Elizabeth M. Norman (24 page)

Josie Nesbit gathered the Filipino nurses around her.

“They were frightened—poor little things,” she said. “They kept saying, ‘Mama Josie! What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘Never mind. I’ll stay with you.’ So I stayed with them and the Japs came in. The officer came with his big boots, stomping through there and a sword hanging down through his belt and gun. He stomped through there and the little girls shivered. He went all through the lateral and inspected the place. [Later] they put up the signs:
THIS IS THE PROPERTY OF THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE GOVERNMENT
.”
¹²

Elsewhere in the hospital laterals a group of Japanese officers accompanied by a handful of sober-faced American officers ordered the rest of the American women to fall into formation.

The nurses stood mute and edgy. Up and down the line walked the Japanese, looking them over. It was difficult, at first, to read the enemy’s face, to separate reputation from reality, reality from fear. Then it became clear that the eyes looking them over were filled with curiosity, not appetite. The sight of women in uniform was so alien to the Japanese that they seemed puzzled, indeed almost confused, by the nurses’ presence. For them war was a test of manhood, and women had no business being under arms.

“The Japs had no notion who we were and why we were there,” said Jeanne Kennedy.

One of the enemy officers was so curious he bent down and “started feeling” the hem of Kennedy’s skirt.

“I was a little apprehensive,” she said, “until I realized he just wanted to compare the material of my skirt with the khaki material on his uniform.”
¹³

A few hours later the Japanese ordered Maude Davison to gather ten of her nurses to pose outside for a series of propaganda photographs. In the group was Madeline Ullom:

“They lined us up out front of the hospital tunnel and they put an armed guard with a gun and a bayonet at each end of us. A Jap officer with excellent English said, ‘We are going to take your picture and we’re going to send it to MacArthur to show that you are alive and that we are looking after you. Don’t be afraid. I know how you Americans feel. I understand you. I’m a graduate of one of your universities.’ ”
¹⁴

Looking at one of those pictures now, one sees the women in their khaki dresses and Red Cross armbands, white ankle socks and oxford
shoes, legs crossed, some staring at the camera, some looking away askance. There is no reading the eyes—the camera was too far away—but three of the women seem to be smiling. Was it really a smile we see or were those mouths draw up in a grimace?

While the Japanese photographer was setting up his equipment, the women had a chance to look around, and what they saw horrified them. There, amid twisted girders and splintered trees, were scores of bloated allied corpses covered by swarms of black and green flies.

Colonel Wibb Cooper, chief medical officer, persuaded the Japanese that the bodies were a health threat, and he was finally given permission to inter them. This grisly work, of course, was performed by American prisoners of war.

The first week after surrender the Japanese herded the seven thousand American and five thousand Filipino soldiers on Corregidor onto a small concrete apron near a destroyed garage.

“The whole area was about one hundred yards on each side,” Major S. M. Mellnick told war crimes investigators in postwar testimony. “There was no shelter of any kind and everyone soon put up blanket and shelter-half awnings. The heat was unbearable. For water we had one faucet and one open well. A twelve-hour wait in the water line to get a canteen filled was the usual rule.”
¹⁵

For a week they were not fed, then the Japanese gave the thousands of prisoners a little rice with canned tomatoes and sardines.

Every day the men went on work details, cleaning up the island, salvaging supplies for the Japanese, building enemy fortifications and living quarters. On one such detail a Catholic chaplain encountered a sobering aspect of garrison life in the Japanese Imperial Army.

“He was in a detail fixing up a set of quarters topside for the Japanese,” said another officer who told the chaplain’s story to war crimes investigators. “Arriving at the house with a load of furniture, he found six Filipino girls who had been brought from Manila to Corregidor. They were crying. They had been picked up off the street in Manila and had been taken directly to Corregidor. They had no time to notify their families. They had all been abused by the Jap officers who came to the house. The Chaplain remarked that it was probably the first time in history that a Catholic priest assisted in establishing a house of prostitution.”
¹⁶

The nurses, doctors and corpsmen had been ordered to stay at their posts in the hospital laterals and to continue to treat the wounded. Frequently the Japanese paid them a visit, and whenever they approached, the women would stiffen or freeze in place.

“You’d hear [the Japanese] stomping down the corridor with their big shoes and you’d tend to stand at attention and wait for them to go past,” said Anna Clark. “It was the uncertainty of not knowing what they were going to do. You just kept doing what you were supposed to do, [but] we couldn’t speak with our officers [and] we were allowed outside the tunnel [only] for short periods of time. We weren’t allowed to get close to each other.”

The Japanese ordered all Americans to pay them obeisance. “We bowed real fast so it wouldn’t bother us,” Alice Hahn said.

With each of these encounters, the Americans tried to get a sense of their enemy, an idea of what might lie ahead for them.

Sallie Durrett recalled that “a Japanese sign was placed at the lateral where the nurses were sleeping. It said,
NURSES OF THE US ARMY
. The Jap soldiers would stop to read the sign and then laugh. They thought we were there for other reasons.”
¹⁷

Things were quiet for a while, then the looting began.

They took everything—radios, binoculars, jewelry, pens, mechanical pencils, cigarette lighters, silver picture frames. They came by day and they came at night.

“One night,” said Eleanor Garen, “I was aroused by someone at my side and realized it was a Jap. He had no business there, but I remained motionless as he took my ring from my finger and removed my most valuable tool, my wristwatch. That watch and I had counted the heartbeats of many men.”
¹⁸

Soon one “inspection” seemed to follow on the heels of another.

“A nurse on duty sat up all night long with a bell and the minute a Jap soldier showed his head she rang it,” said Ann Mealor. “All the nurses slept in their uniforms. They’d get up and stand at attention until the [Japanese] went through. Sometimes they went through in droves, nearly all night long. You wouldn’t get any sleep but you didn’t dare lie down.”
¹⁹

During the day the Japanese might wander into the operating room or, without warning, appear on a ward. When that happened the women would stand silently next to their desks while the soldiers checked each patient, forcing many from bed to join the thousands of men herded together outside in prisoner-of-war pens. In a short time the only American men left in the hospital were those so sick or wounded they simply could not move, about four hundred of them.

The Japanese colonel in charge of the Japanese army medical department seemed to get on well with Colonel Wibb Cooper, and for a
while relations between the Americans and their Japanese counterparts were tolerable. Each day, the colonel or an assistant met with Japanese doctors to present their patient and hospital reports. When an enemy soldier needed surgery, an American doctor assisted a Japanese surgeon, with an army or civilian nurse administering the anesthesia.

After a while the nurses began to grow accustomed to the presence of their enemy. One midnight in late May, Cassie was sitting at a desk on ward duty, finishing some paperwork, when a Japanese soldier approached and gestured that he wanted to sit down.

“Help yourself,” she said.

As the soldier settled himself in a chair next to her desk, he reached for an old copy of
Cosmopolitan
magazine. Flipping through the magazine he came across an advertisement that showed a woman sitting with two small children, and he became excited, pointing at the picture and poking Cassie on the arm.

“Yes, yes,” said Cassie, trying to ignore him. “She’s a good-looking woman, so are the kids.” Then she returned to her paperwork.

The guard looked a little disappointed, then he brightened for a moment, as if he had remembered something, reached inside his tunic, and retrieved a snapshot of a Japanese woman and two small children. He was smiling now, and, using gestures, he began to tell Cassie the story of his life.

Twice he said, “boom, boom, boom,” and pointed to himself and to his family. I figured he was telling he had survived two campaigns and that he hoped to see his family again. Next, he took a pencil and paper and drew an outline of Japan, Hawaii, and the United States. He sketched a boat with smoke curls carrying his family to Hawaii. Then he drew a second boat going to San Francisco. Finally, he drew a train with smoke and made “choo-choo” sounds to Chicago. Then he smiled and looked at me
.

Up to that moment I felt pretty well put upon because of what had happened to me. But this is my enemy? His fears, hopes, and family are not basically different than mine. The only difference was his slanted eyes and yellow skin. In a way, we were both victims of our own government situations. That poor sucker was also out in the field.
²⁰

But such rapprochement was rare. When the Japanese thought an American or Filipino was being “disrespectful,” they beat him or, in some cases, lined him up in front of a firing squad. In the hospital if a
corpsman or doctor tried to intervene when a guard pulled a patient out of bed for a work detail, the doctor was knocked to the ground. A nurse was cuffed by a guard just for talking with a doctor. Another woman, slow to follow a guard’s orders, got a stinging slap with the flat side of his bayonet.
²¹
Then came an incident involving a woman named Mary Brown Menzie.
²²

Although Mrs. Menzie was listed as an army nurse, she was, in fact, new to the group. Soon after the war began, her fiancé, an officer on MacArthur’s staff, managed to insinuate his betrothed, a registered nurse, in the nurse corps, the better to position her for possible evacuation. Once on Corregidor, the couple married. After surrender the colonel was forced to join the herds of POW’s penned up topside under the blazing sun. His wife, meanwhile, remained on duty with the nurses, but slept in a secluded area of a lateral that she and her husband had sectioned off for themselves with a bedsheet. Now, for company, she invited another nurse to join her.

At 2:30
A.M
. on May 9 Mary Brown Menzie felt someone shaking her awake from a deep sleep. She opened her eyes slowly, and as she began to focus she saw a man’s shaved head. The man was a Japanese and, save for the towel around his waist, he was naked.

Just then Menzie caught sight of the knife.

The man looked hard at her and made a gesture—if she cried out he would pull the blade across her neck and slit her throat.

She tried to slip past him out of bed, but he pushed her back down, pointed his knife at her eyes and began to mount her.

She threw her right forearm across her eyes to protect her face, and in the struggle the man cut her wrist. The wound seemed momentarily to unnerve him. In the confusion that followed Menzie broke free, and with her roommate in tow, ran screaming into the nurses lateral.

The next day Maude Davison reported the incident to Colonel Cooper, who relayed it to the Japanese, who in turn “investigated” and concluded that the assailant was most definitely an American or Filipino.

After that Mrs. Menzie and her roommate moved their belongings into the relative safety of the nurses’ lateral. (The Japanese guards were so amused by the incident and the “investigation,” they took to walking by the nurses quarters in their G-strings, laughing.)

As the weeks passed, the American rations began to dwindle.

“The Japs found this cracked wheat that had been sent there maybe a year or two before; it was full of weevils,” Ann Mealor remembered.
“They’d cook that for breakfast. You’d look down and those weevils would be floating on top. You dipped them off and went ahead with your breakfast.”
²³

Soon the women began to forage for food. One nurse discovered a large hole in a wall near their sleeping quarters leading to a crawl space that opened into another lateral filled with canned goods the allies had stashed before the island fell. Night after night the nurses would tap this little stockpile. They waited for the guards to pass, then two or three of them would climb through the hole, while others acted as lookouts. A while later the foragers would return with as many cans of tomatoes and sacks of flour as they could hide in their foot lockers. This gambit, however, was not without its risks. One evening Josie Nesbit’s foray was cut short when the lookouts yelled to her that the guards were unexpectedly returning. Nesbit was in such a rush to get back to her bunk before they discovered her gone, she laid open her scalp on the low ceiling as she scrambled out of the crawl space.

About this time, the nurses took on a second nemesis. Several weeks before the Japanese landed, a family of monkeys moved into a stand of trees near the tunnel entrance and a day or so later began to wander into the hospital laterals. The day before surrender the women spotted a large male squatting next to a bed, eating a patient’s food. When the monkey was done he turned to the man in the bed and started to groom him, picking fleas off his head. In the days that followed, the wounded soldiers took a liking to the creature, nicknamed him Tojo, and spent hours trying to impersonate him. The nurses joked that sometimes it was hard to tell who was monkey and who was man.