Tears in the Darkness (28 page)

The second guard was shouting at him now, and the first was reaching to detach his bayonet from his rifle.

“For God's sake, Fitz,” a friend said, “give 'im the ring. They just cut some guy's finger off because he wouldn't.”

 

THE AMERICANS
thought them “thieves,” “thugs,” “crooked bastards,” but the average
hohei
was no more larcenous than his enemies. American
pockets were full of “souvenirs,” loot taken from Japanese prisoners or stripped from the bodies of Japanese dead.

Get rid of your Jap stuff, quick!

What Jap stuff?

Everything, money, souvenirs. Get rid of it!
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The word went around quickly, and at the airstrip in Mariveles men began to toss away their spoils, most men, that is.

A Japanese private searching a young Air Corps captain found a few yen in the man's pocket. The guard hissed his disapproval and summoned an officer. The officer looked at the money, then forced the American to his knees. Some of the men standing nearby swore they saw a glint of sun on the officer's sword as he brought it down on the young captain's neck.
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Watching the officer wipe the blood off his blade, some prisoners started to think they'd gone back in time, awoken in another era. Who were these cold-eyed men who carried swords and cut off fingers and heads? Medieval marauders? A nightmare let loose upon the day?
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“
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN
,” Sergeant Richard Gordon of New York told himself. Anything.

Gordon and another soldier from the American 31st Infantry, Corporal Elmer Parks from Anadarko, Oklahoma, had been hiding in the bush high on Mount Bataan. When surrender came, they started down a trail to the Old National Road. Along the way they came upon an abandoned truck, cranked it up, and continued down the mountain. Parks was driving fast and almost ran over a Japanese soldier who jumped out from behind a banyan tree.

“What the hell do we do now?” he said, as the truck skidded to a stop.
¹⁰

Gordon glanced around. The Jap seemed to be alone. They could shoot the bastard, run him over maybe and hightail it into the bush. All of a sudden Richard Gordon heard a rustle. More Japs, a lot more, surrounding them, hands reaching up and yanking them out of the truck.

They started on Parks first. One clown hit him on the head with a rifle butt and sent him sprawling, and the rest joined in with their fists and boots. Now it was Gordon's turn.

The first blow caught him in the face and filled him with fury. He had come of age in the streets of New York, a rangy kid from Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, and when the punch landed square on his nose, he
thought, “Son of a bitch! I've never put up with this kind of crap in my life and I'm not going to start now.”

They hit him again, and again, and he thought, “Okay, so you take a beating, you take a beating and you live.”

 

THEY SEEMED
to go off without warning, stoics one moment, lunatics the next.

They beat the prisoners as viciously as their sergeants and lieutenants beat them—slapped them, punched them, kicked them, boxed their ears, bashed their skulls, broke their bones.

They beat them for looking this way or that, for moving or not moving fast enough, for talking or keeping still—beat them for everything and for nothing at all.

It was their duty to beat the prisoners, and for some their pleasure as well. The same sadists who had turned the training barracks back home into crucibles of cruelty roamed the lines of helpless
horyo,
inveighing them with orders they did not understand then slam-banging them for being
bakana,
stupid.

 

ARMY MEDIC
Sidney Stewart, standing in the ranks at Mariveles waiting to be searched, watched a guard coming down the line punch a soldier in the face. The soldier was young, a fledgling, and afraid, and he cried out in pain—a form of protest, as the Japanese saw it, that always invited more punishment. The guard raised the butt end of his rifle and bashed the soldier in the head. The boy sagged to his knees, groaning, and the guard raised his rifle for another blow. This time, he split the boy's skull. The American twitched and shuddered in the dirt for a few moments, then he was quiet and did not move again.

Watching this, Sidney Stewart felt a “black hatred” begin to “boil” in his brain. He had thought himself a Christian man, small town (Watonga, Oklahoma), and full of faith. His religion had carried him through the bombing of Manila and the battle of Bataan, but this, standing there watching a guard bludgeon a comrade to death, this seemed to mock and reprove his piety, and the urge “to tear” his enemy “limb from limb,” to “kill for the sheer pleasure of killing,” overwhelmed him.
¹¹

 

APRIL 10
, the day after surrender, the Japanese started their prisoners walking.

Groups of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred and more were herded into lines or loose formations (sometimes flanked by a brace of guards at either end, sometimes not) and told to get on the road. The ragged, disorganized groups of men set off at intervals. Half the 76,000 captives began the trek April 10 near Mariveles, at the tip of the peninsula, but every day for some ten days thereafter at various points along the thirty miles of road between Mariveles and Balanga, the provincial capital, roughly halfway up the peninsula, yet another rabble of Filipinos or Americans would come down from the hills or emerge from the jungle, and the Japanese would gather them into groups and head them north up the Old National Road.
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To label the movement a “march,” as the men took to calling it, was something of a misnomer. During the first few days of walking there were so many men on the road, one bunch following closely behind another, they appeared a procession without end, prisoners as far as the eye could see, mile after mile after mile of tired, filthy, bedraggled men, heads bowed, feet dragging through the ankle-deep dust.

They walked the sixty-six miles in stages. For those who started at the tip of the peninsula, stage one was a stretch of road that ran east nine miles to Cabcaben. There the road turned north and proceeded along Bataan's east coast some twenty-seven miles, passing through the town squares of Lamao, Limay, Orion, Pilar, Balanga, Abucay, Samal, Orani, and Hermosa. At Hermosa the Old National Road turned west toward Layac Junction, then northeast for eleven miles across a torrid, sandy plain to Lubao, then continuing northeast to San Fernando—in all from Mariveles 66 road miles, 106 kilometers, 140,000 footfalls.

Some days the prisoners trekked ten miles, other days fifteen, twenty, or more. And hard miles they were. More than half the Old National Road on Bataan was a rural road—its base stone and crushed coral, its surface fine sand—built for the light traffic of the provinces. Four months of army convoys had churned up the hardpan, leaving potholes and sinkholes that tripped the men and shards of gravel that sliced up their shoes and boots.

They walked in the most torrid time of year,
tag-init,
the Filipinos called it, the days of dryness, the season of drought. From March to May the sun hung flame white and unshrouded in the Philippine sky, searing everything under it. By early afternoon the air was an oven, the hardpan as hot as kiln bricks.

 

______

 

LIEUTENANT SAMUEL GOLDBLITH
of Lawrence, Massachusetts, started walking at Mariveles with a full pack—an extra uniform, underwear, socks, blanket, raincoat, shaving kit, stationery, mess kit, canteen, and a pink cotton towel, a keepsake from his wife's trousseau. It wasn't long before he had pitched everything save his canteen, mess kit, and Diana's pink towel, which he used as a mantilla to keep the sun from baking his head.
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Goldblith guessed he was bound for a prison camp somewhere in the islands, but where he could not say. One rumor had them being interned in Manila's Bilibid Prison, another had them bound for the railhead at San Fernando, but this information was of little use or comfort since few men were familiar with the local geography and had no real sense of the distances involved or the difficulty traversing them. They were walking, that's all they knew, walking in the heat and dust, eyes burning and throats parched, wondering where they were going and when they would get there.

Richard Gordon happened to be walking in a group that included Brigadier General Clifford Bluemel. Gordon had seen Bluemel in action and remembered him as “a spicy little bastard.” Somewhere between Mariveles and Cabcaben, the Japanese had grabbed the general and started him walking, and along the way some of the guards decided to have a little fun.

They circled the general, then made him squat with his fingers locked behind his neck and started turning him in circles. When he lost his equilibrium and toppled over, they laughed—oh, how they laughed—and when he fought to keep his balance, his poise (“The man is a tough nut,” Gordon thought), they kicked his feet out from under him and howled that much harder.
¹⁴

The looting went on as well. Units of Imperial Infantry were encamped beside the Old National Road, awaiting new orders and watching the parade of prisoners. Though most prisoners had been stripped clean by the time they reached Cabcaben, now and then a
hohei
resting along the road would get curious.

Sergeant James Gautier, an Air Corps mechanic from Moss Point, Mississippi, felt a hand grab his shirt and pull him out of formation. Another shakedown, he reckoned. All he had left was his wallet, and the Japanese was flipping through the folds, looking for something of value when he came upon a snapshot of a woman.

“Waifu, Waifu?” the Japanese soldier said. Gautier nodded, then the soldier dropped the picture in the dirt, stepped on it, and ground it with the heel of his hobnail boot.
¹⁵

So this is what it meant to be a prisoner of war, thought Robert Levering, a Manila lawyer from Ohio who had volunteered to serve on Bataan. This is what it felt like to “come to the end of civilization.”
¹⁶

 

PAST MARIVELES
that first day, the highway ran flat for a few miles, then rose sharply in a series of steep switchbacks that had been cut into the side of an escarpment. The precipitous switchbacks were known as “the zigzag.” Unfolded, this accordion section of road was less than a mile, but its angle of ascent—520 feet in less than two-tenths of a mile—was so acute that the back-and-forth climb was a tough one, especially at the height of the hot season. And for men left weak and exhausted by disease, hunger, thirst, and fear, the ascent was torture.

One hairpin turn after another blocked the marchers' view and made the climb seem endless: another incline, another turn, another incline, up, up again, up some more.

On the outside turns, the road dropped off sharply into deep ravines, stories deep, many of them, with boulders, stumps, trees, and tangled underbrush waiting at the bottom.

The labor of climbing the switchbacks under a tropical sun left the men gasping with each step, and it was not long before some of them began to collapse and crawl to the shoulder of the road.

The guards accompanying the first columns climbing the zigzag seemed to ignore the dropouts, but prisoners in later columns began to spot bodies at the bottom of the ravines, bodies wearing familiar uniforms.

 

PROM THE TOP
of the zigzag the road ran flat and east, seven and a half miles to the seaside town of Cabcaben on Manila Bay. Along this stretch the marchers now began to encounter an increasing number of Japanese trucks, tanks, and horse-drawn artillery, all moving south to stage for the invasion of Corregidor.

Many of these trucks carried troops, and as these vehicles passed the columns of prisoners, Japanese soldiers would lean out with a bamboo staff or a length of wood or the butt end of a rifle and, like a polo player bearing down on a ball, swing their cudgels at the heads of the men marching along in the crowded ranks on the road.

They fractured a lot of skulls, smashed a number of jaws, dislocated scores of shoulders. Now and then a truck would swerve sharply toward a column, and the Japanese riding shotgun would throw his door open to catch a marcher flush in the face.

“Let's stay on the inside row in the column,” Humphrey O'Leary told his friend Phil Murray. “If we march on the other side, the Japs will bash us in the head.”
¹⁷

Here came a truckful of soldiers holding lengths of rope as long as whips, lashing laggers on the road. One whip caught a prisoner around the neck, and the Japanese in the truck started to reel him in as the truck kept going. The poor man was twisting this way and that, dragging through the cinders. About a hundred feet later he was finally able to free himself, and he got to his feet, clothes shredded, skin lanced and bleeding, and looked back down the road.

“You bastards!” he yelled after the truck. “I'll live to piss on your graves.”
¹⁸

 

A MILE
beyond the top of the zigzag, the columns of prisoners passed the entrance to one of the large American field hospitals, part of the headquarters and service area that had been tucked in the American rear. The Japanese had bombed and shelled the service area often during their second attack, fire that left the hospital in ashes. Now wandering among its charred ruins were scores of wounded Filipino soldiers who had been treated there. Many were still in their hospital pajamas or bathrobes, grimy now with dirt and soot. Their wounds and stumps were beginning to suppurate and their bloody bandages and dressings needed changing.

Major William “Ed” Dyess of Albany, Texas, an Air Corps pilot in the line of march, watched Japanese guards herd the sick and wounded Filipinos out of the hospital grounds and set them walking. To Dyess these “bomb-shocked cripples” had a look of “hopelessness in their eyes,” and they stumbled along stoop shouldered for more than a mile before “their strength ebbed and they began falling back through the marching ranks” and to the side of the road.
¹⁹