That didn’t stop the Japanese from honoring the enemy’s dead. In May, Memorial Day services were held at Bilibid’s burial plot just inside the north wall, where in a pauper’s graveyard the POWs made every attempt to uphold military decorum. The old Cañacao staff broke out their navy whites; corpsmen shined officers’ shoes, polished their medals, and brushed off their insignia. Senior American officers attended, as did Captain Nogi Naraji and 2nd Lieutenant K. Urabe. Major General Morimoto sent flowers. Other POWs wore the ragged remains of uniforms or whatever tattered clothes they could cobble together.
A six-piece camp orchestra opened with “One Sweetly Solemn Thought,” which was followed by sixty seconds of silence. Chaplain Cummings read the roll call of Bilibid dead; Chaplain Wilcox recited Scripture. Flanked by navy and army corpsmen standing stiffly at attention, Sartin solemnly placed a floral wreath on the graves as the band struck up “My Buddy.” After a prayer by Chaplain Wilcox and a rendition of “Tenting Tonight,” the ceremony concluded with “Taps.” The cornetist, Pharmacist’s Mate Barnard R. Bell, had only one leg. A fitting example, Murray thought, of “the wounded playing for the dead.”
By then the rainy season had begun, “a welcome relief mostly from the dust,” noted John, “not so much the heat.” But it also coincided with a reduction in food, which consisted mostly of “very thin camote soup and rice.” The stream of goods that had flowed into Bilibid through the underground was reduced to a trickle because the food supply was now under occupation control, leaving no place for merchant middlemen.
In peacetime the diet recommended by the Board of Nutritional Research at the University of the Philippines was a mere 2,600 calories daily for the average Filipino adult male. Low in protein, low in calcium, low in the vitamins and minerals derived from fresh fruit and vegetables, it was completely lacking in eggs, cheese, and milk. The Filipino diet was overly reliant on cereals, and in the rainy season, it depended heavily on the camote. For the POWs, soon even the camote disappeared, and they found themselves eating the greens from the top of the camote vine—and rice.
Meat was an anomaly in the Japanese diet. Buddhist practices proscribed it. Francis Xavier, known as “the Apostle of the Indies,” made the ability to survive on a frugal diet a precondition for sixteenth-century Christian missionaries. Some missionaries, however, tried to introduce the Western practice of eating beef and horsemeat, which the chief minister Hideyoshi outlawed in his anti-Christian edicts. When Townsend Harris arrived in Japan and asked for milk, the story goes, he was told, “Cow’s milk is for calves to drink.” Not until 1872 did an emperor taste meat for the first time.
Canned meat had been used in Japanese military rations since the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877. The Japanese Navy in particular recognized its importance in preventing beriberi, while an 1889 study conducted by army physician Mori Ōgai, one of the most important writers of the Meiji period, favored a rice-based diet over a Western one. Corned beef became popular after the Tōkyō earthquake of 1923, but by 1935 meat was still only a small part of the typical Japanese diet, the average daily consumption amounting to a mere 6.1 grams.
Before the war the average daily caloric intake in Japan was 2,175, which was even lower than that recommended in the Philippines and 30 percent less than the 3,148 calories consumed in the United States. Ninety-five percent of the Japanese diet derived from vegetable foods, and it was lighter in protein than the average daily American diet by 25 grams. Physically the Japanese were considerably smaller than Americans, and the population had a greater percentage of children. So even if the POWs were receiving as much food as Japanese civilians, their diet was woefully inadequate.
Manileños were subject to severe rationing during the Japanese occupation. Rice and bread were available, but after the first two years, sugar, fuel, and shoes would vanish. Like the Fil-American troops during the Battle of Bataan, civilians resorted to eating dogs, cats, rats, snakes and bats. The much-vaunted Co-Prosperity Sphere, Hayes quipped, had turned into the “No Prosperity Sphere.” Matches, toilet paper, and soap were hard to come by “at any price.” The typical method of lighting your pipe was to “stand in the sun and fire it through your lens,” which was easier said than done when the monsoons came. In general, the treatment of POWs at all the camps began to deteriorate, which meant they had to be more self-reliant than ever.
Murray decided to put his background in chemistry to use by trying to convert starch into sugar. “Most of the people in the pharmacy thought I was nuts,” he confessed. But he succeeded in producing “a pretty fair glucose syrup” with a slight caramel flavor. Now if only he could get his hands on some malt and rice starch, his experiment would produce “Beer!”
Fred suffered the next “brainstorm”—raising chickens. On July 6, 1943, the men bought a native rooster for three pesos, and two yellow and white hens for four pesos apiece. By 2100 that evening Murray could report, “They still haven’t been stolen. Maybe that’s a good omen.” It was, but it was a month before they started laying small, soft-shelled eggs. The yellow hen was a mean little pecker and had to be tied up. The white hen, like a true Bilibid denizen, came down with conjunctivitis.
A less auspicious omen was when Nogi brought half a dozen adult pigs into Bilibid from Cabanatuan—not for the Americans but for the Japanese. The POWs built a pig pen, and a Japanese boy was named “Keeper of the Pigs.” But in a few months the porkers were anything but fat, dropping off one by one from cholera.
“I can hear the bang-bang, knock-knock of the box-maker, making crude coffins” for those waiting to die, Hayes wrote in July 1942. One year later his dear friend Bob Herthneck was dead. He had been in Lipa, where an airfield was being built, and returned to Bilibid suffering from paralysis of the soft palate and uvula. Herthneck was isolated in John Bookman’s ward, where he died within twenty-four hours from what appeared to be basilar polio. The virus is highly contagious, and the navy corpsmen who were with him were also placed in quarantine. It was “a shock to us all,” Murray wrote in his diary. Herthneck was a fellow New Yorker, and his death was the first among the navy medical personnel, but it would not be the last. “My one shipmate,” Hayes grieved. “I feel very much alone.”
In a note to Lucy, George described his own health as “excellent,” but it was difficult to tell what that meant. On newly formatted postcards, POWs were now permitted to write up to fifty words apiece but were prohibited from referring to illness or malnutrition.
Two letters from you have made me very happy.Working in Japanese established hospital. Have been on both orthopedic and medical services. Interested in orthopedic residency at Madison under Burns. If you feel the way I do apply for me mentioning Nelson.All my love to you and our folks.
George T. Ferguson
Lewis and Sophie Glusman hadn’t heard a word from Murray since Cavite was bombed on December 10, 1941; nor had Laura Reade. She had tried on at least three occasions since February 1942 to learn of his whereabouts. On June 8, 1943, she received a disconcerting letter from the navy:
Dear Miss Reade: As you are aware, more than a year has elapsed since your friend, Lieut. (junior grade) Murray Glusman, U. S. Naval Reserve, was officially placed in the status of missing in action.According to the last information received he was serving with the Naval Forces in the Sixteenth Naval District during May 1942.
Although many of the personnel serving in Corregidor at the time of its capitulation have been reported as captured by the enemy, the list of prisoners submitted by the Japanese through the medium of the International Red Cross so far failed to include the name of your friend.
The Secretary of the Navy has given careful consideration to the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of your friend. On the basis of data on record, and in the absence of acceptable proof of death, the Secretary has directed that your friend be continued in a missing in action status until circumstances arise to indicate that such status should be changed. . . .
The Navy Department fully
appreciates your anxiety and assures you that it will notify you promptly of any report it receives concerning your friend.
Sincerely yours,
Randall Jacobs
Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy
Chief of Naval Personnel
Two weeks later Murray’s sister, Estelle, was playing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on the piano when a letter arrived from the Navy Department for Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Glusman. The only one home, she opened the envelope and carefully read the contents.
The Bureau is glad to inform you of the following, quoted from a report, “US/801,” furnished by the Prisoner of War Information Bureau, from official Japanese sources, via Geneva, listing prisoners of war in the Philippine Islands: “TOKYO CABLES FOLLOWING POW ALL NAVY PHILIPPINES, LIEUTENANT M GLUSMAN.” It is considered that reference is made to Lieutenant Murray Glusman, United States Naval Reserve, and that he is now a prisoner of war.
Estelle called Aunt Dora, her mother’s sister, to share the good news. When her parents returned, she handed them the letter without speaking. Lewis and Sophie wept after reading it. They had no idea if Murray was sick or wounded, well treated or abused.
“But he’s alive,” Estelle said.
“He’s alive,” Estelle repeated, as if to make sure it was really true.
It was the first time she had seen her father cry, tears of joy commingling with sorrow because they were so utterly powerless to help their son. Lewis was not a man of hope. An orphan who had been raised and ill treated by his elder brother, he had struggled to get a foothold in America, learn a new language, negotiate a new culture, and reach a modicum of success. He had aspirations and expectations, but Murray embodied his hope, and for too long hope was missing from Lewis’s life.
Then out of the blue came a postcard dated July 14:Am doctor prison hospital now 14 mos. Treatment, health good. How you? Some getting mail. Not me. Keep writing via Red Cross. How Sid, Essie, Charlie, Ziff? Tell Charlie regards Laura. ... Love, Murray.
He sounded good, didn’t he? He sounded fine, just like Murray. Fine with malaria, dysentery, and dengue. Fine with beriberi, pellagra, and edema. They had no way of knowing, of course, how he really was, no way of knowing where he was. Actually, many relatives of POWs had glimpsed Bilibid without even realizing it: on December 14, 1941, The New York Times ran an aerial photograph of Manila with the caption “Capital of the Philippines.” The focus of the picture, which apparently eluded the Times, was the unmistakable Panopticon design of the municipal jail.
The very month that Murray was identified as a prisoner of war, Samuel and Olga Bookman read an article aptly entitled “You’ll Never Know!” in The New Yorker. A “Reporter At Large” piece, it profiled navy nurse Ann Bernatitus, who spoke to journalist Mark Murphy at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, after her return from Australia. The Bookmans had no inkling of the connection between Bernatitus and their son. But the circumstances of the story were so close to John’s that it was almost as if he were hiding behind it.
Bernatitus described her wartime ordeal with a restraint born from experience: her work with Carey Smith at Hospital No. 1 on Bataan, the evacuation of Mariveles, the siege of Corregidor (which “would tremble and shiver and shake until you wondered if you were getting it from the bottom”), and her escape to Australia by submarine. Little did Samuel and Olga realize that Carey was the “adopted father” in the family formed by George, Fred, Murray, and John. Little did they know what a changed man John had become, down to his nickname, Jake.
The story ended on a somber note:“I would kind of like to go back to the Philippines someday. Maybe things will be different when we are not retreating. Maybe it’s just my curiosity. . . . A lot of people we left behind we won’t find when we get back out there. A lot of people—”
Her voice suddenly sounded odd. She twisted in her chair, and took a handkerchief from a pocket in her dress, and turned her face away from me. “Oh, nuts!” she said into the handkerchief.
On August 13, 1943, Murray wrote in his diary:Bookman reminded me that 2 yrs. ago today we left San Francisco aboard the Garfield.We wonder when we’ll be back there.
I thought of the letter I wrote Laura describing the moment we left. . . .And the feeling of sadness & loneliness that engulfed me when I saw that thin strand of paper break as the ship slowly pulled away from the pier was not because of a prophetic vision of the present misery ... but because actually I saw the last thin tie that bound me to the life I had known & loved just flutter to the pier & into the bay to become no more than a bit of refuse.
In August the earth was flooded and spirits were dampened. The guards at Bilibid had become more vigilant, punitive, and there was the threat that the commissary would be discontinued. Sixty percent of the rice consumed in the Philippines was imported from Saigon, but the Japanese controlled distribution and sales, which left little for the Filipino people. With inflation soaring, basic foodstuffs were unaffordable for the average Manileño, and even less accessible to the average POW. There were reports that the Japanese were digging foxholes around Manila. An increase in dysentery corresponded to the decline in morale. Some POWs, like Captain Robert Chambers, Jr., were lucky enough to receive radiograms from home via Geneva.
In September 1943 Nogi reorganized Bilibid’s POW camp administration. He had been humiliated the previous June, when Private Sanford Jack Blau was caught selling Red Cross items on the outside, using a Japanese guard as an intermediary. Sartin didn’t notify Nogi of the incident until four days later. Blau was sentenced to twenty days in the brig, and Nogi was so furious with Sartin that he publicly chastised him for “his negligence in his official duty.” Bad enough that Manileños were openly contemptuous of the Japanese.
Nogi replaced Sartin with Hayes as senior medical officer of Bilibid, and Marion Wade took over Maurice Joses’s role as executive officer. In a statement Nogi read to Bilibid’s medical staff, he praised Sartin for his stewardship but reprimanded him again for “the number of cases of infringement of the rule [sic] and regulations” over the past fourteen months. Nogi urged the new administration to abide by the following points, translated into broken English by Yakushiji:1. Strict observance of the rule and regulation [sic] of Japanese Army. The executive officers are responsible for the supervision of all inmates to observe the rule and regulation.
2. Saturate among the inmates that it is the vice to hold such an idea of “Sponge on others,” “Eat off from others and give no return.”
3. Keep your morale high.
4. To those who are assigned as a new member of the organization, exert your sincere effort for the accomplishment of new task.
5. To those who are drafted to No. 1 Camp, I am so grateful for our effort exerted for the consummation of the function of this hospital.
With a patient census of 611 by late September, there were more doctors and corpsmen than necessary in Bilibid. Hayes was ordered to cut his staff in half. He asked Nogi if Sartin and Joses could stay behind, but Nogi refused. Then George, Fred, John, and Murray could also go, Hayes decided, as well as Stan Smith and corpsmen Richard Bolster, Bernard Hildebrand, and Ernie Irvin.
The foursome said goodbye to Carey Smith and Max Pohlman, to Marion Wade and Gordon Lambert, their friends from Cañacao, Cavite, Bataan, and Corregidor. On October 2, 1943, they were among 150 doctors, medics, and patients who were transferred sixty miles north of Manila to Cabanatuan POW Camp No. 1. But they left more than their friends behind at Bilibid—they shed their identities as doctors. For at Cabanatuan they were to assume a new role: not as medical officers, but as slave laborers.
16
The Good Doctor
SUNDAY AFTERNOONS were holidays for Ohashi Hyōjirō and his family in Osaka. The esteemed surgeon who was so fortified by the news of Pearl Harbor played the shakuhachi, or bamboo flute, to relax. His younger daughter, Kazuko, practiced piano. His wife, Yukako, and elder daughter, Yasuko, and son, Hisamichi, sang popular songs from
the Meiji Restoration.
Dr. Ōhashi was a professor of surgery in the Ōsaka Imperial University Medical Department. He lectured every day, except Sunday, when he performed surgery in the mornings. Some of his patients were casualties from the war in China, and sometimes he came home from the operating room with what appeared to be flecks of blood on his face. Their house stood on Matsuyama Street in front of Ōsaka Castle, which had been reconstructed in 1931 on the foundation of the sixteenth-century citadel. It was a spacious home, and like many Japanese doctors, he maintained a small clinic on the second floor that could accommodate six beds, and which he tended in the evenings. Hyōjirō and Yukako reserved another room for themselves. They loved to dance and rehearsed to a large collection of records. He even sewed his own pair of dancing shoes.
His father hailed from Hidaka in Wakayama Prefecture, in south-central Honsh, where he harvested rice and soy and amassed extensive landholdings. Hyōjirō grew up during the Taishō era, the period following the emperor Meiji’s death in 1912, when Japan emerged as a great power with imperialist ambitions yet embraced Western culture. It was a time when popular representation in government was offset by the curtailment of civil liberties, when Tōkyō, as historian Ian Buruma put it, could be likened to Weimar Berlin.
He had met Yukako at a New Year’s party in 1921. She was pretty, outgoing, and optimistic, the daughter of a wealthy Tōkyō family that had operated a money exchange business since the Tokugawa shogunate. She was admired for her complexion and kept it the palest white by using a cleanser made from bush warbler droppings and milk. In the light of Yukako’s elegant urbanity, Hyōjirō seemed somewhat shy and provincial, but he quickly adapted to the tastes of her class. They were married in November 1922 and were planning on living in Tōkyō when the earthquake of 1923 forced them to take refuge in Ōsaka.
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