The doctors sharpened their wits and honed their banter on the game. They teased and deceived while plotting the next move. Bridge took their minds off the day’s work and gave them something to look forward to. It was their intellectual nourishment, and each man had his place at the table. But the game had to end sometime, and the loser, they agreed, would pick up the tab for their first big blowout back in San Francisco. “So far,” John noted on November 17, 1943, “George is it.” The question hanging over all of them was when they would make it home. As John admitted, “May ’42 made prediction of war over by April ’44—revision to be made. Now can’t see it over that early but think it more likely as summer ’45. A long time.” Carey Smith put a bittersweet spin on their prospects when he sang:We’ll be free in ’43
No more war in ’44
Hardly a man alive in ’45.
They dreamed about home just as they fantasized about food. They pored over the few housekeeping magazines in camp and planned and designed the houses they would live in once the war was over. Food fueled the libido, while a lack thereof suppressed even talk about sex. A few POWs—one of whom was a marine, much to Fred’s amusement—offered sexual favors, usually in exchange for food.
Wish fulfillment fed rumors, and the rumors ran wild. POWs would be exchanged for the Japanese interned in the United States! No, they were going to be transferred to a neutral country in South America! The Japanese had granted the Philippines independence! The officers from Bataan were to be knighted by the king of England! The sick and disabled could go home! Tōjō had resigned! Germany had surrendered! FDR had promised the Pacific war would be over by the end of ’43! The rumors could be ridiculous, incredible, or just plausible enough to raise hopes, which then came crashing down and reinforced one’s sense of isolation as fiction begrudgingly gave way to reality.
The guards at Cabanatuan were “meaner’n skunks,” as Fred put it. Their hazing was constant. They beat prisoners on the head and shoulders with cudgels. They slapped them regularly in the face. “Air Raid” Ihara fully lived up to his reputation: you had to duck and cover if the little son of a bitch was on the horizon. Another guard on the farm used to taunt prisoners with a defanged cobra that was leashed to a walking stick. A common form of torture was to place a two-by-four behind a POW’s knees and force him to squat, which cut off circulation in the legs and caused excruciating pain. “Cabanatuan,” said John, “was the worst in terms of personal bodily abuse.” Many of the guards were Formosan—“Taiwans,” they were called—brutalized by the Japanese and denied the right to speak their own language. They were used only in rear areas, where they could be closely watched by their Japanese superiors.
The behavior of the guards reflected, in part, the culture of cruelty in the Imperial Japanese Army. Discipline was enforced with bentatsu, or corporal punishment, which was justified as an “act of love” by the officers on behalf of enlisted men.
“The discipline was terrible,” said Kawasaki Masaichi, a sergeant who served in China from 1939 to 1943. “We were beaten every night. Why? I don’t understand why. Just so we could be hit. We were far beyond reason.”
Novelist Hanama Tasaki, who had served as a private in China, recounted a standing joke in the army:The Lieutenant slapped the Sub-Lieutenant; the Sub-Lieutenant slapped the Sergeant; the Sergeant slapped the Corporal; the Corporal slapped the Private First Class; the Private First Class slapped the Private; the Private slapped the Private-Second-Grade; the Private-Second-Grade, who had nobody to slap, went into the stable and kicked the horse.
A slap in the face was the equivalent of a verbal reprimand, after which a Japanese soldier was required to thank his superior, arigatō gozaimasu, for giving him his just deserts. Then he quickly regained his footing, as if nothing had happened. On one occasion, however, a Japanese noncom beat a “Taiwan” to death. There were no repercussions whatsoever.
But the violence that Allied POWs encountered at the hands of the Japanese was a shock. Indeed, the first English visitors to Japan had been horrified, in the early seventeenth century, by the violence of everyday life in the Orient (at a time when public beheadings and disembowelments were still common in London). The samurai used to slash corpses “until the wretched body was chopped into mincemeat.” One Jesuit observer, Joao Rodrigues, remarked that “the delight and pleasure which they feel in cutting up bodies is astonishing.”
Before World War II the average Japanese had had little or no contact whatsoever with Caucasians. With their “red” hair and blue eyes, Americans and Englishmen were the embodiment of the Japanese goblins of folklore. The Japanese found their strong body odor and tomentose torsos as repugnant as their mixed racial heritage. They were ijin, “strange people,” or ketō, “hairy barbarians,” inferiors who would forever be on the wrong side of the Japanese racial divide.
But being on the right side of the racial divide could be even worse. Filipinos found slapping particularly degrading, though it was a minor insult compared to the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Japanese. On the march from Mariveles to San Fernando, five to ten times as many Filipinos died as did Americans.
What threw the POWs off most was not simply the viciousness of the Japanese but their unpredictability—the accusations, outbursts, and ensuing repercussions. They had rules upon rules, which they made, remade, and disobeyed. They even changed the calendar. In March 1943 they declared Fridays, not Sundays, were rest days. Then they changed their minds, so Sundays were Sundays again. Violence against POWs was triggered by language problems, cultural differences, racial animosity, and the desire for revenge. Seemingly random, it collectively amounted to the systematic abuse of thousands of Allied prisoners of war, even though the guards, whether Japanese or Formosan, were required to memorize the Senjinkun.
The violence against POWs on Bataan was not unusual but became the norm, as if the war were still being waged, one side impervious to the other’s surrender. Gyokusai, or “glorious self-annihilation,” was predicated on destruction of the enemy in battle. The Allies themselves adopted a “take no prisoners” policy. But killing soldiers on a battlefield is one thing; killing unarmed prisoners of war who are being rounded up or are being held inside a concentration camp is another. There was nothing to fear physically from the Allied POWs, just as there was nothing to fear from the estimated 20,000 to 80,000 Chinese women who were raped and the estimated 260,000 noncombatants who were slaughtered during the Rape of Nanking. Or the British nurses who were raped during the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941 on “Black Christmas,” or the doctors, patients, and POWs who were murdered, some of them bayoneted to death in their beds. Or the Australian nurses who were shipwrecked on Banka Island, Sumatra, in February 1942 and machine-gunned from behind as they stood in the waters off Radjik Beach.
In northern Luzon Igorots traditionally engaged in head-hunting. The Japanese did as well though they didn’t have to look far: they beheaded POWs, and in New Guinea they devoured them. In one notorious incident on Noemfoor, they slaughtered Formosan laborers for food under the direction of Captain Sugahara, who also served as mess officer. They even cannibalized their own dead when they were starving. The practice was strictly forbidden by the Imperial Japanese Army, but as historian Tanaka Yuki has remarked, “Cannibalism was a systematic and organized military strategy, committed by whole squads or by specific soldiers working within the context of a larger squad.”
John Dower pointed out that the Allies themselves were guilty of mutilating the bodies of fallen Japanese soldiers by removing ears, teeth, and heads as war trophies. Along with the mail, U.S. censors discovered, fingers were sent home as souvenirs. One infamous photograph published in Life magazine as “Picture of the Week” showed a pretty blonde posed with a skull that her fiancé had shipped her from the Pacific. The Allies executed would-be prisoners of war on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands and slaughtered “hundreds and possibly thousands of Japanese survivors” of a transport ship sunk by the USS Wah
oo off the north coast of New Guinea. On Bataan, said Private James Kent, thirty-five Japanese were turned over to the Philippine Constabulary—and shot. But such incidents were unusual, just as capturing a Japanese soldier—who usually fought to the death or committed suicide—was itself an exception. “This is explained by the fact that in close work in thick cover ( jungle) the man who fires first is the one who will ordinarily walk away,” Major James C. Blanning of the 26th Cavalry noted in his diary. “The policy was when in doubt—shoot.” When Japanese soldiers surrendered to American forces, in general, the treatment accorded them was humane. Dr. Marcel Junod, chief delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Far East, found the care administered by American and Allied armies to the Japanese POWs he visited to be exemplary.
Many Japanese POW camp guards were disabled or retired soldiers. Others were civilians, with a rank below private. They asserted their authority over POWs by beating them; they effectively cannibalized prisoners by denying them drugs and sustenance so they were consumed by disease or perished from malnutrition. Colonel Irvin E. Alexander, who had marched from Mariveles to San Fernando and was transferred from O’Donnell to Cabanatuan, described some POWs there as “so emaciated that their skins hung on them like translucent parchment.” It was as if the Japanese wanted to erase their identities from the notebooks of history. No sulfa drugs or quinine were received in Cabanatuan until late 1942. By year end more than 2,500 POWs had died, chiefly from dysentery and malaria.
There were exceptions to this picture, of course. Diphtheria broke out at Bilibid in September 1942, and Ralph Hibbs grew furious when Nogi refused to administer antitoxin. One hundred men died as a result. The disease had emerged two months earlier at Cabanatuan, where there were 350 cases and 125 deaths. Three days after the first diagnosis at Cabanatuan, Colonel Gillespie presented a plan to the Japanese medical staff for treatment and prevention, but it fell on deaf ears. Walter Waterous feared an epidemic after diphtheria antitoxin obtained through Philippine Red Cross channels dried up. He bypassed Colonel Gillespie entirely and went directly to 2nd Lieutenant Konishi Shoji. Konishi reported to Nogi and had warmed up to Waterous after being entertained in Manila by one of his friends, Manila Hotel steward Fred Malvier. Konishi let Waterous visit Bilibid, where, accompanied by Sartin, he made his case before Nogi.
“All right, you go with me,” Nogi replied.
Nogi escorted Waterous to the medical depot along the Pasig River, where Lieutenant Colonel Pete Kempf had amassed medical supplies for the Japanese, and within thirty minutes Waterous had 3 million units of the lifesaving antitoxin, which he then divided with Sartin for his patients in Bilibid. Nogi let Waterous spend two days in Manila. During that time he allowed him to go back to his optometrist’s office at the former American Chamber of Commerce on Calle David with eighty pairs of POW glasses that were in need of repair. There Waterous treated Nogi to ice cream and was visited by some of his old Manila friends, including Fred Malvier, who broke out a bottle of booze to toast their unexpected reunion. Waterous was permitted a second office visit, ostensibly to pick up the repaired glasses, and another celebration ensued. On leaving, Nogi warned Waterous to be careful: the Japanese military police, the dreaded Kempeitai, were watching.
Thanks to the antitoxin, diphtheria was contained at Cabanatuan, and not a moment too soon. One POW, Sergeant Clarence M. Graham of the 60th Coast Artillery, was fading into and out of consciousness at Zero Ward and was about to be placed onto a litter when he heard a man say: “I think this guy must still be alive. He hasn’t started to rot yet.”
Another voice added, “Could be. I’ll give him some water.”
Graham was paralyzed. His hands, arms, and legs refused to move. His throat was constricted so he couldn’t speak. But he could hear and see, and he feared he was going to drown because he couldn’t swallow.
“Yah! He is still alive. He bubbles,” came the gratified response.
“Let’s get him out of here.”
Graham was taken to a doctor and injected with antitoxin; with some extra food the chaplains brought, he soon began to recover. While diphtheria was common in Japan and the Japanese had produced their own antitoxin for treatment, they were unfamiliar with the toxoid that was used for immunization in the United States and that successfully prevented epidemics.
Between the lines of camp regulations and behind the guards’ backs, the prisoners became expert at undermining the authority of their captors. Sometimes anything seemed possible, so long as you didn’t get caught and cause the Japanese to “lose face.”
They smuggled in shoes, sugar, vegetables, limes, calamensi syrup, and currency from the market stalls outside Cabanatuan, many of which were fronts set up by Horacio “Mut” Manaloto. Mut’s principal agent was Tomás de Guzman, a schoolteacher in Manila whose wife, Agustina, was a doctor who donated stocks of her own medicine. They received money from the Chaplain’s Aid Assocation, which used Lulu Reyes, a socialite, as a cover and Father Buttenbruck as a go-between. They accepted donations from priests in the Malate Convent and items from Masons that were concealed in the hollow bamboo frames of carabao carts returning to camp from Cabanatuan City. And they welcomed assistance from Anthony H. Escoda of the Manila Daily Bulletin and the New York Herald Tribune. Tony and his wife, Josefa, were affiliated with the Volunteer Social Aid Committee, whose members included Ralph Hibbs’s girlfriend, Pilar Campos, and socialites Helen Benitez and Betty Wright.
Women were often the ringleaders of smuggling operations and employed other women as their agents. The Philippine Women’s Federation set up a canteen a mile down the road from Cabanatuan that was ostensibly for the Japanese but that stored food and medicine until it could be smuggled into camp. A Philippine Red Cross nurse by the name of Angelina Castro plied her charms on one of Cabanatuan’s medical officers, a reputed morphine addict by the name of Dr. Tamura. She was allowed to work at Cabanatuan and to enter and leave at will. Pilar Campos ingratiated herself with the officers and guards of Cabanatuan and regularly sent in parcels for Ralph Hibbs and other prisoners. Peggy Doolin, a Canadian, assumed a Lithuanian identity as “Rosana Utinsky,” alias “Miss U.” A twenty-two-year-old Igorot by the name of Naomi Flores, codenamed “Looter,” served as her go-between. Outside the gates of Cabanatuan, Looter posed as a peanut vendor. Buy a bag of peanuts for a peso, and you’d get ten pesos in change. As a hawker, she made contact with Lieutenant Colonel Mack when he was on the farm detail, and Mack, alias “Liver,” became her point man. Looter worked hand in hand with Lieutenant Colonel Harold K. Johnson, who was the purchasing officer at the Cabanatuan commissary and even took orders for items from other POWs, which Miss U filled and delivered to the camp.
Claire Phillips, also known as Dorothy Clara Fuentes, was another vital source of information and contraband. Known as “High Pockets” for the valuables she stuffed into her bra, she had married a U.S. Army sergeant who died on Bataan. High Pockets ran a Manila nightclub called Tsubaki (the Japanese word for camellia) that was patronized by Japanese officers. She used their confessions and indiscretions for intelligence purposes. She managed to slip more than 10,000 quinine tablets into Cabanatuan. “The medicines and foodstuffs provided through the underground,” said Johnson, “were invaluable in saving the lives of many American prisoners.” But there were entire segments of the camp population that never benefited from this underground pipeline, and the navy doctors were among them.
Smuggling was dangerous work, and those who engaged in it risked their lives. To travel from Manila to Cabanatuan, Filipinos were forced to ride atop boxcars, or between them, or even on the cowcatcher, which could rattle the nerves of almost any courier. Japanese guards regularly harassed them.
Inside Cabanatuan Lieutenant Homer T. Hutchinson, Corps of Engineers, assembled a shortwave radio from components that filtered into camp. From copper, acid stolen from a Japanese truck’s battery, and zinc buttons removed from trouser flies, Hutch made a radio battery, w
hich he stored in a Red Cross tin, and concealed a one-tube receiver in the false bottom of a canteen. He hid earphones in a pillow at night and, pretending to be asleep, picked up broadcasts from around the world, including KGEI. He even had a backup radio plugged into a chapel altar. But Hutch wanted to make sure that no one could ever finger him, so he played dumb as a stump. He wouldn’t disseminate the news until the Japanese sent out a work party, or a new contingent of POWs arrived. Hours later he’d drop into conversation “I heard a good rumor”—about the latest naval engagement or American landing. And “nobody,” said Al Smith, “knew where the rumor came from.” As a result, bragged Alfred Weinstein, “We were never more than a week behind the news.”
There was no end to the resourcefulness of the prisoners. Using snares made from pins and corn kernels as bait, they raided the goose pond on the Japanese side of the camp until half of the flock was hooked and cooked. Frank Davis bribed the honsho on the wood-chopping detail to let him bring back into camp food and fruit, chickens, and tobacco from the Filipino vendors on the outside. The supervisor of the carabao detail, a man named Fred Treatt, used a canteen with a false bottom as a letter pouch. Major Howard Cavender, formerly general manager of the Manila Hotel, was another conduit on the underground postal route. Major Wade Cothran, a businessman in the Philippines before the war started, organized a check-cashing operation that carried a 10 percent service charge. Donations went into a Camp Welfare Fund managed by Lieutenant Dwight Edison. Ted Lowen, an American who ran the Alcazar nightclub in Manila before the war, supervised a construction detail in camp. He shamelessly bribed the Japanese—watches for noncoms, rings for the guards—which enabled him to import “tons of food and hundreds of thousands of pesos” in 1943, estimated Weinstein.
Conduct Under Fire Page 37
