Claire Phillips—High Pockets—remembered her encounters with these Japanese with undisguised contempt. She recalled Japanese officers telling her, “I rove you. You rove me? You very pretty girr. You rike me?” She found these advances “nauseating.” The Japanese called her Madam Tsubaki, and the reason she had chosen “High Pockets” as her code name was because of her long-standing habit of hiding her money and other important items in her bra.

  Valuable as High Pockets’s contributions were to military intelligence, her aid to the American prisoners at Camp Cabanatuan was priceless. Her spy ring had managed to establish contact with several operatives there—mainly American chaplains (known to the men as “sky pilots”)—who managed to send out notes describing their needs. By this time the lowly Japanese guards, who received practically no pay at all, were clamoring for cash money while Claire’s Club Tsubaki was making a mint off their high-ranking officers. Also, a new and more lenient Japanese commander had replaced the brute who had originally run the camp. It turned out that this man, a major, had owned a popular bicycle shop in Manila before the war and, according to POW accounts, he seemed uninterested in strict discipline.

  Thus a new kind of black market came into being, with Japanese guards bribed to look the other way when food, medicine, and clothing were smuggled in—but only as long as they got their cut. The urgent problems were quickly identified. “We knew that the principal cause of the deaths among the prisoners was disease chiefly brought about by malnutrition,” High Pockets sai
d. Quinine, sulfa, antiseptics, and other desperately needed medicines were smuggled in, as well as staples such as rice, beans, peanuts, fruits, and vegetables. She would have tried to smuggle in precious canned goods as well, but these had virtually disappeared from Manila’s foodstore shelves. What had also nearly disappeared was liquor, the life’s blood of the Tsubaki, and without which she’d have to close it. But this problem was solved when a wealthy Filipino collaborator who owned a distillery began supplying her with enough stock to keep the club in business.

  High Pockets managed to smuggle in clothing for the neediest of the prisoners as well as money for bribing the guards but, of course, not nearly enough to supply all the thousands of prisoners. In addition, Red Cross packages were beginning to reach the prisoners, but not before all had been rifled by Japanese guards for prized items such as cigarettes, candy, and the tastiest canned goods. The guards, having stolen the items from the prisoners in the first place, then tried to sell these things back to their pathetic charges at exorbitant prices. In the meantime, the Japanese had begun to terrorize the citizens of Manila. The homes of wealthy Filipinos and other Europeans were entered at will by Japanese soldiers who stole anything that caught their fancy. High Pockets remembered seeing Japanese convoys of old U.S. Army trucks lining the streets leading to the piers, “loaded with every conceivable cargo ... food, electric refrigerators, bath tubs, radios,” all on their way to the soldiers’ homes in Japan. “And what they did not like,” she said, “they wantonly destroyed.” Frequently they would barge in and demand food and drink and “even made us mend and wash their clothes for them. We dared not refuse them.” Anyone remotely suspected of undesirable activity was arrested by the Japanese secret police and would simply disappear. “It was not an uncommon sight,” High Pockets recalled, “to glimpse bloated, headless cadavers floating in the Pasig River.”

  Despite the hardships, High Pockets and her little band were a godsend to the thousands of pitiful Americans imprisoned in Cabanatuan. For many, even years later, it brought tears to their eyes when they spoke of her. Through the shortwave radio in the mountains, she was able to smuggle in news sheets compiled from broadcasts by San Francisco radio stations and give uplifting news to the prisoners, who were constantly being propagandized by the Japanese, who naturally insisted that America was losing the war.

  As her spy ring grew, there was always danger of betrayal or detection. High Pockets had several close calls, one in particular when a Japanese officer who was quite familiar with Italy appeared in the club and insisted she sing “O Solo Mio,” which every Italian singer presumably knew. High Pockets was familiar with the tune, but the only Italian lyrics to the song she knew were the words of the title itself. Nevertheless she whispered to the band to play loud and mumbled and faked the verses in pidgin Italian, belting out a big “O Solo Mio” at the end of each chorus. The Japanese officer never caught on and kept shouting “Viva! Viva!” over and over again. It was almost inevitable that sooner or later she would be caught. One morning as she was feeding her daughter breakfast there were loud raps at the door and four members of the Kemptei, the Japanese secret police, burst in with drawn pistols. One of them said, “You are Madam Tsubaki?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take us to your office, High Pockets!”*5

  Though life in the prison camps had improved somewhat, it remained a hell on earth. Beatings at random by the guards continued unabated and the men were forced to work long and arduous hours at details ranging from cutting wood and gardening to building roads and airfields. The gardening was performed at a cobra-infested location known as the Farm, where the men grew vegetables, ostensibly to feed themselves, but the Japanese always took the lion’s share. Dentistry, such as it was, became a trial for both the patients and the dentists. The multitude of tropical diseases—especially scurvy, caused by lack of vegetable vitamins—resulted in unpleasant shrinking of the gums and attendant loss of tooth fillings. Since there was no dental-filling material available, and certainly no painkillers, the dentists began collecting silver coins—dimes, quarters—from anyone who had them and using the metal obtained from these employed a hammer to fill the men’s teeth.†

  Meanwhile, the camp leaders had organized engineers to build some better kind of sanitary system, which they did, and it contributed much to stem the death rate. The prisoners continued to be assailed by great swarms of flies, and everyone developed the so-called Cabanatuan Flip, a dexterous maneuver in which one continuously swats with one hand while lifting food to mouth with the other—akin to trying to rub your tummy and pat your head at the same time. After a while the camp hierarchy came upon a novel plan to reduce the population of flies. They fabricated thousands of flyswatters out of palm leaves and men were rewarded for killing the insects. For instance, a man who turned in a sixteen-ounce can filled with flies was given the equivalent of twenty-five cents in Philippine pesos.

  Entertainment groups were also organized, since it was realized that the morale of the prisoners had a direct correlation to their health. From out of the thousands of POWs they turned up a few musical instruments: some old trumpets, trombones, a beat-up banjo, a harmonica or two. Concerts were held at night, with the men singing along to familiar tunes, such as “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Stardust,” and “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” as well as others that had been composed in camp. A theater ensemble was formed, known as the Cabanatuan Mighty Arts Players, comprised of soldiers who’d had some kind of acting experience before the war. Many of them could still remember lines from productions they had been in, or movies they had seen, but sometimes they just made them up. Over the years the group staged no less than fifty-four different productions, beginning with Our Town and followed by In Old Mexico, Gone With the Wind, Journey’s End, Queen for a Day, Othello, A Christmas Carol, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Bride of Frankenstein, among others.6

  Some of the more entertaining moments came from behind the barred windows of the shack that served as the psychiatric ward. A number of American prisoners had snapped under the pressure and torture and the camp doctors had them locked up for their own good. One of these cases, with a voice like a radio announcer, had a kind of genius for remembering all the baseball games he had ever seen or heard on the radio, and when he was in the mood he could recite them chapter and verse from the first inning onward, complete with players’ names, runs, hits, errors, double plays, stolen bases, and pop-up flys. On those frequent occasions when he felt the call, this man began broadcasting from behind his window and the word would quickly spread that a baseball game was on. Prisoners from all over the camp would rush over to gather around for a couple of hours of live sports entertainment. “It was so realistic,” recalled one of prisoners, “that late-comers would ask, ‘What inning is it?’”7

  So life in the camps went on, and then the Japanese came up with another horror. It was decided back in Tokyo that all those Americans who were simply languishing in the Philippine compounds could be put to better use by His Majesty’s Imperial government. Accordingly, those not too ill to be moved were marched from the camps in large groups to the docks at Manila, where they were shipped out for slave labor in the iron mines or steel mills of Manchuria or in Japan itself. In thousands of cases, it proved to be their death warrant.8

  The ever spreading global conflict in 1942 continued unabated on other fronts, some more obscure than others. In both Burma and China there was bitter and savage fighting in what became known as the “forgotten war.”

  When war broke out in the Pacific a year earlier, Japan had moved to consolidate her supremacy in Southeast Asia and, after easy victories in Malaya and Siam (now Thailand), quickly proceeded to conquer Burma. Burma was a British colony defended by a single division of Indian troops commanded by British officers. The British at first did not expect that Japan could extend itself so far, but they were wrong. The Japanese high command sent to southern Burma an entire army, which began gobbling its way northward toward the In
dian border. Rangoon was bombed mercilessly, creating a refugee problem of enormous proportions, as the British fought a rearguard action.

  Burma was important to the Japanese and the Allies alike, for two reasons. First, it was the gateway into India, a huge country that, as we have seen, was critical to hold because if it, too, fell there would be little to stop the Japanese from pressing on into the Middle East and linking up with their German counterparts. This became a very real danger after Gandhi ordered all Indians to offer only “passive resistance” to the Japanese, as if that would have done them any good. To further this cause, Gandhi led a mass demonstration urging the four hundred million inhabitants of India to protest continued British rule in their country. Though the British government had already promised Indian independence after the war, Gandhi had brushed aside the offer as “a post-dated check,” and the so-called peaceful protest ignited weeks of deadly rioting, arson, bombings, and sabotage. At the end of it more than a thousand people were dead and it took sixty battalions of Allied soldiers to restore order. The British threw Gandhi in jail, along with some hundred thousand of his followers, but there remained a lingering fear that the Indian people would not help in defending themselves, and the Allies simply did not have enough manpower to stop a determined Japanese invasion.9

  The second reason Burma was now so important had to do with the famous Burma Road. This had been set up in early 1940 to carry supplies from the Allies to the Chinese army under Chiang Kai-shek, headquartered at Chungking, deep in China’s interior. Until the Japanese occupied Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) just before war broke out, there was another, shorter, and easier road to supply Chiang’s army that began at Hanoi, but with the Japanese arrival in 1941 this route was closed off. Thus the Burma Road, cut through a thousand miles of some of the most inhospitable territory in the world, remained the single lifeline for the Chinese, carrying hundreds of millions of dollars of military supplies and equipment (most of it American Lend-Lease) to keep the Chinese in the war.