Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  Like Pavlov’s dogs, the men learned the day’s routine by the ringing of bells. At 0630 seven bells announced reveille. Ten minutes later six bells meant tenko—the Japanese roll call—and at 0730 two bells signaled breakfast. One bell at 0830 heralded the beginning of work, two bells at 1200 spelled lunch, one bell at 1400 indicated the end of the rest period, and one bell at 1700 marked the end of the work day—but not the end of the bells. Supper was served at 1730, to the tune of one bell, followed by six bells at 1830 for evening bangō (count-off ) at 1840. Finally four bells at 2100 turned off the lights, and an encore of three bells at 2200 warned that no one was allowed outside except authorized personnel. If, by that time, you weren’t suffering from tinnitus, you were allowed to go to bed. Or as Hayes put it in a rare moment of levity, “To sweat and boil and stew and then perhaps—to sleep.”

  The Japanese were obsessed with bangō, which could eat up to four hours out of your day if there was a miscount. They busied themselves with paperwork and affected to abide by regulations with barely a pause before punishing those who violated them. They periodically posted rules, but what other guidelines did the POWs have? There was nothing in the officers’ training that prepared them for imprisonment, and nothing in the Handbook of the Hospital Corps. Fred and John, like many prisoners, refused to speak Japanese in protest, but they made sure they understood their orders: Ki o tsuke! (attention). Keirei! (salute). Atsumare! (line up). Mae susume! (quick march). Tomare! (halt). Yasume! (at ease). Misinterpretations triggered violent repercussions. The message was clear: keep your nose clean, your ass covered, when a guard walks by, bow at the waist or risk getting whacked in the face.

  Men were dying almost daily at Bilibid—of dysentery, malaria, and beriberi. With the cemetery beneath the north wall often under three feet of water, ID tags for the deceased were preserved in small glass bottles. The most pressing problem was malnutrition. There were three meals daily: “Rice, rice, and more rice,” as George put it. The rice itself was “in poor condition,” noted Pharmacist Clarence Shearer, formerly in charge of the naval medical supply depot at Cañacao, “dirty, moldy and full of weevils and worms.” It was peppered with rat droppings, cooked in five-gallon gasoline cans over an open-pit fire, and ladled out in canteen-cup servings as lugao, a watery gruel with the consistency of oatmeal. Occasionally lugao was supplemented with a thin soup flavored with small pieces of meat, vegetables—usually kangkong, a weed from the mudflats of the Pasig River that was used as filler in swine swill—or fish. Once the Japanese brought into the POW galley the skeleton of a large tuna. Sartin took the carcass to the Japanese quartermaster to suggest that a mistake had been made. There was no error, he was told; of such stuff was delicious broth made. The POWs buried the bones instead.

  In June alone Sartin appealed three times to Captain Kusamoto for “proper diets for the sick.” Eggplant and tomatoes were delivered rotten and swarming with maggots. “There is so much that could be done for these very sick and injured patients if only supplies, equipment and food were available,” lamented Shearer. Between them, George, Fred, and John had smuggled enough corned beef, tomatoes, evaporated and condensed milk, Vienna sausage, and flour from Corregidor in July to get by in Bilibid for a month. After that they relied on the pesos Fred had “borrowed” in Olongapo and the pittance that remained of their monthly pay to purchase eggs, papayas, bananas, evaporated milk, lemons, limes, and occasionally even meat when the prison commissary stocked them.

  “You are unfortunate in being the prisoners of a country whose living standards are so very much lower than yours,” Hayes was warned by an American-educated Japanese officer on Corregidor. “You will consider yourselves ill-treated when they think you are being treated swell.”

  News of the war reached the navy doctors from a steady influx of patients—POWs who had been captured on Bataan, imprisoned in O’Donnell, Cabanatuan, Pasay, Lipa, or Palawan, or assigned to work details in the Port Area, at Clark and Nielson Fields, and in Batangas. They heard of the horrific march prisoners had been forced to make from Mariveles to San Fernando. They learned of the hellish work detail in Tayabas Province, where POWs, tormented by clouds of mosquitoes and clusters of leeches, tried to hack a road out of nearly impenetrable jungle.

  Tayabas, wrote Paul Russell in his survey of the Philippines in 1931, was one of the most malarious regions in the entire archipelago. The prisoners spent their nights along a polluted river southeast of Manila near Lamon Bay and were ravaged by the disease. Six weeks after the project began, 150 out of 235 POWs were dead. Those who survived were brought back to Bilibid caked in feces, exhausted, dehydrated, and deformed by starvation “as though they were little old men,” said Captain Paul Ashton, an army doctor who was so sick in Tayabas that his friends didn’t think he would recover.

  Corporal Paul W. Reuter of the 19th Bomb Group was another survivor who arrived in Bilibid on July 1 swollen to the waist with wet beriberi, “covered with scabies,” and suffering from dengue, pellagra, scurvy, and jaundice. Then he developed anemia. Lieutenant Commander George P. Hogshire coated him with sulfur paste for scabies and gave him atabrine for jaundice. Since there was no plasma with which to treat the anemia, he found another POW willing to donate blood for five cents per cubic centimeter.

  On July 10 thirty-three more patients from the Tayabas road detail arrived at Bilibid in horrific shape, all of them malnourished. George found it difficult to contain his anger:This afternoon at about 4:30 I saw something to make one’s blood boil and go emotionally berserk. Should have been a movie made of the scene and circulated to every US city and then I’ll bet you couldn’t stop the current until——wiped out to the man.Three loads of prisoners came in from the south . . . where a road is under construction. Every one of them to the man was a living skeleton and just about able to drag themselves along. Some couldn’t do that but collapsed upon sliding off the truck.All but one was a dysentery case.

  Words couldn’t express his outrage, and if they could, to whom would he address them? Who, if he cried out, would hear him? The suffering of others shook George to the very core of his being. The indifference to human life contravened his strict sense of morality as a Catholic and ran counter to the values he upheld as a practitioner of medicine. Language failed him, and the ellipsis in his diary entry was a haunting reminder of the effect so much suffering had on him. “He always got on with people,” said his first cousin Jeanne Gier. “He didn’t care if he was talking to a five-year-old or a twenty-five-year-old.” And here he was in Bilibid consumed with animosity, hating the Japanese as blindly as they hated him.

  Things were worse at Cabanatuan, said Father Theodore Buttenbruck, a German padre from Christ the King Church in Manila, who gave a sermon at Bilibid on July 19. Thirty to forty POWs were dying daily. “At this rate,” George quipped in his diary, “a few years will deplete the Americans in these here parts. Thank you again Uncle Sam.” Most of the prisoners in Cabanatuan had been transferred from Camp O’Donnell after it was shut down in late May 1942. More than 2,000 of the 9,300 American POWs at O’Donnell and 27,000 Filipinos had died there before the 14th Army relieved Captain Tsuneyoshi, the camp commandant, of his command. Homma Masaharu hadn’t bothered to pay a single visit to O’Donnell—much less to any POW camp in the Philippines—though Major General Kawane had advised him of the camp’s excessive mortality rate.

  John escaped malaria on Bataan, but in August 1942 at Bilibid he came down with dengue fever, a highly infectious disease caused by a flavivirus transmitted by the aedes mosquito. Also known as dandy or breakbone fever, for the extreme joint pain experienced during the onset of the illness, dengue is common in the tropics. You might wake up in the morning feeling just fine and in no time at all experience such extreme pain—in the fingers, toes, or limbs—that you can’t finish getting dressed. A sudden chill comes on. Your head and eyes begin to ache. Discoloration appears in your face, your pulse rate increases, and your temperature spikes. Finally, a rash may break
out on your hands, wrists, elbows, knees, and the soles of your feet. Dengue is not fatal, but there are few prophylactic measures that can prevent it, other than isolation. Once the disease runs its course, joint and muscle pain may persist. Relapses are not uncommon. Bedrest is the typical recommendation. John’s illness was a sobering reminder that diseases don’t discriminate among their victims. Indeed, dengue was in danger of becoming an epidemic at Bilibid. Fred suffered from dengue and was “down to skin and bones,” according to Hayes, who had had five bouts with it himself. But the Japanese appeared to be unfamiliar with the disease, Sartin learned after he and Nogi attended a conference on malaria at the Manila Hotel.

  Sartin continued to press the Japanese authorities for more drugs. He also appealed to Morimoto to allow the POWs to purchase food and supplies from Manila. Camp Warden Gooding had already established a brisk black market in foodstuffs, as a result of his friendship with Sergeant Tokonaya at Pasay. A mango, which sold for five centavos on the street, cost a peso inside Bilibid, the equivalent of fifty cents. Men clamored to pay the inflated prices if they had the money. If they didn’t, they were out of luck—and out of food. Soon two corpsmen, Richard H. Mayberry and “Tommie” Thompson, built a crude galley from bricks and scrap lumber. This was the “diet kitchen” where, under the supervision of navy dental officer Lieutenant (j.g.) Stanley W. Smith, special meals were prepared for patients suffering from extreme nutritional deficiencies.

  The Japanese patrolled Bilibid day and night, but visitors were adept at smuggling items into it. Nancy Belle Norton, an American schoolteacher in Manila, made regular stops in a calesa that concealed fresh fruit, baked goods, and native sugar. She also acted as a courier for news and mail. Lieutenant Walter H. Waterous, an army reservist who had a successful ophthalmological practice in Manila before the war, was allowed to receive Filipino technicians who brought in thousands of frames and Bausch & Lomb lenses for the POWs as well as their jailers. His associate, Maxima Villanueva, wrangled an MP pass that gave her regular access to Bilibid. In addition to fixing spectacles for the Japanese, almost all of whom wore glasses, she managed to smuggle in nearly 180,000 pesos over a two-and-a-half-year period. The guards themselves were another source of contraband—if the money was at hand—as were Filipino sweethearts.

  Ralph Hibbs, the army doctor from Hospital No. 1 on Bataan, would tie a letter to a rock and throw it over the prison wall to his girlfriend, Pilar Campos. The daughter of the president of the Bank of the Philippine Islands, Pilar was a ringleader of the Filipino underground and regularly sneaked in food and medicine. Father Buttenbruck proved he was a man who practiced what he preached and delivered to Bilibid’s medical staff a much-needed microscope. Fortunately, Fred still had the pesos he had “borrowed” from Olongapo. He shared the food he purchased from the commissary with George and John. Other POWs pilfered rice and sugar from work details and concealed their booty in pants legs and shoes.

  So the men began to quan, a catchall word reputedly invented by Master Sergeant Tabaniag of the 45th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, and derived from the Tagalog word kuwan. The POWs used it as a noun, verb, and adjective to refer to one thing: food. Quan meant a small group of men cooking a meal over an open fire. Quan meant to scrounge, swap, or save anything edible. Quan meant, simply, delicious, and you could use it interchangeably in one sentence, as in: “Whatcha quanning in that quan, Joe? Smells very quan. Howse about sharing some quan with me?”

  The navy doctors shared their quan with one another, whether they had a little or a lot. As George wrote in his diary:27th August Thursday 1942.Yesterday the food situation improved when the store opened up & plenty of bananas, eggs, & even got 6 thin pork chops from a Filipino MO. So last nite we really splurged & two fried eggs, pies, 7 pancakes, sugar, butter, and rice.

  But their bounty was short-lived. By the fall of 1942 “the ravages of poor diet and lack of vitamins,” Sartin wrote, were all too apparent. Fire-wood, stripped from dilapidated buildings, was a scarcity, and before long open fires were forbidden. Without adequate food, recuperating patients slid into relapse, while those in fair health fought a battle against time.

  An increasing number of men had lesions on their hands and shins and suffered from sore mouths. The symptoms were consistent with pellagra—mal de la rosa, the Spanish called it when they identified the disease in the early eighteenth century. A red rash appears first; then the body literally tries to shed its skin, breaking out into blisters that crust over and slough off. The gastrointestinal tract can become so inflamed that swallowing water and eating food is agony. The “scourge of the American South” in the early twentieth century, pellagra was long thought to be germ-borne, until Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a surgeon in the U.S. Public Health Service, discovered its cause: a lack of niacin, normally derived from protein in meat, fish, and vegetables.

  Xerophthalmia and optical neuritis also began to appear in “alarming numbers,” along with hideous corneal ulcers caused by a lack of vitamin A. Left untreated, they clouded vision, distorted perception, and as Al Smith and Ted Williams discovered firsthand, could lead to permanent impairment.

  But of all the vitamin-deficiency diseases, beriberi was the most serious, and virtually all of the POWs suffered from it in one form or another. Up until the late nineteenth century beriberi, like pellagra, was believed to be germ-borne, but the cause was again nutritional. In the Philippines, when rice was milled, the outer layer of the grain—or pericarp—was half-removed. The pericarp is rich in essential vitamin B1, the absence of which can disrupt the metabolism, causing peripheral nerve damage and enlargement of the heart. Fatigue, irritability, and memory loss are early symptoms, which in “dry berberi” are followed by searing pain in the legs, feet, and toes. Sweating, grotesque swelling, and warm skin characterize “wet beriberi,” which literally floods the body’s interstitial spaces and can culminate in cardiac arrest.

  Bilibid had been a major center for the experimental study of beriberi at the turn of the century. But as long as POWs were forced to endure a rice-heavy diet, they could only watch the slow, painful deformation of their bodies—the shrunken muscles, palsied limbs, swollen ankles, and distended bellies—that terminated for many of them in death.

  15

  “The last thin tie”

  MURRAY’S CURSE was a blessing in disguise. The sole navy doctor left on Corregidor, he and Army Captain Thomas “Tommy” Hewlett looked after a salvage detail of some 200 POWs under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Lewis S. Kirkpatrick. Hewlett was an orthopedist by training, in charge of surgery. Murray took over internal medicine. They were assisted by twenty-four navy corpsmen.

  Murray and Tommy got along well. They were relieved by their new responsibilities and the complete lack of oversight. No Commander Hayes or Colonel Cooper to tell them what to do now. As officers they had complete freedom of movement on the Rock. They shared private quarters in the old Fort Mills Station Hospital and enjoyed beds with mattresses, intermittent electricity, and occasionally running water. There was even a Hallicrafter radio they could tune in, to follow the war’s progress on KGEI.

  All of the medical equipment on Corregidor had been removed to Bilibid, so Hewlett fashioned an operating table from a dining room table, which he covered with a bedsheet. Then he made a steam sterilizer from a metal boiler. The mess hall became the OR, where Hewlett conducted more than forty major surgical procedures. Murray performed his first appendectomy and assisted Hewlett in several hernia operations. He also served as Hewlett’s anesthesiologist, using the open drop-ether technique. It was a primitive method of sedation: ether was dropped onto a gauze-covered wire mask, which was placed over the nose and mouth; the ether was inhaled and diffused from the lung aveolar spaces into the bloodstream and tissue cells. Twelve drops the first minute, twenty-four the second, forty-eight the third, and ninety-six the fourth, until the patient was out.

  There was food on Corregidor, but not enough. The Japanese allowed the Americans to go fi
shing with dynamite, using Brightwork polish cans—army staples—packed with TNT and fitted with caps and fuses. On behalf of his patients, Murray appealed for more food to the Japanese medical officer, who in turn spoke to the Japanese quartermaster. To his surprise, the ration was increased with corned beef, sardines, and flour from Malinta Tunnel. They were well stocked the next week, when Murray decided to try his luck again. Poker-faced, he appealed to the same Japanese medical officer, who again spoke to the same Japanese quartermaster. The ruse worked: another case of sardines, corned beef, and more flour. Earlier on Corregidor Murray had resorted to stealing food with John; now he had learned the art of the bluff. He excused his behavior on the grounds of necessity. In a world where the old rules no longer held, pragmatism won over principle, unscrupulousness over honesty.

  The Japanese set up a store near Bottomside that sold canned milk, corned beef, peanuts, bananas, and sugar—goods that they had appropriated from Malinta Tunnel—but black market prices made them almost unaffordable. The real reason for the commissary was to try to recover some of the fifteen million silver pesos that the Americans had dumped between Corregidor and Fort Hughes before the surrender and that were mysteriously finding their way back into circulation. Twenty tons of gold bullion and silver from the Philippine treasury had already been removed by the submarine Trout in early February 1942.