The purchasing power of POWs was supplemented by their pay, and by pesos that had been expertly counterfeited by the Chinese in Manila. But more than just counterfeit cash was circulating in Cabanatuan. One ingenious POW fabricated sulfathiazole pills by mixing rice flour with cornstarch, stamping out tablets with the hollow brass jacket of a .30-06 cartridge, imprinting them with a W that looked like the Winthrop Pharmaceuticals logo, and baking them. He sold the placebos for a dollar a pop to Japanese guards, an estimated 50 percent of whom suffered from baidoku, or venereal disease, and continued to suffer from it in spite of their purchases. POWs at Bilibid also trafficked in counterfeit drugs, until the Japanese finally analyzed some of the tablets and broke up the racket.
By late 1943 the Japanese were clamping down on clandestine operations. They arrested and interrogated Naomi Flores three times and once tortured her for a week in Fort Santiago. They imprisoned Miss U, beat her, tortured her, and placed her in solitary confinement over a thirty-two-day period, releasing her only after she signed a document that read in part: “Since I have been in Fort Santiago for questioning, I have received courteous treatment from all officers and sentries and been provided with good food.” They exposed Colonel Mack, whom they brutally interrogated and also threw into solitary. And eventually they caught Guzman, who wound up in the Mandaluyong Psychopathic Hospital. The Japanese prevented Father Buttenbruck from visiting Cabanatuan and the Escodas from bringing in supplies. Fred Treatt, Jack Schwartz, Lieutenant Colonels Edward C. Mack and Alfred C. Oliver Jr., the camp’s senior chaplain, would be incarcerated in the Japanese guardhouse for their role in the distribution of mail and money. Prices escalated as goods became scarce and the value of the peso plunged. Father Buttenbruck was later executed, Pilar Campos was murdered, and the Escodas were imprisoned, tortured, and killed.
Barracks inspections were common, and sometimes guards rifled through personal belongings three or four times, searching for unauthorized books, literature, or maps. They took whatever they wanted. The POWs frequently had advance warning and buried their contraband beforehand. One prisoner was doing just that after the sun went down when a Japanese sentry called out, facetiously, “Yasume!” (at ease).
If some POWs managed to circumvent the Japanese, others were willing to exploit any situation out of blind self-interest. There were those who faked the symptoms of “painful feet” to avoid work details, only to be discovered later in the day playing volleyball. Sergeant Jack C. Wheeler felt the spirit move him after guzzling two bottles of Protestant sacramental wine by himself. Warrant Officer C. A. Price was caught selling sulfa drugs to Filipinos in Cabanatuan City. Still other prisoners committed perhaps the most heinous of crimes, stealing food from fellow POWs. To turn against a comrade was only to augment the power of the Japanese when the goal, instead, was to diminish it.
So the men verbally emasculated the guards, cut them down to size, and dehumanized them by reducing them to nominal jokes. The popular American image of the Japanese—in publications ranging from the venerable New York Times, Collier’s, and Time to the Marine Corps’s Leatherneck—devolved into gorillas, baboons, and monkeys. To the POWs the Japanese were “dwarfs,” “midgets,” “squinties,” and “little yellow bastards.” In his notebooks Calvin Chunn couldn’t even bring himself to capitalize the word jap.
There was “Little Speedo,” who was all business in front of officers and noncoms, but as easygoing as could be when he was out of their sight, and a notorious thief. His larger counterpart, “Big Speedo,” had been a Tōkyō policeman and was generally well liked until he casually shot a deranged Filipino boy in the head for having sneaked under the fence. “Air Raid” Ihara once whacked a line of 100 POWs in formation, knocking half of them down from behind, and he executed Major Charles F. Harrison for concealing seeds in the hollow heel of his shoe. There was Koshinaga, whose speech was so garbled he was dubbed “Donald Duck.” Told he was named after a famous Hollywood movie star, he was flattered by the notion until he saw his namesake one day in a Disney cartoon at Cabanatuan. One guard was known simply as “Dumb-Shit.” Insult and imprecation, the name reflected with deadly accuracy the way so many POWs were made to feel about themselves, as if their lives were an embarrassing hindrance, an offensive obstruction, no more than human waste.
The biggest morale boosters were Red Cross packages, which first arrived in Cabanatuan on November 28, 1942. The Japanese cut rations correspondingly. They removed the newspapers that were included in the parcels and went so far as to replace the standard-issue Old Gold cigarettes boasting “Freedom is our heritage” with Chesterfields. It didn’t much matter to the men. The smell of tobacco smoke was intoxicating, “redolent of heaven and home,” Murray wrote wistfully, “and I suppose the two are synonymous anyway.”
The sudden increase in daily caloric intake coincided with a decrease in malaria and enteric diseases, though George was still subject to attacks of amoebic dysentery. But another disease was now visible in 10 percent of Cabanatuan’s 5,000-strong prison population, Ralph Hibbs noted: gynecomastia. Grown men developed breasts the size of adolescent girls’ and in some cases could even express milk. It was humiliating to the prisoners suffering from it, and Hibbs could only speculate that it was caused by an endocrine imbalance and inadequate vitamin intake.
Along with Red Cross supplies came medicines, and guards continuously harassed the POW doctors for treatment. Japanese headquarters strictly forbade the practice, but the officers ignored it. Gonorrhea was such a persistent problem among the Japanese that sulfathiazole tablets, which the Americans had only in limited quantities, were at a premium, whether real or counterfeit. Drugs became dollars, or pesos, or food. Instead of taking the medications prescribed for them, some POWs sold it. One prisoner was found dead from malaria, with dozens of quinine tablets in his possession.
As the black market dried up, the daily diet became one of subsistence. Meat disappeared. Granulated fish—which some said was really intended as fertilizer—was issued in its place and sprinkled by the spoonful over the rice ration, which fell to 300 grams daily. Inflation increased to such an extent that commissary expenditures soared to two times the payroll receipts. Some items, such as duck eggs, literally quintupled in price.
The men scoured Cabanatuan. They rooted through Japanese garbage cans and made soup from the scraps. They hid frogs in canteens and roasted them on sticks. Two men were so desperate that they cut up corncobs into small pieces, ate them, and were found dead the next day.
As 1943 came to a close, the prisoners in Cabanatuan could tell the war in the Pacific was turning against the Japanese. The signs were clear: the lack of food, a shortage of gas that necessitated a daily carabao cart train between the camp and Cabanatuan City, and articles in the English-language Nippon Times and Japan Times and Advertiser that the Japanese allowed into camp once a month. According to such accounts, the Japanese were always fighting bravely, but their triumphs were in the face of greater odds, and it struck Colonel Irvin Alexander that the authors who recounted the heroics of the Japanese military “would not object to resting in Tōkyō permanently, permitting others to gain all the glory of defeating the Americans.”
Christmas 1943 “was celebrated as beautifully at Cabanatuan as in the finest church in the world,” said 1st Lieutenant John M. Wright, Jr., of the Coast Artillery Corps. On Christmas Eve the glee club serenaded the camp, and thousands of men turned out for midnight mass, which was organized by Chaplain Thomas J. Scecina. The International Committee of the Red Cross sent a holiday radiogram extending “their most cordial wishes for 1944” and affirming that “its associates all over Switzerland and its delegates throughout the wide world are thinking with deep affection of war prisoners, civilian internees, and their families.” Major Paul Wing secretly photographed one of the ceremonies at Cabanatuan and processed the negative with chemicals smuggled into the camp, though there was no paper on which to print it.
To others, the Christmas cheer rang
hollow; the singing sounded like a dirge. The Japanese had begun a new campaign of harassment. There had been no meat for nearly a month, John noted in his diary entry for December 25. By mid-January singing, movies, and band practice would be eliminated from camp activities. Then talking and smoking were prohibited after 1900.
John was tormented by a sense of stasis, of life going on without him, of a career that lay dead in its tracks. After work details at Cabanatuan, he had taken to repairing watches. He enjoyed the precision and concentration it required, adjusting the balance spring and escapement, fine-tuning amplitude, calculating the daily rate, fixing time so it could move once again. If only he could turn the clock back and start all over, or wind it forward to the future so being a prisoner of war was in the past.
Seeing John at work made Murray think of the gold Wyler-Incaflex wristwatch that Charlie Lipsky had given him and that had been stolen on Corregidor. Stealing time, that was what the Japanese were doing. Murray was determined to keep up his contacts back home and stake a claim for himself by mail, even if it was from prison camp in the Philippines. But when would they return, and how? At what point would the Americans try to liberate the islands? And what would happen to the prisoners of the Japanese? The navy doctors had more questions than answers, but they felt certain of one thing: they would still be POWs next Christmas, whether they were in Luzon or Japan.
On February 7, 1944, Murray returned from burial detail and learned that a 200-man medical detachment was leaving Cabanatuan. Colonel Craig called a meeting at 1900:We have arranged the personnel into four groups. Of course you will realize it was a difficult job. Some of the people who wish to be together may have been separated—but we did our best. Perhaps some of you may have been able to do better—but we did our best. The casual medical officers here have been available for work detail—but that was no fault of ours—we had nothing to do with it—we did our best—we did our best.
Murray was incensed. Colonel Craig’s explanation was bumbling selfexculpation. “I don’t know how many years of post-grad. training the Col. had,” he seethed in his diary, “but apparently his specialty was the inane.” While a few army doctors and medics were included in the detail—Al Weinstein, John Bumgarner, and Major James Bahrenburg among them—the message couldn’t have been clearer. Almost the entire navy medical group at Cabanatuan—doctors, dentists, and corpsmen—was being shipped out “for parts unknown.”
As early as September 1942 the Japanese had begun transferring POWs from Luzon to Japan to augment a workforce that was being drained by the Imperial Japanese Army. Prisoners were used as slave laborers by some of Japan’s largest corporations, and in jobs that aided the war effort—among them Hitachi Shipbuilding and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Chemical, and Mitsui Mining. They became coal and copper miners, stevedores and railyard workers, machinists and mill workers. They were loaded onto unmarked merchant vessels, or shōsen, built by some of the very companies they would soon be working for.
Rumors circulated of POW transports being sunk by American planes or torpedoed by American submarines. Hayes had heard them at Bilibid. Weinstein had heard them at Cabanatuan. George got wind of them as well. But after his initial anger at Colonel Craig, Murray reasoned that the decision might work to his advantage after all, rumors notwithstanding. The Americans were bound to retake the Philippines, in which case Luzon would be at the center of a monumental battle. There was no point being in the bull’s-eye again if they could avoid it. It was better to leave now. Or were they merely leaving one target for another, as they had so often?
The medical detachment was divided into four groups that would set up POW hospitals in Kysh, Osaka, Tōkyō, and Hokkaidō. For Fred, John, and Murray, there was one problem: George couldn’t go with them. The Japanese were terrified of infectious disease, and George was still in the grip of amoebic dysentery. Anyone suffering from a parasitic illness had to be left behind. They tested the POWs by ramming a glass rod up their rectums. The men were forced to drop their trousers and place their hands on their knees or touch their toes. Then an eight-inch glass probe with a knob at the end was inserted anally, twisted, withdrawn, and a culture was taken for disease-causing organisms. The Japanese recorded 1,500 cases of amoebic dysentery at Cabanatuan in early 1944. But the test itself was notoriously unreliable.
Murray urged George to swap smears with someone who was healthy and who would rather remain in Cabanatuan. One of Craig’s corpsmen, John Cook, claimed that a 4th Marine had substituted dog feces for his dysentery test courtesy of Soochow, the mongrel mascot of the regiment who survived the fall of Corregidor. Fred worried that George would get caught. But they couldn’t break up the group, Murray argued. Not now. He knew it wasn’t ethical, but expediency overruled what was right, and what had worked for them so far was staying together and pooling their resources, even if it meant betraying the very principles they had been trained to uphold. Hadn’t Fred’s pesos, which he had pocketed in Olongapo, kept them going during hard times at Bilibid? Hadn’t stomach pangs quickly diminished any qualms John and Murray had had about stealing food from Malinta Tunnel? All for one and one for all meant not leaving anyone behind. Quanning wasn’t just about sharing food or money; it was about friendship. Together they’d known fear, hunger, fatigue, ill health, and hope. Besides, they had that long-running bridge game, and it would be a shame to interrupt it now. If they could steal food that the Japanese had stolen from them, they could just as easily deal the Japanese someone else’s shit in the interests of group survival. Or maybe, Murray reconsidered, he should stay on Luzon, too? Fake the diagnosis in order to be left behind?
George convinced him otherwise. He wasn’t worried—he’d had amoebic dysentery since Corregidor. He’d been sick as a dog in Bilibid, and as a doctor he’d spoon-fed charcoal to men who were melting away from the disease that would eventually kill them. But he’d be fine, he insisted. He’d catch up with them later. They’d have that blowout in San Francisco after all.
As the time for their departure drew nearer, their bridge game got longer and longer. They played in their barracks until it was too dark to see; then they moved their table outside to continue under the stars. On their last evening in Cabanatuan, George finally drew away from Murray, leaving him the low scorer. They’d finish the game in Japan, or on their way home.
At 0400 on the morning of February 26, 1944, the four navy doctors marched toward the main gate of Cabanatuan. George gave Fred a hand with his gear. They had just learned that the Americans had hit the atoll of Truk, where the Japanese Combined Fleet was based in the Caroline Islands. The fleet had been out to sea, but in mid-February American carrier planes destroyed 250 to 275 enemy aircraft and more than 200,000 tons of shipping. Operation Hailstone was the deadliest blow to Japanese mercantile power yet, and it neutralized Japan’s air power in the southeastern Pacific. The Yanks were less than 1,800 miles away.
George said goodbye to his buddies and watched from behind the fence at Cabanatuan as they were loaded onto trucks by Japanese soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets. He knew that he could have gone with them. But as he headed back to his barracks, he felt certain that he had made the correct choice. He had done what was right.
17
“The Japanese will pay”
GUY AND VICTORIA BERLEY couldn’t have missed the news on the morning of January 28, 1944. The headline of the Chicago Daily Tribune blared: “JAP ATROCITIES REVEALED.” The subhead read: “Hero Relates Horror After Bataan Fall.” The story was based on the reports of three USFIP officers—Captain William E. Dyess, Major Stephen M. Mellnik, and Lieutenant Commander Melvyn H. McCoy—who had escaped from the Davao Penal Colony on Mindanao. The actual account of the “Bataan Death March” (as the press dubbed the trek from Mariveles to San Fernando) began to appear the following Sunday in 100 associated newspapers around the country with an estimated daily readership of 40 million.
In The New York Times Samuel and Olga Bookman read the official te
xt of the joint army-navy report on Japanese atrocities in the Philippines. They learned of the beatings, the beheadings, the torture, and the refusal on the part of the Japanese to offer food, water, or medicine to their prisoners.
The story opened the eyes of many Americans for the first time to the horrors suffered by Allied POWs in the Far East. It was followed the next month by a feature in Life magazine by Dyess and Mellnik, as told to Lieutenant Welbourn Kelley, which was then expanded into book form as The Dyess Story.
Dyess, Mellnik, and McCoy had actually escaped Davao ten months earlier, on March 27, 1943. In July 1943 they had met with General MacArthur in Brisbane, Australia. On hearing their descriptions of prison life at O’Donnell, Cabanatuan, and Davao, the general “tightened his lips,” said Dyess, and vowed: “The Japanese will pay for that humiliation and suffering.” But their story was hushed up for fear of reprisals against POWs and to avoid jeopardizing the mission of the exchange ship Gripsholm, which in September 1943 had set out with 140,000 Red Cross food packages intended for the prisoners of the Japanese.
In his first address of 1943 President Roosevelt had declared: “The period of our defensive attrition in the Pacific is drawing to a close. Now our aim is to force the Japanese to fight. Last year, we stopped them. This year, we intend to advance.”
On May 8, 1943, the “Strategic Plan for the Defeat of Japan” was adopted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A multiphase campaign codenamed Cartwheel, it envisioned a two-pronged offensive by MacArthur and Nimitz through the central Pacific. Four stages of operations would follow: the liberation of the Philippines; an advance to the China coast with the recapture of Hong Kong; the bombing of Japan from bases in China; and finally, the invasion of the Home Islands.
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