by Peter Eisner
He stared at her as he boarded a truck for the trip north.
Jack did yell loud enough to put the fear of God in her—at least for an hour or so. “And then I went out and rented an apartment.”
It became increasingly obvious every day to Peggy that war was indeed coming and Manila might not be spared. She began saving up food and supplies just in case. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Peggy was working a full nursing shift at Remedios Hospital. She hardly even had time off when Jack got a pass and came in from Bataan for a few days after Christmas. She said they spent little time together. After bombing raids the hospital staff was working around the clock. In the end, Jack made sure to tell her she was right to have stayed in Manila. “I came back here thinking I’d have to pull you out of a ditch. Instead of that, I found you scurrying around, pulling other people out. I’d like you to know, darling, I’m very proud of you.”
A few days later the Japanese occupation of Manila was imminent. Peggy took advantage of an offer by the commissaries at all U.S. military bases to empty out their warehouses, first come, first served. She hired taxis and carts and took everything she could, then piled supplies floor to ceiling in her small apartment. Starting January 2, the day the Japanese marched in, she kept the lights off and pretended the apartment was empty. She avoided going out in daylight for more than two months, then finally ventured outside.
The primary order of business was to avoid detention as an American. Like Claire, she had arranged a fake identity card and an alias to avoid being dragged off to Santo Tomas. She was now Rosena Utinsky, the spinster daughter of a family from Lithuania, a Baltic state under Nazi occupation and therefore considered to be on the side of the Axis. With forged Japanese signatures and a passable travel document, Peggy could circulate freely. She returned to Remedios Hospital and began assisting doctors in their normal duties. After the U.S. surrender at Bataan and Corregidor, the Red Cross petitioned Japanese authorities to provide help to prisoners of war who had survived the Bataan death march (not called that at the time, at least not within earshot of the Japanese). Officials approved the request—as long as only Filipino prisoners were treated. This was in line with the Japanese view of the occupation: Japan was the Philippines’ benevolent savior, and Filipinos and Japanese should be considered Asian allies. Only the Americans were the enemy.
One of the doctors Peggy had been working with, Ramón Atienza, received permission to set up a small Red Cross facility at Camp O’Donnell to treat Filipino patients with the proviso that he and his staff were not to have any contact with the American POWs. Though they were isolated in a separate section of the camp, Atienza managed to establish contact with Colonel James W. Duckworth, the physician caring for American POWs at the camp, and with Captain Frank L. Tiffany, the camp chaplain.
In early June, around the same time that Claire was sneaking into Manila, Atienza summoned Peggy to work with the Red Cross mission at Camp O’Donnell. Peggy’s role was confirmation that her tough decision to remain in the Philippines had been well founded. “After this trip through filth and nightmare, when everything seemed to be festering death, I knew that I could not stop until I had given every ounce of my strength to help the men who still lived.”
With help from Atienza, Peggy was able to smuggle food, medicine, clothing, and small amounts of money into the camp on ambulances returning empty after having transported sick Filipinos to his clinic just outside the gate. It was a dangerous enterprise.
Peggy knew she looked enough like an American to be the focus of suspicion on the train rides from Manila up toward Camp O’Donnell, especially as she began bringing more and more gear on every trip and had to depend on porters and conductors to get all of the sacks of supplies on and off the trains. When Japanese guards stopped her, she smiled and showed them her travel permit and her Red Cross ID and armband. That usually worked, but it was only a matter of time before she would be questioned more carefully.
One day she was just unloading her latest package of supplies when a Japanese soldier ran up to her, yelling and pointing. “American! American!”
Doctor Atienza raced up in alarm and protested, “No, no, not American, Lithuanian. That is like German—friends to you.”
This Japanese soldier stopped yelling, but he did not appear to be convinced that Peggy was either Lithuanian or German. Atienza pointed to Peggy’s uniform and said, “Kankoshi, kankoshi,” one of the only words they had learned in Japanese: nurse.
If that was the case, the Japanese soldier said, how do you say kankoshi in German?
“That stumped me. The only German word I had ever heard was Deutsch [which means German]. But it was a start, so I might as well use it. ‘You say nursie, Deutsche nursie,’ I told him, and the Japanese turned away satisfied.”
Back in Manila, Peggy asked a German friend about the word for nurse—Krankenschwester, or just Schwester [sister]. It was a good idea to commit it to memory for future reference, in case the next Japanese soldier she met knew enough English to realize how silly “Deutsche nursie” sounded. Something similar had happened to Claire at the nightclub. She now carried false papers that gave her Italian citizenship. Since she was presenting herself as half Filipina and half Italian, a Japanese officer said he had been stationed for a while in Italy. “Can you sing ‘O Sole Mio’ for me?” he asked. “Sì, sì-sì, sì-sì-sì,” she responded, belting out the song and a bunch of gobbledygook sounds whose lines always started or ended with words that sounded like sole mio and amore, whatever that might mean.
With increased volume and despite the ability to fool Japanese soldiers a few times, Peggy had the reasonable fear that she would eventually be found out as an American. Meanwhile, the work of filling sacks of goods and transporting them with the Red Cross was getting busy enough that she needed help and more supplies. By the time Claire and Peggy met in the fall of 1942, Peggy was gathering a loosely knit crew of Filipinos and foreigners willing to gather donations and ship supplies to prisoners in Manila and up north to the Cabanatuan prisoner of war camp. Her work was to aid the men who had survived the Bataan death march but were now dying by the hundreds every week. Before the war, Claire and Peggy had lived within blocks of one another; soon they would be working together.
The Prisoners of Japan
Camp O’Donnell, Capas, Philippines, 1942
THE JAPANESE MILITARY viewed surrender as a shameful act and believed that prisoners, especially American prisoners, had disgraced their country and themselves. Accordingly, they treated the Americans as lesser beings, and their survival was a minor topic worth little consideration. The Tokyo High Command often sent the lowest of the low to be prison camp guards and commanders—disabled soldiers, men unfit to fight and destined to remain far from the prestigious front lines of battle. For some of them their only glory was the systematic, sadistic torture of the American POWs. Camp O’Donnell, about sixty miles north of Manila, had been the terminus of the Bataan death march in April 1942. O’Donnell had been designed as a Philippine Army outpost for ten thousand men, but construction had not been completed. About fifty thousand Filipinos and nine thousand Americans were forced into cramped, inadequate facilities under the camp’s tyrannical Japanese commander, Captain Yoshio Tsuneyoshi, who greeted the POWs with a long rant, berating them as cowards and common criminals, not prisoners of war.
It is regrettable that we were unable to kill each of you on the battlefield. It is only through our generosity that you are alive at all. We do not consider you to be prisoners of war. You are members of an inferior race, and we will treat you as we see fit. Whether you live or die is of no concern to us.
Filth, hunger, and depravity followed. Some men were shot outright; many more died of neglect. The Filipino and American POWs died at an appalling rate; as many as sixteen hundred Americans and possibly ten thousand Filipino prisoners died in the first six weeks. The survivors could hardly describe the horror they ha
d suffered—every form of jungle disease, black flies, green flies, parasites, typhoid, malaria, and tropical plagues that had no name.
On June 1, after about two months, General Homma himself removed the camp commander and reported him to Tokyo for incompetence. It was none too soon for the prisoners, who called Tsuneyoshi “little Hitler,” among other things. “He was one of the ugliest mortals I have ever seen,” one of them said. “He breathed the very essence of hate.”
The replacement, a higher-ranking officer known as Colonel Ito, set out to improve conditions, at least somewhat. In an effort to alleviate the overcrowding and disease, Japanese authorities began to furlough sick and dying Filipino prisoners and transfer surviving Americans to a different facility. Release of the Filipinos was billed as a goodwill gesture; few people took it that way, but they raced to the rescue. Family members had been allowed to register and travel to the camp by train in baggage cars so they could fetch their loved ones. The prisoners often collapsed in their arms when they arrived for the trip home. Some were so sick and malnourished that the strain of the transfer back home killed them on the return train trip before they could reach Manila.
The scene at the station in Manila was heartrending. The Filipinos saw through Japanese claims and realized that the furlough of the prisoners was hardly a humanitarian act. Rather, it was a pragmatic decision to avoid their dying while still in custody, which would have turned public opinion against the Japanese. Nursed back to health, most of the former prisoners were defiant and wanted to find a way to keep fighting. “If given the opportunity,” said Marcial Lichauco, “they would like to get another crack at the enemy.”
The Japanese then drove most of the remaining Americans by truck in small groups to a new location about forty-five miles to the east. They named it Cabanatuan; the camp was close to the Pampanga River, about four miles from the center of Cabanatuan City, the capital of Nueva Ecija Province, and about one hundred miles north of Manila. The transfer to Cabanatuan, which was divided into three living areas, was somewhat better for the remaining Americans, but they were still sick, starving, and in need of help. Some of the able-bodied Americans were being shifted to prisons and detention centers in Manila to serve as the laborers, servants, and drivers whom Claire, Steve the Greek, Peggy, and their allies saw performing menial and clerical and hard-labor tasks in the city. They lived in thatched and palm-leaf-roofed barracks in one quarter of the camp, isolated by barbed wire and rifle-toting guards in wooden towers.
At first the Cabanatuan camp was hardly better than Camp O’Donnell. Cruelty and deprivation reigned. More than seven hundred men died in July, the first month they were there; five months later the prisoners were amazed to record a milestone: One day, December 15, 1942, had been death free. That was far from the norm. By the end of the war, almost a third of the nine thousand men who had passed through Cabanatuan had died there or at other camps.
The prisoners themselves took steps to organize and improve conditions; they built latrines, and their officers lobbied for better hygiene and better food, though their requests were rarely granted by the Japanese officers in charge, not as sadistic as the hated Captain Tsuneyoshi but often capable of neglect and great cruelty. POW doctors staffed an infirmary, others established a commissary, and others organized maintenance and sanitation. The Japanese officers also soon did allow limited contact with outside food vendors—mostly because they could not supply enough food to keep the Americans alive. The Japanese authorities did make a show of following or at least paying lip service to the Geneva conventions governing treatment of prisoners. POWs were allowed to have Red Cross contact and occasional food supplies, along with the right to send and receive messages home—in practice food was often stolen or rifled before the POWs received it, and their messages were deeply censored and unevenly transmitted. Observing the conventions when convenient, the Japanese even paid the POWs wages—between five and forty pesos a month, depending on rank—as payment for doing work at the camp, though it was often backbreaking and bruising under the tropical sun—and not voluntary. Local Filipino merchants delivered supplies to the small camp commissary, where the prisoners could buy food and other basics. This quickly became part of an elaborate black market system. A man who worked at the commissary, Horacio Manaloto, quickly made contact with outside relief workers who wanted to help the prisoners.
The Underground
Manila, November 1942
THANKS TO STEVE the Greek and Mrs. Norton, the retired teacher, Claire came to visit Peggy at her apartment, which was just a few blocks up Mabini Street from Tsubaki Club. They realized they had much in common—both Americans with assumed names, they were both already sending support to the POWs. They also were looking for lost soldiers, Jack Utinsky and John Phillips, who both might be prisoners at Cabanatuan.
Peggy introduced Claire to her committee of like-minded Filipinos and foreigners—all of them had seen the prisoners marching by and wanted to do what they could to help. They began to solicit funds and donations, each operating under a code name, sometimes together, sometimes apart, trusted allies with a goal of helping the POWs. The key members were a forty-four-year-old Irish priest, Father John Lalor, who hid supplies and passed along messages at his nearby parish church; Ramón Amusategui, a well-to-do Spanish Basque businessman, and his Filipina wife, Lorenza, organizers and fund-raisers; and Naomi Flores, who was in charge of actually making contact with the POWs at the new American camp at Cabanatuan.
Naomi and Peggy had met in May 1942. Naomi was working at the American-owned beauty salon where Peggy went to have her hair done. The owner, Charles, had been sent to detention at Santo Tomas. They chatted generally one day about working on a clothing drive for prisoners in Camp O’Donnell. Gathering supplies for men in the prison camp was not necessarily considered seditious. Peggy told Naomi she had already safely taken duffel bags of clothes and shoes by train up to Capas, the town nearest O’Donnell, and delivered them directly to Dr. Atienza. Naomi told Peggy she had also been gathering clothes with friends at the YWCA. “If you are working the same way, well, let’s get together and collect clothes,” Peggy said. Naomi soon moved into Peggy’s apartment.
Now that they had a larger group, it was logical to start using code names to compartmentalize their activities. A captured message could not reveal the source—a POW would not know the real name of his outside contact. If anyone in the underground was arrested, no one person would have the full picture of their operations. Meanwhile, few people knew that Claire was also supporting the guerrillas.
The code names were amateurish, but they apparently worked. Peggy became “Miss U,” hardly an undecipherable choice, and that became the name of their group. More often the others referred to her as “the old lady” or “auntie,” which she probably did not like; Naomi became “Looter” because her principal occupation was to smuggle goods from Manila to Bataan. Ramón was “Spark Plug,” because he was the most able and the smartest—he made the operation roll smoothly; his wife, Lorenza, was “Screwball,” because she appeared in public to be mentally unbalanced. She was far from it, but people were afraid to approach her. When questioned by the Japanese police, and it happened at least once, she said, “they didn’t bother me, they thought I was crazy.” Claire had been doing a good job with multiple aliases without help. She now added an additional name—she would be known in underground circles as “High Pockets.” Claire said it was because she was known to stuff messages down her blouse into her brassiere.
Breaking Through to the POWs
Cabanatuan, June 1942
IN MID-JUNE, Naomi made her first trip with Peggy up to the train station at Capas, north from Bataan, and onward by horse-drawn cart with clothing, medicine, and money for the prisoners at Camp O’Donnell. It worked well, and this was still aboveboard and legal under the aegis of the Red Cross. A diminutive Filipina with an easy smile, Naomi had an easier time passing through Japanese checkpo
ints on the way to deliver supplies to the prisoners. However, when the Americans were separated and sent to Cabanatuan, the women lost regular contact with them. Naomi’s job would be to reestablish the supply line. It proved to be difficult.
Naomi’s first attempt in November 1942 was little more than reconnaissance. She visited a nearby barrio on the road to the new POW camp and came back with a helpful survey of the scene but no contact with the POWs. She went back again in early December. This time Naomi decided to blend in with the locals. She dressed in peasant garb, unlikely to provoke suspicion. With the other women joining her, she began to sell fruits and vegetables from a makeshift stand on the road, close to the camp’s rice paddies. The first day she had no luck in reaching out to any of the Americans; the camp appeared to be impenetrable. Then finally, a few days later, she spotted prisoners a couple of hundred feet from the road, bent over, tending rice and gathering straw for the carabao water buffalo in the camp.
The POWs hated pulling the farming shift; even if the compound was suffocating with flies and mosquitoes and stinking sewage, most of them were too weak and tired to want to move; even when they got a small increase in food and water, it still was not worth working in the hot sun all day.
That morning, guards were not allowing the prisoners to come close enough to buy food at the stands. Nevertheless, when no guard was close by, Naomi called out to the closest prisoner. All she could see was a person wearing a hat hunched over at a distance. The man looked up and shielded his eyes. She shouted that she had been working with Captain Tiffany and Colonel Duckworth at Camp O’Donnell and now wanted to set up a new transportation system for Cabanatuan. Tiffany, the camp chaplain, and Duckworth, the doctor, could vouch for her. “Call me Looter.” The prisoner must have been surprised to hear a woman call to him in English. He acknowledged that he understood.
