BILIBID 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.
“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.
[Hayes, “Notebook,” August 24] Our dysenteries and beriberis still die. We have improved the general mass of the sick but even at best, with our supplementary [food bought from merchants at the gate] we are not able to produce a planned ration. None of us will ever be really well.7
Beriberi is a disease of the nervous system and heart caused by a thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. There are two forms of the disease. Dry beriberi affects the nerves and the extremities, particularly feet and legs, and some of the men in Bilibid were in so much pain they could not walk or even stand. Wet beriberi weakens the heart, affecting circulation and blood pressure. Without thiamine, the body’s cells begin to break down and the walls of the arteries and veins grow so weak and porous they allow pints of fluid to leach into the surrounding tissue and body cavity, turning a man into a bloated hulk. The fluid in turn puts pressure on the body’s organs, and when they start to fail, death is sure to follow.
Ben Steele looked awful. The fluid in his body had pooled everywhere. The swelling that had started in his feet and spread to his ankles, legs, scrotum, and abdomen finally reached his chest and head. His body was so bloated (the term is “anasarca”), that his skin looked like the surface of an overinflated balloon—smooth, shiny, stretched hideously tight. Sometimes the liquid in his head would pool on one side of his face and he’d wake looking deformed, his eye sockets so swollen he’d have to hold an eye open with one hand so he could see to eat with the other hand.
Looking himself over, he thought he weighed three hundred pounds. He was so misshapen it was impossible for him to do anything but lie flat or sit propped up against the stone wall. There were many nights when he could hear the fluid sloshing around in his chest and he was afraid his heart would drown. Many days he was so sick he couldn’t eat, couldn’t do anything for himself, really, and since the corpsmen and orderlies were always too busy to tend an invalid properly, his doctor on Ward 11, Lieutenant Gordon K. Lambert, assigned an ambulatory patient in the ward—a man with his own troubles—to help him.
STEVE KRAMERICH was as crazy as ever. He came into Bilibid from Tayabas Road with severe cerebral malaria. The daily doses of quinine he was taking had done little so far to stop the amnesic spells and the bizarre behavior that had started on the rocks by the river. His doctors recognized his pathology right away. His comrades, meanwhile, thought him just plain loony.8
One day on Ward 11, for example, he spiked a fever of 105°, and the corpsmen dragged him into a cold shower to lower his temperature. He was addled and woozy, and as he stood in the shower stall watching the water circle the drain at his feet, he got the idea he was being sucked down into city’s sewer system. And he started to scream.
In the weeks that followed, he suffered one malarial delusion after another. One day he might be Jesus Christ standing in an open window, arms outstretched, shouting to heaven, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The next day he might see himself as a fallen angel exploring the precincts of hell. He was sure Bilibid was hades, he told his bunkmates, because the clock on the central guard tower, long since broken, of course, never changed time. “Forever and ever,” Steve Kramerich kept mumbling as he stared at the clock. “Forever and ever.”
For a while Dr. Lambert thought that intravenous quinine might stop Steve Kramerich’s delusions, but the man was still “nuttier than a fruitcake,” as his comrades liked to say, so Dr. Lambert took Steve into the compound for a stroll and a talking cure. Steve talked and Lambert took notes.
He was still seeing visions, he said, still hearing voices—the wards as circles of hell, the rain on the roof as a chorus of the damned. Then he accused the doctor of being Satan in disguise, said he was keeping him alive just to torture him.
The doctor had heard enough. “Soldier, you need a job,” he told Steve Kramerich, something to occupy the mind, and he ordered him to work as a corpsman’s assistant on Ward 11, work with one particular patient, empty the invalid’s bedpan, fetch the man’s food, chat with the poor fellow, a patient named Ben Steele.
[Hayes, “Notebook,” August 25] To gather round a lugao bucket and dip out your ration with a wooden stick, to drink from a hollowed-out coconut shell a watery slop made from a river weed and some tough gourds, to squat about a fire with some dozen practically naked comrades and beat mongo beans or boil a tenth run of coffee in a blackened tin can—you can’t do these things day in and day out, with nothing to look forward to tomorrow except this mud and heat and flies and stink, half-starved and yet not wanting the stuff that comes to fill the emptiness of your guts, you can’t do this and then snap back into a world that couldn’t ever believe that this could happen to us.9
Lunch was at noon, dinner at six, rice and rice, just like breakfast. The Japanese insisted they were supplying the prison with enough raw grain to yield two cups of cooked rice for each man every day, but the daily ration was usually less, closer to ten or twelve ounces. Other than carbohydrates, rice has few nutrients. Filler food, for the most part.
The prisoners got the worst grade of rice, the dregs of each shipment. The grains were often spoiled or moldy, each sack laced with worms, weevils, small rocks, dirt, rat droppings. Everything, of course, went in the pot. There were men who couldn’t stomach the worms. They’d sit hunched over their ration, meticulously culling them out, white worms about as long as a finger joint, with two tiny black spots near the head. Paul Reuter ate it all, the whole squiggling mush, but he always took a moment to flick off the worms on the surface. Just couldn’t look ’em in those two black eyes before they went down.
The rice tasted “moldy and musty,” “dirty and soggy,” “like raw dough,” “like wallpaper paste,” “like dishwater.” Some men found it so vile they had to “choke it down.” To others it tasted like nothing, a meal that left the American palate sour and unsatisfied. Still, they ate every ounce. Especially the men from O’Donnell and work details. They licked their cups clean, then checked in the dirt at their feet for any grains that might have dropped there.
Twice a day the cooks served soup, which is to say hot water with a bit of meat (“a sliver,” “a ribbon,” “a thread”) or a tiny piece of fish (always rotten) and a “vegetable,” usually worthless thistle, muddy water lilies from the nearby Pasig River, or other weeds of unknown origin. Almost every day the men found scraps of garbage in the soup, the tops of carrots or camotes or radishes, refuse from a restaurant or Japanese army mess.
Pappy Sartin and his doctors tried to supplement this subsistence ration with extra food from local merchants. (The doctors pooled the little money they’d smuggled into prison with the $10 to $12 a month the enemy paid them for “working” in the hospital.) Some of this fund went to set up a special diet kitchen for the heavy sick that procured foods high in protein or other nutrients—peanuts, duck eggs, most of all, mongo beans. Mongo beans, about the size of small lentils, were cheap, ubiquitous, high in thiamine. Some men ate them raw or stewed or let them soak in a wet towel to sprout, then boiled them and served them over rice. Every ward had a mongo bean garden, tins and jars and buckets growing the beans.
[Hayes, “Notebook”] This mongo bean is a life saver to us and as long as we can get them we can stomach the rice and eat a sustaining quantity as well as acquire a vitamin intake of which we are so much in need. We buy these beans at 45 centavos a cup (canteen), about one centavo’s worth [in prewar prices]. But they go a long ways and so long as I live I will always attribute my survival to this lowly bean.10
Everyone was hungry all the time. Men picked through the garbage outside the galley for scraps—scraps of scraps, really. They chased after the dogs, cats, snakes, and rats that wandered into the compound. The Catholic chaplains had contacts outside the walls who from time to time would smuggle in peanuts and chunks of crude horse sugar, and for a while an unusual number of Bilibid’s patients expressed an interest in converting to the Church of Rome. “Son,” Father John E. Duffy told a would-be catechumen, “you don’t want to be a Catholic. You’re just hungry.”11
They dreamed about food, dwelt on it night and day. Men formed “food clubs” to trade recipes—Brandy Pottage, Virginia Brunswick Stew, French Apple Pie—or talked about their favorite restaurants.12
“Prison life goes on,” Tom Hayes often wrote. “Mongo [beans] night & morning, lugao, dry rice, & watery soup . . . days of scratching for existence, groups gathered about open fires with improvised utensils fashioned from tin cans, gasoline tins, pieces of wire, parts of galvanized roofing, cooking up odd concoctions of all possible edible combinations of anything edible and available . . . At night one lies courting sleep and looks at the reflection on the stony floors of the cold black bars that stand between us and the moon.”13
BY NOVEMBER 1942, Ben Steele was doing better. He was still sick with malaria, beriberi, dysentery, and jaundice, but after three months in Bilibid he seemed on the mend. The spike of protein in a duck egg Dr. Lambert had given him had activated his kidneys, and the terrible swelling that had distorted his body had slowed. He was still an invalid, but against all odds and his doctors’ expectations, he had survived. As they say in Montana, he’d been near enough to hell to smell the smoke and was happier than a kid pulling on a dog’s ears, just to be breathing.
Meanwhile, he’d made a new friend, a landsman, or as close to one as Ben Steele would find in Bilibid, a man named Merrill Lee. Raised on a ranch in Lincoln County, Nevada, Lee too had been a working cowboy. A double hernia had landed him in Bilibid’s hospital, and since the Air Corps had trained him as a cook, the doctors put him to work in Bilibid’s galley. It was a good job—the cooks always looked suspiciously healthier than the rest of the prison’s company—and Merrill Lee was hoping to finish the war in Bilibid, whenever the war was going to finish.
The two men met by chance. Lee had gone to Ward 11 in search of a doctor, and glancing around the room, his eye happened to fall on one of the patients. The man was swollen with wet beriberi, and he was lying next to a filthy old mattress, scratching lines on the floor with a chunk of charcoal.
Lee, curious, wandered over to take a look, and there, taking shape on the floor, was the drawing of a cowboy—the broad-brimmed hat, the boots, the bowed legs, a corral, a snubbing post, two horses.
“Damn!” Lee said to himself. “That’s my life.”
“Hey there, I’m Merrill Lee.”
The man on the floor looked up. “Oh yeah, I’m Ben Steele.”
“Where you from, Ben Steele?”
“Montana, out the Bull Mountains way, north of Billings.”
“Well, I’m from Panaca, Nevada, Lincoln County. And what you’re drawing there, that was my life. That’s what I’m living for, to get back to that kind of life.”
It was like two men meeting on the open range, two solitary horsemen coming upon each other in the middle of nowhere after days or weeks riding the benches and badlands and waves of buffalo grass alone.
“What kind of outfit you got?” Merrill Lee asked.
“Well,” Ben Steele said, “the Old Man used to run about three hundred head on six sections.”
“Funny thing,” Lee said. “I was up in Montana working in Yellowstone Park just before the war.”
“By God, that’s just down the road,” Ben Steele said.
Nearly every day thereafter, Merrill Lee visited Ward 11. And every day he brought Ben Steele a canteen cup brimming with stewed mongo beans and a nice crust of burned rice as a side dish.
Lee would sit down on the mattress while Ben finished the snack, then he’d watch Ben draw, watch him for hours and hours, day after day. Sometimes, in the torpor of a tropical afternoon, Merrill Lee would get drowsy, and he would lie back on Ben Steele’s mattress and shut his eyes and lose himself among the sorrels and bays, corrals and snubbing posts.
BEN STEELE’S LIFE as an artist began in the dark interstices of his disease, the periods of waking rest when he was left to lie on an old and moldy mattress on the concrete floor of Ward 11. He’d never felt so helpless, useless, and low. Propped up slightly against a gray adobe wall, he spent most of the day staring at his bloated limbs and balloon of a body.
The more he took stock of himself, the mound of flesh he’d become, the more he thought about his life, the life he’d lived at Hawk Creek and in Billings. He kept drifting back to that day in the studio when the great Will James invited him in and started drawing. He knew that James was largely self-taught, and as he lay on the thin mattress on the floor day after day, Ben Steele wondered whether he too had the talent to make magic. After a while, he could imagine himself drawing, and he started drawing horses in his head. Then, sometime in early November, when he began to lose some of his aqueous bulk, he dragged himself across the floor to the ward’s stove and grabbed a burned stick from the woodpile and started to scratch on the concrete floor.
His scratches didn’t look like much at first, just rough black lines on the gray concrete. This drawing business was difficult, more to it than he’d thought. “I have to make something that looks like something,” he told himself. Finally, after weeks of scratching, a memory started to take shape—a horse straining against a halter in a corral.
Every day after that, after bangō and breakfast, he would settle down to draw. His new friend Merrill Lee started bringing him paper, old government record sheets the cooks were using as kindling for their fires. Some of his bunkmates brought him pencil stubs and twigs of charcoal. He drew in the morning, he drew in the afternoon, he drew under the yellow lights. Horses, cows, sheep, ranch buildings, his beloved hills at Hawk Creek. He sketched the contours of the land, the prairie architecture, the animals and objects of his youth, but since he knew nothing of the geometry of composition, his renderings were all surface, pictures on one plane with animals and men that looked more like cutouts, paper dolls, than the animated figures he’d watched Will James create.
One day, one of the prisoners who occasionally wandered over to watch (the “artist” from Montana had become something of an attraction) started going on about “angles” and “edges” and “lines of convergence.” Ben Steele asked the man what he was talking about. “Perspective,” the man said. He was an engineer, and like all engineers he’d been trained as a draftsman. Every sketch, he said, needed depth and distance, and the way to create the feeling of depth was to find a drawing’s “vanishing point.”
Okay, vanishing point. What was that?
By mid-December Ben Steele was able to stand and take a few steps. Pretty soon he could make his way across the compound to the ward where the engineers slept. Every few days he took another lesson in “picture planes” and “eye level.” His teachers were patient. They explained that all the lines in a sketch should run to a point of convergence, the point where the lines vanish from sight. Vanishing point, they told him, was the secret to creating perspective, and perspective was the magic he was looking for.
He practiced every day. One day, sitting cross-legged on his new bunk, a sleeping platform fashioned from scraps of wood, he decided to draw the interior of Ward 11. The ward was an L-shaped building with plenty of angles and vanishing points. He drew them all, every pillar, crossbeam, joist, rafter, and brace. And afterward, sitting back and looking at what he’d wrought, he thought, “Hell, everything worked! Worked beautifully.” It was like, well, “a revelation.”
He kept at it, one sketch after another, convinced that it was art (along with a timely duck egg, many cups of mongo beans, and doses of quinine, carbasone, emetine, and sulfa powder) that had saved him. Here, he thought, was “a way to put all this other misery aside.” All he had to do was take up a pencil and start to draw, draw his way around his disease, past the guards, over the wall, and across an ocean home.
[Hayes, “Notebook,” December 6] Some lousy rumors got abroad today—of no value whatsoever. Usual hooey . . . They are the same rumors [we] have heard a dozen times before, and each time proven childish banter. But each time hope springs in the human breast that “this time, it may be right.”14
“The hope of ultimate release” is “part of the will to live,” wrote Terrence Des Pres, a chronicler of survival. And every day in Bilibid, every single day, this particular hope got a boost from rumor.15
Every prison, barbed-wire pen, and work site in the islands had a rumor mill. The grist for these grinders came from any number of radios hidden in Filipino homes and tuned either to KGEI in San Francisco or other distant English-language stations. Civilians with news would throw messages wrapped around rocks over Bilibid’s outer wall. Merchants allowed to trade with the prisoners, Filipino clergy visiting Bilibid, and other interlopers also passed along the latest bruit and buzz. Occasionally this “news” had some truth to it, but the mongers in Bilibid who purveyed scuttlebutt could not resist the temptation to embellish it. Many men, desperate for the least bit of light, hung on every word of this nonsense. Tom Hayes, Bilibid’s resident cynic, listened and laughed.
The dope is “Big things to happen in Luzon in a matter of hours,” implying arrival of an American Force. Of course that is plain unadulterated hooey . . . To bed before I begin to think.
Scuttlebutt began to flow about hearing bombings about midnight last night . . . If the [rumors] keep on as they have in the past few days they will have MacArthur calling up from the Manila Hotel and inviting us to lunch in about a week.
The last wild rumor of the day comes in that Wall Street bets 2 to 1 the war will end in November, Lloyd[’s of London] bets 29 to 1 it will end in December.
Gobs of rumors . . . Formosa has fallen and Hirohito is asking Roosevelt to permit Tokyo to be an open city. My! My! [Or] Hirohito has requested that Roosevelt keep Tokyo an open city and Roosevelt is supposed to have replied “Get out of Manila.”16
Just beyond their ken, of course, the actualities of war were playing out across two oceans. For the first six months of 1942, the Tripartite Pact countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan, the so-called Axis powers, had pushed the Allies, the Americans, British, French, and Dutch, off their colonial possessions and out of their overseas bases. Allied losses were heavy: 894 ships sunk and more than 192,600 American, British, and Dutch soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen captured (along with at least another 100,000 native troops under their command).
Then, in May, as General Wainwright was surrendering to the Japanese on Corregidor, the American Navy, steaming in the waters between Australia and New Guinea, won a strategic victory at the battle of the Coral Sea, the first serious challenge to Japanese advances in the Pacific. In Europe, meanwhile, the British increased their air raids over Germany, and a thousand Royal Air Force bombers raided Cologne.
In June, Germany and the Axis rolled over the British in North Africa, but in the Pacific at the sea battle of Midway, a tiny atoll held by the Americans, the American Pacific Fleet sank four Japanese aircraft carriers in a dramatic victory.
The next month the Japanese consolidated their position on New Guinea, but again the Americans were able to mount an offensive and bomb Japanese possessions in the Solomon Islands, including Guadalcanal.
In August, the Allies suffered a setback as six thousand British and Canadian troops tried to conduct a surprise raid on Dieppe in occupied France; half were slaughtered and the survivors were lucky to escape. Meanwhile, U.S. Marines in the Pacific landed on Guadalcanal, built an airfield, and held it.
The year ended with the Japanese being beaten and pushed back in the South Pacific. On New Guinea and Guadalcanal, hohei fell in great numbers.
[Hayes, “Notebook,” January 2, 1943]. Thirty eight Jap bombers went over today. Couldn’t tell from our site, of course, whether they were coming in or going out. Probably for the south. Cold in the early mornings now. We stand bango long before day break . . . I am reminded that this is 1943, and as I recall, the year Mr. Churchill had decided upon as when Britain would make her offensive.
The greens, the water lilies and pechay [Chinese cabbage] are still shoveled out of a truck on delivery to our galley. And they still stink and are cluttered and mixed with egg shells and other debris that plainly tell its source as being some slop chute or hotel garbage barrel. It makes no difference if we refer to it as “greens in the garbage” or “garbage in the greens” it is still garbage, but they are still greens—and we eat it.17
They had been prisoners of war, most of them, for more than half a year now, and like all convicts across time, they had come to accept what Dostoevsky called the “drab, sour and sullen aspect” of life behind bars and barbed wire. They lived on hope because hope was all they had. And they sat around all day speculating about the date of their deliverance and composing anapestic epigrams to cheer themselves.18
We’ll be free in ’43
Mother’s door in ’44
Men lost hope, of course. In the squalor of prison life and throes of disease, a number of the sick just gave up. Irwin Scott could see it in their eyes, “dull eyes,” he and other patients used to call it, eyes that went “blank.”19
“It’s like you can look right through them,” Scotty thought, “and you know they are going to die.”
So Scott and some of his comrades tried to cheer the cheerless, sit and talk with them, tell them anything—MacArthur has landed on Mindanao and will be in Manila in a week!—“all kinds of lies” just to get their comrades to continue. All the talk “seldom did a damn bit of good,” however. Once a man had lost his will to live, he usually surrendered his life. “Three days,” Scott discovered. “Every damn one of them dies in three days.”
Friends never let friends die alone. Steve Kramerich’s Air Corps buddy Kenny O’Donald was debilitated by dysentery and could not shake the disease. And when O’Donald died in the Isolation Ward, Kramerich was sitting at his side.
“He looks like a hide stretched over a skeleton,” Steve Kramerich thought. “If his mother and father could see him, they would never stop crying.”20
SOMETIMES camaraderie is based on compassion, one man seeing his suffering, or abject loneliness, in another.
Zoeth Skinner struck up a friendship with Bobby Robinson, an aging civilian who had been in the Philippines most of his adult life and was a patient with Skinner on Ward 1. Robinson had served during the Spanish-American War and had stayed in the islands, working as the manager at one of Manila’s most famous gin mills, the Legaspi Landing. By 1941 he’d survived two Filipina wives, married a third, and had a handful of children of various ages. Despite nearing his dotage (some of the men guessed he was going on seventy), he reenlisted at the beginning of the war, reassumed his old rank as a first sergeant in the 31st Infantry, fought in the battle for Bataan, and made the march off the peninsula, the sixty-six-mile trek that killed men a third his age.21
Skinner liked and admired Robinson; with his gray grizzle and rimless eyeglasses, he looked somehow wise, authentic. Both men were classified as convalescents and had been assigned to light work sorting POW mail at Japanese headquarters. The headquarters was two blocks from the prison, and every morning, as the two walked the route with a guard, they saw Robinson’s third wife standing at the curb outside the front gate, holding his youngest child high for him to see. Robinson always stopped to look before moving on, and every morning, Zoeth Skinner noticed steam on the old man’s glasses and tears rolling down the old man’s cheeks.
FOR MONTHS “the laity” as Tom Hayes liked to call the men on the wards, had been awaiting the arrival of mail from home and food packages from the International Red Cross. Patients working the docks (convalescents strong enough to do manual labor were drafted as stevedores) reported unloading pallets of cartons marked with the Red Cross logo and labeled “Prisoners Parcel” or “For American Prisoners of War.” So where, the men wondered, had those packages got tor
Every occupying army has profited while doing its “duty,” and some of the Americans in Bilibid knew that a certain amount of these “relief supplies” were going to end up in the pockets of Japanese soldiers or as goods on the local black market. And sure enough, in the early winter of 1942 some of the guards were seen smoking American cigarettes.
“It will be very interesting to see how much of [the shipment] we get,” Hayes wrote in his secret notebooks. “Entire cases are taken by the guards at the pier and of course, every agency handling them gets their cut.”22
Finally, a week after Christmas 1942, the eleven-pound boxes, along with some mail and medical supplies and vitamins, were distributed to the various work sites and prisoner of war pens throughout the islands, and since Bilibid was so close to the docks, the prisoners in the hospital were among the first to get the boxes.
Ben Steele was excited, the whole ward was, guys ripping open their packages, laughing and joking and spreading the contents on their bunks:
Biscuits, lunch, type C |
8 oz. pkg. |
Cheese |
8 oz. pkg. |
Chocolate, ration D |
two 4 oz. bars. |
Cigarettes, pkg. 20’s |
4 packs |
Coffee concentrate |
4 oz. tin |
Corned Beef |
12 oz. tin |
Fruit, dried |
15 oz. pkg. |
Liver paste |
6 oz. tin |
Milk, whole, powdered |
1 lb. tin |
Oleomargarine |
1 lb. tin |
Orange concentrate |
4 oz. tin |
Pork luncheon meat |
12 oz. tin |
Salmon |
8 oz. tin |
Soap two |
2 oz. bars |
Sugar |
8 oz. pkg.23 |
Ben Steele grabbed a chocolate bar. He peeled the wrapper from the end, bit off a corner, and let the candy slowly roll around in his mouth. (Save the rest of the bar, he told himself. No telling when, or if, they’d get another package.)
Then he eyed the margarine. How long had it been since he’d tasted butter? He stuck his finger in the can, smeared a gob on a cracker. God, was that good!
Around him guys were swapping for their favorites.
“Anyone want to trade butter for some coffee?” Ben Steele asked.
And right away he had a taker.
“How about cigarettes?” he asked, “I’m giving cigarettes for spam.”
Everyone knew that these few supplies would not last long. With some prudent self-rationing, they might stretch the contents several weeks and augment their regular daily ration, but after a month or so they would be right back to their cups of verminous rice, spoiled fish, vegetable peelings, and a handful of peanuts in the cup of sewer water they called soup.
Still, Ben Steele was happy. There were plenty of prisoners, Tom Hayes among them, who thought Bilibid a hell on earth, a place of “doubt, depression, disappointment, diversified disease, hunger, hate, heat, pestilence, poor prospects [and] pauperized prisoners.”24
Not Ben Steele. He didn’t mind the dank adobe and dim barracks, the foul emanations of his bedfellows, the clock whose hands never moved. He was doing all right. Most of his swelling was gone. The rest was just a matter of time. He was still weak, still sick, and he was hungry all the time—who the hell wasn’t?—but, on balance, he thought, “Bilibid is the best damn prison I’ve been in so far.” Roof over his head, wooden bunk, guards more annoying than anything else. And the doctors, the doctors had brought him back to life. Dr. Lambert still stopped by to check on him, chat with him. Kind of like a father. (“I think I will always worship that man,” he told himself.) All he had to do was get better, then live day to day until the day the war was over. Wait, that was the thing, just wait.25
ONE AFTERNOON in February 1943, Ben Steele was crossing the inner compound on his way to the galley to see Merrill Lee. For more than a month he’d been feeling well enough to get around and had slowly been exploring the half of the prison that served as the hospital. He’d visited a couple of the Air Corps men in other wards, taken a look at the prison store (such as it was with its handful of items—horse sugar, bananas, and a few peanuts—that no one could afford), looked in the library, and taken general stock of his surroundings. Around the corner from his ward, he noticed a rusty metal door in one of the prison’s interior dividing walls. The portal was painted orange, and it appeared to lead to another section of Bilibid. On this particular day, passing by that door, he heard screams coming from the other side, the kind of screams made by men who are being beaten.
“What the hell’s going on over there?” he asked Merrill Lee, when he got to the galley.
“That,” Merrill Lee said, “is where they keep the special prisoners.”
ON THE ISLAND OP PALAWAN, a long, narrow strip of land between the Sulu and South China seas, on the night of Tuesday, February 2, 1943, Don Schloat, a tall, lean twenty-one-year-old Army medic from Los Angeles, waited until his fellow prisoners had fallen asleep, then slipped out of his barracks, scaled two high barbed-wire fences, and scampered down an embankment between some palms and through the undergrowth toward the beach below to begin an escape.26
His partner, a man he knew only as Hanson, was right behind him in the drizzle and mist. It was roughly one in the morning, they guessed, which would give them about five hours of darkness to get as far as possible from the airstrip work camp.
They walked north along the shore, keeping an eye on the sea and sky, and when the first glow of light revealed the horizon, they headed inland to find a spot to hole up the rest of the day.
Their hiding place was a tangle of roots, hanging vines, and dangling branches in a mangrove swamp. After a while, from somewhere outside the tangle, they heard a commotion, a kind of clatter! Monkeys, they thought. A short time later, they heard another noise. Sounded like the door of an automobile slamming shut. Then they heard barking. They thought about abandoning their hiding spot, changed their minds, watched and waited.
Schloat was sure that by now the guards back at camp would have held bangō and discovered them missing and sent out search parties.
Suddenly, from somewhere very close, they heard a voice, a flat, matter-of-fact voice.
“What will you do?” it said.
Through the tangle they could see a man in uniform, and he was pointing a small silver-plated pistol at them. The man was Kempei Tai, the Japanese secret military police.
“What will you do?”
Schloat and Hanson had agreed they would never be taken alive. They’d both seen fellow prisoners beaten almost to death for making escape plans, and they knew the enemy’s standing order: Anyone caught trying to escape would be executed.
Hanson jumped to his feet.
“Don’t shoot,” he yelled, raising his hands high above his head. “Don’t shoot. We surrender.”
The Kempei Tai man motioned them forward, and as they stepped over the vines and roots and out of the tangled grove, they saw that the policeman had company, Negritos, Philippine bushmen the Japanese used as trackers, standing nearby with long spears.
Maybe it was his experience as a medic, someone who’d watched how other men handled pain, or maybe it was his sense of self-possession, the staunch Presbyterianism of his youth. Whatever the case, Don Schloat guessed what was coming and started to gird himself.
He thought, “You’re going to be punished terribly. Whatever happens now, eventually you’re going to be killed, executed, decapitated. So don’t allow yourself any hope. Don’t allow yourself fear. Be numb, completely numb.”
The Kempei Tai man had brought an interpreter. The interpreter was holding a bokutō, a wooden practice sword the Japanese used as a punishment stick, and he rushed the two prisoners and started to beat them on the shins.
The prisoners were put in a truck and hauled to Puerto Princesa and headquarters, a two-story cement building with cells in the basement. “Looks like a fortress,” Schloat thought.
Guards separated and questioned them. “Where were you going? Who else was involved? Why did you want to escape?”
Between questions, the prisoners were beaten.
“Bide with the blows,” Schloat told himself. “Feel nothing.”
They beat him across the day and through the night and into the next day. Then they told him, “Tomorrow morning you will be beheaded in front of your people.”
Instead, they denied him food and water, deprived him of sleep, gave him another beating.
“Don’t faint,” he thought. “Don’t let yourself get hungry. Don’t let yourself feel pain. Don’t let yourself hope.”
But it was hard not to hope, for his reason kept getting in his way. He reasoned that every day he survived, he made his death less valuable as an object lesson for his fellow prisoners. If the Japanese were going to kill him, he thought, they’d have killed him straightaway, walked him into the compound, made him kneel in front of his comrades, and left his head rolling in the dirt.
They asked him to sign a confession, a document written in kanji. He signed. Who cared? If they were going to kill him, they were going to kill him anyway.
A month passed, another month. Off and on, a Filipino or two would be thrown into jail with him. One had a mirror, and Schloat was shocked to see himself: his hair was falling out and his scalp and face were so white his blue eyes seemed to glow against his cretaceous skin. He had a full beard too, and it was bright red. He looked bizarre, he thought, a haggard albino in a crimson frame.
Finally, in late April 1943, nearly ninety days after he went over the wire, he was told that he and Hanson were being taken to Manila to be court-martialed.
The hearing was quick, the verdict reached in minutes. Hanson was given four years in jail, Schloat five. Sentences to begin immediately in Bilibid Prison, the section for special prisoners.
THEIR “CELL” was a wooden box, one of ten such boxes, or enclosed rooms, that had been built inside a regular adobe cell block, a kind of box within a box. This particular chamber was roughly ten feet wide, thirty feet long, and twelve feet high, a long narrow I of a room. At one end was a short barred door, four and a half feet high and two feet wide. On either side of the door was a small observation window for the guards. The floors, walls, and ceiling were polished mahogany, Schloat guessed, beautifully joined and fitted. At the rear of the room were two traps cut into the floor; beneath one was a drain, beneath the other a shallow tin box the prisoners used as latrine. Overhead a single naked lightbulb burned day and night. The room was otherwise bare, save for the prisoners, ten in this case, all escapees.
Their hair and beards were clipped short, and they were issued baggy gray shorts and a plain blue cotton jacket and trousers with coconut-shell buttons. They were to wear the blue uniform only for morning and evening bangō, which took place at the far end of the room, standing at attention. (Gohyaku yonjū ichi, Schloat would shout, “five hundred and forty-one,” his prisoner number.) At all other times they were to wear only their shorts.
From seven in the morning to nine at night, all day every day, they were made to sit and face the wall. Just sit.
A Japanese-Filipino guard, a slob of a turnkey the prisoners called “Mister-Big-Number-Three,” read them the rules:
You are not to talk to each other.
You cannot lean against the wall.
You must sit on opposite ends of the room with your backs to each other while facing the wall.
You must not look up at this door or window.
While sitting, you must not put your hands on the floor to rest.
You can sit [with] your knees [up] or cross-legged. In any other position you are breaking camp rules.
Whatever you do, you must always face the wall.
And you must never talk!
Breaking any of these rules invited a slap in the face, a cuff on the ear, a punch, but these beatings were nothing compared to the real torture, the real punishment that was taking place in the special prisoners section of Bilibid Prison, brute boredom.
“You must always face the wall . . . You must never talk!”
Five prisoners facing one wall, five the other, their arms folded and resting on their knees. Ten men, sitting all day, staring at a blank wall.
DON SCHLOAT wondered, naturally, why he was still alive.
At every prison and work camp in the Philippines, the Japanese had warned their captives that if they were caught trying to escape they’d be shot or beheaded. Don Schloat had lived in the shadow of that falling sword since the morning he and Hanson had been caught in the mangrove swamp. Why had the Japanese spared them? Why had the enemy spared any of the other special prisoners? And what were they sparing them for? For this? Sitting all day in front of a blank wall?
“How long can I sit here?” Schloat wondered. “Just sit and wait. How long is this going to go on?”
The more he asked the question, the more time became his torturer, present time, the moment that never passes. It is “the now that is agonizingly slow,” he discovered. “How many heartbeats are there in an hour? Must I count them all?”
At first he thought he might escape “the interminable present” by slipping into the past, taking himself back to the locations that had defined his life: 2650 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, his home; the “Wilshire Crest Presbyterian Church where he sang in the choir; Los Angeles City College where he had studied entomology and the Los Angeles County Art and Natural History Museum where he’d worked as a summer volunteer mounting insects.
But how could he think about where he had been without remembering where he was? There was simply no escaping the stillness of the moment. Besides, thinking about home made him sad, and being sad made him weak.
So he tried some other tricks. He studied the section of wall in front of him. “Sometimes I feel I am almost a part of it. I am flesh, and it is wood, but we are both made of atoms. Can the atoms of my body pass through the atoms of wood and the steel bars beyond to freedom? If no guard is watching, I will press my hands against the wall, atom to atom, testing the reality of the walls, hoping to see my hand go through—The wall remains impenetrable. I wonder what Hanson’s thinking, Hanson behind me facing the opposite wall.”
AS THE MONTHS PASSED, the ten men in the wooden box found that when the guards were out of earshot they could whisper to one another. And when one of the ten died, and another became so sick a Japanese doctor thought he was dying, the survivors started to scheme.
For reasons none of them could explain, the Japanese did not want their special prisoners to die in the box. When a man became mortally sick, the guards always removed him, picked him up and carried him out through the orange steel door in the wall that led to the regular prison hospital.
Schloat and a couple of cell mates thought, why not make themselves so sick, so malnourished, they too would appear to be dying? And, one by one, they secretly started to starve themselves, passing their pitiful ration of rice to the other men in the box.
It was a risky gambit, and Schloat knew it. “How,” he asked himself, “could the pretense of dying be done without dying? It cannot, of course.” All the same, he was desperate.
Don Schloat got thinner, weaker, more worn and wan. Finally, after several weeks starving himself, he looked so bad the guards called a Japanese doctor, and on October 22, 1943, after almost five months in a wooden box, Don Schloat was put on a stretcher and carried though the orange door in the wall to the regular prison hospital, a “grinning skeleton” with only one thought: “What bliss!”
BEN STEELE was getting his strength back. He’d even gone on a day-long work detail at the docks. He came back weak and exhausted, but at least he’d kept his feet.
That fall the Swedish Red Cross ship Gripsholm, chartered by the American government to effect an exchange of a limited number of Japanese and European civilian internees, made port in Manila with more Red Cross boxes and with mail and parcel post packages for the prisoners of war. Ben Steele got a small parcel and twenty-five letters from home.
In the parcel his mother had packed some personal items, including socks, red socks, and in one of the socks she’d stuffed candy, hard candy that had melted into the fabric. Ben Steele filled his canteen cup with water, added the socks, and gulped the sweetened liquid down, red dye and all. Then he tore into the letters.
In one was a black-and-white photograph of the entire family that had been taken during an outdoor birthday party for Gert’s daughter, Sandy at the folks’ house in Billings. They were all there—his parents, brothers, and sisters—smiling, but it was not the faces that caught Ben Steele’s eye, it was what was on the table behind them—the platter of fried chicken, the chocolate cake, the large wedges of watermelon.
“Holy God!” he thought. “They don’t have a clue. They really don’t know what we’re going through here.”
He had tried not to think about them. Easier that way. During the battle, on the march, and at Tayabas Road, each time a memory of home worked its way up from his subconscious, he’d force himself to think of something else. Then the bundle of letters and the package arrived. Now he missed them, missed them a lot, especially his mother, and he read her letters over and over until the paper started to tear at the folds. She was “concerned,” she said—that was the word she used in almost every letter—she was concerned about him.
BY THE BEGINNING of 1943, the Axis powers had started to lose ground in both the Pacific and European theaters of war. In January the British Royal Air Force bombed Berlin, and the Allies in conference at Casablanca agreed that their goal was nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy.
In February, in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, the Americans, after six months of combat, had defeated the Japanese at Guadalcanal. Meanwhile, troops under the command of American Admiral William Halsey were advancing rapidly through New Guinea to Bougainville.
That June, submarines from the U.S. Pacific Fleet started a campaign against Japanese shipping, and by September they had sent more than 160,000 tons to the bottom.
Through the fall of 1943, U.S. Marines moved deeper into the central Pacific and defeated fierce Japanese garrisons on Makin and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.
In his Fireside Chat on December 24, President Roosevelt told his fellow Americans that at last he could “do more than express a hope.”
Increasingly powerful forces are now hammering at the Japanese at many points over an enormous arc . . . [The Allies] are all forming a band of steel which is slowly but surely closing in on Japan.
These setbacks put pressure on Japanese lines of communication and supply, and in all Japanese-held territories, especially in the southwest Pacific, there were shortages of men, matériel, manufactured goods, and food.
For the prisoners of war at Bilibid hospital, the shortages were proof that America was at last winning, but after a year and more of captivity, they no longer expected the cavalry to come riding over the hill at any moment, and “We’ll be free in ’43” and “Mother’s door in ’44” gave way to “Keep alive till ’45” and “Golden Gate in ’48.” In his notebooks, Hayes wrote, “General change in attitude can be noted. The war is no longer expected to be over next month or next week.”27
A few thinking men, Hayes among them, also began to worry about how the enemy, so seemingly indifferent to the fate of their captives, might behave in losing.
“I have never been able to convince myself that the Japs would [just] move out of here in the face of attack and leave us to be relieved by our own forces,” Hayes wrote. “I can’t be convinced they would . . . allow us to continue [on] our way unmolested.”28
In a war driven by ideas about race, which is to say, hate, the threat of extermination was ever present. And the Japanese hated white men such as Hayes as much as Hayes and his comrades hated the Japanese.
“Shades of the days of the Tripolitan Pirates,” he wrote, “days of the Moslems and Turks when our seamen died & rotted in Oriental prisons! The white man is sure as hell serving in bondage to the Yellow boys today . . . The American people back home can’t realize yet what it means to [be] . . . reduced to [an] animal existence with less care and attention than animals in our zoo.”29
Japanese military leaders made no attempt to hide their animus, either. To hate the ketōjin, the hairy white foreigners who had denied Nippon its due, was part of the propaganda at every army training camp in the Japanese home islands. But as a practical matter—and the Japanese, a most practical people, were always looking for something that was jitsuyō, “capable of being turned to use”—prisoners of war were an obvious source of labor, especially in a country where every man, woman, and able-bodied child was either pressed into military service or put to work in the fields, rice paddies, and overburdened factories.
Not long after the fall of Bataan in April 1942, the bureau chiefs at the War Ministry in Tokyo met to decide what to do with the 192,600 Dutch, British, and American POWs they’d captured in their conquest of the southwest Pacific. The generals reminded one another that Japan had not ratified the Geneva Convention and thus was not bound by the proscription against using prisoners as slaves. So, “all prisoners of war [will] engage in forced labor,” they decided. First they would set up work camps in Japan proper, then in Formosa, Korea, China, Manchuria, and throughout the occupied territories of the southwest Pacific, 160 camps in the home islands, 367 camps overall.30
The commanders of these labor camps were ordered to keep their chattel busy. Do “not let them remain idle for even a single day,” Hideki Tojo, the war minister, said.31
And work them they did. By the fall of 1942, in a brief on labor conditions in the home islands, the Japanese Prisoner of War Information Bureau was able to report, “The use of [POW] labor alleviated in some measure the labor shortage” in the country at large. The ketō, of course, were not as efficient as Japanese workers, only “60–70 percent [as good] in special labor such as coal unloading,” the brief said, but “it is generally admitted by all the business proprietors alike that the use of P.W. labor has made the systematic operation of transportation possible for the first time, and has not only produced a great influence in the business circles, but will also contribute greatly to the expansion of production, including munitions of war.”32
In the Philippines, the first draft of American prisoners to leave for Japan, five hundred men, set sail from Manila aboard the Nagaru Maru on September 5, 1942, some five months after surrender. These innocents, still filled with hope and perhaps a little hooey handed out by the Japanese, boarded their ship convinced that the Red Cross had negotiated a prisoner exchange. Later drafts either knew better or the Japanese dropped all pretense. Whatever the case, no one wanted to go. They knew that the Allies, their liberators, were fighting their way north from the Solomons to the Bismark Sea, from the Marshalls to the Marianas, and simple geography told them that the Philippines would likely be liberated long before America would be able to push north of the islands and mount an invasion of Japan.
THE JAPANESE captured some 20,000 Americans in the Philippines, and from that first day of captivity forward the victors used their prisoners of war as slaves. Several of these work details and labor gangs, especially the ones building airfields, were quartered in self-contained camps, places with bamboo barracks, barbed-wire enclosures, and permanently assigned guards, but most work details—cleanup parties, road gangs, field crews, and the like—drew their labor from the central American prisoner of war camp, a large, flat, open piece of land on a treeless plain outside the city of Cabanatuan in the central Luzon province of Nueva Ecija.
Camp Cabanatuan had replaced Camp O’Donnell. At first it had all the same ills—appalling living conditions, feeble and corrupt army leadership, feculent Zero Wards of dying men. Then the Japanese put Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Curtis T. Beecher of Chicago in charge. Beecher, a decorated hero of World War I and by every account one of the most competent field officers in captivity, set about turning a cesspool into a place of survival. He ordered the sprawling camp cleaned up, organized the men, lobbied his Japanese overseers for more medicine, supplies, and food, and the monthly death rate dropped from several hundred to a handful. In 1943 the camp census averaged between three thousand and four thousand men. And everyone, including the officers, worked. Prisoners drove trucks, repaired machinery, performed various chores and menial labor. Every day two thousand men tilled and tended the fields of a two-hundred-acre plot adjacent to the camp, a farm that grew vegetables exclusively for Japanese mess tables on Luzon.
It was from Cabanatuan, for the most part, that the Japanese drew their cargoes of prisoner chattel to ship north to the slave labor camps in the Japanese home islands. Five hundred this month, eight hundred the next, a thousand after that. And as the calls for more men increased, the doctors in Bilibid came under pressure from the Japanese to move as many patients as possible off the sick lists and into Cabanatuan, patients the doctors knew would likely end up on drafts designated for Japan.
BEN STEELE wasn’t well yet, but at least he was on the mend. The beriberi was under control and his malaria was in slow remission. Christmas was coming, Christmas 1943, his second in Bilibid Prison. Services were scheduled in the chapel in the compound and the ambulatory planned to serenade the invalids with carols. Maybe Santa would deliver a Red Cross treat or two.
For weeks the doctors had been discharging men from the hospital, sending them to Cabanatuan. Some of the men in Bilibid were so desperate to stay in the hospital they were buying stool samples from comrades with dysentery and passing them off as their own. Ben Steele just sat and waited and sketched.
Sitting cross-legged on his bunk with a makeshift drawing board in his lap, he usually attracted an audience. One day a short, gruff Japanese sergeant, a man the prisoners called Captain Bligh, sat down next to him. For a moment, Ben Steele worried he’d made trouble for himself. The sergeant was pointing to the drawing—a generic sketch of a Japanese guard—and going on and on, yammering about something. Finally someone summoned an interpreter. Seemed the artist had misdrawn the guard’s leggings, and the sergeant was trying to get him to do it right.
His drawings were getting better, the subject matter more varied—portraits, prison scenes, landscapes. Meanwhile, some of the officers approached him with a secret project. The cruelty they’d all suffered was criminal, they said, and no one was “taking any photographs of this stuff,” so maybe he should start drawing it, create a record of atrocities for the reckoning that was sure to follow the war.
He’d never thought of art as documentary, as an accounting. To him a drawing should aim to capture the raw energy of the world, the mysterious force of life. Like someone looking at a well-drawn picture of a horse and feeling the animal under him, feeling its muscles, its natural aversion to having anything on its back. That was the kind of art he wanted to create.
Still, he understood. In their secret diaries and reports, a number of American officers had already started a chronicle of the enemy’s misdeeds. Now, here was a young artist who could help record that malfeasance, a man who could make his comrades’ misery come alive.
So with an eye out for the guards, he started drawing scenes of suffering, scenes he remembered. He drew men on the long march off Bataan falling to their knees and begging for water; he drew the Japanese guards who answered those entreaties with a bullet or bayonet. He drew the daily death parade and burial details at O’Donnell. He drew the rocky hell of Tayabas Road.
This was dangerous business, and everyone knew it. As soon as each drawing was finished, Ben Steele would give it to Father Duffy, who would hide the young artist’s growing body of work in the false bottom of his Mass kit.
Ben Steele produced more than fifty such scenes and, from time to time, kept sketching his West as well. He drew every day, drew his pencils down to the nub. Rather than sharpen them and waste precious lead, he carefully picked the wood away from the core until, at the end, he was left holding nothing but a short rod of lead between his fingertips. At some point during all this drawing, he got the idea that “this is what I want to do when I get home, go to art school.” Art, after all, had saved him, sustained him. It distracted him from his constant hunger and gave shape to his days. To almost everyone else in prison, the sameness of the days produced a numbing apathy. They woke to the bell, stood bangō, ate lugao, went to bed. Then they got up and did the same thing all over again, day after leaden day. Ben Steele got up and started to draw.
HE GOT THE WORD from the doctors right after the New Year in 1944: they had reclassified him from convalescent to well, and he was listed to go to Cabanatuan. He knew that Cabanatuan was the staging point for drafts to Japan. Everyone said it was going to be cold in Japan, very cold. And he didn’t want to go.
He arrived at Cabanatuan in the middle of January, a huge hot and dusty place, six-tenths of a mile long (roughly the length of eleven football fields end to end) and half a mile wide, all surrounded by three high barbed-wire fences that formed a no-man’s-land, a kill zone for the guards. Same sawali shacks as O’Donnell, same rice slop as everywhere else, men in the same rags and loincloths.
He worked the farm, digging, planting, hoeing with homemade tools. Camotes, corn, eggplant. He thought he might steal something and smuggle it back to camp under his hat or waistband. Then he saw what happened to the skeletal men who got caught doing that, and so like everyone else, he picked pigweed for himself and choked it down with his rice. Sometimes, when he thought the guards weren’t looking, he’d sneak a bite of a corn stalk near the base. The stalk was kind of tender down there, at the bottom, his nose in the dirt.
In July 1944, his name appeared on a draft of eleven hundred men listed for shipment to Japan. The draft was taken by train, boxcars, back down to Manila and put up overnight in the transient section of Bilibid, across from the hospital. That night, quite by accident, Ben Steele ran into Q. P. Devore, who was on his way to Cabanatuan from a work farm in Mindinao.
Ben Steele thought Q.P. looked good; he’d been treated well at the camp in the southern islands. Q.P., on the other hand, thought his friend looked awful—his cheekbones were showing and his eyes were sunken in his head. He’d lost so much weight (he was down to 110 pounds) his skin sagged on his bones, and his knees looked like doorknobs, his ribs like a washboard. Q.P. handed him a small mirror from a Red Cross package. Ben Steele was shocked by the image in the glass.
Still, they were delighted to be together again, if only for a night passing through prison. They shared a coconut, traded tales, wondered what was ahead.
The next day Ben Steele and the rest of the draft were assembled in the prison compound. They marched out the front gate and through the streets of Manila to the docks by Manila Bay. There they were loaded aboard an old freighter, the Canadian Inventor, for the long trip north, a trip into the heart of the enemy’s homeland.