by Peter Eisner
Backing the promising news, the Philippine president in exile, Manuel Quezon, spoke directly to his compatriots via a KGEI shortwave broadcast from San Francisco. “We are well on the road to victory,” Quezon said. “The United Allies are triumphantly marching together. People of the Philippines, we shall soon be with you.” It was one of Quezon’s last major addresses. Quezon, sixty-five, had been suffering from tuberculosis and died on August 1, 1944, at Saranac Lake, New York. He was succeeded by his vice president, Sergio Osmeña, also exiled in the United States.
• • •
Hunger diminished hope in Manila. Food was sparse and prices were astronomically high. The Japanese took advantage. They needed workers to build new airfields as they dispersed their airplanes, preparing for the unspoken, inevitable moment when the United States eventually would invade to retake the city. “Evidently they intend to scatter their planes around as many fields as possible, a strategy which the Americans should have followed during the first days of the war. To recruit the thousands of laborers needed for these jobs, the Military Authorities have made a most tempting offer to Manila’s half-starved population. Every able bodied man willing to work for them will not only be paid good wages in cash but will also be given 300 grams of rice to take home at the close of each day’s labor.”
Food shelves were bare. A bag of rice on the black market could cost more than a month’s salary. Claire just listed the prices as if the numbers alone told the story—a small sack of rice was 250 pesos; four weeks later the price had tripled. People who had enough money ate in restaurants when there was food, and then were accosted by children left to beg for scraps of food on the street.
If those who were free to beg on the streets were hungry, the situation was worse for prisoners and detainees. At Santo Tomas food supplies had been waning since the end of 1943, when the last Red Cross ship brought in supplies. Then the Japanese camp administrators had blocked off all access to Santo Tomas by outsiders. As of February, no one could send in food or medicine for any of the thousands of detainees who were held under deteriorating conditions and the increasing threat of disease.
“Breakfast was several ladles of ‘mush’ (boiled rice flour) in coconut milk with a spoonful of sugar, plus tea or coffee and a banana,” said Rupert Wilkinson, eight years old at the time, recalling the suffering decades later. “Lunch was usually a ladle of boiled corn or rice, plus a slice of corn bread and sometimes a bit of coarse greens from the camp gardens. Dinner might be dilis (a very salty and skinny small fish) or a little carabao meat boiled with corn, followed by tea and a banana or calamansi (lemon). Any milk or eggs that the Internee Committee could get went to the camp hospitals or the Annex kitchen for young children.”
Protests and appeals to the humanity of the Japanese authorities were of little use. The only exception was on April 29, when, to commemorate the emperor’s birthday, the Japanese allowed some people to visit their family members. The outsiders were shocked. The detainees were gaunt and weak. “The principal sufferers,” said Marcial Lichauco, “of course, are the children who are being deprived of the milk, the eggs, the vegetables and other kinds of nourishment that all fast growing youths need.”
Hunger had turned Manila into a city of beggars and thieves. Desperate people had taken to exhuming bodies in the local cemeteries, hoping to find rings and bracelets that could be sold. Still they survived. Parents stockpiled food for their children and endured the hunger, managing to survive a step ahead of starvation. It was much the same throughout Manila. The floods that swept the islands at the end of 1943 destroyed rice fields and drowned livestock. When rice or oatmeal was available, it was rationed almost by the grain, then devoured. When Marcial Lichauco, one of the wealthier people in town, finished off a high-priced meal with rice and a bit of condiments at a restaurant, a street urchin slipped in and swept the few remaining grains off the plate into his mouth. On Christmas Day 1943 there was no rice available in the city at all. People survived on a bit of cornmeal for a few days, the kind usually fed to pigs, but there were no more pigs—they had mostly been devoured long ago.
“Evil Days Are Upon Us”
Cabanatuan, May 3, 1944
NAOMI WALKED FROM her rented room at Miss Bell’s house into the morning sun to signal to Fred Threatt, her POW contact, as she had done so many times before, although not recently. Mr. Threatt and the other oxcart drivers were parked along the Cabanatuan bridge, across from the rice fields. Recent days had been tense and the Japanese guards were in foul moods. Undoubtedly the gossip was getting through that they were losing the war. The day before, guards for no apparent reason had beaten one of the POW officers, Captain William Blackledge, while he was out on the farm detail. His fellow officers thought he might have tried to say something in Japanese but had been misunderstood. Blackledge’s head was bleeding, but the guards blocked anyone from coming to his aid.
There were new warnings from Manila in the days after Juan and Manuel Elizalde were arrested. After the admonition in December from Mack and other officers inside Cabanatuan, Evangeline was not making the trip north and Naomi was only rarely delivering messages to the camp. Mr. Threatt was now even more worried than before; he felt something was up.
Naomi brushed her long black hair in one long stroke and Threatt understood.
Even though Captain Tiffany, the chaplain, also had sent out a message to put the deliveries on hold, they now had an urgent request from the POW hospital for a drug shipment in hopes they could save the life of a dying patient. Naomi had gotten word to Manila, and Ramón had sent the needed medicine, along with some money.
Mr. Threatt waited a good while and then went over to the bridge as if to rest and drink from his canteen, which had a false bottom for hiding money and notes. He bent over by the designated tree and dug out and pocketed Naomi’s little package wrapped in paper. Something caught a guard’s attention; perhaps the white wrapper glinted and reflected the sun. Possibly the guard had been clued in to expect something unusual. He walked over to Threatt and took the package. He held on to the money and the bottle of medicine, wrapped with a note scribbled on the inside. The guard glanced at the note and, fortunately, told Threatt to tear up the paper and throw it away. That was lucky, Naomi said afterward. If others had seen the note, “he would have been shot when he got inside because the guards in the prison camp are more strict than the ones that used to go with the cart detail.”
When the workday was over, Threatt and his fellow carabao cart drivers carried the men of the work detail back to Cabanatuan. “As he approached the unloading platform inside the fence [Threatt] managed, though closely watched, to whisper to [one of the POW officers], ‘The fat is in the fire.’”
Moments later, guards seized Threatt and the other oxcart drivers, S. J. Bish, Virgil Burns, Reed Phillips, along with two men identified only as Tysinger and Rose. They were held in isolation. Within days the Japanese had picked up a paper trail of money transactions and deliveries, lists and messages and invoices that went far beyond the commissary, where Mr. Threatt and Manaloto were supposed to be doing a cash business. News about what had happened spread quickly in the camp—along with deep concern about what the Japanese might be doing to Threatt and the others. One of the officers, Major Tom Maury, had a good enough relationship with a Japanese lieutenant named Itoh to ask for information. Itoh had been friendly with the POWs and sometimes bought black-market cigarettes from them. Itoh said that the Kempeitai had been called in to investigate. Nothing good would come of it.
A week later Kempeitai investigators drove into the camp and went right for Lieutenant Colonel Mack, took him into custody, and questioned him nonstop for a day. They seized a dozen men in all. On May 11 the men “were all loaded on a truck and taken out of camp, destination and fate . . . unknown. The truck stopped at the gate, where more Filipinos were loaded, and then proceeded west.” Colonel Arthur Lee Shreve watched as the truck pulled away. Sh
reve was in charge of handling accounts at the commissary and the camp hospital. He made his way to the hospital as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. “I checked the Group and Hospital Commissaries to assure myself that their books would stand inspection. I also disposed of Main Commissary surplus funds and papers. During disposition the Japs went into the building next door. Close—but we made it.” The next day they brought in Captain Tiffany for questioning as well.
The Kempeitai tortured and interrogated the men, then dumped them back in Cabanatuan on May 16. The prison guards separated Mr. Threatt and Colonel Jack Schwartz, one of the doctors at the camp hospital, and forced them into “sweat boxes”—solitary-confinement cages—open to the elements in the hot sun in the middle of camp. For weeks they received minimum rations: little to drink and one scant meal a day.
For the first time in eighteen months, the Bataan survivors had been cut off from the lifesaving operation that began in late 1942 when Peggy and her boss, Dr. Ramón Atienza, had started the shipments into Camp O’Donnell and then to Cabanatuan. POW officers at the camp estimated that the Manila-based relief operation had spent more than one million pesos on food and supplies to feed and keep thousands of men alive.
• • •
Within minutes of Threatt’s capture, Naomi knew she was in grave danger. By the afternoon, Japanese military police had begun searching the neighborhood around Miss Bell’s house, which was a few miles from the center of Cabanatuan. She jumped out a window at the back of the house, hid in the jungle underbrush at a corner of the bridge, and waited for nightfall. Then she moved in the shadows toward the center of town, hoping to warn Horacio Manaloto that they had to escape. However, Japanese police patrol cars were cruising the streets and she couldn’t make it out of town. People told her that the military police had seemingly stopped everyone to ask about “the girl who sent the notes inside the camp.” They were also looking for her friend Joffie Maglaya, who sometimes helped her at the fruit stand. Police said that both women were suspects.
Naomi was especially worried about Joffie, who was young and might be vulnerable under interrogation. She did manage to reach Joffie’s house. Her family lived in a barrio where everyone knew about the supply operation—and everyone was willing to help. Friends took in Naomi and Joffie; neighbors managed to hide and protect both young women. They kept out of sight for a month, but the Japanese police remained on the lookout. One day Naomi chanced to peer over a windowsill and saw military policemen congregated close by. One of them was Captain Tossino, the officer who had interrogated her more than a year earlier when she had gone voluntarily to Fort Santiago. She had to figure that Tossino now knew her identity, and she could not risk another session at Fort Santiago. It took weeks more to get away, until August, three months after the roundup, around the time Japanese were redeploying for MacArthur’s expected attempt to retake the Philippines. Naomi made it safely to the hills and caught up with Major Bernard Anderson’s guerrillas northwest of Cabanatuan. She rode out the rest of the war in the mountains.
• • •
On May 18, 1944, German (pronounced “Hair-MANN”) Eroles worried as he waited at the Marfusa Restaurant in Ermita, the district bordering the bay close to Tsubaki Club and Luneta Park. He sensed danger; he needed to run. Helen Petkoff was never late for their scheduled meetings. Eroles and Helen worked with Ramón; one of Eroles’s jobs was to type up the newsletters compiled from their clandestine radio monitoring. Helen helped distribute the newsletter around the city and was reliable. She worked with them often and had a U.S. Navy boyfriend who was imprisoned at Cabanatuan. When she didn’t appear, Eroles knew there was trouble. He was ready to run for the mountains, a notion that Claire, Peggy, and all of the others had also considered. Before he could move from the café, a Japanese man in civilian clothes and two soldiers walked up to him. Too late. They took him away to a waiting car, blindfolded him, and drove away.
Ramón and the rest of the Manila crew, in turn, were waiting anxiously to hear from Manaloto and Evangeline after the special medicine delivery to Cabanatuan. Instead, a Filipino runner who worked with Naomi and Evangeline sneaked into the city to report that Manaloto and Naomi were on the run, Evangeline was missing, and their contacts inside Cabanatuan had been arrested.
Next they got word that both Eroles and Helen had been taken in. The pieces fell into place. Helen sometimes sent letters through their message pipeline to her boyfriend at the POW camp. It was obvious that when the Kempeitai investigators detained Threatt and the others, they had found one of Helen’s letters. Claire figured that the letter might be traceable, that it might not have been properly censored to cut out real names. “Helen was a nice girl,” Claire said. However, she doubted Helen would withstand interrogation under threat of torture. “The Nips will make her talk.”
Two days later Helen was suddenly released. That was the worst news of all—the Kempeitai likely had gotten all the information they needed and then let her go. Interrupting distribution of the underground newsletter was a side victory for Nagahama and his intelligence officers. Agents had long been searching for the source of anti-Japanese propaganda. Several months earlier, Nagahama had received a report on the disruption of one group that “has been publishing anti-Japanese articles, and has been distributing this material among important Filipinos in the government. The American missionary Mary B. Sutago and 21 others who have been spreading propaganda were all arrested on the 28th [January 1944].” Catching Helen and Manaloto would further compromise the distribution of independent news reports.
• • •
There was nothing left to be done. Claire counted off the code names one by one in her little diary—in her bittersweet phrasing of what had happened, she wrote they all “were going to school.” She believed that she had hidden all dangerous material, had given instructions to all of her employees—had done everything she could possibly do, save one thing. She was not going to run away. On May 22, as she waited for the inevitable, Claire knew that she and the others had done their part in sabotaging the Japanese occupiers in every possible way. No matter what was to come, she also knew it was a matter of time—not if but when—General MacArthur would lead American troops back to Manila. The exact timing would affect whether she would live to see that day.
She was calm as she wrote one last note in the small diary that she had used to blow off steam and to perform her ritual of self-confession. Claire knew what was coming. She wrote: “Waiting for my call to school.” She then hid the little date-book diary somewhere that only Fely would know to retrieve it.
Ramón’s Turn
Manila, May 23, 1944
FIRST THEY TOOK RAMÓN. On the morning of Tuesday, May 23, five Kempeitai agents arrested him at his office and brought him home to search the place but found nothing incriminating. After German Eroles had been arrested, Ramón and Lorenza had swept their house to gather and protect any and all documents. The incriminating material would have contained more than a year of message traffic with the POW officers at Cabanatuan, including a series of confidential reports written by Lieutenant Colonel Mack. Mack had written details about general conditions and mistreatment and the names of culpable Japanese officials at the POW camp. He wanted the reports to survive the war in the event he was killed. Ramón put it all in four large glass jars and then summoned Angustias de Mencarini, one of the key donors to the POW relief operation. She took it all away for hiding in a safe location. Among other papers, Ramón was holding many dozens of checks written by POWs in return for cash, assuming the checks would be honored when standard banking functions resumed after the occupation. He gave the checks to another trusted friend.
The Kempeitai officers threatened to arrest Lorenza, but she and Ramón held to the script. Lorenza said she was innocent and knew nothing about underground activities. She said all she had done was write personal letters to people she knew at Cabanatuan. The officers harangued the two of them
and spewed threats as they searched for clues; Ramón continued to protest. Husband and wife were forced to stand there for about an hour and were not allowed to speak to each other.
Lorenza recalled: “All we could do was to look at each other, my eyes, I imagine, devouring his features, as his eyes were mine, looking at me with a mixture of devotion and inexpressible sadness, as if he knew it was the last time he was looking at his wife.”
With a final warning, the police officers told Lorenza she could stay. Ramón looked back at her once more as he was led away.
“He was not even allowed to say goodbye to his children, the small one, three years old at the time, crying because he wanted to kiss his daddy. That such cruelty should exist is inconceivable to the human mind, but we who suffered under the yoke of the Japanese, not only can express this, but also vouch for it.”
Sometime after they left, Lorenza dared to visit Claire to report the mournful news. There was nothing more to say. Claire responded the same way that Ramón and Lorenza had. Fely helped her burn more papers in the kitchen sink and they gathered other documents—“a list of names and amount of supplies sent to the different prison camps and guerrillas in the hills.” Mamerto, the bartender, also helped scour the place for incriminating evidence one last time. They had already sent some material up to Fely’s father, Vicente Corcuera. Now they sent more. They did not take away the club financial books: accounts, expenses, payroll, and the ledgers Fely maintained. Any good accountant would have such paperwork at a legitimate business—it would be suspicious not to have it.
Claire could have decided to do what Peggy was considering—head up to the hills with Boone. Either she did not have enough time, or she figured that she was already being watched or that she might be able to use her persuasive power with the Japanese officers she knew to remain safe. It is equally possible that she just didn’t want to submit herself and Dian once more to a life in the jungle. She was taking a chance—she was resigned to being arrested and hoped she would survive.
