Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  Hayes’s premonition came true. On the afternoon of December 13, 1944, 1,619 Bilibid POWs boarded the 7,362-ton Oryoku Maru, the last group of prisoners to evacuate the Philippines. Thin, ragged, and weakened by nearly three years of confinement, they were the last survivors of the Bataan Death March, defenders of Corregidor and Mindanao. Two-thirds of them were senior officers—combat unit commanders as well as doctors from Bilibid and Cabanatuan. Captain Nogi Naraji, director of the Bilibid hospital, supervised the boarding, which included Japanese women and children. General Kou Shiyoku, commandant of the prisoner of war camps in the Philippines, stood on deck while men were packed so tightly below that they collapsed from suffocation. There were no portholes in the holds, no ventilation except the hatch. The prisoners begged for water, but their requests were repeatedly denied. First Lieutenant Toshino Junsaburō, the guard from Cabanatuan known as “Liver Lips” who executed Robert Huffcutt, was in charge of the transport. His interpreter, a hunchback named Wada Shsuke, carried out his orders.

  The Oryoku Maru sailed the next morning, and the POWs soon encountered their greatest threat—Admiral Halsey’s Task Force 38. During the day, carrier planes from the USS Hornet and USS Hancock made several passes, leaving Fred’s friend, Marion Wade, and Murray’s corpsman, Cecil Peart, with shrapnel wounds. Jack Schwartz and the medical staff were allowed to treat the injured, Japanese women and children among them. Then they were beaten in revenge for the attack.

  That night was “the most horrible period of my life,” said Colonel Beecher of the 4th Marines. The hatches were closed, and men went insane from dehydration and lack of oxygen. They stripped off their clothes to let the pores of their skin breathe. They slit their own veins to drink blood. They slit the veins of others to drink more blood. They knifed, strangled, or beat fellow prisoners to death with empty canteens in search of water. They ate feces out of honey buckets, swallowed urine to slake their thirst. By dawn, the ship had drifted aground, and “even those who had not lost control of themselves,” said Beecher, “looked like demons.”

  The steering gear of the Oryoku Maru was shattered, and on the morning of December 15 the Hornet’s planes found the ship off of Olongapo. Six rockets and a 500-pound bomb exploded in the aft hold, where the highest-ranking officers were confined. Two hundred fifty were killed instantly. The Japanese civilians had been quietly evacuated during the night, and many of the crew followed their lead. There were no life preservers left for the prisoners, who began to abandon ship once they realized they were no longer under guard. Jack Schwartz couldn’t swim; he held on to Lieutenant Kenneth Wheeler as they jumped thirty feet down to the water. Three or four hundred yards off Olongapo Point, the men made a desperate bid for shore. One U.S. Navy pilot strafed six Japanese in a lifeboat, careful to avoid the two Americans sitting in the stern. Another waggled his wings in recognition as he flew over the thin white bodies struggling in the water. A Japanese naval landing party had positioned a machine gun in front of the old Olongapo Naval Station and began picking off survivors drifting away from the beach. Hayes set up a small aid station on the seawall. The navy bombers returned. Having knocked out the bases’s anti-aircraft gun, they bombed and sank the ghost ship.

  The 1,333 prisoners who reached land were penned up for five days in a concrete tennis court that measured sixty by a hundred feet and was surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high chicken-wire fence. Raw from sunburn, they shivered with cold at night and were given only a few table-spoons of raw rice for meals. Navy corpsmen draped two bedsheets over a “hospital” area at one end of the court. Hayes and Cecil Welch worked alongside Jack Schwartz, who successfully amputated the gangrenous arm of a U.S. Marine corporal using a razor and without anesthesia. Dozens perished from injuries and exposure.

  The POWs were trucked in two groups to San Fernando, Pampanga. The fifteen sickest men, Wada said, were to be removed to Manila for hospitalization. Instead, on the night of December 23, they were driven to a small cemetery outside San Fernando where, in the presence of Wada and Toshino, they were bayoneted, decapitated, and buried in a mass grave. The next day the prisoners were packed into a train bound for San Fernando, La Union. Wada told the wounded to ride atop the boxcars so they could wave their bandaged limbs at American pilots to ward off attack. “How shall I ever forget this Christmas Eve,” Cecil Peart asked. Once in San Fernando, the men were marched to Lingayen Gulf, where they spent two days and bitterly cold nights on the beach. Their nightmare resumed on December 27, when 1,070 prisoners boarded the Enoura Maru, and the remaining 250 were herded onto the 5,860-ton Brazil Maru, rejoining their comrades on the Enoura Maru once they reached Takao, Formosa.

  Hayes died on the Enoura Maru on January 6, 1945. On January 9, the day U.S. forces launched the invasion of Luzon, a bomb tore through the ship’s forward hold, killing 300 men, many of whom were medics. “The carnage,” said Major John M. Wright, Jr., of the Coast Artillery Corps, “was beyond description.” “I felt that . . . we were beyond prayer,” said corpsman Loren Stamp. The survivors were transferred back to the Brazil Maru and, after a forty-seven-day journey, finally reached Moji, Japan, on January 29.

  Of the 1,619 POWs who had boarded the Oryoku Maru on December 13, 1944, 300 died; 316 more perished on the Enoura Maru, and another five on the Brazil Maru. Roughly half the army doctors who had served at Manila’s Sternberg Hospital and Hospital No. 2 on Bataan—including Lieutenant Colonel William Riney Craig—died. More than three-quarters of the marine officers who embarked that day from Manila died. Max Schaeffer of the Headquarters and Service Company died. William “Hogey” Hogaboom of Battery A died. Willy Holdredge of Battery C died. Robert Chambers, Jr., of Company O died. “Fidgety Frank” Bridget of Patrol Wing 10 died. The ranks of Bilibid’s medical staff were ravaged. Marion Wade died. Gordon Lambert died. Maurice Joses died. Clyde Welsh and Cecil Welch died. Chaplain Cummings died. The poet Henry G. Lee survived the attack against the Oryoku Maru, only to die on the Enoura Maru. His poem “Group Four,” penned more than a year before in Cabanatuan on Armistice Day, November 11, 1943, reads like an epitaph for the hellship victims:We’ll have our small white crosses by and by,

  Our cool, green lawns, our well-spaced, well-cared trees,

  Our antique cannons, muzzles to the sky,

  Our statues and our flowers and our wreaths.

  We’ll have our bold-faced bronze and copper plaques

  To tell in stirring words of that we saved

  And who we were, with names and dates; our stacks

  Of silent rifles, spaced between the graves.

  We’ll have our country’s praise, here below

  They’ll make a shrine of this small bit of hell

  For wide-eye tourists; and so few will know

  And those who know will be the last to tell

  The wordless suffering of our lives as slaves,

  Our squalid deaths beneath this dripping sky,

  The stinking tangle of our common graves.

  We’ll have our small white crosses by and by.

  Carey Smith, who used to sing “We’ll be free in ’43 / No more war in ’44 / Hardly a man alive in ’45,” was one of the few navy doctors who survived.

  Months after the war some still didn’t know if Murray had made it home. One former patient wrote to his father:Dear Mr. Glusman

  The last time I saw Dr. Glusman was in March 44 on a Nip tramp

  steamer. I told him that I’d write—Please let me know if he is OK—

  Because I’m almost sure the doctor saved my life.

  Alway [sic] your friend Sgt. Stevens.

  But what had survived, really, when you felt you had nothing left, when your perspective on life had been so distorted that the world was unrecognizable, when conversation was detached from reality, and when the landscape of the heart was so charred by the fires of hatred that you wondered if you could ever love again, ever feel as intensely again, ever find someone who would be able to find you beneath the ruin of your former
self?

  Intellectually he knew it wasn’t true. His life had been put on hold, not taken away. On the scale of horrors, the Japanese had dealt far more harshly with Chinese, Filipino, and Korean captives than they had with Caucasian POWs. Their treatment of the Javanese, Burmese, Malayan, and Indian slave laborers working the notorious Siam-Burma Railway was even worse. According to one estimate, 31.4 percent, or 60,600 of 193,000 Allied POWs, died compared to 48.3 percent, or 290,000 native prisoners out of 600,000. E. M. Gonie and Louis Indorf, officers of the Royal Dutch East Indian Army, left three and a half years of captivity only to watch Indonesia catapult into four years of war in its struggle for independence, after which they found themselves at once without a country and orphaned by the Dutch home government. There were concentration camp survivors and refugees from Germany and occupied Eastern Europe who had lost their businesses, their homes, and their families. Prisoners of war lived in fear of death, not, like some of Murray’s relatives in the Ukraine, under threat of generational extinction. They suffered from systematic abuse and neglect, not the orchestrated attempt to annihilate an entire people.

  The three navy doctors were lucky: lucky to have survived the bombing of the Cavite Navy Yard, lucky to have escaped the Bataan Death March by mere hours, lucky to have endured the siege of Corregidor, lucky to have left the Philippines on the Kenwa Maru, lucky to have emerged unscathed from the American firebombing of Kōbe. Unlike the prison doctors of Nazi Germany, they were never forced to engage in experimental medical procedures; nor did their diagnoses result in inmates being sent to the gas chamber. But comparing your own lot with that of someone whose was worse was no palliative. To the contrary, it forced you to wonder why chance favored you and not others, why you deserved to live and they didn’t. Instead of confirming self-worth, it called it into question.

  Captain L. B. Sartin, who was liberated from Cabanatuan in February 1945, welcomed Murray back to the realm of the living.

  Naval Hospital

  New Orleans, La.

  November 18, 1945

  Dear Murray:

  I was delighted to see your name among the survivors who were liberated in Japan. I am thankful that as many got through the awful ordeal as did. Of course the terrible part is that so many perished during the last few weeks, just when liberation was in sight. . . .

  I hope that you will enjoy your leave, and I know you will.The transition from prison life will take a while, I know from experience. Everything was so strange when I first returned. I felt like I was in a new world. I have gained about fifty pounds and can no longer get in the clothes I purchased when I first returned.

  Let me hear from you from time to time and if I can do anything for you let me know.

  Kindest regards.

  Sincerely,

  L. B. Sartin

  John eased back into civilian life. When he arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on October 5, 1945, after convalescing at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, a medical officer told him he would have to remain there for rehabilitation. “No way,” he replied with a resoluteness born from his experience. He took a taxi to 21 East 87th Street in Manhattan, where his parents gave him “a royal welcome,” as they put it. He was happy to see his family, but he was noticeably subdued. Thirty-three pounds heavier since liberation, he was still underweight, and at one meal, he polished off a dozen eggs. His ankles were swollen from edema, and his night vision was shot. He was circumspect in speaking of his wartime experience, and his reticence tended to deflect questions about it. By New Year’s Eve he was engaged to Ruth Lowe, whom his sister Edith had decided was the girl for him, and he was working as an assistant resident at Bellevue Hospital. He was married in April 1946, by which time he had begun his residency at Mount Sinai Hospital.

  Fred, meanwhile, was as angry as a hornet. He was irritable and restless. He couldn’t understand the questions people asked him about POW camp life, couldn’t grasp that they didn’t already know the answers. He set his sights on a fellowship in surgery at Cook County Hospital and hoped the navy would at least pay for his coursework in anatomy and pathology at Northwestern University. The business of writing condolence letters, drafting reports, and submitting commendations for medals and decorations helped focus his energies.

  November 25, 1945

  Dear Murray,

  I am certainly very happy to have heard from you—I understand perfectly how you feel about this readjustment business—I had one helluva time myself when I first got back. . . .

  I’m afraid that I was an awful fizzle for the various reporters that interviewed me because I just could not talk about the past—but now it doesn’t bother me too much altho [sic] it is very difficult to tell a story because there is so much there.

  You undoubtedly remember me mentioning the psychoanalyst that I knew whose daughter I used to go with—well, I’ve been to his home for dinner and was over just the other night for cocktails. I mentioned your name to him and some of the work you did with hysteria at Kobe and he almost knocked me over when he told me that he had already heard about you. I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I feel very strongly, and John does too, that your field is Neuropsychiatry rather than Neurosurgery.

  It was a damned shame that we couldn’t have met in Frisco, but in some ways it was just as well because I know that the way John and I felt—we just didn’t have any desire to go out. I finally broke down and took a cute little nurse out the night before I left. Felt like a high school kid on his first date but finally calmed down and had a grand time. Thanks a lot for calling the folks when you got home—they appreciated it very much as I do.

  Well, Murray, that’s about all the scuttle for now—keep in touch with me and let me hear from you and some day the three of us will have that party together.

  Fred

  Many returning veterans suffered from fear and anxiety, listlessness and depression, and were tormented by flashbacks and nightmares in which they relived traumatic events. The doctors had not been engaged in actual combat; nor did they have to live with the consequences of having killed anyone. But they had been subjected to five months of horrific warfare before enduring three and a half years of captivity, and they were haunted by those they had been unable to save. The syndrome came to be known as “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  Symptoms of the disorder were first noted in 1871 by Jacob Mendes Da Costa, a Civil War army surgeon who described it as “soldier’s heart.” In 1919 British cardiologist Sir Thomas Lewis observed a similar affliction in veterans of World War I. That same year Scottish psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers became one of the first doctors to treat veterans by having them recall their traumatic experiences, a technique he used with his most celebrated patient, the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner went a step further by positing, in 1941, a psychological as well as a physiological basis to war neurosis. In War Stress and Neurotic Illness, which he wrote with Herbert Spiegel, Kardiner described five characteristics of war neurosis: a heightened startle response and general irritability; a proclivity for aggressive outbursts; a fixation on trauma; emotional constriction and a reduced level of personality functioning; and an atypical dream life.

  But the experience of POWs in World War II, like that of concentration camp survivors, was utterly new to stateside psychoanalysts. Systematic, quantitative studies on the psychological effects of captivity, on the threat of imminent death, and on starvation were rare. Ancel Keys, the creator of the K-ration, launched a pioneering project with Josef Brozek, Austin Henschel, Olaf Mickelsen, and Henry Longstreet Taylor to help prepare for the massive relief efforts in war-torn Europe. Called the Minnesota Experiment, it tracked the effects of controlled starvation on thirty-six conscientious objectors in 1944-45. But their complete findings didn’t appear until The Biology of Human Starvation was published in 1950. Given the paucity of reliable information, analysts treated postwar psychological disorders with varying degrees of success. As Kardiner and Spiegel admit
ted, “The real drawback . . . lies in the absence of a consistent psychopathology, which alone can furnish the directives for therapy.”

  Lacking empirical data, psychiatrists could listen, girlfriends and spouses could offer consolation, but their understanding hinged on the willingness of their patients, lovers, and husbands to talk. And many of them wouldn’t because they were psychically numb. Others remained silent because they didn’t want pity, they didn’t want anyone else to see them in the degraded position to which they had been reduced. The problem was finding a common language, and the only ones who spoke it were their fellow ex-POWs.

  Murray dear,

  I want to tell you again how wonderful it was to see you, and what a good evening it was last night—

  I have some tickets for Maggie Teyte, a most luxurious singer of French songs, for Town Hall, December 19th. Can I take you? It’s only fitting, no?

  Suppose you call and let me know very soon—I’ll be disappointed if you can’t make it.

  By the way, my mother is most anxious to say hello to you—Perhaps we can arrange that soon?

  Love,

  Laura

  She was living uptown, eager to find an apartment that she and Gerald could move into the next month. Murray was staying with his mother and father. Had he heard of anything available? Would he keep an eye out for her and let her know? Murray exploded.

  “Where the hell do you think I’ve been all these years?” he fumed. “Now I’m supposed to be looking out for you?”