Tears in the Darkness (44 page)

Pharmacist's mate Clarence Shearer, standing nearby, started to catalog their condition: “All very pitiful . . . suffering from Malaria, dysentery, beri-beri, pellagra, and general starvation . . . With [our] food issue [here at the hospital] scarcely more than sufficient to prevent starvations; with the supply of anti-dysentery and anti-malarial preparations meager and uncertain, it is going to prove extremely difficult to save the majority of these individuals.”
¹⁰

 

 

 

 

 

B
ILIBID PRISON
was a sprawling seventeen-acre quadrangle (a penitentiary the size of five city blocks) in the center of Manila on the north bank of the Pasig River. Behind its high stone walls, topped with barbed wire, were long one-story cell blocks and barred dormitories radiating out from a central rotunda and watchtower like spokes from the hub of a wheel. It was an ancient prison, built by the Spanish in 1865, and neither the Americans nor the government of the Philippine Commonwealth had maintained it. Most convicts were being transferred to a new jail in a suburb south of the city, and many of the crumbling cell blocks and ramshackle barracks were being used as temporary office and storage spaces for several departments of the Philippine government.

The Japanese quickly returned the place to a lockup. They used one part of the old adobe and concrete prison as an overnight staging center for prisoners in transit between the many forced labor sites in the islands. Another part of the prison housed disciplinary prisoners (so-called hard cases). A third part was given over to administrative offices and barracks for the Japanese guards. The rest of the old jail, roughly half the compound, was a central hospital for all prisoners of war in the islands, a place, putatively at least, where the sickest men could be sent to get well, which is to say, to keep from dying.

Patients and their doctors lived in nine of the cell blocks. They also occupied several L-shaped dormitories set in each corner of the compound. Once upon a time all the buildings had been whitewashed; now the façades were gray and ocher and streaked with soot and grime. The roofs leaked, most of the pipes and electrical fixtures had been purloined
by the locals, and almost everything else inside the crumbling prison was rusted and rotting or in disrepair.

Not long after surrender, the Japanese moved a group of American Army doctors into the derelict compound but, overwhelmed by the number of patients, the doctors mostly warehoused the sick instead of trying to treat them. Then in early July 1942, the Japanese brought in a group of Navy doctors and corpsmen led by Commander Lea B. “Pappy” Sartin and his chief of surgery, Lieutenant Commander Thomas H. Hayes. Sartin, now the senior man, took a look around at the “filthy and degrading hell hole” and immediately ordered his 26 doctors, 11 dentists, and 165 corpsmen, pharmacist's mates, and orderlies to scrub it down and effect repairs. The Navy men took inventory of the medicine and equipment they had been able to salvage from the places where they'd been captured, infirmaries in and around Manila and the hospital on Corregidor, then they established wards, treatment rooms, and a space for surgery.
¹

Pappy Sartin set down the rules, but Hayes was the hospital's real ramrod. A day or two after he arrived, he visited each ward to see what was waiting for him.

[
Hayes, “Notebook,” July 4, 1942
] A walk thru the length of the wards, each holding about eighty cadaverous animals that once were men, is one of the most desperate, heartrending sights conceivable . . . At best many must die. In this prison the war is not over.
²

Hayes was impatient and impolitic (“outspoken” and “aggressive” in official reports), but he was such a good doctor and medical administrator that he thrived at every post ashore or at sea. He grew up by the ocean, the Tidewater region of Virginia, and after graduating from George Washington University Medical School, he joined the Navy and was commissioned in 1924. By May 1941, he was a lieutenant commander, the chief surgeon at the U.S. Naval Hospital, Cañacao, Philippine islands, Cavite Naval Base, eight miles from the capital. On December 10, 1941, the first day of air raids that would soon destroy the base, Tom Hayes proved to be the right man at a critical moment. He kept three operating teams working continuously, treating more than 1,330 casualties, then, under fire, he helped organize the evacuation of the hospital and move the wounded to dispensaries in Manila. On December 22, as
the Japanese were coming ashore at Lingayen Gulf, Hayes was named chief surgeon to the 4th Marine Regiment, the unit defending the beaches of Corregidor. When the island fortress surrendered in May Hayes ordered his doctors and corpsmen to stuff their pockets with gauze, bandages, tape, bottles of medicine, surgical instruments, medical records, anything of medical utility they could take with them into prison camp. What was left they secreted under the blankets of the stretcher cases—supplies that made the hospital in Bilibid more than just another prison camp charnel house.
³

On July 28 Hayes happened to be in the prison yard as a long line of trucks pulled into the compound, a convoy carrying Dalton Russell, Louis Kolger, Irwin Scott, Preston Hubbard, Ken Calvit, Ben Steele, and a hundred and one other “heavy sick,” as they were labeled, human wrecks from the miserable jungle work detail at Tayabas Road.

I stood in that yard and just looked. All the bitterness and the hate that has kindled and built up in me in these past two months of captivity seemed to well up within me at that moment. At no one other moment in my life have I ever hated with the intensity of that moment. And then again I swore and vowed that I would never be satisfied nor content on earth until every vestige of Nippon was destroyed—until I have personally known the feel of ramming a bayonet into their guts, starving them, looting them of all they hold dear . . . Until I die, every one of them is my avowed eternal enemy. Goddamn 'em.
⁴

 

THE TRIP
from Tayabas Road had been long and rough, a day's travel across bad roads. When a truck hit a rut or pothole, the men in back would bounce and moan, and Ben Steele, delirious, would come to for a moment and think, “I'm all but dead.”

Now, in the prison yard, someone was slipping arms under him, lifting him up, setting him down on a stretcher.

How did he feel? one of his bearers asked. He would be okay now, they said. They'd take care of him.

They carried him across an open area and into a building. The first thing he thought was, “I have a roof over my head.”

They set the stretcher by a wall, spread a cotton pad on the concrete floor, rolled him onto it.

“How about some soup?” one of the corpsmen asked.

The soup tasted good.

“Thank you,” Ben Steele said. “Thank you.”

Then he began to weep.

 

HIS FALCIPARUM MALARIA
(the worst form of the disease) had turned the blood in his brain to sludge, and he was unconscious for long periods of time. His beriberi was advancing rapidly—his ankles were swollen to the size of melons and the edema had climbed up his legs and into his scrotum. The wound in his right foot that had given him blood poisoning was suppurating, and doctors thought they detected the first signs of gangrene. (During a moment of lucidity, he was sure he heard one of the them say, “You could lose that leg, you know? You hear, soldier?”) His lungs were gurgling and his temperature was spiking, sure signs of bronchial pneumonia. He still had dysentery, and he was jaundiced, a liver infection, doctors said.

Some days he knew he was alive, some days not. On one such day a priest appeared, Father William T. Cummings, a short, plucky Maryknoll brother who had served his order in the Philippines before the war and, after the Japanese attacked, had volunteered for service in the army.

Father Cummings opened his Mass kit, took out a prayer book, a rosary, a tin of holy oil. He dipped his thumb in the oil, made the sign of the cross on Ben Steele's eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.

“Through this holy anointing, may the Lord forgive you whatever sins you have committed . . . Amen.”

Ben Steele lay very still. His eyes were closed, his senses swimming, but he could hear the voice and he could recognize the prayer, the last rites. (Along the death march and later in Zero Ward at O'Donnell, he'd watched priests kneel at other men's sides and absolve them of their sins before death released them from their misery.) Now he felt neither joy nor fear, just sick, heavy sick, and tired.

“I'm ready,” he thought.

He survived the week. His edema got worse, though. He was hideously swollen now. Then he went into a coma again, and Cummings returned with his rosary and tin of holy oil.

“Okay, Ben,” the priest said, “why don't we try this again.”

The other men in the ward, watching all this, took Ben Steele's moaning and babbling as death throes. And after the priest left, a few of them crawled over to where Ben Steele lay and began to divvy up his
kit—his web belt, mess gear, canteen, and the crackers an orderly had set at his side.

The next morning Ben Steele was still breathing. The day after that he was able to sit propped up. Now he could look around a bit, get a sense of place, check his pitiful few belongings.

“You goddamn bastards!”

Where the hell was his gear?

“Give me my stuff back. Damn you guys. You wait till a man gets buried before you do that.”

 

TO THE MEN
who had been on the death march, then in O'Donnell, then on a grueling work detail, the gray stone walls of Bilibid Prison seemed warm and enfolding.

The doctors and orderlies, however, hated the place. The circumstances of their capture and early custody had not been nearly as harsh as that of the patients. Accustomed to the white, antiseptic chambers of a hospital, the navy men were appalled by the sooty squalor of Bilibid.

Every morning when he opened his eyes and was “confronted by four walls and faced with another dismal day as a prisoner of war,” Stanley Smith, a dentist from Sandwich, Illinois, felt the shock of confinement. To Smith and Tom Hayes and the other medicos, Bilibid was a Bastille, a melancholy tomb.
⁵

[
Hayes, “Notebook,” July 30
] All day rain. Raw damp & cold. Held a [leadership] council meeting tonight [with five senior doctors]. Things look a little desperate. Information from the outside plainly indicates [extra] food becoming almost unobtainable . . . There isn't a chance in a million of any Red Cross Relief ship or any thing of that kind . . . There is every reason to believe that as far as we are concerned, our country has scratched us off the list and charged us up to loss.
⁶

Every day at 6:00 a.m. the Japanese rang an old bell in one of the guard towers, summoning the men for
tenko,
roll call, and those who could walk stood formation outside their wards, while the invalids were counted where they lay. When the count was correct—and it always took the mistrustful guards many
bangō
(count-offs) to get the tally right—the bell would ring again, and everyone would return to quarters and wait there for breakfast. Around seven o'clock, one man from each ward
would go to the central galley and return with a five-gallon can of
lugao,
rice gruel, to distribute equally among patients, doctors, and staff. Then, around eight, the doctors would begin rounds, two or three doctors to a ward, wards crowded with eighty to a hundred men, some on pads on the concrete floor, others on old iron-and-spring cots or beds cobbled together from scraps of wood.

Here, for example, on a thin cotton pad on the concrete floor in Ward II, a dim prison dormitory, is Army Air Corps Private Benjamin C. Steele, serial number 190-18-989. The patient presents symptoms of multiple infectious diseases, indications of starvation, and an infected puncture wound of the right instep. His pulse is 110, irregular and thready; his blood pressure is 95/50 but difficult to hear because of extensive edema; he has a fever of 103°. He is often not oriented to time or place and must be forced to eat. His treatment protocol involves quinine for the malaria, carbasone and emetine and liquids for the dysentery, sulfa powder for the foot infection and incipient gangrene, and complete bed rest for his jaundice and pneumonia. A treatment plan with one notable omission: it did not address the most serious and easily
treated of Ben Steele's maladies, the one turning him into a fleshy elephantine grotesque, beriberi.

Diseases born of starvation respond to a simple cure; give a swollen or emaciated starveling the food he needs and his improvement will be marked and dramatic. That knowledge, that ancient and obvious medical certainty, left the prisoner-doctors of Bilibid frustrated and depressed. For want of a few vitamins and minerals, simple sustenance, men were dying. Every week a burial detail quarried fresh graves in the boneyard by the back wall. And in their early months in prison there was little that Pappy Sartin, Tom Hayes, or the other forty clinicians at Bilibid could do to stop the digging.