Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  The pharmacy was part general store and part emergency room before hospitals had their own ER units. Pharmacists also had access to alcohol and engaged in bootlegging during Prohibition, a lucrative but risky business in Lewis’s case since one of the most famous Prohibition “dicks” of the era, Izzy Einstein, lived just below him.

  You could always tell when there was a serious accident in the neighborhood because a crowd would be milling in front of the pharmacy waiting for an ambulance to arrive from Bellevue Hospital, the first hospital in the nation to offer a municipal ambulance service. The ambulances were built on a Model T Ford chassis and had an open back, a fold-down seat on one side, and a gurney on the other. In their smart hospital uniforms with their Civil War, kepi-style hats, the interns cut an impressive figure. Quickly and authoritatively they moved through throngs of bystanders to attend the victim of a streetcar accident, a gunshot wound, or a cinder lodged in the eye. The pharmacist’s son, Murray, had a ringside seat. That’s what I want to be, he thought: a doctor.

  Like his own father, he was fascinated by chemicals. He attended Townsend Harris Hall high school, which attracted some of the city’s brightest young minds and where Jonas Salk was a student. He applied to Columbia College but at fifteen was considered too young, so he attended New York University instead, majoring in chemistry and fulfilling his pre-med requirements. In 1934 he entered the College of Medicine at New York University-Bellevue Medical Center and was awarded his M.D. in June 1938, by which time Germany had already annexed Austria.

  Lewis adored Murray. He was the emblem of his success in America, and perhaps that knowledge gave Murray the confidence to pursue a lifestyle completely foreign to the one he encountered in his own home, yet without fear of losing his place in the family. He laughed at the mystical beliefs of his zaide, who accepted Kabbalist texts as truth and in a fury told Murray he would grow up to be a bum. He rejected his father’s orthodoxy, dated non-Jewish girls, and became good friends in his residency with the Protestant chaplain, the Reverend H. W. van Couenhoven, affectionately known as Father Van. He was tickled by the slapstick humor of Laurel and Hardy and enjoyed listening to music, be it a Beethoven symphony or one of the popular songs of the day with curiously foreboding titles—“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Deep Purple,” or “Two Cigarettes in the Dark.” He especially enjoyed hearing his girlfriend Laura sing.

  They had fallen in love in the summer of ’39 at Unity House, a resort in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains established by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Murray had worked there as a waiter in high school when he was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, and he returned as the resident physician. Laura was on the entertainment staff. Unity House was a large adult camp that catered to Jewish singles and young marrieds. There was Lake Tamiment for rowing and canoeing, tennis courts and riding trails, and secluded Deer Lake for romantic walks in the woods. On top of Bushkill Mountain was Camp Tamiment, where Murray had also been a guest.

  Tamiment was founded by the American Socialist Party and funded by the Rand School for Social Research. Its inspired cultural program attracted an extraordinary array of talent. Max Liebman directed The Tamiment Players and perfected the concept of the weekly Saturday-night musical revue. On a tip from composer-lyricist Sylvia Fine, he discovered a crazy redheaded comedian by the name of Daniel Kaminsky whom he signed in 1939 to play opposite Imogene Coca under the stage name of Danny Kaye. And he lured a brilliant nineteen-year-old dancer by the name of Jerome Rabinowitz to Tamiment, where he introduced his first choreographic work, Death of a Loyalist, under the name of Jerry Robyns, later known as Jerome Robbins. The songs, skits, and dances presented each week by The Tamiment Players became the basis of The Straw Hat Review, which was produced on Broadway at a cost of $8,000 in the autumn of 1939. As much as he loved Tamiment’s Saturday-night revues Murray never missed an opportunity to hear Laura sing.

  A coloratura soprano, she had a beautiful voice. “America’s youngest opera singer,” the Philadelphia Ledger announced the year before when listing her appearance as Olympia, the mechanical doll, in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. “Baby Opera Star,” said the caption above a photograph of the self-possessed nineteen-year-old with shoulder-length brown hair, a full mouth, dark eyes, and a gaze that coyly avoided the camera. She had studied piano with her father, the choir director of a local temple in the Bronx that was so dilatory in paying his salary that he declared himself an atheist. She majored in music at Hunter and took voice lessons from Henry Baron, who had performed at the Metropolitan Opera House. Once she began to audition, she changed her name from Reichman to Reade, her stage name.

  Charming, vivacious, outgoing, and fastidious, Laura was the kind of woman to whom a man who was naturally reserved was instantly attracted; she made him feel different from the way others perceived him and from the way he thought of himself—bolder, more spontaneous, more fun, and more at ease. There was a warmth to her speaking voice and a resonance to her letters that was at once yielding and embracing. She lit up the room. She knew she’d landed a catch with Murray, and she made sure she was on her best behavior with him, wasn’t too impetuous, and kept a lid on a mouth that could make a marine blush. Murray took her places she couldn’t easily afford—restaurants, concerts, shows. He’d dated many women before, but he felt there was an unspoken understanding between them. Laura kept a photograph of Murray posed in front of Lake Tamiment wearing an open-collar short-sleeve shirt beneath a dark-colored sweater vest with his hands on his hips. He looked like he owned the world.

  In the spring of 1940 American involvement in Europe seemed imminent. Some of the attending physicians at Welfare Hospital had fled Berlin and Vienna to escape Nazi persecution. Murray was young, healthy, built like a football player with wavy mahogany hair, and single. He had fashioned a life for himself that he loved, but he knew he was an ideal candidate: he could be of service.

  He associated the army with the horrific trench warfare of the Great War and reasoned that if you had to fight, if you had to go to war, you might as well live it up beforehand, and the way to live it up was in the navy. Either you survived a battle at sea, or you went down with your ship—a clean end to the story.

  So in November 1940 he joined the Naval Reserve, and as an assistant surgeon with the rank of lieutenant (j.g.) he requested duty on a battleship. He was called up in June 1941 and reported to the Third Naval District in Brooklyn on July 7. Just one week prior he had been appointed Chief Resident in Neurology at Welfare Hospital. His professional career was stopped dead in its tracks; his plans for research in neuropsychiatry were put on hold. With a simple order from the chief of the Bureau of Navigation, Chester W. Nimitz, he found himself in a completely new hierarchy, and he was on the bottom rung of it.

  Three months was standard training for men to become officers—“ninety-day wonders,” they were called. Murray had three weeks. He learned about the Navy Regulations and Customs for Medical Corps officers through a fourteen-assignment correspondence course. He had been at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Brooklyn for such a brief time that the commanding officer, Captain G. E. Robertson, remarked in his Report on the Fitness of Officers: “This officer has been on duty at this hospital too short a period to form a true opinion of his ability.” His only other training had been two months of ROTC at New York University in 1930. That didn’t stop the U.S. Navy from giving him orders to sail for Manila on August 8, 1941.

  His family said goodbye to him at Grand Central Station as he waited for the sleek Twentieth Century Limited that would take him to Chicago in a mere sixteen hours en route to San Francisco. Their farewell was emotional yet typically restrained. Murray tried to make light of the situation by giving his parents a fifth of bourbon as a parting gift. Lewis was proud of his son for becoming a doctor, proud that his adopted country had vowed to defeat Nazism. But he was also deeply worried. He decided not to open the bottle until he knew Murray was safe. The last thing Murray saw f
rom his Pullman car window was his brother Sidney running alongside as the locomotive slowly gathered speed.

  On a drizzly afternoon in September 1941 the President Garfield eased into Manila Bay. On her port side was Corregidor, the tadpole-shaped island that warned ships of its presence with a nineteenth-century Spanish lighthouse and massive coastal guns. On the starboard side you could see the mountains of Batangas Province. The Garfield slipped into her berth at Pier 7, and when John Bookman and Murray Glusman stepped off the gangway, they found themselves in a city that could have sprung from one of Somerset Maugham’s tales of the South Seas.

  The waterfront was bustling with Filipino laborers. The smell of copra was everywhere. Lieutenant Commander H. C. Brokenshire, an attending surgeon, greeted the two men. A corpsman drove them to Sangley Point, a hook-shaped peninsula on the southern end of Manila Bay that housed the U.S. Naval Hospital at Cañacao.

  There was a reason Manila was called the Pearl of the Orient. A necklace of elegant houses encircled Manila Bay. Coconut palm trees swayed along the shoreline, and an equestrian trail ran nearby, beyond which rose dark green hills and mountains that turned purple in the haze. The sunsets were as beautiful as the undulating iridescence on the inside of an oyster shell. The jewel in the American commonwealth, Manila was a symbol of U.S. power in the Pacific, won after Commodore George Dewey’s momentous naval victory over Spain in the war of 1898. At low tide you could see the rusting hulks of the Spanish Fleet off the Cavite Navy Yard.

  Pier 7 was known as the “million-dollar pier,” built in the 1920s on reclaimed land to accommodate luxury liners. Just beyond lay Dewey Boulevard, which boldly announced American interests. The Manila Hotel, where General Douglas MacArthur made his home in a sumptuous mahogany-paneled suite, overlooked the water. Across Luneta Park was the elegant Army-Navy Club, where you could sip drinks on the veranda for fifteen or twenty cents apiece as you watched the sun set or listen to old “sunshiners” at the bar tell tall tales once too often and impress junior officers with little except a capacious talent for alcoholic consumption. Due south was the Malacañang Palace, the residence of the president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, Manuel L. Quezon. Stately and imposing, it was a dramatic contrast to the wood-frame dwellings that grew out of the landscape, and it conveyed wealth that was anything but common.

  The streets of Manila were crowded with stalls that reeked of deep-fat frying. Vendors hawked their wares and cried “Balut”—duck eggs that were just ready to hatch before they were boiled in water and sold as a delicacy. Cab drivers swerved like madmen to avoid caretelas, the two-wheeled carriages pulled by calesa ponies. Donkeys and carabao—water buffalo—swayed beneath their burdens. Bicycles veered in front of brightly colored, red and yellow Pambusco buses. Cascos—cargo boats used as houseboats—bobbed along the Pasig River. In the old walled city of Intramuros, men stood in doorways smoking black cigars and women sat beside windows chewing betel nuts.

  The ride to Cañacao gave the navy doctors their first glimpse of the rural Philippines. The natives lived in nipa huts, shacks built on stilts and made from bamboo with roofs of thatch. The floors were slatted so you could drop scraps down to the pigs and chickens below. The dwellings were more primitive than the worst tenement conditions John and Murray had ever seen in New York City. But it was hard not to respond to the friendliness of the Filipinos or admire the simplicity of a lifestyle that depended on the fish they caught and the rice they harvested for sustenance. The language they spoke was Tagalog, meaning “of the river.”

  Cañacao, which stood in a lush tropical setting on the west fork of Sangley Point, was under the command of Captain Robert G. Davis. The hospital had been built by the Spanish in 1871 and was originally managed by the Sisters of Charity. After the Spanish-American War it was operated by the U.S. Navy to support the naval base at Cavite, across Cañacao Bay on the east fork. The Pan American Clipper touched down just offshore and made weekly runs between Manila and San Francisco, moving passengers and mail. It was a five-day trip, weather permitting.

  The army had its own facility near Intramuros. Sternberg General Hospital was named after the father of American bacteriology, George Miller Sternberg, who served as Surgeon General during the Spanish-American War. Colonel Percy J. Carroll was the hospital’s commanding officer.

  The Army Medical Department was established in 1818 to reform a grossly inadequate medical service that had changed little since the days of the American Revolution. The Navy Medical Department—the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED)—was formed in 1842 to address the health problems seamen had faced since the so-called Quasi-War with France in 1798-1800. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, an Army Nurse Corps was created in 1901, and a Navy Nurse Corps followed suit in 1908. The marines comprised a separate service within the navy, while the Air Corps was literally the wing of the army.

  BUMED was younger than the Army Medical Department, smaller, and clubbier. “The navy gets the gravy,” the saying went. BUMED also had the advantage of being overseen by Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Roosevelt’s personal physician who reported to the Chief of Naval Operations.

  Navy doctors were assisted by medical corpsmen who had undergone two months’ training at the Medical Field Service School on the Marine Corps base in San Diego, California. You began as a Hospital Apprentice, 2nd Class—an “HA deuce”—advanced to Hospital Corpsman, made Pharmacist’s Mate with the first stripe, and went on up to Chief Petty Officer if talent and opportunity allowed.

  Corpsmen were responsible for evacuation of the wounded; they performed all nursing and first aid functions, swept floors, cleaned clinics, made beds, and disinfected heads. “The women did all the brain-work,” quipped one corpsman. “Candy asses need not apply!” bragged another.

  If rivalry was fostered between the army and the navy, the navy and the marines were as tight as ticks. Marines called navy corpsmen “Doc” out of respect and bought them drinks after hours; navy whites could often be seen in the company of marines in khakis or in greens.

  In the field corpsmen carried canvas musette bags stenciled with a red cross above USN in black block letters. Standard-issue supplies were six gauze bandages; a diagnostic tag book and pencil; four tubes of tincture of iodine; one bottle of ammonia; two rubber tourniquets; an instrument case containing pins, scissors, and forceps; eight packages of sublimated gauze; one jackknife; one spool of adhesive plaster; and one roll of wire for splints. In the Philippines, corpsmen were also supplied with sodium chloride (salt) pills, halazone tablets (for water purification), sulfadiazine (an antibacterial agent for wounds), quinine sulfate, and morphine tartrate syrettes (for pain). Medical officers were armed with a hypodermic needle sterilizer, operating scissors and knives, forceps, silk braided sutures, a clinical thermometer, and an eye dressing and burn injury kit.

  John Bookman remained at Cañacao until September 21, when he was transferred to the Navy Section Base at Mariveles, on the southern tip of the Bataan peninsula, thirty miles west of Manila. He had graduated from medical school in 1939, a year after Murray, but because he joined the Naval Reserve a few days earlier, he had seniority over him. John would become the medical officer in charge of the dispensary at Mariveles. He had made a pallid impression on Murray.

  Murray, meanwhile, was ordered to report to the Cavite Navy Yard, where his work in the dispensary, Admiral Hart stated, was “required in the public interests.” He would have preferred duty at sea, but being in the Philippines, he quickly realized, was an education in itself.

  If you think of Luzon as a giant lobster claw with its grip around Manila Bay, the Bataan peninsula to the west becomes the pincer and the province of Cavite to the east is the crusher. Hot and dusty in the dry season, crowded with nipa shacks, Cavite played a pivotal role in the history of the Philippines. Cavite was the site of the old Spanish naval arsenal just eight miles south of Manila, and a seedbed of Filipino insurgency dating back to January 20, 1872, when rebels attempte
d to overthrow its small Spanish fort, San Felipe. Loyalist troops quelled the rebellion, and thirty to forty Cavitenos were swiftly executed. Three Filipino priests fighting for equal recognition—Burgos, Gómez, and Zamora—were unfairly implicated in the Cavite mutiny. The thorn in the side of the Spanish clergy, they were summarily tried, tortured, and garroted in public. Their execution stoked the flames of Filipino nationalism.

  Twenty-five years later, the firebrand Emilio Aguinaldo spearheaded a revolution in Cavite and declared himself leader of his own republic, until he was persuaded by the Spanish to relinquish his claim for cash on condition that he leave the Philippines. Aguinaldo went into exile in Hong Kong, where he remained true to the revolutionary cause and purchased arms in support of it. He was in Singapore in April 1898 when he approached the American consul who cabled Commodore George Dewey back in Hong Kong. “I requested him to come,” Dewey wrote in his autobiography, “as it was possible that he might have valuable information at a time when no source of information was to be neglected.” War between the United States and Spain had been on the horizon since the U.S. battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, at a cost of 260 lives. A native-led insurrection against the Spanish in the Philippines could bolster the American cause for intervention, just as Cuban patriots fighting for independence played into the hands of American expansionists. Cavitismo, as it came to be known, was the embodiment of the Filipino rebellious spirit.

  Once Congress demanded Spain’s withdrawal from Cuba and granted President McKinley the right to intervention, Spain declared war on the United States on April 24, 1898. The United States responded by declaring war on Spain the next day, retroactive to April 21. The first salvo was fired not at Cuba but 10,000 miles away, in the Philippines.