As Good As Dead Page 10
The Japanese needed their prisoners alive to build the new airfield, yet they offered few medical supplies for Captain Hickman and Lieutenant Mango to keep their patients healthy. Mango had catgut for sewing wounds, tweezers, forceps, a stethoscope, thermometer, scissors, and a scalpel, but nothing to offer the growing number of men stricken with malaria and other tropical ailments. His only recourse was to place such men on his sick list for transfer back to Manila.
Marine Roy Henderson was among them. Suffering with recurring bouts of malaria that caused him to miss work off and on in early 1943, Henderson grew weak while laid up in the barracks. The spring dry season, also the hottest period for Puerto Princesa, did little to ease his suffering as temperatures climbed into the low nineties. His survival pact buddies convinced him to get up for work each morning, but one day Henderson ended up in a chow-line fight with another prisoner. The stronger man prevailed, inflicting a serious head injury that put Henderson back in the barracks on Mango’s sick list.
Henderson’s comrades smuggled in bananas and breadfruit to keep him alive until he could be shipped out. Smitty and McDole slipped out of the barracks one night to pilfer some coconuts, Mac keeping watch while slender Smitty shinnied up a tall tree to shake loose some nuts. While he was up there, the sentries went through a changing of the guard, so Mac signaled his buddy to stay put and wait it out. Unfortunately for Smitty, he had disturbed a hornet’s nest while ascending and was forced to silently endure stings all over his body as he clung high atop the tree.2
Once the guards were clear, he shook down dozens of coconuts, so many that Evan Bunn and Clarence Clough had to help hide them in a homemade locker in the barracks. The coconut milk went a long way to keep Henderson alive until the transport ship arrived. Smitty had grown quite close with his fellow East Texan and was heartbroken to say good-bye to Henderson. Twenty-six prisoners were returned to Bilibid during March and April. Bunn, one of the five clique-mates of Henderson, McDole, Smitty, and Clough, was shipped out with a severe case of malaria that nearly took his life. Clough covered him with blankets to help control his shivering as Bunn’s fever reached 108.6 degrees, the highest human temperature ever recorded by the American doctors in the Philippines.3
Marine Joe Dupont—stricken with a bad case of beriberi that began to take a toll on his vision—worked as a truck driver until he was shipped back to Manila on April 19. The Japanese would not take Dr. Knight’s word that Dupont needed to go, so Captain Hickman created a scheme to get Dupont placed on the next sick ship. Hickman had the prisoner wrap himself in a blanket and warm his face by placing it near the kitchen oven just before the Japanese doctor entered. Dupont’s heated skin and Hollywood-class acting job—complete with deep shivering—were enough to convince the Japanese doctor to order him out with the others who were too ill to work.4
Captain Kishimoto proved to be the most lenient camp commandant the Palawan prisoners would encounter during the war. Realizing that even his prisoners needed some respite from their slave labor, he declared most Sundays as a day off work, allowing the Americans to wash their clothes and enjoy sports, games, or other forms of entertainment. Some POWs used their wits to create leisure-time musical instruments. Clarence Clough found the remnants of an old piano while foraging through some abandoned buildings, tore out the wires, and created a crude banjo from an old wooden box. He was blessed with a good singing voice, as was Sergeant Doug Bogue, and the two were soon popular entertainers around the barracks at night.5
Mac McDole scrounged up old sporting goods equipment on one of his hunts through Puerto Princesa, including a ball, bat, and basketball hoops. The men who were not too fatigued for exercise took up ball games at night. Some of the Japanese guards tried their hand at basketball, but they quickly gave up when able Americans handily defeated them. Kishimoto, who was quite interested in athletics, staged a track meet one day, but when one of the prisoners beat him, he was so infuriated that the men never saw another meet.6
After eight months at Palawan, Mac had worn out his dungarees and shoes. His clothing now consisted of a ragged shirt that he rarely wore, a pair of shorts fashioned from an old canvas bag, and a pair of sandals cut from discarded tires. When he awoke on March 17—St. Patrick’s Day—something felt wrong. He felt a sharp pain across the lower right side of his body as he reached to put on his rubber sandals and winced as he eased back down onto his blanket. The pain became so severe that beads of perspiration formed on his face and chest.7
Smitty had to help Mac to his feet and into his sandals as guards shouted for the prisoners to line up for morning duty. Mac staggered out to the parade ground, suffered through the morning exercises, and choked down his morning ration of rice as the agony increased. He used his shovel as a crutch as guards prodded him to work that day, but by midmorning, the pains in his gut were so intense, he could barely force his shovel into the ground.
One of the guards finally said, “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m sick, you stupid son of a bitch!” Mac snapped.
The guard’s club, administered swiftly to Mac’s head, dropped him to his knees, but he managed to regain his footing and tried his best to work on past the noon hour. By midafternoon, he collapsed to the ground with his abdomen red and inflamed. Several comrades carried him back to the barracks, where Doc Mango gave him a quick diagnosis.
“I think it’s your appendix and it’s about to rupture,” said Mango. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to operate, or you’re not going to make it.”8
Mango explained to the guards that Mac needed immediate surgery. There was no place to do such an operation within the Puerto Princesa compound. Smitty waved good-bye to his best friend as Mac was loaded onto a truck for a rough, hour-long ride around to the Iwahig Penal Colony, located almost directly across Puerto Princesa Bay nearly fourteen miles by white coral gravel road. With Mango at his side, Mac moaned with every jarring bump as three Japanese guards laughed and pointed at the ailing American.
As Mac was carried inside to a makeshift surgical room, Mango could tell that his patient’s appendix had likely already ruptured. To complicate matters further, the Japanese informed him that there was no medicine to serve as anesthetic. He told Mac that he would simply have to cut him open without painkillers in order to save his life.
“For Christ’s sake, go ahead and get on with it,” Mac gasped. “It can’t be much more pain than what I’m going through right now!”
Five Japanese guards clustered around the table and held down the marine’s arms, legs, and shoulders as Mango made the first incision into Mac’s gut. He handled the pain reasonably well until the camp doctor reached his appendix. He screamed as red-hot pains shot through him. When the guards laughed, Mac cursed them as he slipped in and out of consciousness.
The procedure took some three hours for Mango to remove the burst appendix, clean up the area, and suture McDole with catgut from his medical bag. Mac remained in serious condition at the Iwahig facility for two days until the Japanese ordered him to be transported back to Puerto Princesa, where his buddies carried him into the barracks. Seeing that Mac’s incision was becoming infected, Mango removed the stitches, poured hot water over the wound, cleaned out the infection, and sewed him up again.9
Fortunately for Mac, he was under the care of a doctor who was becoming quite skilled in back-alley surgeries. Private First Class John Oleska underwent the same procedure without anesthetic in a two-and-a-half-hour operation. When Oleska’s appendix ruptured and required daily care, Mango improvised with a bamboo shoot and rubber ball from the toilet to clean out the infected area. Mac similarly clung to life in his barracks for the days following his surgery. Smitty snuck in rice rations to feed him, and even managed to kill and boil a chicken with the help of another prisoner. The fresh meat went a long way to help improve Mac’s strength, but the infection returned two days later. Mango opened him up again, cleaned the incision, and decided to leave the wound open to prevent further infec
tion.10
Mango used boiling water and employed other prisoners as assistants to clean the open area three times a day. Mac could only lie on his back for days until painful bedsores formed on his tailbone. Since he was unable to move, his only hydration came when Smitty braved the guard detail to crawl out into the compound to fetch water with his canteen.
Later that night, something burst within his gut. Thick, odorous pus oozed out of the wound as Mac fell into a deep slumber. Mango cleaned out the area with hot water the next morning and found that the infection had drained itself. Finally, his patient seemed to be improving. Mango continued the cleaning process for another week until he finally decided it was time to close up McDole’s gut using the only thing he could find: buttons off Mac’s shirt. Using some string, he weaved six buttons along each side of the incision.
Mac’s button-weave sutures aroused great interest in the camp. Even Japanese guards entered the barracks in pairs to marvel at the rugged marine. Never one to pass up a chance to barter, Mac insisted that the guards give him several cigarettes before he would expose his incision. He did not smoke, but he offered some of the cigarettes to his buddy Smitty and traded the others for food.11
His body was slowly healing. By the time he was well enough to get around, he became aware of a change at Puerto Princesa.
*
CAPTAIN KISHIMOTO’S LAST day as camp commandant was March 23, 1943. He was assigned to other duties in Manila, quite possibly as punishment for allowing a dozen prisoners to bust out of his camp within nine months.
In some cases, he had shown compassion for his prisoners, even calling out some of his men for delivering unprovoked beatings. Once Kishimoto took a Japanese guard to the side and slapped him in the face—a terrible disgrace to the soldier, to be disciplined in front of an American.12
Kishimoto faced his POWs one last time as he took his seat in the rear cockpit of a Japanese dive-bomber—the first aircraft to land on the new airstrip—and encouraged the men to continue working hard so they could one day return home. Then he saluted them before bumping down the dirt runway en route to his next assignment.13
Kishimoto’s replacement was First Lieutenant Kinoshita, an older man in his late fifties with gray hair and a mustache. He was slight, perhaps 120 pounds, and stood only about five foot six. He was not one for giving long speeches; neither was he seen about camp as often as Kishimoto had been. Kinoshita brought in fresh guards, some of whom soon proved to be even more aggressive than their predecessors, and beatings increased under his regime. Struck by fists and rifle butts on several occasions, Beto Pacheco learned never to look a Japanese guard in the eye, even when spoken to. Work details became harder and longer under Kinoshita, and not a single day passed without Americans being attacked, often with hardwood clubs.
Under Kinoshita’s direction, work progressed steadily on the new airfield. Fresh clothing was nonexistent for much of the first year at Palawan, where each man simply maintained what rags he had worn to the island. When the Japanese did finally offer extra apparel, Smitty accepted whatever “new” items were thrown at him, whether the size was appropriate or not. If they fit, he wore them and if they did not, he used the new items as patches to cover up the tattered clothing he had.14
By mid-April, Mac McDole was feeling well enough to be given light duty, and he was assigned to work in Kinoshita’s office. His job was to keep track of the prisoners each day and record the names of those who were too ill to work. Studying the names and hometowns of his fellow Americans, Mac recited the names in his mind day after day, attempting to memorize the roster in alphabetical order in hope that his memory would be of some future benefit.15
By the end of April, the POWs had cleared an airfield space about 690 feet by 7,200 feet—an area roughly a mile and a half in length. The bearded, calloused skeletons had accomplished the work under slavelike conditions using only hand tools. The Japanese were so pleased with the progress that they now initiated the second phase of runway construction. A cargo ship arrived with two motorized cement mixers and a hold full of dry cement for paving the runway.
A crew toiled from early morning until night, unloading the mixers and thousands of bags of cement. The heat in the ship’s hold was too extreme for the Japanese, who remained under cover of shade while American prisoners ran the winch to hoist loads to the dock. As George Burlage’s team slaved down in the red-hot cargo hold, passing up heavy cement bags, they found several cases of San Miguel beer brewed in Manila. The Americans quickly arranged half-hour shifts so everyone could enjoy sips of warm beer. After each San Miguel was consumed, the cap was carefully replaced and the bottle repacked into its case. The boxes of empty bottles were later hauled out of the hold and packed onto trucks for the Puerto Princesa guards.16
Once the two motorized mixers were hauled to the work site, a yard and a half of cement at a time could be blended while other prisoners hand-mixed more cement in wooden wheelbarrows. They poured the concrete eight inches thick for a length of about forty-six hundred feet—long enough for aircraft landings—as other prisoners cleared more jungle to make room for turntables at each end of the runway and for turnoffs to be used to hide aircraft in the jungle during bombing raids. Francis Galligan helped sabotage the progress by dumping extra barrels of sand into the cement mix when the guards were not paying attention, knowing that the frequent tropical rains would soon turn the freshly poured pads into mush.17
Captain Ted Pulos had been shipped out on April 19, leaving Captain Fred Bruni as the senior officer in charge of the American prisoners of war. Bruni, along with Warrant Officer Glen Turner, now had his hands full trying to prevent his men from stirring up the ire of the new commandant. In May, they learned that Lieutenant (junior grade) Frank Golden was conspiring to escape with Private First Class Harding Stutts, Private James Rudd, and Corporal Bill Bragg. Bruni and Turner threatened to turn the men over to Kinoshita if they did not drop their plans, but the threat merely delayed Golden’s group for a week before they began new preparations to escape.
A few nights later, the three men were just preparing to slip out of the barracks with their meager belongings when they were discovered by Turner, who argued at some length to prevent their escape. When Turner said he would give them a few minutes’ head start before sounding the alarm, Golden’s men finally abandoned the plan. The unrest was put to bed when Bruni had Stutts and Golden placed on the sick list. Both men were in good health, but Bruni told the Japanese that Golden was insane, and he was shipped out on June 9 with a group of thirteen men bound for Manila.18
As the summer of 1943 crawled by, the Americans did their best to avoid confrontation, but abuse was inevitable. Corporal Walt Ditto was singled out by Private Oguri for spilling gasoline while fueling a work truck. Oguri, now known as “John the Bastard,” enlisted another soldier for a quarter hour of kicking and beating Ditto for the offense. One of the few bright spots in June was a change in menu, when a fourteen-foot shark washed up and graced the prisoners’ black dinner pot.19
Unbeknownst to the Puerto Princesa prisoners, some of their Red Cross letters began arriving in their hometowns during 1943. Most had thought little about the postcards they had been allowed to fill out with brief messages during the first Red Cross visit months before. Mac McDole’s family in Iowa received its first telegram from the War Department on June 16. Ernie Koblos’s father had previously received notice in Chicago on February 11 that his son was a prisoner of war of the Japanese government in the Philippines. The families of those notified were provided with a Red Cross mailing address in the event they desired to send any letters or packages to their loved ones.20
Palawan’s dreaded military police unit, the Kempei Tai, was revamped soon after Kinoshita took command of the Puerto Princesa camp. Around May 23, Watanabe and five of his subordinates were transferred to Manila, although Watanabe would soon return and serve as the senior Kempei Tai officer into early 1944. Arriving in early June was Master Sergeant Taichi De
guchi, who had served with the Manila branch of the Kempei Tai. Deguchi became second in command of the Palawan unit, but he was soon number one on the American prisoners’ most-hated list.21
Powerfully built and possessing a chilling stare, Deguchi became feared for his irrational and unprovoked outbursts, in which he beat prisoners simply for fun. Deguchi was serving as the acting commander of the Kempei Tai when two more Americans tried to escape from Palawan. His handling of the affair was the most horrific war crime that the POWs had yet experienced.
It was June 23 when the fourth prison break from Puerto Princesa occurred. Marine Private First Class Seldon T. White and Navy Machinist’s Mate First Class Earl Vance Wilson slipped into the green vegetation while on airfield work duty. Once the guards discovered their disappearance, the remaining prisoners were marched back to the barracks and made to stand at attention for three hours until Kinoshita decided that the two escapees had acted without assistance.22
Kinoshita called in the Philippine Constabulary and ordered them to search the jungle until the Americans were found. The men remained on the loose for five days until their luck ran out. About 1800 on June 28, a guard truck rumbled into camp and unloaded the two escapees. Japanese guards slapped and punched the two men as other prisoners looked on. Wilson, his hands bound, lunged at one of his attackers, but the guards ended the scuffle by using their rifles to prod Wilson and White into the Kempei Tai brig.23
When the prisoners returned from airfield duty that evening, they spotted Wilson and White in a stooped position near the guardhouse, their hands tied behind their backs. Most of the Americans who had escaped in the three previous prison breaks had eluded capture—a fact that had not boded well for Kishimoto and Watanabe. As the new compound commander, Kinoshita was not about to make the mistake of leniency, and thus he allowed Sergeant Deguchi free rein in handling these two recaptured POWs.