by Peter Eisner
“I didn’t have anything to do with those boys,” she said each time she was asked. “I didn’t know they were Americans.”
The man in charge, Captain Tossino, slapped and punched her when he didn’t like her answer to one question: How many times had she gone to the shop after the men began working for her? “A couple of times,” she said. Tossino did not understand the translation of “a couple” or did not like the vague answer.
Tossino asked repeatedly: Who were these men? Did you know they were soldiers?
She repeated once more: “I didn’t have anything to do with those boys. . . . I didn’t know they were Americans.”
Finally, in mock frustration, she told them to get it over with. “They kept on hammering that I was telling a lie.” If they didn’t believe her, she said, they should just kill her.
“Go ahead and shoot me. . . . Go ahead and shoot me and get it over with.”
Her show of anger and frustration brought an end to the interrogation. They believed her. Tossino thanked her for coming and let her go.
All the while, Peggy was waiting for news at the apartment. The day passed slowly, dusk approached, and there was no news. If the police did not believe Naomi’s story, everyone could be arrested; they all might be killed. Finally, at around 7:00 p.m., Naomi walked in. She had been slapped around but was not actually injured, or at least didn’t mention it. The main thing was that she was free and they were safe. The ruse had worked. Naomi took a long breath and told Peggy what had happened.
They slept well that night. Everything was fine until the next morning, when there was a knock at the door. A pair of Japanese military policemen walked in; one of them had been questioning Naomi the day before. They were cordial and had some questions for Peggy—that is, for Rosena, the Lithuanian nurse with a supposed non-American-sounding first name.
All very casually and friendly as the women served tea, the Kempeitai officers chatted about nothing in particular. One of the men opened an atlas that was on the table and pointed to Asia and Europe. “This is for Japan—this is for Germany,” he said. “That is the way it will be after the war. Where will you live then?” he asked Peggy. “In Manila, I think. Lithuania will probably be destroyed.” The men bowed and left, apparently satisfied that Rosena Utinsky, as her forged papers indicated, was Lithuanian and supported the Japanese cause. Two weeks later Claire heard that Barney and Tommy were still alive and were being moved out of Manila, presumably to Cabanatuan or another camp. There was no further word of their whereabouts.
Dangerous as it had been, the visit from the Kempeitai gave Naomi the excuse she needed to leave Peggy’s apartment. She obtained a permit to move out of Manila after informing the authorities that she had to take care of her aunt, Miss Bell, who lived just outside Cabanatuan City. Naomi then persuaded Evangeline Neibert to stay on as the main transport person from Manila to Cabanatuan, but working directly with Ramón. From then on, Naomi rarely traveled to Manila and when she did, she made other lodging arrangements.
Messages at Dawn
Cabanatuan, May 1943
WHENEVER A DELIVERY was ready to be smuggled into Cabanatuan, Naomi emerged after dawn from the home of Miss Bell—not really her aunt, as she had told authorities—on the main road, where she was renting a room. At that time of day the temperature was still tolerable, not yet steaming, with the rainy season a few months off. At Cabanatuan, POW work details were mustering to ride the oxcarts through the gates and over to the fields.
Naomi pretended she had just gotten up. She wandered outside the house, close to the main road. She lived a couple of hundred feet from the rice fields where the Americans would soon begin their farming chores. When the oxcarts had passed and the men had come out to the fields, Naomi knew that Fred Threatt, the prisoner in charge of the cart detail, would be able to see her. They would park the oxcarts at the bridge along the road, in sight of the fields, and from there Naomi and Mr. Threatt could see each other.
To the Japanese she was just a young woman stretching in the morning out in front of her house. Any man, Japanese guard or American prisoner, would appreciate the sight of a lovely girl standing by the road. She would run her fingers through her thick black hair once, twice, three times. And what of it? Then she would casually go back in the house.
That simple gesture was her signal to Mr. Threatt—code-named Mango. Threatt, forty-seven, was a World War I veteran from Louisiana who had settled in the Philippines with his wife before the war. He had enlisted in the navy in December 1941, but the POWs still considered him a civilian and always referred to him as “Mr. Threatt.” He looked out toward Naomi in the distance: Three strokes of the hair meant three packs of medicine and supplies buried under the tree. Later in the day Mr. Threatt always stopped on the bridge heading back to the camp so he and the other cart drivers could water their animals and get a drink of their own. The guards allowed prisoners to hop off the carts to buy fruits and vegetables. The guards would not be paying particular attention. Another slow, warm day. What danger could there be? The POWs made a show of pretending to pay for rice cakes, bananas, and small calamansi lemons. Naomi had repacked the supplies sent up from Manila in smaller quantities (easier to hide), along with letters and money stuffed into sliced banana peels and leaves. The men at the stand appeared to be paying for fruits and nuts but were really handing over notes and requests for more supplies. Meanwhile, Mr. Threatt hopped down below the bridge and retrieved whatever packages Naomi had left for him, then hid them on his carabao cart under the sacks of rice and straw being hauled in. So went the days, the same routine once, even twice a week. So far they hadn’t been caught.
Just in case, if the Japanese wanted to make sure the women were really selling fruit, they could ask Naomi to show them her money. She always had enough crumpled Japanese occupation notes—the Filipinos and Americans called it Mickey Mouse money—on hand to show them.
Threatt used a careful tracking system when he delivered the supplies to Mack and to Tiffany and then onward to the prison hospital or to individual prisoners. A soldier’s name might be checked off on the Manila note to Tiffany and might have an extra notation: “with onions.” This guy was to receive money. The system was simple enough in both directions that the operatives knew who was expected to get what and that there would be confirmations flowing back to Manila. Signaling Threatt was by no means easy, though, nor without danger. Naomi’s rented room by the road was the terminus of a sixty-mile smuggling route from Manila to Cabanatuan. All along the way, everything needed to appear innocent, simple, and homespun. Naomi and her friend Evangeline carried travel passes, and they had to make sure their movements seemed irregular and haphazard. If they crossed paths with Japanese guards, they had to appear calm as they slowly and humbly bowed to them, making sure to avert their eyes.
They would take as much as they could carry—a large sack and half a dozen woven paper shopping bags. Evangeline or Ramón himself would hire a horse cart at dawn to take them to the train station in Manila. One or two of the bags were different from the others, and they carried concealed money and notes in those bags; Evangeline always kept these closest to her on the train. Before packing the bags, Ramón and Lorenza censored and reviewed every piece of paper and looked at the overall appearance of the packages. They made sure that no language in the letters could refer to an identifiable person—code names only.
The entire supply operation, though, depended on Naomi and her ability to communicate with the prisoners. She and her friend Evangeline were in constant danger. Claire downplayed her own role compared with the daring of the Filipina women. “I don’t know of any other girl that would have done the dangerous work that you . . . did. I am sure there is no American girl who would have done the dangerous work you two girls did. I am really proud that I know you.”
Naomi and Evangeline learned to pack so that messages and money would be easy to miss. “It was concealed
by mongo [mung] beans or black-eyed beans or candy. By putting the candy on top of the big bags,” they ensured that if the Japanese soldiers “stick their hands in, they will find out that it is just candy or mongo beans in there.”
Buried deep within were small shipments of food, medicine, tools, and letters to and from the POWs. Threatt also had to maintain a casual, low profile. When the amounts became greater, Horacio Manaloto, the authorized merchant supplying the prison commissary, used the same method for his truck but carried greater volumes than the women could handle on their own. Manaloto could ship far more than what the women could bring up on the train, more than Threatt could carry on his oxcart—sacks of rice, tomatoes, baskets of potatoes, and black-eyed beans. A few times Manaloto even corralled shipments of water buffalo purchased by the Manila underground, then herded to town by local Filipinos. The Japanese officers actually allowed the delivery of the animals for slaughter. The Americans could pool some money to make it look like a legitimate purchase. Many of the Japanese guards were more than happy to accept bribes along with a portion of the slaughtered beef. The water buffalo could be a high-protein food source: Hundreds of pounds of meat definitely could make a difference. However, divided among thousands of prisoners, the shipments never added up to enough protein for a prolonged period of time—no more than a few ounces each for thousands of men for a week or two. They were always hungry.
Members of the network were always alert to potential dangers, possible infiltrators, or anything suspicious and out of the ordinary. Whenever they suspected a problem, they would interrupt shipments for a while. Naomi would send a message to hold back and supplies would back up. Lorenza and Ramón saw it as part of the problem of doing business. “This work brought us into contact with humanity in the raw,” Lorenza said, “often times leaving us in a bitter state.”
Fan Dance
Tsubaki Club, Manila, December 1942
ONE NIGHT a Japanese submarine commander came into the club and fell for Claire, her long legs, and her American torch songs. The commander was prominent enough to warrant special attention from Madame Tsubaki herself. He said that he had traveled in the United States and Claire reminded him of one experience he would never forget. When he got to San Francisco, he had seen Sally Rand perform her world-famous fan dance. Could Claire do the fan dance? If she could, the commander said he would hold over a night in port and bring in other officers with him to see the show. Claire figured that an extra night meant her hostesses could work more information out of the men. Of course, Claire said, she was happy to do it.
Sally Rand was a burlesque performer who had started in silent films directed by Cecil B. DeMille in the 1920s; she popularized her glimmering fan dance at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair and on that success opened a burlesque house in San Francisco in 1936. Sally’s show used shadow and backlighting, along with the oversized feathers, to make it appear that she was pirouetting naked across the stage to a romantic piano accompaniment. It was an illusion—all the while Sally wore a skintight body stocking. No matter for the Japanese commander, who probably did not know the technicalities. He and his friends wanted to see some flesh.
Claire really had not ever paid much attention to Sally Rand, but she got the idea—it was a matter of skin and fantasy. The following day she and the other women sewed together substitutes for feather plumes, one for each hand, from pieces of fabric and designed skintight cream-colored clothing. Mamerto split bamboo stalks to serve as a frame for the feathers. In the dim light of the club, it would do. The idea was to lift one plume and to spin just as she lowered the other plume, then move one plume to the right and cover up with the left, then reverse and back again. At showtime Claire suited up. When the house band’s pianist began playing, Claire started swirling. “The commander and his forty guests almost lost their eyesight . . . straining their orbs to determine whether I was really nude behind the fans . . . as they hoped, or wearing tights . . . as they feared.”
The dance worked well: The men loved it and the hostesses and the drinking kept them late into the night. Along with it came the same old billing and cooing repartee by Claire and the hostesses—“I love you, don’t leave me”—and in return for the special performance the commander and his crew held over as promised.
When the night was over, the hostesses had circulated and gathered the information they could: names of officers and details that slipped out about their travels, including word that at least some of the men would be heading to the Solomon Islands next. Before dawn, Claire already was preparing an intelligence report on the submariners and sent it with a courier up to Boone as quickly as she could. Claire might have held out hope that the men watching her Sally Rand dance eventually would be the targets of Allied bombers or depth charges launched by ships; the United States didn’t have real-time capacity to do that. She assumed all along that the intelligence she was sending might be of real-time help to MacArthur and company in Australia. It was not; neither Boone nor anyone else on Luzon had a working transmitter yet. It would take at least a day before he would get Claire’s report. In practice, information from Claire or Elizalde or General Roxas or any of Chick Parsons’s other friends in Manila was not actionable in terms of targeting specific ships leaving port after their commanders had taken time off in Manila. Communications were too slow and too unreliable for that. However, the intelligence was always worthwhile in completing the map of where Japanese forces were traveling and when. Over the course of time, Claire’s reports on troop concentrations, the locations of patrols, and the anticounterinsurgency movement fed the overall intelligence picture of the Japanese occupation. Boone did not discourage her from sending messages as quickly as she could.
Despite the rush of gathering information and supplies, Claire had low points. A Russian man named Alex came into the club and asked if she wanted to escape the Philippines. A friend had a sailboat large enough to take them away, probably to Australia. Others had tried it. It was tempting, especially after a night of smiling and conning her customers. When her mood sank and she was being slapped around and drinking to the praise of the Japanese Army, and when she worried about Dian, she entertained the thought. However, Alex did not return to the club—either he had managed to leave or he had been caught in the attempt. One could never know.
She took the work day by day. Claire jotted in her diary that she still needed to control the drinking sometimes, though drinking to forget was what she wanted to do. She warned herself to cut back and tried to keep it controlled and hidden within the confines of the club. She was proud that she never lost the respect of the people working for her.
Claire had put up a good challenge to Ana Fey’s up the street. Business was good, although it tailed off sometimes with the competition. While Japanese officers paid well and left liberal tips, they had other alternatives for nightlife, more than just Tsubaki Club and Ana Fey’s. Casa Mañana was nearby and also catered to Japanese officers. There were dozens more, notably a few hot spots close to downtown: Flamingo, La Famille, the Stork, and Tambourin. The clubs were not large, and the entertainment scene was popular.
The floor show at Tsubaki Club was always a draw. An advertisement in the Manila Tribune on December 17, 1942, promised a surprise party for Christmas Eve. “Everybody is welcome,” said the advertisement, “Fely Singing Nippongo Songs,” “Josephine Baker and Company in Surprise Numbers,” probably referring to Fahny’s exotic dance and musical number with David. Though no one knew it at the time, Josephine Baker, the great American expatriate singer and dancer, was performing her risqué show in occupied Paris, spying all the while on German and Italian officers for the French Resistance.
Fely’s Japanese folk songs were warming and nostalgic for the men far from their homes in Japan, and Claire’s suggestive gown and her torch songs brought many admirers. However, there was a secret life surrounding Tsubaki Club that Claire did not mention. Of course the young women, many of them teenagers,
were out to charm the Japanese officers and the civilians who came to spend their money at the club. Sometimes a night of charms could become something more.
Everyone knew there were brothels for men who were interested strictly in sexual encounters. Claire had said from the outset that Tsubaki Club—“sophisticated” and “high class”—was not that kind of place. Her protests were hard to believe. Even if Tsubaki Club wasn’t that kind of place, it was an easy stepping-off point. Tsubaki Club and the other nightclubs did not prohibit women from taking the trade outside. Perfectly adequate hotels were close by. Some of the dancers and courtesans circulating in the night catered to specialized business.
Among them was Walterina Markova, an exotic dancer and singer who enjoyed performing at Tsubaki Club. She was a popular singer and dancer, slim and attractive, in her twenties. When the young officers approached her, she was willing to step out. Sometimes that was a good thing; sometimes it was not—once they touched Walterina the right way, they would realize that Walterina was a boy. He was a transvestite performer and, when it got that far, was happy to turn tricks. “That was where I performed for Japanese customers. They didn’t know that I was a gay. And some of my gay friends were working there as receptionists. Five of us were working there but only me doing the floor show.” One night, Walterina said, the club didn’t have many customers, and he went out for a walk with a few other cross-dressing friends, wearing evening gowns and strolling through Luneta Park.
Four Japanese officers approached them, struck up a conversation, and invited them to their hotel, the Luneta, a block or two from Tsubaki Club. “We went to our separate rooms and the Japanese were kissing, kissing, kissing.” Then the man Walterina was with started moving his hands south and soon realized what was happening. Sometimes, Walterina said, the officers didn’t mind at all. In this case the officer was angry. “‘You’re a boy!’ He got mad. He was furious.” The Japanese rounded up Walterina and his friends and dragged them off. Walterina said he and his friends were held captive for a month, raped, brutalized, and tortured for days until they could escape. Claire never mentioned the incident or whether she tried to intervene to help Walterina and his friends.
