Elizabeth M. Norman (32 page)

Some of her melancholy no doubt came from pain. Although her friends never knew it, she had been suffering for six months with the swollen ankles, nausea and blurred vision that comes from avitaminitis, a condition brought on by malnutrition. A camp doctor gave her a shot of thiamine, vitamin B-1, but the shot did not help, so he ordered more injections and told her to eat as much meat as she could scrounge. Clearly, he said, she was developing beriberi, a very dangerous and often fatal disease. Just as she began to mend, she came down with chronic osteoarthritis and her joints became inflamed and started to deteriorate. The doctor prescribed fifteen grains of aspirin a day and told her to take things easy for a while, stay in her room and read.

Let me lie in bed and rest:
Ten thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again
.

A. E. H
OUSMAN
¹⁹

•   •   •

T
HREE DAYS AFTER
the navy nurses and eight hundred men left for Los Banos, some eight hundred new internees rolled through the gates of Santo Tomas, among them 325 men over the age of fifty and seventy-seven women and their children, 198 of them, all under the age of five.

Many of the older men were veterans of the Spanish-American War, Americans who elected to stay in the Philippines in 1898 when the war was over. Now these elderly veterans suffered from arthritis, heart disease and other conditions that required intensive nursing care. The large number of new children also taxed the hospital staff, for the youngsters were frequently breaking their bones in rowdy games or contracting fevers and diarrhea from playing in the dirt.

The hospital grew—it had more operating rooms now, new wards, outpatient clinics, a laboratory, a pharmacy and a kitchen. The average daily census was climbing, around one hundred in late 1942. The camp mortality rate, meanwhile, had reached 19.2 deaths per one thousand internees by the end of 1943, up from 13.2 deaths earlier that year.
²⁰

During the monsoons of late summer and early fall, people were forced indoors. The longer the torrent, the dirtier and more foul-smelling their quarters became. The corridors in Main Building were cluttered with tables and baby carriages and racks of wet clothes. The adults, who were bored, and the children, who were restless, began to get on one another’s nerves. Babies cried, youngsters shrieked, old men shouted their complaints. The nurses, meanwhile, tried to crochet or read, play cards or nap, but it was impossible, and they eagerly waited to begin their four-hour shifts at the hospital. At work, at least, it was quiet.

In early September 1943, the internees got news that a repatriation ship, the
Teia Maru
, was headed toward Manila, and soon the camp was wondering aloud who might be freed. Some argued that surely the old and sick should go, while others made a case for mothers and their children. The army and navy women knew it was unlikely that they would be repatriated; they were military, after all. What’s more, they were badly needed in camp. The Executive Committee met with the commandant and soon had a list of 127 people who would be shipped home on the
Teia Maru
. Most were transients stranded in Manila at the outbreak of the war—missionaries, doctors from the Rockefeller Foundation on their way to Far East assignments, newspapermen, businessmen and families
traveling from Shanghai and Hong Kong. One name saddened the navy nurses—Dr. Charles Leach, the head doctor at Los Banos.
²¹

The lucky group left in late September, and although their leaving had no apparent effect on camp life, it came to serve as a sober benchmark, for just after that, the conditions in both camps worsened.

By late fall 1943 the internees often went days without meat. Camp cooks started serving “chili sine carne” and succotash and vegetable stew. Meanwhile the price of bananas, yams, squash and beans soared. There was news from the underground of food riots in Manila and other cities. People began to guard closely their stores of canned goods, hiding them from the hungry burglars who stalked the camp looking for something to stop the ache in their stomachs.

The nurses pooled their money and bought fruits and vegetables to share. For protein they baked peanut loaves and poured boiled peanuts and peanut sauce over rice. Still they were hungry and soon found their energy flagging. After six or seven hours a day working in the ward and standing in lines, they were exhausted.

In mid-November a typhoon with sixty-mile-an-hour winds dumped twenty-seven inches of rain on Manila in three days. The water and wind destroyed shanties and most of the gardens.

As Christmas 1943 approached, the nurses were beginning to feel the dunning effect of twenty months’ captivity. They again made Christmas gifts, dolls and stuffed animals, for the camp children, but Eleanor and Cassie noticed that the women did so with less enthusiasm and vigor than the year before. Even their homemade Christmas cards reflected the sober mood.

It is never Merry Christmas
When you’re feeling sad and blue
And the one you care the most for
Forgets to think of you
.
But when hopes and dreams are fading
And your fondest joys depart
You can still have Merry Christmas
If it’s Christmas in your heart.
²²

Still they had at least one thing to celebrate—the arrival of Ruby Bradley. Bradley and another army nurse, Beatrice Chambers, had been trapped in Camp John Holmes far north in Baguio when the shooting
started. For months Maude Davison had been trying to arrange their transfer to STIC. Chambers, in a decision she would later regret, decided to stay behind, but Bradley jumped at the chance to be with her comrades again. She arrived at STIC that September carrying a mattress and half a bar of soap. She looked thin and drawn, but she was tonic to her friends.
²³

On Christmas Day, the navy women at Los Banos enjoyed a quiet meal among their fellow internees. Meanwhile at Santo Tomas, the army nurses decided to observe the holiday together. Ida Hube had sent in special gifts and packages of food. After religious services the nurses sat down at long tables they had set up on the lawn beside the hospital. It was a warm, clear day and their disposition and outlook were better than they had been in weeks. They officially welcomed Ruby Bradley to their midst, then set to eating. In her journal Josie Nesbit wrote, “cheerfulness prevailed.”
²⁴

On New Year’s Eve, Manila was quiet. No whistles, no horns, no bells. Few of the women looked forward to the new year. Realists, most of them, perhaps they sensed the emptiness, the slow and inexorable ruin, 1944 was going to bring.

Chapter 14

Eating Weeds Fried in
Cold Cream, 1944

D
URING THE FIRST
week of 1944, control of Santo Tomas and the other civilian prison camps passed from the Japanese Bureau of External Affairs to the War Prisoners Department of the Imperial Japanese Army.

The army’s reputation for cruelty was well known, and a short time later when the new camp commandant, Colonel S. Onozaki, arrived on the campus of Santo Tomas, now a worn and shabby place, no one was surprised when “he told the Internee Committee that” he planned to “isolate the camp from any contact with the outside, and that as a result of this new policy, the internees could expect more arduous regulations than in the past.”
¹

First the army shut down the package line, the internees’ one link to the outside world. No longer would the bundles of extra food, clothing, housewares or provisions be allowed into camp. Gone too was Ida Hube’s black limousine and the cart full of bounty for the nurses that always followed her.

Then the commandant announced that instead of giving the Executive Committee an allowance for provisions, the army would supply the camp with food. He promised fish, cereal, vegetables, sugar, salt, cooking oil or fat and tea when it was available. Implicit in the statement was an assurance that there would be enough to go around. He was lying, of course.

When the first shipment fell short, the internees used what money they had left to buy extra staples from the few officially sanctioned vendors and bodegas still allowed to operate inside the walls. Soon, however, the stocks at these little stalls ran low. The 1,400 loaves of cassava
bread STIC usually received each day dropped to 1,000 and then to 500. Milk deliveries dropped from 130 to 95 gallons a day. All that was left in the official canteens were items like vinegar and spices. As a consequence, the lines at the mess hall grew much longer, and it seemed to many internees that the Japanese wanted them hungry, perhaps to control them, perhaps to starve them to death.

Each month brought new restrictions. The commandant abolished the Executive Committee, and for the first time the guards began to patrol the campus with fixed bayonets. The army assembled a crew of male prisoners to clear a ten-foot-wide “security zone” next to the walls, a measure that forced the dismantling of many shanties. More soldiers arrived, roll calls doubled, one at 8:00
A.M.
, another just before dusk. The internee radio station was censored; “broadcasts” now consisted of a few songs and essential announcements. All electrical appliances were confiscated.

No one, of course, knew why, exactly, the Imperial Army had assumed control of the civilian prison camps, but clearly the war was going badly for the Japanese. The Allies had won important battles in New Guinea, New Britain and the Gilbert and Solomon Islands, and the internees at Santo Tomas reckoned that the army was tightening its grip on the occupied territories with new waves of repression.

“The first two years were day before night compared to 1944,” said Frances Nash, thirty-four years old, of Washington, Georgia. “The Japs began to really clamp down. Practice blackouts were started and we were restricted to an area a couple of blocks, instead of having the run of the sixty acres. From seven
P.M
. until six
A.M
. we were locked in our rooms. All contact with the outside world was cut off.”
²

In many ways the camp hospital was a mirror of the growing misery at Santo Tomas. First the Japanese expelled the handful of Filipino physicians and nurses who had been helping out on the wards. Then they stopped the practice of channeling the severely and chronically ill to hospitals elsewhere in the city; now no matter how serious or complicated the medical problem or operation, it had to be dealt with at the camp’s understaffed and ill-supplied dispensary. To offset some of the load, the doctors and nurses decided to reorganize the camp’s clinics and dispensaries. They turned part of the gymnasium into a geriatric service for men and in another building opened a special eighty-bed isolation hospital for those with contagious diseases. They also opened a twenty-four-hour clinic and small emergency room in Main Building. (The clinic quickly became so overwhelmed with complainants, the nurses working
there set out simple medications, such as aspirins and laxatives, in small bowls and told people to treat themselves.)
³
Finally, when all else failed and the main hospital reached capacity, doctors simply started discharging patients, sending some of the sick out to fend for themselves.

In the camp at large, each week brought more harassment—inspections, unannounced searches and capricious cancellations.
⁴
The Japanese closed the rodent control center, the soap shop, the textile department and the library. Many of the men in camp were pressed into labor gangs to build guard sheds and sentry boxes and to string barbed wire. Late one night the guards rousted everyone from bed, looking for a hidden radio. After more than two hours combing the campus they gave up. (The radio, the camp’s only connection to the outside world, was maintained by a camp electrician, who had bolted it inside a five-gallon can and arranged to have it moved from room to room, building to building.)

Next the Japanese ordered the internees to elect room monitors, people who would take a twice-daily roll call, divide the bread-and-egg ration and record the problems in the room. The army nurses picked Edith Shacklette, a popular thirty-six-year-old senior nurse, to represent rooms 38, 39, 40 and 41 in Main Building. “Shack,” as the five-foot-four-inch blond Kentuckian was called, had been a head nurse on Bataan and made a lot of friends when she refused to surrender her sense of humor and perspective to the exigencies of war.
⁵
She went about the business of being room monitor with the same evenhanded thoroughness and attention to detail she had shown in combat.

[Shacklette Monitor’s Diary, 3-2-44] … Bread issue cut in half tomorrow. Rec’d our first individual pkgs from home.
⁶

[3-7-44] … No talking in halls after 11
P.M
. Checking nurses teeth tomorrow.

[3-9-44] … Persons throwing garbage on floor will be punished. No more toilet paper at present.

[3-18-44] … Noise in hall … at nite—children running and playing must be stopped. Promptness at all roll calls is demanded.