Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  “Say doc,” a navy diver asked Murray one day, “do you think you can get this black stuff off these coins?”

  The pesos were coal-black from sitting in salt water. Back in May, Captain Takeuchi of the Japanese Army Engineers had launched a salvage operation using local Filipino divers. They relied on an old, manually operated oxygen pump designed for a maximum depth of 90 feet. But the Filipinos were inexperienced, and the silver, scattered over a large area, lay 120 feet beneath the sea. Two of the divers succumbed to the bends; another died underwater when his helmet was accidentally pulled off. The remaining Filipinos refused to dive anymore. Only eighteen boxes of silver had been recovered.

  In June the Japanese recruited six POWs from Cabanatuan who had been navy divers on the USS Pigeon. They retrieved equipment from the Canopus, reconstructed from memory a decompression chart, and figured out how to raise, using a three-sixteenths-inch recovery cable, boxes of the precious metal that weighed 300 pounds apiece. They also figured out how to sabotage the operation.

  At first the American divers pried open the wooden boxes on the ocean floor with a marlin spike and stuffed the pesos into their underwear and tennis shoes. Then they developed a system. While a crate of silver was being hoisted up on one side of the barge, a ten-tug pull on the air hose signaled that a stash of coins stuffed into denim sacks cut from dungaree legs or old gas mask bags was ready to be hauled up on the opposite side. Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class Robert C. Sheats of the USS Canopus would go into the water, ostensibly to make sure that the air hose was free of the recovery cable, and attach a weighted line to the purloined treasure. As the deck hands struggled to bring the crate on board, a screen of divers would hover over the contraband as it was pulled up on the other side, dump the loot into a bucket, and cover it with diving gear. At day’s end the men divvied up their gains. They even managed to scavenge from Malinta Tunnel some muriatic acid, an electric grinder, and a wire brush to clean their loot.

  Murray had a better solution. He simply dipped the pesos in nitric acid—then, after brushing them with Japanese tooth powder, they gleamed like newly minted coins. He thought of it as his contribution to devaluing Japanese occupation currency, which was barely worth the paper it was printed on. The motor pool became a clandestine silver exchange, where 50 pesos could buy 100 dollars, personal checks accepted. Little more than 2 million pesos was ever recovered by the Japanese on Corregidor, most of it thanks to a group of Moros who were experienced pearl divers from the Sulu Archipelago.

  Murray had become a thief, a gambler, and now, literally, a money launderer. If only his father had known. But the real value of his work was in caring for the patients in the old Fort Mills Station Hospital from the 200-man work detail on Corregidor. Not one man was lost during the postsurrender period when he was on the Rock. The medical decisions that were made were his and Tommy Hewlett’s alone.

  Back in New York City, Lewis Glusman had already written to the New York Life Insurance Company to inquire about his son’s policy. At a time when Murray, in captivity, was so proud to be a doctor, proud to have gotten out from under Hayes’s shadow, his father was expecting, any day, to receive news of his death.

  The chief of surgery at Bilibid, Thomas Hirst Hayes, was one difficult son of a bitch. He was smart, erudite, disciplined, and demanding, quick to judge others but perhaps hardest on himself. A native of Philadelphia, Hayes was married and had a young son, Thomas Jr., nicknamed Barnacle because he weighed on his mother like the shells on the hull of a ship. “Just a country boy at heart,” he signed a photograph of himself. Far from it—he was a complicated man, talented and troubled. With seventeen years’ experience as a navy officer under his belt, his sometimes holier-than-thou demeanor rubbed the junior officers raw with resentment. “Terrible Tommy,” they called him for his temper, which blew over as quickly as a summer rainstorm.

  Hayes liked to read a book a week, take notes, and then reread the same books the next year, take notes, and compare the changes in his interpretations. At Bilibid he kept a diary that remains one of the most detailed records of POW life in the Philippines. For his son he made a photographic album of his prewar tour in the islands. He was an artist who, on the evacuation of Cañacao, left an unfinished painting “still on the board” of the very scene where Dewey and Admiral Topete y Cervera “fought it out in 1898.” He even tried his hand at writing short stories in Spanish.

  In spite of an intense friendship with Dental Corps officer Bob Herthneck, “my closest comrade,” Hayes thought of himself as very much alone. In prison he came to expect the worst of humanity, and not surprisingly, he found it. “Emaciated carcasses look up with staring eyeballs sunk deep in bony sockets,” he wrote on arriving at Bilibid. “The conglomerate horror of it all beats upon my sensibilities as an outrageous defiance against all the principles of civilization, and dispels any delusion I may have of human progress.” He deplored the profiteering that was permitted by Camp Warden Gooding. He castigated the Americans for their arrogance and provinciality. And he railed against “the stuffed shirt, high and mighty Army boys” who patronized Colonel Manuel G. Olympia, chief of the medical service, Philippine Army. Hayes was anti-Semitic, homophobic, and harbored homicidal rage toward the Japanese. On seeing POWs walking “like Haitian zombies” from the Tayabas detail, he declared:At no one other moment have I hated with the intensity of that moment. . . . I swore and vowed that I would never be satisfied nor content on earth until every vestige of Nippon was destroyed—until I have personally known the feel of ramming a bayonet into their guts, starving them, looting them of all they hold dear. . . . If my hunger for their blood is abnormal, they have made me so.

  He was also struck with a sense of foreboding. “I knew when I left for the Asiatic just one year ago that this present plight, or death or both was in my immediate future,” he confided to his diary. He feared that he would be among the last Americans to leave the Philippines, by which time “we will be bombing our own Americans wherever we bomb.”

  “Old Hazy,” as the junior medical officers also dubbed him, seemed to live behind a veil of contempt. If their basic training was on the battlefield, they had a recruit’s dislike of their commanding officer, and their esprit de corps was the stronger for it. What they couldn’t see beneath the badgering, the bluster, and the denigrating comments was that Hayes had enormous respect for many of them.

  Before leaving Corregidor, Hayes compiled fourteen detailed narrative histories of the Navy Medical, Dental, and Hospital Corps personnel on duty with the 4th Marines in the Philippines. Fred suspected he had lost favor with Hayes because of his friendship with Fleet Surgeon Ken Lowman. But in his “Report on Medical Tactics,” Hayes lauded John for his work at Camp Dewey and the Section Base Hospital in Mariveles. He praised George for his perseverance on Corregidor during hostile activity that was “heroic, modest and served as an inspiration to every officer and man serving under him.” And he admired Murray, whose Medical Corps education amounted to less than twelve weeks by correspondence course but whose sound judgment, steadfast performance, and “conduct under fire” were “worthy of the best traditions of our Service.” “It was inspiring to see,” Hayes wrote, “the cool competency and willingness of the youngsters, many of whom were having their first taste of blood and fire, and they did splendidly. I have been proud of them ever since.”

  Hayes was a stickler for protocol, a firm believer in discipline who insisted that doctors in the Medical Corps “must be officers.” But he had sense enough to adapt medical tactics to a situation whose handbook was yet to be written. Having lived in the tropics for years, he knew that “a Mayo Clinic isn’t necessary for excellent results.” At Bilibid, ingenuity and improvisation were a means to that end.

  “Osler has said that the physician who cannot successfully treat malarial fever,” John wrote in his medical notes, “should not be practicing medicine. Insofar as this refers to only the fever of malaria this is true. Insofar as it refers to malaria it
self it is not true.”

  The standard course of treatment for malaria couldn’t be carried out in the majority of cases due to a lack of quinine. But what John noticed at Bilibid was that even those patients who had completed six months of quinine therapy, in addition to courses of atabrine, suffered relapses as early as three weeks later. The reason, he thought, was malnutrition, which lowered the body’s resistance. But it wasn’t only food and quinine that were in short supply at Bilibid.

  Lacking emetine, the doctors administered ground charcoal to dysentery patients because it absorbs intestinal gases. To avert an epidemic, Radio Electrician Earl G. Schweizer, who replaced Gooding as camp warden in October 1942, designed a self-flushing latrine. To reduce the spread of infection, a fly-trapping contest was implemented—two beers for each can of flies caught. To treat scurvy, they rounded up limes, which seafarers of yore had found to be an effective remedy for vitamin C deficiency. To combat beriberi, they cultivated mongo beans in tins and jars and then steamed them like lentils. And to fight vitamin B deficiency, they doled out half-canteen cups of yeast, which the San Miguel Brewery in Manila provided for Bilibid’s “diet kitchen.”

  Due to the shortage of gauze, bandages were washed and reused. Due to the shortage of paper, the doctors wrote their patient notes on the reverse side of Chinese immigration certificates dating back to the 1920s. Due to the shortage of soap, they simply rinsed their clothes in water. But there was no shortage of patients, and the doctors themselves were riddled with illness. As Hayes wrote with Dostoevskian disdain: “We are all sick.” In September 1942, 37 percent of all hospital admissions were doctors and corpsmen.

  Most of the old Cañacao Naval Hospital staff still had their khaki uniforms, tatters of their group identity. Tunics were cut from shirts, shorts were tailored from pants, and once shoes wore out they were replaced with bakyas—native clogs carved from scraps of wood and secured with cloth or leather straps across the instep. Santo Tomás, the civilian internment camp, made a special donation of clothes to the hospital. Those on work parties in the Port Area, or Pandacan, or at Fort McKinley simply wore the Japanese-issue loincloth, or fundoshi.

  The men reused coffee grounds until the brew was a pale shadow of itself. When coffee ran out, they baked banana skins and crumbled them in hot water for a cup of joe. If they had soap, it doubled as toothpaste. For cigarettes they substituted bitter black cheroots, and for toilet paper they were given a sheet apiece each day. They honed their razors on shards of glass and made sure their mess-kit spoons lasted for years.

  Ingenuity and improvisation were woven into the social fabric of Bilibid as well, a patchwork of interests, desires, and wide-ranging abilities. Fred loved to bake and seemed to whip up ingredients out of thin air. He presented Carey Smith with a cake on his birthday, then played fiddle while John and George serenaded their “adopted father.” Corpsman Johnson drew up a menu with a variety of dishes “à la Bilibid.” Signed by the “Chief Chef, Chief Dish & Bottle Washer, and Chief Bookkeeping & Purchasing Agent,” it was embossed with the “Bilibid Seal,” which showed a man in profile thumbing his nose above two crossed keys on a mock escutcheon, beneath which unfurled a banner that read: “SNAFU.”

  The POWs had access to a circulating library that was housed between Buildings No. 1 and No. 2, and a medical library on the second floor of Building No. 18. The Philippine Red Cross provided books as well as athletic equipment.

  Volleyball and baseball were favorite pastimes, as was deck tennis, the net for which was made from hemp. In the evenings the men read or listened to recordings such as “My Prayer,” “Always Forever,” and “Sunrise Serenade” on a Victrola that had been smuggled into camp. They played cards, placed bets as to when they would return to the States, and shared war stories. John patiently tried to explain to George the “finer points” of bridge. Lieutenant Max Pohlman, a devilishly handsome doctor from Los Angeles County Hospital and the self-proclaimed “King of the Auto Courts,” regaled the men with tales of nubile nurses and other amatory adventures.

  Saturday nights the POWs put on a “camp show” with music, songs, and magic acts organized by Lieutenant Commander Clyde L. Welsh, chief of general medicine, and approved beforehand by the Japanese. Lieutenant Commander Cecil Charles Welch, chief of outpatient service, made a hobby of collecting favorite recipes from the men—for steak and stews, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie and apple crumb cake. At night, they dreamed about food—rarely about sex. Hayes admitted that he was afraid of his dreams. “They break up my steeled defense against thought, memories, hopes and fears.”

  His fears were justified. The punishment for sending a note outside Bilibid was burning it and eating its ashes. The punishment for talking back to a guard was a beating, being forced to squat on your heels for hours, or both. When Corporal Robert C. Barnbrook attempted escape on September 26, 1942, he was sentenced to two and a half years in the military prison on the other side of the compound, but he died of beriberi before he completed his term. When two army colonels and the navy supply officer from Mariveles were caught after an attempted escape from Cabanatuan, Hayes heard, they were tortured and executed. Rumor had it that Lieutenant (j.g.) Bernard Cohen, whom John and Murray had worked with in Mariveles, succeeded in escaping from the Penal Colony in Davao and made it safely to Australia.

  Fortunately Nogi seemed a decent fellow. He looked the other way as Nancy Belle Norton slipped food, medicine, and clothing into camp on a regular basis until she herself was imprisoned. He let Hayes go outside Bilibid on an excursion to the Port Area, where “a miserable lot” of POWs from Cabanatuan were boarding a Japanese merchant ship—destined for Japan. Afterward he took him out to dinner. Hayes was convinced that the war with Japan was essentially racial in nature, and in spite of his antipathy toward the Japanese people as a whole, he found Nogi singularly well intentioned.

  Nogi refused to believe either the Japanese or the American reports of the war’s progress. But George pinned his hopes on both news and rumor, some of which emanated from a radio set the POWs concealed in Bilibid. The Battle of Coral Sea in May 1942, followed by a decisive American victory at Midway in June and a bloody campaign for Guadalcanal launched in August, surely signaled an aggressive Allied counteroffensive The war would be over in a month, KGEI reported in early September. Two days later George exclaimed, “November seems to be the promised time now & we are planning our first few days of release. Wow!!!” But by November he could only admit, “Well, another month has gone by rapidly and still waiting for Yanks & Tanks.” Then there was the strange rumor that Hayes had heard about a Japanese transport ship loaded with 1,800 British POWs captured in Singapore. Bound for Japan, it had been torpedoed and sunk by American submarines.

  Time waiting was well spent by the POW doctors. Nearly 500 operations were performed by the surgical service in the first six months at Bilibid, noted Lieutenant A. M. Barrett, who worked with Fred and Hjalmer Erickson in the Sick Officers’ Quarters—appendectomies and amputations, orthopedic repairs and rib resections, gastroenterostomies and hemorrhoidectomies, anal fistulas and circumcisions. Only one patient died, and he had been moribund on admission.

  POWs flowed into Bilibid from Clark Field, where they suffered from malnutrition and food deficiency diseases, and from Cabanatuan, where the army doctors had no emetine or carbarsone and the prison population was decimated by amoebic dysentery. Others were quarantined in Bilibid for typhoid fever.

  Pellagra continued to proliferate. Dengue accounted for more than a third of hospital admissions in September 1942. But it was dysentery that remained an “outstanding” problem in Bilibid, indeed throughout the Philippines.

  In June 1942 Ted Williams was on a work detail at Clark Field when he discovered two large bottles of bismuth and paregoric in the dispensary. He turned them over to an army captain for future use, and soon Williams himself contracted amoebic dysentery. He was kept at Clark and isolated from the other POWs until he was hauled back to
Bilibid in a flatbed truck. By then he was so weak he couldn’t stand up and had to be carried to the infectious diseases ward on a stretcher. “Do you know why you’re here?” Dr. Welsh asked him. “Because I’m going to die,” Williams whispered.

  There were no beds or mattresses in the infectious diseases ward because with dysentery you lose complete control of your bowels. Men lay on a bare concrete floor. A large tub was filled with water and creosote for washing soiled clothing. If you lived, you got your clothing back; if you died, it was recycled to another POW. Williams was given the native remedy of ground charcoal, which had little effect, he thought, except to turn his feces black. Paregoric, an opium derivative that tastes like licorice, helped relieve abdominal pain. But he also needed bismuth, and the army captain from the Clark Field detail refused to give him any. Eventually the amoebic dysentery cleared up, and then Williams developed bacillary dysentery, which Lieutenant Commander E. M. Wade treated successfully with plasma he was able to obtain from Nogi.

  Williams survived by becoming a “dog robber,” army parlance for an enlisted man working for an officer. He was paid in extra food—clean rice, sugar, mongo beans, and mangoes—which didn’t save his sight but in all likelihood saved his life.

  Thirteen men died in Bilibid in June 1942, thirty-three in July, and twenty-one in August. Dysentery ranked as the leading cause of death, followed by malaria. The Japanese permitted religious services on Sunday, and in early October Chaplains Cummings and Perry O. Wilcox gave a memorial for all those who had perished since the outbreak of war. Nogi attended, and afterward the Japanese High Command presented the POW hospital personnel with cookies, candy, and four bananas apiece. The Americans expressed their gratitude in “a letter of appreciation,” but the irony wasn’t lost on them. The Japanese showed more respect for the dead than for the dying.