Murray arrived at Bilibid on December 10, 1942, the first anniversary of the Cavite bombing. Far from losing weight, he’d actually gained a few pounds on Corregidor. Sometimes being the low man on the totem pole had its benefits. Sometimes, he now realized, you had to think counter-intuitively. Being with the senior medical officers was not necessarily the best option.
He was glad to be reunited with the gang, but Murray found prison conditions wanting compared to life on the Rock. Bilibid’s death rate had leveled off, but the food ration was abysmal. Eighty percent of the hospital patients suffered from one kind of nutritional deficiency or another. When Sartin appealed to Nogi to request more medicine from the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, he was informed that the POWs couldn’t have what the Japanese didn’t have.
The senior Japanese medical officer, Colonel Ishii, evidently agreed that rations at Bilibid were insufficient for malnutrition patients. Ishii recommended that each man receive 100 grams of canned meat daily. But the Japanese also claimed that their own troops were virtually immune to vitamin-deficiency diseases. “Had we been obliged to subsist only on what the Japs have given us,” noted Hayes, “there isn’t one of us who would be able to carry on and work today.”
On December 23 a Christmas miracle arrived at Bilibid in the form of British Red Cross parcels from Geneva. “Really increased the morale,” George wrote, “and you should see the smiling faces this P.M.” Less than two weeks later American Red Cross boxes arrived via the Gripsholm, which brought a total of 445 tons of supplies for POWs and internees in United Nations countries. It was the best possible present from home:✚
American Red Cross
STANDARD PACKAGE NO. 8
for
PRISONER OF WAR
FOOD
The packages weighed eleven pounds apiece and had to be divided between two men. The POWs pawed through them like squirrels, sniffing, hoarding, devouring. Lifesavers for some, they were currency for others. The corned beef had an almost immediate effect on edema and skin ulcers. On the other hand, it was odd to see chaplains, of all people, trading cigarettes for food, which to the doctors was tantamount to a criminal offense. One sailor died from stomach distension after ingesting the contents of an entire Red Cross parcel in one sitting. The Japanese were amazed to see foodstuffs packed in tin cans and foil, which had disappeared from daily life in Japan, so dire was the military’s need for scrap metal.
Along with the Red Cross parcels came a supply of medicine at Bilibid, but not all of the items in the Red Cross parcels ended up in the right hands. One POW stole packs of cigarettes, which he then sold to a Filipino calesa driver for one and a half pesos apiece; the driver resold them on the black market for a tidy profit. The ruse was unraveled when the calesa driver was discovered one day with 300 pesos in his pockets. Sartin took responsibility and was publicly reprimanded by Nogi. The 300 pesos were deposited in the Indigent Sick Fund. “A public act,” Sartin observed, “to cover up the far more extensive theft being carried out by the Japanese themselves.” Manila was flooded with goods the Japanese had purloined from Red Cross packages.
In the meantime the Japanese issued every POW a box of matches, a cake of soap, and formatted postcards so the men could write home. The design was the brainchild of a Japanese graduate of Columbia University. Beneath the Imperial Japanese Army letterhead was a series of statements with multiple choice options or a one-line space for fill-in-the-blank answers. The purpose was to dictate the information a POW could divulge and limit the text of messages to facilitate translation and censorship.
IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY
1. I am interned at _________________________________________
2. My health is—excellent; good; fair; poor.
3. I am—injured; sick in hospital; under treatment; not under treatment.
4. I am—improving; not improving; better; well.
5. Please see that _________________________________________ _________________________________________ is taken care of.
6. (Re: Family): ____________________________________________
7. Please give my best regards to ___________________________
Even with such restrictions, the idea of writing home was as liberating as the glimpse of life beyond Bilibid that George and John caught one day from the third floor of the inner compound. But only fifteen letters had come into Bilibid. One of them was for George, and it was from Lucy. “Boy, oh Boy what a thrill, she didn’t say much but it was all good. Dated June 5th was opened 2x. Passed it around for a few to read.” And what they read made them think of their own sweethearts and families, of what they’d left and what they’d lost, of farewells and homecomings. “Very few people (only one other M.D.) got a letter,” George noted, “and this is hard to understand.”
The reason was twofold. The whereabouts of many POWs captured in early 1942 was a mystery to U.S. authorities because the Japanese still hadn’t released their names or camp locations. Late in 1942 Japan issued instructions on how to address mail to POWs even if their particular camp was unknown. Mail received by the Japanese Red Cross Society was simply forwarded to the Horyo Jōhōyoku, which was quickly overwhelmed. Soon a mail distribution center was established in Tōkyō and operated by POWs from Ōmori Main Camp, but it was shut down after a year for fear that prisoners were harvesting too much information from it. As a result, the responsibility for processing reverted to the Horyo Jōhōkyoku, which was unable to cope with the enormous task of first translating and then censoring mail. Many letters simply sat in sacks throughout the Philippines and Japan and remained undelivered and unread. While POWs wondered why there was no word from home, their loved ones felt as if they had poured their hearts out into an ominous silence.
Laura Reade hadn’t heard from Murray in more than a year and a half. In January 1942 the Navy Department wrote to her that he was “alive and well,” but in March his exact whereabouts were “not available at this time.” On May 18 he was classified as “missing in action,” a designation he would carry until June 1943. Murray became a thought, a memory, a rent in the fabric of everyday life. But how do you overcome the pain of absence? Do you confront it or bypass it, dwell on it or move forward? How can you still love someone if you only think of them in the past tense?
“My boy,” Max Pohlman told him with a wink, “you are missing the best years of your life.”
Murray didn’t need to be reminded.
Bilibid was a village behind walls, with shops (a pharmacy, a tailor, a commissary), a hospital, a library, a church, magistrates (senior officers), commoners (enlisted men), town meetings, a rumor mill, ritual observances, thieves, moralists, ministers, chroniclers, and even a brig within a prison for those who broke laws determined by the Japanese.
A choir made up of POWs sang carols on Christmas Eve, and Protestant and Catholic services were performed in the chapel just before midnight. “Why can’t everyone just be a Catholic?” George wondered out loud, to the amusement of Murray and John. “It’s such a fine religion.” He knew they were both Jewish. Even their dogtags were imprinted with a J.
At one point the Japanese ordered Lieutenant Commander Cecil Charles Welch to compile a list of POWs by religion, and he dutifully asked each prisoner his faith. To Welch’s inquiry, Murray boasted: “My family’s been Jewish for thousands of years and I see no reason to change now.” John was just as adamant. It was a foolish taunt in spite of the Jewish presence in East Asia. Jews emigrating from Russia or fleeing Germany had found refuge in Shanghai and Japanese-occupied Harbin. Kōbe’s well-established community dated back to the nineteenth century, when Jews arrived not as refugees but as traders. But since the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936, Nazis had been infiltrating Japan, and anti-Semitism was on the rise. In some cases the Kempeitai, Japan’s Gestapo, identified Jews and arrested and imprisoned them as suspected Communists or spies. Neither Murray nor John was an observant Jew—science, in their opinion, gave the lie to religion. Their claim
was an assertion more of identity under threat than of genuine conviction. Welch wisely reported their religion as Christian to avoid any possible repercussions.
The doctors at Bilibid had their individual specialties, but they quickly gained familiarity with a range of diseases that were almost numbing in their consistency. Their remarks to their patients were cool, clinical, and precise, betraying no emotion as they recorded the symptoms and recommended treatment for one POW after another suffering from cross-infections. And they could only speculate on the cause of death when bodies of POWs were delivered from Pasay, then hastily buried by the Japanese.
There was one case, however, that Fred would never forget. Corporal Lloyd D. Adams had been bitten on the face and leg by a rabid dog when he was on a work party at Balanga. He was placed in Bilibid’s isolation ward and given a course of rabies vaccine provided by the Japanese, but it did little to stop the virus from multiplying in the brain and surging through the efferent nerves to the salivary glands. Adams went insane. He salivated uncontrollably and developed hydrophobia. His spasms—triggered by the most innocuous stimuli—became so violent that the disease seemed to have seized his body, to speak and act for it in a bizarre parody of human behavior. Ted Williams could barely see from xerophthalmia, but at night and at bangō he could hear the most horrible screaming. The spectacle induced in Fred a sense of awe in the face of the incurable.
Doctors quickly learn to separate the personal from the professional, but some relationships at Bilibid blossomed into friendships. Corporal Donald E. Meyer, who had been stationed at Nichols Field with the 693rd Aviation Ordnance, suffered a depressed skull fracture and a dislocated hip on Corregidor. When he arrived at Bilibid in October 1942, Carey Smith and Lieutenant E. R. Nelson tended his hip fracture first. Later Nelson and George Ferguson operated successfully on his skull. Meyer recovered beautifully. “I knew he would be a friend to me always,” he said of George.
Some cases, however, were medical mysteries. Murray was intrigued by patients complaining of “painful feet.” Their extremities felt as if they were on fire, they said. Their fingers tingled, and the discomfort in their toes was so intense that some of them couldn’t walk. Was it neurological in origin, psychological, or nutritional? he wondered. Was it dry beriberi? Murray began to experiment by administering 20 milligrams of thiamin each day. Nogi was so concerned about the “sore foot syndrome” that he appointed Hayes the head of a “commission” to study the disease, and together they visited Philippine General Hospital and the Institute of Hygiene in Manila. The incidence of “painful feet” decreased as the daily diet was supplemented with meat, mongo beans, and black-eyed peas from the Indigent Sick Fund. But what exactly caused it?
Less of a mystery were the malingerers. Captain Arthur Wermuth of the 57th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, was a legend on Bataan for his guerrilla attacks against the Japanese. Oddly enough, “One-Man Army” Wermuth always had a temperature when he came in to see Fred, and Fred couldn’t understand why—until he caught Wermuth dipping the thermometer into a cup of hot water when his back was turned.
Avoiding work, pilfering supplies, profiting from the misery of others—what levels wouldn’t some of the POWs stoop to? Hayes wondered. Disease affected the human body, and it threatened the body politic as well. When the plague struck Periclean Athens during the Peloponnesian War, according to Thucydides, the state descended into “unprecedented lawlessness.” “In the midst of affliction and misery,” Boccaccio wrote of fourteenth-century Florence during the Black Death, “even the revered authority of laws, divine and human, had all but lapsed and dissolved.” At Bilibid, with so little for so many, temptations were hard to resist, especially since the threat of punishment—at the hands of the Americans—had lost its sting. They were already in jail, a separate social unit within an enemy hierarchy in an occupied country. Was survival compatible with morality? Hayes speculated. Was the veneer of civilization really so thin? “The inner man is little more than a beast,” Hayes concluded with Hobbesian gloom after just a month and a half inside Bilibid.
Sartin was neither tough enough on POWs when they violated camp regulations, nor would he stand up to the Japanese. He was uncomfortable with authority, but his position demanded that he exercise it because the Japanese, Murray observed, had a time-honored respect for “place.” The emphasis on hierarchy in Japanese society dated back to feudal times. In the military it translated into rank, and in civil society, status. As Hayes put it, “If we act as a hospital we will be a hospital in the eyes of the Japanese, and we will get more and be able to do more as a result.”
In January 1943 the Japanese began showing propaganda newsreels that extolled the nation’s expeditionary successes. One of them was Toyo no Gaika, or Victory Song in the Orient. Produced by the Ministry of War, it was a black-and-white film that blamed American jazz and movies for their corrupting influence on the Filipino people and used several hundred POW officers and enlisted men from Cabanatuan as extras in sequences depicting the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. The final scene showed General Homma on horseback reviewing his troops at the victory parade in Manila and closed with the anthem of the Japanese Navy, “Umi Yukaba,” or “Across the Sea”:Across the sea, water-drenched corpses;
Across the mountains, grass-covered corpses.
We shall die by the side of our lord,
We shall not look back.
Impervious to the message of his country’s propaganda, Nogi then let the POWs watch a feature that was pure Hollywood: Laurel and Hardy’s Fra Diavolo. The entire camp turned out—stretcher patients, men hobbling from “painful feet,” those who were confined to the back wards, even the Japanese. Boy, did it feel good to laugh at Stan and Ollie’s slapstick antics, grown men hardened by the experience of war and captivity guffawing like little kids, laughing until tears came to their eyes. It was the first in a string of American movies shown that included the Marx Brothers’ Room Service and Boys Town with Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy—but not before the Japanese dutifully played newsreels celebrating their victories at Pearl Harbor and Singapore.
For their own amusement, the navy doctors formed the Papaya Club. Members were required to grow a mustache and a Van Dyke, and you couldn’t shave it off without permission of the group. The penalty was a twenty-centavo papaya to each member, or another twenty-centavo food item if papayas weren’t in season. Max Pohlman ended up looking like Trotsky—and getting fined. Hjalmer Erickson, Hayes thought, bore an uncanny resemblance to Hitler. Fred already had a mustache. And poor Murray was so fair-haired that he had to use the magnifying end of a hand-held mirror to see any whiskers at all.
In February 1943 Bilibid’s medical staff began offering courses of instruction to inmates, from math and astronomy to English and engineering. For a brief period Bilibid was an open university within prison walls. It was one way for the doctors to keep as up to date as possible in their respective fields while sharing their knowledge with their fellow POWs. Hayes joked that he was “majoring in Spanish, minoring in Japanese, taking a few hours of ‘domestic Science’ (lab course only), and a course in ‘Applied Economics.’ ” For class flower he voted for kangkong, and for mascot, a rabid dog.
Murray taught chemistry, using Smith’s Inorganic Chemistry as a text. When he wasn’t brushing up on anatomy and neurology, he devoured Wells, Tolstoy, and Dreiser. He dismissed Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as “terrible, pointless stuff,” but Erskine Caldwell struck a chord, not for the quality of his prose but for his earthy realism. It was Caldwell who said: “I suppose there is plenty to eat somewhere if you can find it; the cat always does.”
The Japanese, for their part, held language classes for POWs and instructed them in calisthenics. Murray had studied Hebrew as a child, he spoke Yiddish with his parents, and he understood German. Unlike Fred and John, he had no reservations about learning Japanese; he saw what a useful tool it could be. Yakushiji Kunizo, the camp interpreter, later solicited written accounts from those
who had marched from Mariveles to San Fernando. Should the POWs tell the truth? Wouldn’t the Japanese lose face? Was it a ruse that would result in reprisals against the Americans? Camp Warden Schweizer asked Yakushiji point-blank. Yakushiji replied that Tōkyō wanted to know the truth, Geneva was involved, and POWs could submit their reports anonymously. As Hayes recorded in his diary:Schweizer informed Yakashisi [sic] in that case he would get reports that would mark that march as the most bestial atrocity-filled incident of all military history.Yakashisi admitted he expected so.The result was, the accounts submitted contained every atrocity imaginable, shootings, bayonetting, burying alive, beatings, denial of food and water, plundering and robbing, denial of medicine and medical care of the sick.
Shortly afterward Tōkyō’s intentions were cast into doubt. POWs were prohibited from teaching any more classes. The Japanese feared they had ulterior motives.
In March 1943, food deficiency cases decreased, and in April not one death was recorded in Bilibid. Adequate quinine, atabrine, and plasmochin led to “a noticeable decrease in the incidence of malaria,” John wrote. But there was a disturbing development on April 15. A draft of POWs from Pasay arrived “in hellish shape from hard labor, starvation, very little water,” said Hayes. “From this group we learn the Japs are mad as hell about losing Guadalcanal and have read of our tanks actually rolling over them and raising hell. Pasay is without doubt a reprisal camp of the worst order.” And the most horrific kind of revenge, as far as Hayes was concerned, was medical experimentation. Japanese doctors were using American POWs as guinea pigs.
Conduct Under Fire Page 33
