Tears in the Darkness (20 page)

 

THE AMERICANS
noticed the change almost immediately.

The enemy has “definitely recoiled,” MacArthur told Washington in a series of cables in February. “Heavy enemy losses sustained in his ill advised
and uncoordinated attack of the past two weeks have . . . dulled his initiative” and “he begins to show signs of exhaustion.”
⁸

Some of MacArthur's men were so buoyed by the news, they wanted to leave their foxholes and counterattack. “The situation looks rosy,” one young army captain wrote in his diary. “If we can only get help here,” he said, they could “clear” all Luzon of the enemy. “Hope this happens.”
⁹

Fueled by hope, the American rumor mill ground out one canard after another: Relief convoys were on the way from Australia; the war would be over by Easter; they'd soon be playing tennis and golf again.

The gossipmongers were everywhere, even in high headquarters. On March 7, MacArthur sent a radio message to General George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff in Washington:

“General Homma committed Harikari [
sic
], repeat, Harikari, because of his failure to destroy our forces in Bataan and Corregidor.” The funeral, MacArthur went on, had been held in Manila on February 26 and Homma's “ashes were flown to Japan the following day.” While he could not “completely substantiate this report,” the general said, “it is believed to be correct.” And in a postscript he added, there was even “a touch of irony” in all this—“his funeral rites, and, it is believed, his suicide, took place in my old apartment, which he occupied in the Manila Hotel.”
¹⁰

More melodrama from MacArthur, but any bit of good news, fact or fata morgana, suited the moment, and there had been few such moments in the first battle for Bataan.

The Americans had stalled and bloodied their enemy, but no one in the American camp was counting coup, for while the enemy's hardships were temporary (all Homma had to do was wait for Tokyo to reinforce him), the list of American troubles seemed intractable. And first on that list was hunger.

 

THE FILIPINOS
and Americans had been living and fighting on crumbs. For six weeks their ration had been less than two thousand calories a day, a scant twenty-four ounces of food, half the minimum the average man needed for the hard labor of combat. And their stomachs were sore with hunger because MacArthur had made a fundamental mistake: in the rush to retreat, he'd left most of his rations behind.

Tons of provisions stockpiled in northern Luzon to support MacArthur's plan to fight at the beaches and along the central plain had
simply been abandoned. At just one warehouse alone, the army quartermaster had left fifty million bushels of rice, enough grain to keep a garrison going for years.

The missteps—“mismanagement and indecision,” one officer called it—were all MacArthur's. Somewhere along the line from West Point to Bataan, the general had forgotten the most fundamental lesson of warfare, the lesson on logistics.

Just as an army on the attack must keep its lanes of resupply open as it moves forward, an army that plans to fight a defense, holed up behind bulwarks, must stockpile its supplies in advance. (Many of his officers had implored MacArthur to give up his grand scheme and send the supplies to Bataan, but the general had refused to listen.)
¹¹

On January 2, after the Filipinos and Americans had completed their withdrawal to Bataan, the army quartermaster sat down to assess his stores. Roughly 80,000 combatants and 26,000 refugees had found their way to the peninsula, and the quartermaster figured that at full ration (four thousand calories, or roughly four and a half pounds of food per man per day), the garrison would exhaust the supplies on hand in less than a month.

Headquarters immediately put every unit on half rations, and the defenders of Bataan now had to fight on less than two pounds of rice, canned fish, or canned meat a day. After two weeks of such subsistence, the men were hungry, very hungry, and losing heart. When word of the grumbling got back to MacArthur, who was holed up underground in a command tunnel on Corregidor just off Bataan's southern tip, the general wrote a letter to his men, assuring them that “help is on the way from the United States . . . Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched. The exact time of arrival of reinforcements is unknown as they will have to fight their way through Japanese attempts against them,” but help was coming. They could count on that.
¹²

It was a lie, a Judas kiss. The American Pacific Fleet had been crippled in the attack on Pearl Harbor and was in no position to break the blockade of Japanese ships patrolling from the Bering Strait to the Coral Sea. The Philippines was cut off, isolated. Washington knew it and so did MacArthur.

 

EVERY DAY
during the lull in the fighting, self-appointed sentinels from various units would climb a hill, shinny up a tree, or stroll down to the
water's edge to squint at the horizon. Somewhere out there, beyond the line of black sea and blue sky, ships loaded with tanks and airplanes, men and food—great floating larders, as some imagined them—were steaming toward Luzon. They were sure of it. Washington had told MacArthur, and MacArthur had told them. Help was on the way.

Naturally there were naysayers, men convinced their country had forsaken them. And there were wise guys too, wags who liked to needle the optimists. (One joker hung up a picture of an old four-masted schooner and added the legend, “We told you so, help is on the way!”)

When the Japanese got wind of this waiting game, the Imperial Army's honey-voiced propagandist, Tokyo Rose (the name used by several women broadcasters), took to playing a popular ditty on Japanese radio broadcast to the Philippines. “Here's one for the boys on Bataan,” she would say:

 

Red sails in the sunset,

Way out on the sea,

Oh! carry my loved one

Home safely to me.

 

Everyone talked constantly of a convoy, one rumor following the next: The convoy was coming from Australia, from Hawaii, it was taking the northern route, it was crossing to the south, it was just off shore, just over the horizon, just days away. And each new report, each bruit or bit of scuttlebutt, was an occasion for a bet—a case of scotch or San Miguel beer, a couple of cartons of Luckies.

Tomorrow would bring rescue. America would never abandon them, they told one another. And they held as hard to blind hope as their enemy held to the idea of destiny. Tomorrow, they believed, tomorrow was going to be better than today.

 

THEY WOULD EAT
almost anything.

When the canned meat ran out, they hunted and slaughtered carabao, a Philippine water buffalo. The quartermaster set up abattoirs, and the oxlike animals were slaughtered in the cool of the night, then cut into quarters, leaving the hairy hide intact to keep the flesh partially clean, which is to say at least half free of maggots. Once it reached the field kitchens, the meat was soaked in salt water overnight and pounded
for hours to make it chewable. Even the best cooks, however, had trouble dressing the flesh of an animal that likes to spend its days wallowing in slime and swamp water. Reporter Frank Hewlett told his readers that he found the taste of carabao distinctive, “just short of rank.”
¹³

Soon almost every carabao on Bataan, some twenty-eight hundred animals, had been eaten, and the quartermaster began to slaughter the cavalry's mounts, packhorses, and mules. When these too were gone, the men turned to hunting wild pigs, jungle lizards, giant snakes. A veterinary officer who thought birds might make a good meal shot and cooked some crows. “He insisted that they were not bad at all,” a comrade reported.
¹⁴

Often whatever the men caught or collected went into a common kettle. When infantryman Dominick Pellegrino of Medford, Massachusetts, went to ladle himself a portion of his unit's “Bataan stew,” he spotted the skeletal paw of a monkey reaching up from the depths of the pot. “I think I'll pass,” he decided.
¹⁵

Patrols “fished” the streams and rivers with grenades, and the quartermaster tried to organize a fleet of local fisherman to ply Manila Bay, but the Japanese bombed the boats. (During the attack a soldier in a nearby foxhole shouted, “If enough of those bombs hit the bay close to shore we will have fresh fish for dinner.”)
¹⁶

Mango trees were picked clean of their fruit, and by the end of February there did not seem to be a single banana left on Bataan. Some men tried eating grass and leaves, cooking them down like spinach to dress up their daily portion of bland rice.

Every morning at breakfast, Calvin Jackson, an army doctor from Kenton, Ohio, found worms and weevils in the porridge served at one of the field hospitals. “The bugs and larvae don't bother me,” he wrote in his diary. “Most people try to skim them off as they float, but I just stir up the mess and [down] it goes.”
¹⁷

Like almost everyone else, intelligence officer Allison Ind of Ann Arbor, Michigan, could think of little save his stomach. He was hungry in the morning, hungry in the heat of the day, hungry at night, a monotony of unrelieved craving and want: “moldy rice . . . tasteless coffee [the grounds left white from many boilings] . . . flies . . . flies . . . moldy rice.”
¹⁸

By the middle of February, Ind and others were showing the first signs of malnutrition:

 

In the mornings before chow, one's legs feel watery and, at intervals, pump with pains that swell and go away again. If you move too rapidly, there is a hint of vertigo. The heart thumps like a tractor engine bogged in a swamp. These not-too-serious discomforts disappear immediately upon eating. For perhaps an hour one feels quite normal. Then lassitude. Between noontime and one o'clock is the worst for me. Seems as though I cannot sit straight, but must hump over.
¹⁹

 

By the middle of March, well into the lull now, army doctors were reporting that “the physical fitness of [the] troops” is “seriously impaired,” so serious that headquarters had to limit operations. The men simply lacked the energy to exert themselves; they had no stamina to mount long-range patrols, stage ambushes, launch frontal attacks. Some were so far gone they did not have the strength to crawl out of their foxholes or raise a rifle to their shoulder and take aim at the enemy.
²⁰

The average weight loss was staggering, between twenty and thirty pounds. “They need food,” the chief surgeon, Wibb E. Cooper, told headquarters. “And lack of proper food is the basic cause of all the trouble.”
²¹

Living on a bare diet, the men quickly exhausted their reserves of body fat, then, bereft of the most basic nutrients (vitamins and minerals) they started to waste away.

Doctors noted that the command appeared ever “more emaciated.” Men twenty years old had the feeble gait and haggard cast of octogenarians. They shuffled along head bowed, gasping for breath. Their skin, mottled and streaked like old marble, hung loose on their bones. Their faces were gaunt, the eyes seemed to protrude from their sockets.
²²

They felt awful, too. Most medical charts listed the same symptoms: dysesthesia (a burning and painful itch like pins and needles), edema (spontaneous swelling at the joints and in the arms and legs), gingivitis (bleeding gums), hypotension and hypothermia (rapid loss of blood pressure and body heat and the shivers and shakes that go with it), polyuria (frequent urination), and paresthesia (numbness in the hands and feet).

Many suffered from anemia so profound they could not walk. Others were chronically dyspeptic; the enzymes and acid in their empty guts left their gastrointestinal tracts painful and growling. A large number developed eye trouble; their optic nerves began to deteriorate, and men with twenty-twenty vision suddenly became quite nearsighted, saw the battlefield through a blur, suffered night blindness.

The most troubling ocular abnormality, however, was inorganic. Soldiers lost their foresight, their ability to see past the moment. Malnutrition, it seemed, had also laid waste to their morality.
²³

Hungry men, famished men, think of nothing so much as their next meal. They develop a kind of gustatory psychosis, “a pathological greed for food,” and in their pursuit of something to eat they know no restraint, respect no right, suffer no attack of conscience. “Hunger,” Woodrow Wilson said in 1918 at the end of his war, brings out “all the ugly distempers” in man—man the liar, man the cheat, man the thief.
²⁴

 

[
Field Memo to All Commands
] It has come to the attention of this Headquarters that organizations, individual officers and men are looting supply dumps . . . hijacking [food] trucks [including those headed for the front] . . . and hoarding supplies . . . Anyone caught doing this will either be shot or court martialed.
²⁵

 

FIRST THEIR STRENGTH
. Then their moral balance. Finally their immunity to illness. On Bataan privation became a partner to disease. Run down from malnutrition, thousands of soldiers were susceptible to the twin scourges that have haunted armies since ancient times: dysentery, which brought on a diarrhea so debilitating that doctors in the field hospitals feared their patients would collapse as they squatted over the straddle-trench toilets, and malaria, the blood disease that burned men's brains.