In the weeks after Los Baños, Tal talked of joining the military before the war was finished. Then the fighting ended in Europe. The U.S. Marines in the Pacific geared up for an all-out assault on Japan’s home islands. There wasn’t much war left. Tal got the notion instead that he might like to work in one of the hotels being rebuilt in Manila. He’d learn the business, then start a hotel himself. He liked the idea of a hotel, a place where folks could come and go as they pleased. Carmen would handle the kitchen. Remy could gamble in the bar. Remy said this was a great idea, knowing it might not be. The boy had turned twenty last month. He would have many ideas.
Tal stood over his ball, in grass high enough to cover his shoes. He chose a long iron for a shot at the green, ignoring Carmen’s advice to pitch out. The boy had four pale dots in his flesh now, the bullet scars having tanned more slowly than the rest of him. These were the only evidence of his ordeal. Tal walked fine and his left arm was strong again. It was not strong enough, Remy figured, for the shot the boy was lining up. Remy kept his counsel and let him learn, as always, after his own fashion.
Tal stood behind his ball, waiting while the POWs got out of his way. A dozen former imperial soldiers shouldered their rakes to move in a bunch. Their peaked straw hats reminded Remy of the roofs of the barracks at Los Baños. A single American guard kept watch over the prisoners. The Japanese had no intent of escaping. Where would they go? The first Filipinos to see them would beat them to death.
The boy’s line was cleared. He didn’t address his ball for the shot but stared at the shuffling POWs after they took up work behind him. Carrying his club, Tal walked into the fairway.
Remy called to him, “Change your mind?”
“Pitch out,” Yumi said. “Crazy shot.”
Tal rapped Yumi on the shoulder. The two bickered like siblings.
“Look at those Japs.”
“What for?” Remy and the girls eyed the laborers.
“Look close.”
Carmen saw him. “On the right. The older one.”
Tal breathed the name. “Toshiwara.”
Remy eased his hand over his son’s shoulder. The boy had filled out. If he wanted to break away from Remy, there was nothing that could be done.
Tal tensed to step forward. Before he could move or Remy speak, Yumi bolted across the fairway.
The POWs did not notice, busy with their rakes under their wide straw brims. The big armed guard moved to intercept the girl, but too late.
With both hands she shoved the narrow, damp back of the camp commandant.
The old man stumbled but did not go to his knees. Too bad, Remy thought.
Keeping his hand on Tal, he said, “Boy, please. Stay right here. Understand?”
Carmen took Tal’s hand.
Remy hurried across the fairway to free Yumi from the American guard. The soldier had put his hands on the little girl in bright colors. She’d pushed him, too. Remy would try to explain.
~ * ~
I doubt that any airborne unit in the world will ever be able to rival the Los Baños prison raid. It is the textbook airborne operation for all ages and all armies.
—Gen. Colin Powell
former chairman,
U.S Joint Chiefs of Staff
~ * ~
Annotations
CHAPTER ONE
≈ In late December of 1944, American fighter and bomber planes were a common sight above Los Baños. The planes were based on the southern island of Mindoro, which had fallen in mid-month. American pilots frequently flew low over the camp, performing aerobatics and other feats to hearten the internees and alert them that their plight was known. One flier did, in fact, loose four cannon bursts in the forests beside the camp, in the rhythm of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, also Morse code for the letter V. Many pilots also dropped items into the camp, including cigarettes.
≈ The Japanese considered a slap, the binta, to be an act of ultimate disdain. American prisoners suffered this indignity in all Japanese wartime camps.
≈ Dr. Dana Nance, the medical director of Los Baños, was a known curmudgeon. He was tireless in his efforts to preserve the internees’ health against the encroaching effects of intestinal parasites, edema, roundworms, skin fungi, beriberi, pellagra, malaria, bacillary dysentery, dengue fever, pernicious anemia, scurvy—all treatable but made far worse by malnutrition and the absence of medication. Nance had little patience with fools or the Japanese. The day before Thanksgiving 1944, he beat Poochie, the pet dog of Polly and Bill Yankey, to death with an iron bar. Poochie had grown fat on food sacrificed by its owners. The pet compromised Nance’s ability to complain to the Japanese about decreasing rations for the internees. Poochie’s owners got into a fistfight with Dr. Nance, then retrieved the dogs carcass before the doctor could drag it to the kitchen. They smeared the corpse with poison to prevent Nance from digging it up, and buried Poochie in the camp garden.
~ * ~
CHAPTER TWO
≈ One comfort woman existed for approximately every fifty soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. The author has taken the liberty of placing a comfort station, or shuho, at the internment camp of Los Baños; the Japanese garrison at the camp numbered approximately two hundred soldiers, and the town of Los Baños was a major crossroads and rail terminal.
≈ Suicide was a common escape for many comfort women. Girls were also invited into double suicide pacts by depressed soldiers. As the war turned against the Japanese, a great number of comfort women were simply deserted; in extreme cases, they were driven into ditches or caves and executed by the retreating soldiers. Some estimates state that fewer than one quarter of the comfort women survived their enslavement.
≈ Injections of 606 (the compound salvarsan) were used not only as a treatment for venereal disease but to prevent pregnancy and to induce abortion. The drug was exceptionally strong; after the war, comfort women reported that they had become sterile due to the frequent use of 606 by Japanese medical staff.
~ * ~
CHAPTER THREE
≈ The internment camp at Los Baños was run by a series of commandants, ranging from benign to weak. Toshiwara is meant to represent an amalgam of these men. None of them were punished by the Allies at the end of the war.
≈ Nagata is a composite drawn from the actual Lieutenant Sadaaki Konishi. The guard has been described by several chroniclers of Los Baños; none leave out the word sadistic.
He is well depicted in Angels at Dawn, Lieutenant General Edward M. Flanagan, Jr. (USA, ret.), Presidio Press, 1999, page 38:
Konishi was universally despised by the internees. He was about 5’7” tall, with a scarred face and a generally “mean” look. The internees felt that he had “an intense hatred for the white race,” that he was “very cunning” ... that he was “an arrogant, brutal type of person.” He “had a vast effect over the commandant... not only within his own sphere, which was food and supply, but also in other matters of camp administration.” ... There is no question that he hated the Americans with a consuming passion. He vowed at one point that “they would be eating dirt before he was through with them.”
~ * ~
CHAPTER FOUR
≈ A comfort woman typically serviced between fifteen and thirty soldiers per day, with officers arriving at night. The worst periods of activity came when the women were visited by soldiers passing through their locations. According to The Comfort Women, George Hicks, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997, page 73:
What the women dreaded most were visits by bodies of troops in transit. A stable attachment to one particular unit would at least tend to limit the volume of service required, and perhaps improve the chances of developing some degree of fellow-feeling. But in the case of transients, the demand would not only increase in volume, but also in intensity. Such troops would often be headed for action, and would regard this as possibly their last chance for sex. After a quick succession of such visits, the woman’s performance would become mechanical. The men would regard this as p
oor service or coldness. This could lead to violence.
~ * ~
CHAPTER FIVE
≈ The Japanese guards identified those internees whom they considered troublemakers and placed them in barracks 11, located near their own quarters. The residents of barracks 11 were mostly younger males with a taste for insurrection and mischief.
≈ Gen. Douglas MacArthur insisted that his suite at the Hotel Manila be built with seven bedrooms, the same as President Quezon’s residence, Malacañan. MacArthur had his rooms ringed with an outdoor parapet where he could stroll and be seen from all sides. When the general retreated from Manila to Bataan in December 1941, his wife left two bronze Japanese vases outside their door, to appease the invading commander Yamashita and to seek protection for her home. Yamashita took MacArthur’s quarters for his own. Three years later, during the battle to liberate Manila, Yamashita directed the suite be burned. He waited until MacArthur and his troops were across the street from the hotel. The general watched his beloved quarters and immense military library go up in flames. The bronze urns remained at the front door.
~ * ~
CHAPTER SIX
≈ Terry’s Hunters was one of several guerrilla groups in the area of Los Baños, and was arguably the best equipped and led.
Because the rescue of the internees was such a notable historical event, much jockeying for credit has ensued in the aftermath. The effectiveness of the guerrillas in the liberation of the Philippines, and the rescue at Los Baños in particular, remains a contested matter. The guerrillas themselves make a strong case that their role was pivotal, while the American military tends to minimize the Filipinos’ combat claims. This is to be expected, as regular soldiers would have had little opportunity to see the guerrillas’ hit-and-run fighting in the isolated jungles and mountains.
To the author, this seems a debate only over matters of degree. What is not in question is that the Filipino resistance was brave and effective, independent of their discipline or tactics. Were the guerrillas not terribly bothersome to the Japanese, there would not have been so many slaughters of Filipino villages as retaliation.
An in-depth discussion of the guerrillas role in the Philippines can be found in Flanagan, Angels at Dawn, pages 72-98.
~ * ~
CHAPTER SEVEN
≈ A common use of comfort women, and a further degradation, was to put them naked at the head of tired Japanese columns to encourage the soldiers to march forward.
≈ The “recruitment” of comfort women took every conceivable shape, from trickery to outright kidnapping. Shady dealers roamed the countryside searching for virginal girls to snare and sweep off to China or some other battleground nation. Soldiers and police grabbed whom they pleased; families were bribed, fooled, or bullied into sending away their daughters.
The Japanese military believed that comfort women would help reduce the incidence of venereal disease among the troops, ease the incidence of rape against the women of conquered populaces, and protect military secrets from being drawn out by sex with civilians. In the end, rape continued unabated (which must include that committed against the comfort women), sexually transmitted diseases continued to spread among the troops, and many comfort women fed information to the local militias.
~ * ~
CHAPTER EIGHT
≈ In the years following their imprisonment, many Los Baños internees wrote memoirs describing their time in the camp. All referred to guards both cruel and kind. Many were ruthless in the mold of Konishi, others profited from the internees’ misery by striking one-sided trades, while some tried in secretive ways to ease the starvation and sickness inside the wire. In the end, the Japanese officials and guards of the camp were as diverse as the internees themselves.
≈ The camp was the equivalent of a small American town, with a commensurately wide range of personalities. Among them was a man named Harry Sniffen, the basis for the character Lazlo, who reportedly lived very well in the camp while others starved, sickened, and died. Sniffen and the rest of the internee community are well described in Deliverance at Los Baños, Anthony Arthur, St. Martins Press, 1985, pages 49-78.
~ * ~
CHAPTER NINE
≈ At both Santo Tomas and Los Baños, a handful of internees, including Dr. Nance, created secret radio receivers and transmitters out of spare parts. The methods of concealment were as ingenious as the designs of the apparatuses. These men kept their fellow internees supplied with news from outside the wire, an irreplaceable service to camp morale, all the while knowing that being caught with such a device was a death sentence.
~ * ~
CHAPTER TEN
≈ Comfort women were treated as prisoners in their stations. They were rarely allowed out of doors, never without escort. When not servicing soldiers, they were forced to labor for the troops, doing such menial tasks as laundry and sewing. Their pay was almost always a joke; they were either cheated out of it by their shuho handlers, given Japanese scrip that proved worthless at war’s end, or simply not paid at all.
~ * ~
CHAPTER ELEVEN
≈ The Japanese left Los Baños in the early morning of January 5. Before departing, they gathered every digging tool in the camp. History does not record the reason; it has been speculated that the guards were ordered to dig trenches and defense works around Manila, or for the Tiger Division bivouacked ten miles south.
~ * ~
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
≈ Far more than “tens of thousands” of conquered women were enslaved by the Japanese as comfort women. Conservative estimates range from two to three hundred thousand.
≈ The Imperial Japanese Army did infrequently employ its own citizens as comfort women. The practice was restricted to Japanese professional prostitutes of at least twenty-one years of age at the time of their recruitment. Japanese comfort women, unlike their foreign counterparts, received approximately 40 percent of their pay, with 60 percent going to the military establishment that housed them. They were not kept in conditions of slavery (physical restraint) and were not abandoned or killed at war’s end.
In Comfort Women, Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Suzanne O’Brien (trans.), Columbia University Press, 2002, page 155, the reasons for avoiding nonprostitute Japanese women are stated clearly:
If Japanese women who were not prostitutes were sent from Japan... as comfort women, it would exert a grave influence on citizens, especially on families whose sons were stationed overseas. Also, if the sisters, wives or female acquaintances of soldiers stationed overseas came to the battlefields as comfort women, it would probably destroy soldiers’ sense of trust in the state and the army... Therefore, the rounding up of comfort women from Japan was extremely limited.
~ * ~
CHAPTER NINETEEN
≈ The Japanese returned to Los Baños at three o’clock in the morning of January 13, 1945. They were worn out and short-tempered.
The commandant, Iwanaka, normally a taciturn man, was visibly upset over the return of a camp radio that was not the Philco his guards had left behind (an internee had traded the guards radio in the villages for food), and the pilfering of his private rice bowl, hand-painted with the emperors flag. The internees had also looted the storehouses during the guards’ absence. Lieutenant Konishi responded by immediately cutting the camps rations.
≈ Konishi did jail the commandant’s chicken for ten days. According to Delivery at Los Baños, page 109, the chicken sat outside the commandant’s quarters
in its tiny cage built especially for the occasion----It had eaten its own eggs ... in dire need of calcium, like all of the internees at Los Baños, and had instinctively tired to eat the nearest source, which was its own shells.
≈ Konishi—out of little more than spite—instructed exhausted internees to carry heavy sacks of grain back and forth under the guise of allowing them first to keep the grain, before changing his mind.
~ * ~
CHAPTER TWENTY
≈ On January 17, the guards a
t the main gate shot thirty-eighty-year-old Pat Hell, a mining engineer from the Arkansas Ozarks. Hell, recalled as an intrepid and affable man, had ignored the Japanese order for internees to stay in the camp. Returning at four thirty in the afternoon after a foraging trip to the villages, Hell was shot four times in the chest. He dropped a bag of coconuts and bananas, with a dead chicken clutched in his right hand. He died on the road, in plain view of the internees. The camp commandant, Iwanaka, issued an official statement that Hell had been caught escaping.
~ * ~
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
≈ The massacre of American POWs on Palawan was one of several factors for General MacArthur’s decision to prioritize rescue operations. In his autobiography, Reminiscences, the general relates:
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