As Henry G. Lee wrote in a poem entitled “An Execution”:Red in the western sun, before he died
We saw his glinting hair; his arms were tied.
There by his lonely form, ugly and grim,
We saw an open grave, waiting for him.
We watched him from our fence, in silent throng,
Each with the fervent prayer, “God make him strong.”
They offered him a smoke; he’d not have that,
Then at his captors’ feet coldly he spat.
He faced the leaden hail, his eyes were bare;
We saw the tropic rays glint in his hair.
What matter why he stood facing the gun?
We saw a nation’s pride there in the sun.
“Escape impossible,” Colonel Mori had told the entire stockade. The POWs were divided into ten-man “shooting squads.” If one man escaped, he warned, the other nine in this squad would be executed in retaliation. The atmosphere was charged with a slow, steady undercurrent of fear.
By the time the four navy doctors arrived at Cabanatuan in October 1943, the prison population was roughly 4,400, 1,500 of whom were in the hospital. The death rate had dropped to just one or two men a day. Barracks No. 32 became their new home, and as soon as Murray stepped into it, he saw that they had visitors: the place was crawling with bed-bugs and lice.
The camp was divided into three groups—Camp Supply, Camp Library, and Camp Utilities. In early 1943, Major Iwanaka, then the camp commandant, had determined the number of medical personnel who could work in the hospital and dispensary, and both were run by the army. With the hospital census reduced, the navy doctors and corpsmen from Bilibid had only a small medical role to play. Except for John Nardini, Bruce Langdon, and the senior officers—Sartin, Joses, and Hjalmer Erickson—they were consigned, like the enlisted men, to manual labor.
If a man could walk, the Japanese reasoned, he could work, and if he couldn’t walk, his food ration was cut. This was known as the “No work, no eat” policy. But protest one violation, and you were apt to be subjected to another. Beecher and Schwartz were “slapped around” for voicing their objections.
The POWs’ work ranged from farming to chopping wood, digging ditches, moving buildings, repairing roads, cutting hay and bamboo, “beautifying” the cemetery, and constructing an airfield, which violated Article 31 of the Geneva Convention forbidding work that bore a “direct relation with war operations.” There were light and heavy equipment operators, cowboys who raised Brahma cattle for Japanese consumption, and truckers known as Kings, because they lived like royalty and were a regular source of news and contraband from Manila. When fuel for trucks became scarce, the Japanese formed a carabao caravan between camp and Cabanatuan City, whose jockeys were called “coxswains.” Some enlisted men worked as dog robbers for the Japanese in exchange for food and tobacco. The least desirable job of all was the “honey detail,” whose unfortunate handlers had to empty Japanese latrines and spread human waste on fields as fertilizer or “night soil.” There was even a movie detail, whose stand-ins engaged in mock battles on Bataan for the Japanese propaganda film Ano Hata o Ute, known under the English pre-production title as Tear Down the Stars and Stripes. Directed by Abe Yutaka, a University of Southern California graduate who had lived in Hollywood for fourteen years, it was released in Manila in February 1944 as The Dawn of Freedom.
Each work party had a boss, or honsho. A Japanese sergeant named Nakatsui supervised the truck detail and was unusually solicitous. The farm boss, Ihara Kazutane, nicknamed “Air Raid,” was notorious for his brutality. Beecher was careful to warn POWs of the consequences of their behavior:Do not oppose, insult, or offend the Japanese. Control your temper. Avoid all profanity in your official dealings. Bear in mind Article 60 of Camp Rules and Regulations: “For any violations of Regulations the death penalty may be inflicted.” These words are unconditional. They mean just what they say; do not doubt them, do not test them; put your shoulder to the wheel and do your best.
John refused to speak Japanese but he could recite bangin his sleep. Each morning the daily count-off began at 0615. Ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, k, j. Miss your turn, and you’d be whacked by a guard’s “vitamin stick.” If the count fell short, the guards made you start all over again. You’d already eaten lugao for breakfast, and by 0700 you were on your way to work. Lugao at noon, and you were back at work from 1330 until 1730. Finally, supper was served at 1800, and it was lugao once more. You were grateful, as much as you’d come to detest it. How many bowls had it been? Hundreds? Thousands? You’d say arigatō to express your thanks, even if the rice was milled, shorn of its vitamin-rich polishings. Occasionally it was supplemented with bits of carabao the size of hickory nuts.
George, John, and Murray all worked on the farm. So did Fred, until he was allowed to join the wood-chopping detail. The farm was the worst of them all. Rakes were made from wire and bamboo, hoes were cut from 55-gallon oil drums, and “things get done in the old coolie fashion,” as John described it. A 200-acre plot had been cleared and cultivated northeast of the camp, and as many as 2,600 POWs toiled on it at a time. Many men wore nothing but fundoshi. They were barefoot, which was intended to deter escapes and also turned them into open portals for hookworm. And they were completely unprotected from a blistering sun. Murray was fortunate in having held on to his pith helmet.
They walked down a road along the edge of a field carrying five-gallon gasoline cans, turned right, and at a pile of fertilizer had the cans filled by a shovel crew; then they turned right again, walked down the opposite side of the field and into the furrows, slipping and sliding in the mud, until they reached the holes into which they dumped the fertilizer, and the routine began all over again. Their expressions were blank, their actions rote. Talking was forbidden, so they sang to themselves, cursed under their breath, counted silently, or fell into rhythms, ruts, and imaginary designs. Occasionally a solitary figure stopped to slap or brush off the red ants that feasted on arms and legs; otherwise the only stationary figures were the Japanese guards who stood at the four corners of the field armed with rifles, watching over the men until a white flag was hoisted up the pole on the guard tower and one of them shouted, in broken English, “Take a break.” The rest period, yasumi, was fifteen minutes in midmorning and midafternoon. The men sat down on the roadside and took long swigs from their canteens, which had been lying in the sun since morning and were now filled with water hot enough for shaving. No one cared, because that was all they had, and before long they broke out some tobacco, rolled cigarettes with toilet paper, or lit up the native smokes sold in camp that they called “Awful Awfuls,” because God were they awful and to Murray tasted about as good as hot tar. At least it was something—better than nothing—to break the mindlessness of work, the monotony of their lives.
The farm was planted with corn and camote, okra and eggplant, peppers and squash. From sowing to harvest, the work never stopped. The POWs irrigated the vegetables with water that they carried a distance of 500 yards in five-gallon cans. They weeded by hand. They cleared anthills that rose as high as five feet and were infested with cobras. They harvested the crop and in four-man teams hauled it back to camp on litters made from four-by-eight-foot wooden panels that weighed up to 600 pounds apiece or more. The produce was eaten by the Japanese in camp, shipped to headquarters in Manila, or sold at market in Cabanatuan City. Steal a camote, the guards said, and you’d be beaten with a pick handle or shot. Drop from heat stroke or illness, and there was no telling what would follow.
Private Walter R. Connell of the 34th Pursuit Squadron was one of those who had escaped from the farm, the Japanese claimed. Filipinos in a barrio two and a half miles to the east had turned him in, they said. His front skull was crushed, his right jaw was broken, he was bayoneted in the chest, right hip, and leg, and one eye was gouged out. He had gone to work that day with a temperature of 103 degrees. The Americans suspected that he had simply collapsed and was beaten
to death for his crime.
In late October 1943 Murray received a radiogram from home. It was his first correspondence from his parents in nearly two years, and on November 1 he was allowed to write a fifty-word card in reply:Was overjoyed to receive your radiogram & hear family well. Keep writing, wiring. Is Sid living at home? How are Ziff, Charlie, Irving?
Regards Dr. Edwin Zabriskie of Welfare Hosp.Tell him intend to study neurosurgery when I return, will ask for his help & recommendation. Hoping for reunion soon.
Love,
Murray Glusman
Of course you couldn’t speak your mind. You couldn’t say that the camp was running out of medicine; that the “Cabanatuan Shuffle” wasn’t a new dance but was the characteristic gait of men suffering from beriberi peripheral neuritis; or that some men couldn’t say what was on their minds anyway because they suffered dementia from the long-term effects of starvation, a condition the POWs called “rice brain.” You couldn’t write that others were so far gone, they looked like pathological exhibits in a museum of the grotesque, blown up to twice their size by wet beriberi, their eyesight occluded, their testicles as big as grapefruits due to a lack of vitamin C; or that the lines on their fingernails were growing transversely from malnutrition; that teenagers were suffering from “rice belly,” with shrunken thoraxes and distended stomachs, their cheeks hollow, their eyes sunken, their chests concave, making them look like little old men. The procession of pathetic human beings tore at the hearts of the navy doctors, augmented their sense of powerlessness, and made them feel as if they had failed miserably in their mission.
In time the POWs were allowed to cultivate garden plots beside their barracks and wards. The Japanese provided some varieties of seed; others were pocketed from the farm detail. The men grew eggplant, okra, corn, radishes, peppers, papaya, banana, and soybeans, using implements fashioned from scrap metal, rusted pipe, and wood.
The wood-chopping detail was supervised by Lieutenant Frank Davis, navigator of the Canopus, and Fred was lucky to be assigned to it. Fifty to a hundred POWs were sent ten miles away to cut down trees, debranch them, chop them into three-and-a-half-foot logs, and then load them onto trucks. The wood was used for fuel to keep the kitchen fires going at Cabanatuan. Food was cooked in 25- and 50-gallon cauldrons, or kawas, on stone fire boxes in open sheds. The burned rice stuck at the bottom of the pots was prized for its taste.
The woodcutters worked in pairs, and it felt good to be out in the open, shielded from the sun. One Japanese noncom was especially accommodating and even let the POWs go for a swim in the Pampanga River on their way back to camp. On at least one occasion a guard shot a carabao so a little meat would be served with the next bowl of rice.
Fred’s love of the outdoors, his Boy Scout upbringing, and his navy training had taught him a handful of skills. But he was amazed nonetheless by the ingenuity of the POWs at Cabanatuan, whose talents seemed to blossom like flowers in a junkyard. There were men on his detail who carved beautiful ax handles and intricately detailed cigarette holders, statues, and figurines. One prisoner made a violin from hardwood, another a guitar using sheet metal. Fred himself carved a pipe, using a handmade drill to bore a hole through the stem.
With scrap lumber, bamboo poles, and a little whitewash, Captain Ingerset and Sergeant Abie Abraham built the Carabao Café and Greasy Spoon Annex. Corporal Holliman and Private First Class Greenley designed a miniature nine-hole golf course alongside their barracks and whittled wooden golf clubs and balls until irons were smuggled in from Manila. Sergeant John Katz, a clerk on Corregidor, conducted the camp orchestra, culled from the former 4th Marine band. Called the Cabanatuan Cats, they performed every Wednesday with a repertoire that ranged from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and ballads such as “Mood Indigo,” “Tenderly,” and “In My Solitude.” Saturdays were reserved for the Cabanatuan Mighty Art Players, who staged Shakespeare’s Othello, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Lieutenant Colonel Ovid O. “Zero” Wilson, meanwhile, organized a weekly talent show known as the Little Theater Group. Audiences of 3,000 to 4,000 men gathered in a semicircle around the stage were common. Lieutenant Colonel D. S. Babcock started a camp library that eventually was stacked with the works of Shakespeare, Bertrand Russell, and Winston Churchill, as well as games and magazines such as Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Mademoiselle—many of which were supplied by the International Committee of the Red Cross and were slowly released by Japanese censors. The most popular periodical turned out to be not a glossy but a seed catalog from Australia with pictures of vegetables and fruits that made mouths water. Chaplain L. F. Zimmerman followed Babcock’s lead with a hospital library for medical texts and journals. Some of the books came from Camp O’Donnell; many others were brought back from a medical conference in Manila that staff doctors were allowed to attend in November 1942. There was even a team of bookbinders who made glue from lugao, paper, and boards from Red Cross boxes, and string from cloth remnants. When the books became too shopworn to read, their pages were used to roll cigarettes—or finally as toilet paper. And of course there were movies, Edgar Bergen’s Look Who’s Laughing being one of the first films the navy doctors saw after arriving at Cabanatuan.
Personal items were zealously guarded. Paper was at a premium, initially scrounged from tin can labels. Then the camp received elementary school notebooks, in which the men wrote poems, songs, or recipes or kept diaries that they hid from the Japanese. If they needed a razor, they broke off the tip of their mess-kit knife, and if they were without a toothbrush, they used the split end of a twig.
They were just as industrious when it came to quanning. If you used a glass bottle like a rolling pin, you could crush rice into flour for making flapjacks, pies, or cakes. Substitute coconut fuel oil for vegetable oil, Red Cross ascorbic acid for baking soda, Eno’s Fruit Salts for baking powder, and Japanese-issue shoe cream for pan grease. For a touch of peppermint in banana custard pie, Japanese tooth powder did the trick. Cornmeal for corn bread and “Indian pudding” relieved the tedium of a rice-based cuisine. The problem was finding enough fuel. Wood was filched from barracks, benches, tables, chairs, even latrine seat covers to feed the flames. Eventually Major Iwanaka banned individual outdoor fires, and quan kitchens were established instead.
Within three months of sowing seeds, the prisoners’ garden plots began to yield beans, okra, eggplant, tomatoes, garlic, onions, and squash. The men eagerly consumed the vegetables, then experimented by making sourmash, mixing starch into a five-gallon demijohn filled with bananas, burned rice, camotes, sugarcane, ginger, and taro root. It tasted as bad as it sounds.
The outer perimeter of a garden could extend no farther than ten feet from the inner fence. One POW, Lieutenant Robert Huffcutt, a representative of the State Department in the U.S. High Commissioner’s Office, knocked over a basket of eggplants, which rolled across the boundary. When he went to retrieve them, he was shot by 1st Lieutenant Toshino Junsaburo—“Liver Lips”—who fired two more rounds as Huffcutt lay dead on the ground.
There was a schedule of activities after work. Monday: lecture; Tuesday: carabao sing; Wednesday: lecture; Thursday: Captain Lawler’s quiz program; Friday: carabao crap game; Saturday: jazz band, theater, or glee club; Sunday: religious services, which were held in mess halls or outside in a grove of papaya trees before chapels were built. There was no rabbi for the Jewish POWs, so Master Sergeant Aaron Kliatchko, a Russian immigrant who resided in the Philippines and had been trained as a cantor, held services on Friday evenings and over the High Holy Days.
After dark the men played acey-deucey, chess, checkers, Monopoly, pinochle, backgammon, and poker. Dice were made from carabao horn, the dots drilled out by dentists. The players talked, joked, and reminisced. They tore each other down, set each other up, even got down on all fours to conduct that classic medical experiment: Was it really true that passing gas could turn a match flame blue? But of
all the games they played, none held their attention more than bridge.
Fred had received a deck of cards in a package from his parents, which led to a running game with George, John, and Murray. Bridge had become hugely popular at home and abroad and proved the perfect pastime for military men. A 1916 British recruiting poster featured three rather elegant men readying themselves for a game of bridge in the trenches above the caption: “Will You Make a Fourth?” The game’s reputation spread around the world by ocean liner in the 1930s and won fierce devotees in the highest ranks of service. High Commissioner Sayre never played during peacetime, but he warmed to the game while on Corregidor. President Quezon was a well-known high-stakes player whose regular partner, Manuel Roxas, was now working for the Japanese puppet government in Manila and doubling as a spy. With its seemingly limitless number of individual hands and full deals, and its element of ambiguity, bluff, and double bluff, bridge was the playful metaphor for life and war—at once sublime, serendipitous, and subversive—and life at war.
Conduct Under Fire Page 36
