Elizabeth M. Norman (35 page)

At one point many of the sick turned into thieves and began to plunder the camp’s supply of plasma (blood serum is rich in protein, and protein
prevents the leakage of fluid from the bloodstream into surrounding tissue—the cause of swelling and pain in wet beriberi).

“If a man had plasma ordered for him in the clinic, he didn’t dare lose his grip on the bottle,” said Sally Blaine. “He carried it in his arms to whatever clinic or doctor was going to give it to him. If he dared to put it down, someone was likely to steal it. That’s the truth.”
³⁵

The fighting in late 1944 made it impossible for the International Red Cross to ship its annual holiday packages of meat and food to Santo Tomas, and with severe food shortages in the islands, all the agency could manage at Christmas were a few sacks of rice and beans, and some vegetables and salt. In fact the food shortages were so severe, and the need so desperate, that the black market almost priced itself out of business. A kilogram of sugar cost $105. A pound of margarine was $90, a pack of thirty cigarettes $18. The wealthy internees offered Japanese guards jewelry for food: one platinum-band diamond ring—one and a quarter karats, originally purchased for $575—bought five kilos of sugar and five packages of tobacco.
³⁶

Christmas approached with funereal gloom. The Japanese refused to allow any gifts into the camps, the Americans had not bombed the city in three weeks and everyone at every prison was hungry all the time. Their daily diet now contained only twenty grams of protein, two hundred grams of carbohydrates and five grams of fat.

A few days after the Allied bombing raids resumed, the Japanese, for no apparent reason, arrested four of the internee leaders and led them away. Everyone wondered who would disappear next. Were the Japanese planning to execute all of them, a few at a time?
³⁷

On Christmas morning the internees awoke to a cryptic present. During the night American planes had dropped leaflets on Manila.

The Commander-in-Chief, the officers, and the men of the American Forces of Liberation in the Pacific wish their gallant allies, the people of the Philippines, all the blessings of Christmas, and the realization of their fervent hopes for the New Year, Christmas 1944.
³⁸

Many took the leaflet as a sign that their liberation was at hand, but nothing happened. No word of ships sighted offshore or planeloads of paratroopers filling the sky.

One day slowly and painfully gave way to the next. Allied bombers continued to attack the city and its suburbs while inside the walls at
Santo Tomas, the internees grew weaker, their faces wan and gray, their eyes empty.

The nurses told one another they looked, and felt, like old women: hollow cheeks, wrinkled skin, thin hair, legs as thin as pipe stems. When they stood in front of a mirror, they said, they saw the faces of their grandmothers. A camp survey showed that, on the average, male internees had lost fifty-one pounds during their internment, women thirty-two.
³⁹
Five-foot-six-inch Eleanor Garen was down to 118 pounds, a good portion of that the fluid in her grossly distended limbs.

“My legs were ten times swollen, just like walking with the trunks of a tree,” she said. “When I woke up in the morning, I had to watch myself because from my elbows down I didn’t have any feeling in my hands or arms—my legs either. I’d just sit there or drop.”
⁴⁰

The entries in Eleanor’s notebook, her selections from her anthology of poetry and prose, were fewer now, but much more pointed.

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heav’n
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesses him that gives, and him that takes
.

S
HAKESPEARE

Human life is such a little thing
,
The passing of a moment
,
That is all
.

H
ELENE
M
ARTHA
B
ALL
⁴¹

Sometimes Eleanor and her best friend, Jeanne Kennedy, would slowly make their way to Eleanor’s garden patch and pull the green tops off her potato plants, fold them into cylinders and imagine they were eating ice cream cones; this bizarre behavior turned their lips, tongues and teeth green.

At this point Eleanor had a chronic nasal drip and cough, pleurisy and a tender abdomen. She tried hard not to think of home or her mother, Lulu, lest she become homesick or seized with pangs of self-pity. She hated feeling sorry for herself. When she had the strength for it, she tried to keep busy gardening or sitting with the children, drinking imaginary cups of imaginary tea. Sometimes she would backslide and lose control of herself, especially when it came to Maude Davison. “Had
night duty twice within this month. The old lady is hepped on a few (a certain few) for it,” she wrote bitterly.

Then she would catch herself and regain her balance. “Dear Garen, This is to yourself. Remember life is not a bed of roses.”
⁴²

By mid-January the camp diet was down to seven hundred calories a day per person. The menu for Saturday, January 13, 1945, was: breakfast, one ladle watery mush, one cup hot water; lunch, one ladle soybean soup; dinner,
camote-bean-rice
stew.
⁴³
A doctor at the hospital ate his laboratory guinea pig. Another man climbed to the roof of Main Building, baited mouse traps with coconut flakes, and managed to catch a few sparrows; he meticulously split the little birds into portions and shared them with two friends.

Frances Nash, a tall, slender, outspoken Southerner, tried to chronicle the mass dissipation: “I saw my friends faces with the skin drawn tightly across the bones, eyes unnaturally bright and deeply circled.… I worked in the clinic and people would come up to me crying and begging and asking what to do about getting more food. People were dazed.… On my way to some task I would find myself standing absolutely still, staring into space. I had trouble remembering the days and the dates. There were times when my mind could not recall a time when I had lived as anything but a prisoner. It was easier to remember my childhood than the year before the war. I thought of the boys and girls I had gone to school with, the games we had played, the toys I received at Christmastime.… There was nothing beautiful in our lives except the sunsets and the moonlight. I would sit at the window for hours, dreaming of home.”
⁴⁴

The Japanese, meanwhile, maintained the fiction that the “detainees” were being well treated. A Japanese doctor named Nogi, the medical officer in charge of the prison camps in the islands, called together the physicians at Santo Tomas and demanded they remove the words “starvation” and “malnutrition” from all internee death certificates. Theodore Stevenson, the camp’s chief physician, refused and resigned his position. The next day an armed guard marched the good and honest doctor off to jail.
⁴⁵
By the end of January, three, sometimes four people a day starved to death.

There was little difference now between the health of the nurses and the health of their patients, perhaps that due only to the few grams of protein or milligrams of thiamine the nurses were receiving. Several women, in fact, looked just as jaundiced as the people they were treating.
And the work was hard. It took all the women’s energy just to change a simple dressing or administer a standard treatment. Any exertion exhausted them, and before moving on to the next patient they would have to sit and rest their painfully swollen legs.

But every day they reported for work. They worked because they were nurses and the sick called them to duty. It was good work, honorable work, especially here among the dying, where they were needed most, and especially now, when their own existence hung in the balance. In a way the work sustained them, for it gave them something most of the others in camp did not have—a mission, a reason to get up in the morning and struggle through the hunger, want and sorrow of another day.

The camp was now surviving on one meal every twenty-four hours, usually a cup of vegetable gruel, and the results were always predictable.

Death roster for January 23, 1945: Roy M. Huggins—malnutrition, arteriosclerotic heart disease; Fred H. Moran—beriberi, pellagra; Henry S. Peabody—malnutrition, enteritis.
⁴⁶

No one, save a loved one, cried or mourned these diurnal passings.

“When you get to the point where you begin to wonder if you’re going to be around or not,” said Dorothy Still, “it begins not to matter.”
⁴⁷

By February 1, each day had become a death watch. Three, four, sometimes five people a day succumbed to malnutrition. Maude Davison developed an intestinal obstruction and was hospitalized. Marie Adams, the American Red Cross field director, fell ill with beriberi; the hospital was overflowing so she was taken back to Main Building and put to bed there.

Surveying all this, Frances Nash wrote, “By this time we had stood more than I had ever thought the human body and mind could endure.”
⁴⁸

Chapter 15

And the Gates Came
Crashing Down

o
N
J
ANUARY 9, 1945
, troops of the American Sixth Army, part of the large invasion force assembled to take the main island of Luzon and at last liberate the Philippines, established a solid beachhead at Lingayen Gulf, a spot on Luzon’s west coast roughly a hundred miles north of Manila and the campus of Santo Tomas.

Some 275,000 Japanese troops in defensive positions up and down the huge island were dug in and ready to meet the invaders. The Americans advanced south and east; the going was slow at first, the fighting often bloody, but General MacArthur, eager to retake Manila, pushed his commanders to pick up the pace.

Three weeks after the initial landing, some 150 army rangers from the 1st Cavalry Division, accompanied by a larger force of Filipino guerrillas, staged a daring raid through Japanese lines near the town of San Jose, some fifty miles southeast of the beachhead, and freed five hundred survivors of the Bataan Death March, held there in a small prison camp.

The raid intrigued MacArthur, especially the tactic of the quick punch through enemy territory.

“Go to Manila,” he told the commander of the 1st Calvary Division, Major General Vernon D. Mudge. “Go around the Nips, bounce off the Nips, but go to Manila. Free the internees and Santo Tomas.”
¹

A bold and imaginative officer, Mudge formed two “Flying Columns,” small units of roughly seven hundred men supported by tanks, howitzers and trucks. The quick, light columns were ordered to “cut right through the enemy,” as one officer put it, and “get into Manila before he knows what’s happening.”
²

Down Route 5 went the Flying Columns, while overhead marine corps dive bombers, scouting and clearing the way, protected the columns with bombs and cannon fire.

Forty-eight hours later, on the evening of Saturday, February 3, the Flying Columns fought their way into the suburb of Grace Park, then crossed the Manila city limits.

Guerrillas met the cavalrymen and guided them through the empty city streets, past nests of snipers, down Espana Boulevard and up to the large, iron gates of Santo Tomas University.

A
LL THROUGH THE
dark, early morning of February 3 the emaciated men, women and children of Santo Tomas had listened to the sounds of shelling and explosions across the city. The fighting seemed especially intense to the north, where they could see fires burning in the direction of Grace Park.
³

Eleanor Garen “had a funny feeling that night.”
⁴
The Japanese soldiers on guard duty outside the wall were singing, like men having one last moment together. More ominously, earlier in the day soldiers had placed large barrels under the central staircase in Main Building.

Dynamite? whispered a few panicked internees.

Rose Rieper snuck a look at the barrels and saw something else, some “stuff,” as she put it, “soaked with kerosene.” She and some of the other nurses were convinced the commandant meant to “blow STIC up.”
⁵

At first light a group of the internees working in their gardens spotted two reconnaissance aircraft flying over Grace Park.
⁶
The camp waited for something to happen, but morning, then the afternoon, passed without incident.

Just after the late-day gruel, more planes returned, this time marine corps dive bombers, eight of them. The formation buzzed over the camp and one of the pilots tossed a small object from the cockpit, a pair of aviator’s goggles with a note attached.

“Roll out the barrel,” it said. “Santa Claus is coming.…”
⁷