Tears in the Darkness (39 page)

The Japanese had been bombing and shelling Corregidor since late December. Many of the big guns on the tiny island fortress had been knocked out, but not all of them. And from deep in Malinta Tunnel, General Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur's successor, still led what was left of his command—scattered combat units in northern Luzon and in the southern Philippine islands. So General Masaharu Homma, eager to end the campaign, issued orders to reduce the fortress to rubble and “exterminate its garrison.
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On May 5, Homma sent two thousand
hohei
ashore. At that point the island's beach force of four thousand marines, sailors, and Filipino soldiers had been bombed and starved to the breaking point. They fought

the invaders fiercely, fought them for nearly a day After that, the Japanese landed tanks, and without the weapons to stop those armored cannon, American commanders knew the fight was finished.

More than a thousand wounded lay in the hospital lateral of Malinta Tunnel, and Wainwright, worried about flame-throwing infantry and tank cannon wreaking slaughter in the tunnel, radioed President Roosevelt that further resistance was pointless.

With broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame I report to Your Excellency that today I must arrange terms for the surrender of the fortified islands of Manila Bay . . . With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander.
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When word of Wainwright's decision reached MacArthur, the “hero” of Bataan—on April 1 in Australia he had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for “conspicuous leadership”—refused to meet with reporters. The next day, May 7, MacArthur's press aide issued a brief written statement from the general:

Corregidor needs no comment from me . . . I shall always seem to see the vision of its grim, gaunt, and ghostly men still unafraid.
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In Washington, the commander in chief seemed to understand something MacArthur did not: the Philippines command had always been expendable. Roosevelt radioed Wainwright that those who had stayed behind in “complete isolation” had turned “a desperate situation” into “a heroic stand.”

On May 6, 1942, the nine thousand Americans and two thousand Filipinos on the island also became prisoners of war, guests of the emperor.

 

TOWARD THE END
of April, O'Donnell's hospital was more a death house than an infirmary, a place for only the sickest of men, the terminal, the half dead. Its crude, unfinished huts, set up on stilts, formed a quadrangle in the northeast corner of the camp—five wards, long open buildings of wood and bamboo. No beds, furniture, blankets, pillows, or sheets. Patients lay shoulder to shoulder in rows on the rough, hard plank floor.

The surgeons, physicians, and medics who tended the hospital's eight hundred patients had few supplies and almost no medicine, only a trickle of pills and patent cures from the Japanese (a bit of quinine, sulfa, iodine, and slaked lime for sanitation) plus what they had carried into camp from the field hospitals on Bataan—adhesive tape, gauze, plain old aspirin.

Roughly a third of the patients suffered from malaria. Doctors, pooling the quinine on hand, calculated they had only a quarter of a tablet per patient. Not even a palliative. So rather than “waste the drug,” as one of them put it, they decided to practice pharmaceutical triage. Only patients with a chance of survival or remission were given a dose. And when the potential survivors outnumbered the supply, doctors staged a quinine lottery to see who might get lucky and live.
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Most of the hospital's other patients had dysentery, O'Donnell's black plague. And the worst of these were gathered together in one building, “Zero Ward.”

Zero Ward patients had long since stripped off their clothing and now lay naked on the hardwood floor in pools of filth. Without soap or water to bathe the patients or scrub the ward, medics could do little to improve the place. They tried to trowel the filth out the door, then spread lime to mitigate the stench, but the lime splashed on men with open sores, and their screams soon made the medics stop.

In the end, the patients of Zero Ward just lay there, waiting to die, two long rows of living skeletons side by side along each wall from one end of the ward to the other, half conscious, most of them. The flies found them, of course, and it wasn't long before maggots were spotted in their mouths, ears, and noses. Then the ants arrived.

Army Captain Merle Musselman, a doctor from Nebraska City, attended Zero Ward during the late April rains when a leaky hospital roof left the patients wet and shivering. At night, seeking warmth, they would “worm together across the floor in an unconscious effort to share body heat.” And in the mornings when Musselman and his colleagues entered the ward, the doctors would come upon “a large mass of intertwined bodies,” the living snuggled up to the dead.
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HIS MALARIA WAS SO BAD
he could barely get to his feet, so Humphrey O'Leary found himself on his way to Zero Ward.

The ward was full when they carried him in, and since he looked half gone, they took him back out again and laid him on the ground in the
crawl space beneath the building, among four other hopeless cases. In the morning when he awoke, he was cold, very cold. One of the men lying beside him was holding his hand, and the man was dead.

Since he'd survived the night, the medics gave him a spot on the ward floor. At least he was off the wet ground. That morning, a man he knew well, Bill Young from Manila, was also brought into the ward. Bill was in bad shape too, worse than Humphrey. His back was covered with suppurating sores and the ulcers were infested with maggots.

“You guys have got to clean this man up!” O'Leary shouted.

“We're too busy for that,” one of the medics said. “Besides he's—”

“Just give me the stuff,” O'Leary said. “I'll do it.”

With a basin and some filthy rags, O'Leary did the best he could. His friend seemed to revive a bit, then around noon, Young became delirious. O'Leary yelled for the medics again. The medics called for a priest.

“What's the matter here?” Army chaplain William Cummings said when he arrived.

“Father, this man is really delirious,” O'Leary said. “You better give him extreme unction.”

The priest anointed the dying man and turned to O'Leary.

“I'd better give you last rites, too,” he said.

“Shit, Father! I look that bad?”

“Yeah, soldier, you do.”

That afternoon Humphrey O'Leary happened to catch the glance of the man lying against the opposite wall. The man was staring at him, giving him the eye. Probably trying to put a name with a face, O'Leary guessed.

“I know you?” O'Leary asked.

“No,” the man answered. “I'm looking at your boots,” cavalry boots O'Leary found on the side of the road during the march.

“What about my boots?”

“When you die,” the man said, “I'm gonna pick them up.”

“Fuck you, you son of a bitch,” O'Leary said.

He grabbed his boots and wedged them between his head and the wall behind him. He hardly slept that night, watching his property, a waste of time, as it turned out. The next morning the vulture was dead.

“Goddamn,” O'Leary thought. “Now I feel sorry for the son of a bitch.”
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IN SHORT ORDER
the ground beneath Zero Ward became the camp's de facto morgue, the place where they stacked the bodies for burial.

At first the numbers were modest, four Americans dead one day, three the next, nine a few days later. Then on April 28, twenty-two Americans died; on May 11, thirty-two; on May 19, forty-three. The Japanese wanted to cremate the bodies but agreed to the Western custom of burial. Now, with a death rate between twenty-five and fifty a day, the camp required standing burial details, one group to dig the graves, another to bear the bodies to the cemetery. Barracks chiefs picked men at random for this work, but most of the men on the burial details were volunteers.
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They were burying friends, many of them, and they reckoned that if it came to it, they too would want to be put in the ground by those who'd known them, those they could count on to carry their memory, whisper their good name.

Many signed up for the grim duty day after day. Like the Samaritans who shared their food and water, the gravediggers and pallbearers were also trying to hold on to their humanity. For them the will to live sprang from impulse rather than instinct, the impulse to be human and do human things—tend the ill, inter the dead.
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The burial parties formed up after dawn. The gravediggers collected their tools (old spades and makeshift shovels fashioned from truck parts and discarded metal) and headed up a rise to the American cemetery, a flat piece of ground outside the main camp, some eight hundred yards from Zero Ward. The pallbearers, meanwhile, gathered with a graves registration officer in front of the morgue and began to bring out the bodies.

Grizzly work, collecting those corpses. Many had lain around the compound for days before they were hauled to the morgue, and in the tropical heat these derelicts had started to decompose. To Army medic Sidney Stewart, they were “no longer recognizable as the bodies of men,” just “yellow balloon-like forms,” stacked in the dirt, some with their limbs frozen at grotesque angles. The “horrible smell” of these “shrunken skeletons . . . hung in the air” and “clung to the ground” like a “thick, pungent gas.” It stung the nostrils and made the eyes water. Grabbing a limb to pull on a body, a pallbearer might come away with a sleeve of skin and a month's nightmares.
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Irwin Scott noticed that a few of the dead lay facedown, one arm outstretched, one knee drawn up as if they had crept to the morgue to die.

“I swear to God,” he thought, “they crawled under that building to save us the trouble of having to carry and drag them there.”
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The bodies were put on litters fashioned from wooden doors and shutters or blankets strung between bamboo poles. Many had no dog tags, and the graves registration officer, Captain A. L. Fullerton, did his best to identify and make a record of each body and the plot of ground where it was to be interred. Then four men would pick up the litter and join the line of other bearers, and the silent procession, in the company of a guard, would pass through the camp fence behind the hospital, down a slight incline, and work its way slowly along a streambed toward the cemetery.

The graves were six feet wide, ten to twenty-five feet long, and three to four feet deep, communal graves for five, ten, fifteen men and more. After several days of rain, the water table would rise and the holes would be half full of liquid mud. By the end of May, the burial parties had to weigh the bodies down with stones to keep them from floating up before the diggers could cover them.

The first burial parties treated their dead comrades with tenderness and respect. They lowered them carefully into the holes, laid them respectfully side by side. Later, as the death rate rose—in May, the diggers seemed to be burying men from dawn to dusk—the burial parties tossed the bodies into the holes as if they were piling up firewood, one recumbent form pitched on top of another. At first Richard Gordon, a regular on the detail, was horrified by the “crack” of skull hitting skull, but by his third time out he too was tossing corpses and turning quickly away.

 

JOHNNY ALDRICH
volunteered for the burial detail almost every day. He wanted to keep busy. Men who didn't, he'd observed, seemed to just “lay down and die.”
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Aldrich grew up a Catholic in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the fifth of thirteen children born to two bookkeepers. He left school after the eighth grade and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. He liked the job, the life—the barracks, the discipline, the company of men—and in 1940 enlisted in the army and was assigned to the Quartermaster Corps as a carpenter and electrician, then sent to the Philippines and stationed at Nichols Field.