Elizabeth M. Norman (25 page)

For their part, however, the women hated Tojo. He took their soap and their yarn. One nurse found him at her washstand brushing his teeth with her toothbrush. Another discovered him crawling out from under a bunk with one of her shoes. A while later he took to tearing the bunks apart and smearing mud on the clean white sheets. If the women went after him and confronted him in a passageway, he was apt to growl and snap at them. Sometimes he actually chased them through the wards.

One afternoon as Cassie sat sewing at her bunk, Tojo climbed up next to her, put her scissors in his mouth, and jumped onto the next bed. Just then Cassie’s bunkmate, Phyllis Arnold, appeared. When she saw the mess the monkey was making of her gear, she got very angry, grabbed a sheet and threw it over the animal like a net. The monkey fought hard to free himself, but Josie Nesbit rushed over to help and together the women captured him.

They wrapped the furious ape in a sheet, and he tried to kick, rip and scream his way free, but they prevailed and dragged the enraged bundle to a nearby room used as a prison cell, tossed it inside, and firmly shut the door.

A guard who had seen them come into the corridor now wandered over to check on the fuss. Curious but cautious, he slowly opened the door to the cell.

The sheet was rolling around the floor and the guard lowered his rifle and poked at it with his bayonet. Tojo, in no mood to be tickled, suddenly broke free, rose up on his hind legs and turned on the man. The guard did what any good soldier would do: he took aim and fired.

The monkey fell dead, the guard returned to his post and the women sat back to enjoy the sweet irony of one of their enemies eliminating another.
²⁴

Colonel Cooper, meanwhile, had convinced the Japanese medical commander to let him move the hospital topside into the shell of a building that used to be Fort Mills Hospital.

“On June 25th, the movement out of the tunnel into the marvelous atmosphere of the renovated old hospital was completed,” the colonel said in his report. “A holiday atmosphere prevailed all over the place. We all had an ‘it’s good to be alive’ air about us. We had secured a radio. We were sending out parties throughout the Island for green stuff to eat.… The Japanese Commandant … had given positive instructions that no Japanese soldier or any visitors from off the Island would be allowed to enter my hospital without his personal permission. He visited the hospital … presented the staff with a large iced cake of which he was very proud, some small cakes and some beer.”
²⁵

To the nurses, leaving the tunnel and moving into the bombed-out shell of a building topside was like moving into the garden of Eden.

“The gardenia trees were in full bloom and, oh my, it was such a thrill to get out of those stinky hot tunnels and miserable mess into the open air,” said Anna Williams. “The roof was off and it was just a shell but it was still good to be in the air and to be alive outside. I’ve always loved flowers. I got a corpsman and we went out and cut the gardenias and put them in wash basins and put the basins all around the patients.”
²⁶

The nurses settled the sick and wounded into the new quarters, stretched gauze over the beds to protect them from mosquitoes and tried to get them something to eat. The blue sky, the open space and the sea air brightened everyone.

A week later, on July 2, the chief Japanese medical officer informed Colonel Cooper that the sick and wounded were being transferred to Manila. The patients, and all male medical personnel, would be loaded on a freighter, the
Lima Maru
, at four o’clock that afternoon. The nurses were to remain with the colonel in the hospital overnight, then in the morning walk down to the harbor and board the ship.

It appeared that everyone—nurses, doctors and patients—were simply being relocated to a hospital on Luzon near Manila. The next morning at the dock, the women were put on small boats and ferried out to the freighter. There was no gangway or hull ramp, so they had to climb a long rope ladder to the deck.

“I did pretty well climbing,” said Madeline Ullom, who had contracted dengue fever two days earlier. But “I had a temperature of a hundred and four” and when “I got about three rungs from the top, everything started swimming around. I knew the bay was full of sharks and if I fell in the water that was the end of it. So I climbed the last rungs and got up. Many of the girls were sick with malaria and dengue. When we got to the top of the ship, many of them laid down just about where they landed.”
²⁷

As the freighter lifted anchor and pulled away from Corregidor for the three-hour trip to Manila, an English-speaking officer approached the group.

“A nice Jap gave us tea and rice cakes,” said Ullom. “We thought as long as he did that maybe he’d tell us something. ‘Where are we going and what are you going to do with us?’ [someone asked]. He said they were taking us to a school outside Manila where there were medicine cabinets full of stuff. Beds were there. First they were going to unload the patients from the boat and take them to the hospital. We thought that was all right.”
²⁸

By midafternoon, the
Lima Maru
was approaching the city docks. The harbor, once an almost pristine place, was now a filthy cove littered with the steel hulks of partially submerged ships. Manila, once the Pearl of the Orient, seemed derelict and lifeless.

The men were unloaded first. Those too ill or wounded to walk were put on trucks. The others, including the doctors and corpsmen, were ordered to line up in ranks behind the trucks. As the vehicles and men started to move slowly up the street, Cassie, Eleanor Garen, Josie Nesbit and the other women waved, then began to queue up to follow, but the guards held them back and marshalled the women into three flatbed trucks. As the trucks moved off, the women suddenly realized they were
headed away from the line of men, not toward it.
²⁹
Again they were being taken from their patients and separated from their comrades, the doctors and corpsmen. For most of the women it was the worst moment of the war. A few began to cry. Others sat quietly, too filled with woe to speak. Madeline Ullom innocently thought that the Japanese drivers had simply made a mistake and headed in the wrong direction.

“I told them they were taking the wrong road,” she said. “They didn’t say anything. I told them again. I said, ‘This is not the way to Paranque. That road up there, that next road up there!’ They tapped me on the back with a bayonet. I decided I’d better keep still.”
³⁰

An hour later a high masonry wall surrounding what appeared to be a large compound came into view. The trucks slowed down a bit, then turned sharply and passed between open iron gates—the gates to Santo Tomas Internment Camp.

Chapter 11

Santo Tomas

O
NG BEFORE THE
Imperial Japanese Army landed on the shores of Leyte Gulf to begin its invasion of the Philippines, the War Ministry in Tokyo assembled a team of military planners to write a script for its conquest of the islands. The planners picked out targets for bombing, and landing sites for the troop barges. They calculated the routes for their infantry attacks and set target dates to capture the major cities.

Part of the plan, of course, involved the administration of the capital, Manila, once it had fallen into Japanese hands. In the years before the war, Japanese spies and Fifth Columnists in Manila fed information back to the planners in Tokyo, and by the time General Homma’s victorious troops crossed Manila’s Pasig River, the Japanese had mapped out every major building in the city and knew exactly what they wanted to do with them.

Among the institutions marked for occupation was a Dominican academy, Santo Tomas University. Founded in 1611 by Spanish Dominican priests and named after Saint Thomas Aquinas, Santo Tomas shut its doors in early December during the first week of bombings. Before that, it was the intellectual home of some six thousand students and three hundred faculty. The college sat on a sixty-acre rectangle of land north of the port area in a busy section of the city. The Dominican priests had carefully enclosed their large campus with a twelve-foot concrete-and-stone wall. Midway down Espana Boulevard the wall was interrupted by a run of iron fence, and in the middle of the run were two huge iron gates that opened onto the spacious grounds.

The high masonry walls and iron fence were originally intended to
create a quiet compound for the contemplative Dominican fathers and their students. Now this bulwark allowed the Japanese to jerry-rig Santo Tomas into a prison.

In January a Japanese officer and a platoon of soldiers took possession of the abandoned campus and began to receive prisoners—foreign civilians working and living in Manila, or “enemy nationals,” as the Japanese called them—Americans, Britons, Australians, Canadians, Dutch, Poles, Norwegians and French. By July, Santo Tomas University had been converted to Santo Tomas Internment Camp, or STIC, as it was called derisively by the some 3,800 men, women and children who came to be imprisoned there.
¹

B
EHIND ITS IRON
fence and high walls, now topped with barbed wire, STIC was a kind of teeming international village. Here were accountants, bankers, engineers, farmers, housewives, insurance agents, mechanics, miners, merchants, seamen, secretaries, stenographers, saleswomen, salesmen and teachers. Here too were aircraft workers, architects, a bakery instructor, six bartenders, three cosmeticians, nine dancers, dentists and doctors, one decorator, one dressmaker, one florist, three golf pros, five governesses, one hairdresser, a dozen or so journalists, one lady’s maid, one laundress, a meteorologist, many missionaries, one model, enough musicians for a small band, one polo player, four plumbers, two restaurant owners and a few cooks, one saw filer, one statistician, several social workers, stevedores, two surveyors, one tennis pro, one X-ray technician, six tobacconists, one veterinarian, six welders and two wrestlers.

Roughly a quarter of the 3,800 internees were children under the age of eighteen and roughly another quarter were over sixty, most of these, men. Among those in the middle, ages eighteen to fifty-nine, roughly two fifths were women, half of whom were married.

All these people were forced to coexist on a walled rectangle of land roughly ten city blocks long and eight blocks wide. From the air the sprawling compound—“concentration camp,” some said—looked like a small town with buildings of various sizes, tree-lined streets and walkways, plazas, greens, open lots, maintenance and repair shops, equipment sheds and athletic fields.

In the middle of this campus-turned-wartime-town was “Main Building,” a huge edifice three stories high and more than a block and a half long built of pale limestone, sandstone, concrete and stucco. Atop
the third story and directly over the front entrance was a square two-story tower, and atop the tower was a cupola capped with a large white cross. The effect of these stacked architectural apogees was that the symbol of God was set so high it could be seen for miles.

Main Building was actually an immense quadrangle built around two interior courtyards. At ground level was the front entrance. Directly overhead was a canopy, and two stories above that, between identical flanking cornices, was an enormous clock with black hands and a white face. Leading up to the front entrance was a large concrete apron or open plaza. The front facade, formed by two identical wings spreading out from the front entrance, was at least a thousand feet end to end. This long, white expanse of stucco and windows was interrupted by a series of recesses, bays and pilasters that gave the illusion of several facades, or smaller fronts, stacked together. The great length and unusual height of Main Building, along with its ornate architectural decorations and designs—a combination of Moorish shapes and angles and classic Greek capitals, dados and cornices—made the building seem at once palatial and official, a place fit for the business of education and religion, the erudite and the divine. Clearly it was a structure that was meant to make the individual seem small in the face of some larger scheme, some grand set of purposes.
²

Located as it was in the epicenter of the campus, Main Building, with its giant clock and towering crucifix, stood solidly as a source of power and authority. For the internees it was also a compass point, the place against which all other places on the sixty-acre campus were measured.

Main Building served as the central dormitory for the internees. Men and women were housed in separate quarters—ten, fifteen, twenty or more packed into classrooms converted into large, common boudoirs and barracks. To the right of Main was the Education Building, a dormitory just for men. To the left, not far from one of the stone walls, was the gymnasium, where some seven hundred elderly men were made to sleep. Behind Main was the Annex, sleeping quarters for women with young children. And to the left of that, just inside the east wall, the Dominican fathers had their own area—a compound within a compound—sectioned off with barbed wire.

Unlike the military war prisons in the islands, especially the cruel, pestilential hellholes of Bilibid and Cabanatuan, the grounds of Santo Tomas at first seemed spacious. Four avenues radiating from Main Building divided the campus into quadrants, enough space for the internees to build a “Theater Under the Stars,” their grand name for an
outdoor stage for evening musicals and entertainment, and across from the main plaza on an expanse of grass, a baseball diamond, a basketball court and, beyond that, a field for football, soccer and field hockey.