Tears in the Darkness (27 page)

 

 

 

 

 

B
EN STEELE
heard Earl Snook calling for him.

“Take the truck, Bud, and run on up to Will James's place and bring him back, will ya?”

Fall 1937 and Ben Steele was going to school mornings and working for wages afternoons. He had found a job as an errand boy at the Snook Art Company, a painting and glass contractor and purveyor of art supplies. He liked working there on North 29th Street, downtown. Pay was okay, twenty-five cents an hour, and some of the workmen were real characters, some of the artists too. The owners, Earl and Eleanor Snook, had gotten real friendly with many of the quiet, serious-looking men who came in to buy sketch pads, canvases, pencils, and paint, in particular a well-known illustrator and author of children's books who called himself Will James.

Will James! The errand boy was excited.

“I'll get on up there, Mr. Snook.”

Growing up, Ben Steele read everything Will James had written, all his stories of Montana and the West. He'd spent hours staring at the artist's illustrations, bucking horses that seemed so real that their riders looked ready to get pitched off the page.

He'd always been fascinated by the magic of art—that's how he thought of it, magic, the way someone could pick up a stick of charcoal or a pencil or a paintbrush and with just a few strokes on paper or canvas make a picture of the prairie or a cowboy running down a steer.

He used to watch the itinerant artists who set up their easels on street corners in Roundup, a town west of the Bulls. He'd stand there for hours
as they turned out their three-dollar landscapes—the blue sky, the purple mountains, the big green pines, Montana—in twenty minutes.

At Hawk Creek he'd sometimes sit at the kitchen table with his mother while she painted flowers on her chinaware. He wondered, was there something of an artist in him, too?

Now and then he tried to sketch horses, Warren always hanging over his shoulder. “That's good, Bud,” his brother would say, “real good.” Same thing in grade school during art hour. “Great horse, Bud,” the kids would tell him, gathering round for a look.

He didn't think so. Not compared to Will James. He'd pawed through the author's best seller
Smoky
so often, the pages were frayed and falling apart. No, he couldn't draw like that and likely never would. Art was like fishing; it was play, and he had to work. Still, he sure liked those books with their wonderful drawings.

“Come on in,” Will James said.

The artist lived on a five-acre spread snuggled against the rimrocks on the city's north side. By then, his wife, worn down by his binges, had left, and most of his friends, save the Snooks, had given him their back.

James had been in an automobile accident that month and couldn't drive, and Earl Snook sent his errand boy out there to fetch the great man to town for supplies.

“You like art?”

“I do, Mr. James.”

“Well, step over here.”

The artist settled himself behind his drafting table and picked up a length of charcoal and started to draw. His hand swept back and forth, this way and that, up and down across the page, and it wasn't long before Ben Steele could make out the shape of a horse—the back, the neck, the withers, the legs. A dozen more strokes and, suddenly, there was a wild bronc bucking, snorting, and stomping in front of him.

“What do you think?” Will James said.

“Magic,” thought Ben Steele.

 

 

 

 

 

B
Y NOON
on April 9, most Filipino and American field commanders had gotten the word to give up, and the jungle hills and hollows of Bataan were speckled with the white flags of surrender.

Like all men facing the dark, the defeated waited for the worst, convinced the worst wouldn't happen. They'd heard the stories, of course. Japan's reputation as a brutal occupier had been written across the world's front pages—the wholesale looting, the violation of women, the wanton murder of civilians, the execution of unarmed prisoners of war—but most soldiers thought such stories exaggerated, made up to sell newspapers, and they did not believe them, or did not want to believe them.

So what if the Japanese were barbarians? They had to abide by the law, didn't they? The international law of land warfare that prohibited the mistreatment of prisoners of war.
¹

“Everything is going to be all right,” officers assured their men. “Just stick together, and don't worry.”

 

AFTER THEY DESTROYED
their gear and gobbled the food they had left, most men sat down where they were to await the enemy. They were beaten men now, trying to shake a growing sense of shame. Some told themselves that disease and hunger had defeated them, not the Imperial Japanese Army, but they could not shake the feeling that they had just flat-out given up, and as they smashed their weapons against the nearest tree, the first of many acts of obeisance that would be required of them, some men wept.

“The little bastards,” said Corporal Brown Davidson of Denver, Colorado. “They've beaten us.”
²

A handful of Americans refused to surrender and either disobeyed General King's order or sought leave from their superiors and headed for the hills, hoping to slip through Japanese lines and make their way north to the Zambales Mountains, a staging ground for guerrillas.

Hundreds of Filipino soldiers tried to evade capture as well. They chucked their uniforms, borrowed civilian clothes from Bataanese villagers, and passed themselves off as locals or made their way to the peninsula's eastern shore and paid fishermen there to ferry them across the bay to Manila, Cavite, Bulacan.

Private Humphrey O'Leary couldn't decide what to do—dissemble and disappear, or talk some sense into his buddy Phil Murray.
³

O'Leary was the son of an American expatriate who had fought in the Spanish-American War and had stayed in the islands to marry a Filipina. When the Japanese invaded, Humphrey O'Leary quit his job at his father's construction company in Manila and, since he held U.S. citizenship, joined the American 31st Infantry.

He was taller than the average Filipino, skin was lighter too, and growing up he often passed for white, a
puti.
Now, sitting in a circle of American soldiers down by the beach, waiting for the Japanese, he watched his white comrades, his friend Phil Murray among them, smear their faces with sand and dirt.

It was laughable, all this rubbing.
Loko-lokos,
idiots, what were they thinking, that they could pass as natives?

Humphrey leaned close to his compadre.

“Come on, Phil,” he said. “Don't be foolish. You're too white. The Japs will see right through that.”

Murray stopped rubbing.

“Tell you what,” Humphrey said. “I'll stay, Phil. We'll sweat it out. “We'll make this together.”

 

CONFIDENT
his April offensive would bring victory on Bataan, General Homma had ordered his staff to prepare a plan to clear the peninsula of prisoners. The campaign for the Philippines was not over yet; Homma still had to take Corregidor, the American fortress and command center blocking access to Manila Harbor. Bataan was to serve as a staging area for the invasion, and the Japanese had to move their prisoners off the
peninsula before they could use it as a base to attack the tiny island out in the bay.

The evacuation plan stressed expediency: Guards were to marshal the prisoners in groups on the Old National Road, the peninsula's main artery then start them marching north to a railhead in San Fernando, sixty-six miles from the tip of the peninsula. Along the way Japanese supply troops were to set up feeding and aid stations and provide trucks to ferry the sick and wounded. At San Fernando the prisoners would be put on trains to Tarlac Province, disembarking in Capas, the station closest to their ultimate destination, Camp O'Donnell, a Filipino training post the Japanese had converted to a prisoner-of-war camp.

Expecting the battle to last the month, the planners set April 20, more or less, as the day to complete their preparations. Since their intelligence estimates were at best a guess, they could not say how many prisoners they would have to manage, but they guessed no more than fifty thousand.

The plan seemed sound, as far as it went, which is to say like all military plans it reflected the miscalculations, misjudgments, misbeliefs, and misintentions of its makers. Of course, at war nothing runs true to plan.

 

WITHIN HOURS
of the surrender, 14th Army Headquarters realized its estimates, and thus its plans, were worthless. Reports from the field indicated at least twice the number of prisoners and refugees headquarters had expected, 76,000 soldiers and 26,000 civilians.

Everywhere the Japanese looked, there were prisoners. On the roads, in the hills, on jungle trails—squads, platoons, and companies of them, twenty here, two hundred there, a thousand at the airstrip in Mariveles. None of the
hohei
had ever seen anything like it. What a spectacle.
⁴

The scene reminded Private First Class Jinzaburo Chaki of a photograph in a Tokyo newspaper, a front-page picture from Malaya showing great masses of British prisoners at Singapore.

“We have done the same thing here on Bataan!” he told himself.

Like all victorious troops, the
hohei
at first were fascinated with their captives, eager to get a close look at the men who had been shooting at them.

Private First Class Tasuku Yamanari thought the Filipino soldiers looked “like children, hungry children” begging for the dry biscuits the Japanese carried in their kits. The
hakujin,
however, the white men,
Struck many
hohei
as
oni,
the devils they had been told about in training. Tall, hairy creatures with big noses and skin the color of a cadaver, ugly men, soft men, men without a fighting spirit, a will to win.

“How could they give up with this many soldiers?” Sergeant Tozo Takeuchi asked himself. And how could a
hohei
have anything but contempt for such men?

 

THEY KEPT PUSHING HIM
down the trail, and his pack became heavier with each step, but Ben Steele wasn't going to let himself fall again and take another beating.

When the group of prisoners reached the Old National Road east of Mariveles, the Japanese soldiers took their packs back, and Ben Steele and the other men were made to join a much larger mob of prisoners squatting in the sun on the side of a hill facing Manila Bay.

He was glad to be rid of his load but worried about what was ahead. These soldiers looked angry.

Hate! Ben Steele thought. “Hate is sticking out all over them.”

 

BY LATE AFTERNOON
on April 9 most of the captured Filipinos and Americans had been gathered at assembly points along an eight-mile section of the Old National Road at the tip of the peninsula.

Corporal John Emerick of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, had been captured in the hills above Mariveles and was herded down to the airstrip there, then forced into line with hundreds of other men. An interpreter was telling them to empty their pockets and spill the contents of their bags and packs on the ground in front of them.

“You have guns, knives, anything,” he said, “and we kill you. We kill you instantly. Right? Instantly.”
⁵

And then the searchers set to work picking through the men's pockets and rifling their clothing and gear, and it soon became clear that the search for concealed weapons was nothing more than a shakedown, a treasure hunt for cameras and flashlights and mechanical pencils and fountain pens (especially Parker Duofolds—“Pah-kah,” the guards would demand, “Pah-kah pen”), sunglasses, mess kits, blankets and mosquito nets, safety razors and blades, terry cloth towels, extra clothing, rings and jewelry of all types, and, best of all, watches, American watches—that Hamilton or Bulova, that gold Lord Elgin with the jeweled works and pearl face.

The prisoners were too exhausted to protest and did not want to
provoke the line of soldiers with pitiless faces holding those long bayonets, but as the Japanese stripped them of their possessions, many Americans started to seethe.

To them the signet rings, wristwatches, and fountain pens with gold nibs were more than graduation or birthday gifts or luxuries long wished for and purchased after months or years of putting money away. They were “personal property,” and property was an expression of the pursuit of happiness, one of their unalienable rights. A section of land, an automobile, a quarter horse, a watch—emblems of the opportunity, part of the freedom they had sworn to protect.

 

THE HELL
with the bastards. Some men dug holes in the dirt and buried their valuables where they sat. Others in silent rage tossed their keepsakes and curios from home into the bushes.

Here and there a man ripped the cuffs of his trousers or the seams of his shirt, then worked some small keepsake into the secret space.

Men with string or thread hung their watches and rings around their necks and down their backs.

One soldier secreted a ring in his mouth and secured it to a molar with a piece of dental floss.

Waiting to be searched, tank corps crewman Bernard FitzPatrick of Waverly, Minnesota, watched out of the corner of his eye as two guards worked their way down a line of prisoners and stopped in front of a soldier wearing a wedding ring.
⁶

“Waifu?” asked one of the guards, smiling and pointing to the ring.

The American nodded and the guards moved on . . . and FitzPatrick got an idea. He turned his college class ring upside down so only the band was showing. The first guard passed by without noticing, but the second was suspicious and told him to turn his hands palm up. Bernard FitzPatrick hesitated. He'd worked hard for that ring, four years of studying and classes, and he did not want to give it up.