Battle Field Angels (23 page)
Dr. Josep Trueta had developed a more effective treatment to prevent wound infection during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Rather than immediately amputate a mangled limb, he aggressively cleaned it, cut away the damaged and dead tissue, packed it with gauze, and left the wound open. He wrapped plaster-soaked lengths of flannel around the wound. The idea of sealing the limb in a cast was revolutionary. A clean environment under a cast substantially reduced the incidence of gangrenous infection. A horrible smell that built up under the cast came to be recognized as a sign of healing. Wound infections during World War I that ran as high as 90 percent in 1916 later declined by more than half twenty years later.
As a result, during World War II, surgeons and doctors possessed a greater understanding of how to give soldiers’ and sailors’ badly injured arms and legs a chance to heal. That, however, didn’t help the poorly equipped doctors and corpsmen held as prisoners of war. They faced emaciated and badly injured prisoners in work camps and prisons with none of the basic supplies necessary to fight gangrene.
The prisoners in work camps such as Tayabas, San Fernando, Cabanatuan, Tarlac, and O’Donnell took comfort in the knowledge that no matter how dire their condition, at least they hadn’t been sent to the worst prisoner-of-war camp, Bilibid Prison in downtown Manila. Conditions were so bad that prisoners transferred from Bilibid to the jungle camps were openly called liars when they described what it was like inside the ninety-seven-year-old prison. On May 29, Silliphant learned that he and others would be transferred to Bilibid. “We felt sure we were being sent to the most undesirable, the filthiest and most degrading prison in which it was possible for the Japanese to place us,” he later wrote.
On Memorial Day weekend of 1942, truck convoys from several work camps drove through Manila toward Bilibid Prison. Filipinos lined the streets. When Japanese guards weren’t looking, some flashed a “V” with their fingers at the American prisoners as they passed.
My first glimpse within its walls was about noon on the day of our transfer. It was one of those hot sultry days in the month of May which can be imagined only by someone who has lived in Manila during one of the hot seasons of the year. As each truck reached the massive [Bilibid] gates, it ground to an abrupt stop in order that the Jap guards could check each prisoner in … The patients had come on the earlier trucks and they had already been moved inside to one of the large prison barracks which was to serve later as the main medical ward.
A few prisoners who had been with us at Pasay and had been transferred some days earlier were on hand to greet us. Seeing that they had survived the surrounding squalor seemed to lighten our spirits a little. They led us to the space in the old hospital to which we were assigned by the Japs. Before we entered, however, they cautioned us never to fail to salute the Japanese guard who was sitting just inside the door, as we passed by him going in or out. Failure to do that might result in a face-slapping or worse.
—William Silliphant
58
The prison spanned about six acres, bordered by 15-foot-high concrete walls that formed a square compound with a towering iron gate at the midpoint of the south wall. An interior wall bisected the Bilibid compound. A round guard tower sat atop the interior wall’s midpoint, giving guards a 360-degree view of Bilibid’s interior. Ten barracks, each about 125 feet long and 25 feet wide, extended from the central guard tower, like the spokes of a wheel. A concrete building near one exterior wall housed the execution chamber. Inside, the stubs of 2,000-volt wires coming out of a concrete pad were surrounded by scuff marks left by the electric chair.
A stench of despair draped every building. Dozens of patients who had arrived earlier sprawled under the few trees offering shade. Legions of flies crawled over the bare bodies of men too weak with dysentery to swat them away. Some of the sickest were thrown inside the execution chamber, where they evacuated their bowels on the barren concrete. Others were so ill that they didn’t recognize the arrival of the captured Navy medical personnel.
Twelve doctors, 7 dentists, and 125 corpsmen organized a hospital inside a prison that held more than 2,500 prisoners of war. Hundreds more arrived daily, most barely able to stand and some close to death. Corpsmen scavenged the prison grounds for anything that might be useful in the makeshift patient wards. They scrubbed floors and walls so that patients could be brought out of the tropical sun, even if it meant lying on concrete. Corpsmen propped up those suffering from dysentery under a shower they constructed and washed them from head to foot before taking them inside. The sickest patients were placed on canvas stretchers.
Today I begin my duties as chief of surgery. There is a lot to be done here. Within these dingy prison barracks are crowded all human flotsam and jetsam from Bataan and Corregidor. Filipino and American alike, side by side on the concrete deck. The mattresses they lie on are filthy, stinking, and vermin-ridden. Emaciated carcasses look up with staring eyeballs sunk deep in bony sockets. Their broken bodies, starved and bloated, hover near death. Some show anguish and apprehension, some are pleading, some even have hope; but most of them are past manifesting anything—or even caring.
My walk through the wards is one of the most depressing and heart-rending sights imaginable. The mixed smells of dirty bodies, rotting tissue, dried blood and excrement are repulsive to every filament of the esthetic senses. The conglomerate horror of it all beats upon my sensibilities as an outrageous defiance against all the principles of civilization, and dispels any delusion I may have had of human progress.
Our job here is to do all we can with the pitiful little available to us. But even badly needed surgery will not help. These starved, tissue-dead, zombie-like creatures can’t stand surgery. At best, many will die. In this prison the war has just begun.
—POW diary excerpt,
Thomas Hayes, U.S. Navy doctor
Bilibid Prison, Manila, July 1942
59
Commander Thomas Hayes arrived as part of a medical unit that had been captured on Corregidor, the island that guarded the entrance to Manila Bay, nearly two months earlier. When the Japanese moved the medical personnel from Corregidor, doctors were given only two hours to pack hospital supplies. They salvaged little, and most of that had been damaged in transit. Jungle work camps in the interim had failed to prepare Hayes for Bilibid’s squalor and the inadequacy of provisions.
The promised deliveries of medical supplies failed to appear at Bilibid. When the Japanese allowed a truckload of medicine into the prison, it contained Carter’s Little Liver Pills, talcum powder, and Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Corpsmen suspected the Japanese guards had stolen the most useful medicines from the shipment. With the exception of a few doctors and corpsmen in jungle work camps, the region’s entire Navy medical corps had been sent to Bilibid.
Deepening hunger defined life as a prisoner. Prisoners were fed very poor rice that had rocks, dirt, or worms in it. Many prisoners grew used to the grit in their rice. Men regularly swept the ground where it was unloaded in search of a few extra grains. Corpsmen scrounged for dirty rice for their bedridden patients. Prisoners, medical staff, and patients also were given watery, polished rice for breakfast, called
lugao
. The white rice contained almost no nutritional value. Worms sometimes floated on the surface, an additional source of nourishment that most prisoners learned to choke down. One day, an American doctor found a fully-grown mouse in his soup. He tossed the stiff rodent aside, reboiled his rice for ten minutes on a homemade hotplate, and ate it.
Sometimes guards served a half a cup of thin soup, made with a bitter swamp grass similar to bamboo. Shoots a half-inch thick could be chewed only by new prisoners whose teeth and gums had not yet rotted. As bitter as the gruel was, most prisoners preferred it to the shovelsful of minnows sometimes dumped into the noontime soup. The entire prison reeked of rotting fish when buckets of minnows were boiled for lunch.
Prisoners passed the time by reminiscing about childhood holiday meals. Some lost their desire for food, while others developed a starvation phobia, eating themselves sick for fear each might be their last meal. Corpsmen guarded small caches of rice and other food for their starving patients.
Survival sometimes rested on ingenuity. The Japanese allowed Manila merchants to sell food to those prisoners whose money hadn’t been confiscated by their captors. Corpsmen and prisoners developed a variety of ways to cook the additional scraps they had purchased. Discarded pots, pans, buckets, or pails became cooking vessels. Rain-warped lumber was highly prized as firewood. The mung bean saved many lives. The size of a small shotgun pellet, it was rich in vitamin B-1 and tasted faintly of lentils. Prisoners wrapped the beans in a wet towel, placed them in the sun, and in a few days the germinated beans flavored the food provided by the Japanese.
Disease was epidemic inside Bilibid. Two types of dysentery ravaged thousands of men. Unsanitary prison conditions, rotten food, and rancid water made it inevitable. Sometimes a man recovered through sheer will, perseverance, and luck. Often, however, doctors and corpsmen were equipped only with their compassion to treat patients.
Corpsman T. F. Brannon took care of Malin Malloy, who had arrived from Tayabas, a jungle work camp notorious for dysentery. The parasitic condition had robbed his body of nearly all its fluid. He suffered from chronic diarrhea, fever, vomiting, and abdominal tenderness, which led Brannon to think the parasite may have infected Malloy’s liver. If it reached his bloodstream, infection of his lungs and brain could be next. Without antiparasitic medication, Brannon had no means to stop its spread. Malloy was one of one hundred fifty dysentery cases in Bilibid on the day he died.
Corpsman L. F. Tyree spent extra time with Reginald Decker. The lack of thiamine, or vitamin B-1, in Decker’s diet had led to a severe case of beriberi. Fatigue and irritation had given way to loss of memory and fitful sleep. One morning, a tremendous burning sensation enveloped Decker’s feet. His calf muscles cramped in pain. Later, his leg muscles atrophied as portions of his spinal cord disintegrated. Without massive doses of thiamine, Decker had little hope for survival.
Corpsman W. N. Thompson regularly checked on Jerrold Powell. A bright red rash on Powell’s face had thickened and deepened in color, and large patches of skin were sloughing off. Powell’s mouth and tongue had reddened and swelled as his diarrhea intensified and his memory faded. Powell had pellagra, a disease caused by an absence of niacin, or vitamin B-3, in his diet. Thompson knew the final symptoms would include stiffness of arms and legs, confusion, depression, and hallucinations.
Corpsman H. L. Kirby attended to Dan Foley, who had been complaining of blurry vision, a sensation that something was in his eye, and an unnatural sensitivity to light. Foley had exophthalmia, a condition in which eyes bulge out of their orbits and are consequently always dry. Nearly all Bilibid prisoners suffered from some degree of sight impairment. Dozens of patients developed ulcers on their corneas, a serious and common complication from prolonged vitamin A deficiency. A corneal ulcer could penetrate the eye, spread infection, and cause permanent blindness.
Corpsman J. T. Istock tried to ease the agony of a patient, simply listed as “Westbrook” in the prison records, who writhed and scratched his leg furiously. He knew the patient had contracted rabies from a dog bite in a jungle work camp. The Japanese guards had given him an outof-date vaccine. The patient suffered from chills, fever, muscle aches, and irritability. By the fifth day, he could hardly swallow between hallucinations and convulsions. He died slowly, fully aware of every nightmare, every spasm.
Istock had given part of his food ration to Westbrook to keep him alive. He walked over to a corner of the ward and pulled a half-rotted rice gunny sack from the pile saved for death shrouds. The corpsman wrapped Westbrook’s body in the sack that once contained the rancid rice. The dead man’s belongings—a pair of handmade shoes, a threadbare shirt, and a worn toothbrush—were given to the neediest prisoners. Burial might have been delayed because rain often clogged Bilibid’s sewer system, flooding the prison grounds with raw sewage.
I had been in my bunk for about an hour last night trying to fall asleep; when I suddenly heard someone in the shadow of the building next to mine whisper my name. I failed to recognize the voice and waited. Momentarily a man stepped out into the open. He was holding a small package. I eased out of my bunk and stood in the dark of the doorway. The parcel was pushed into my hands and the stranger disappeared in the darkness. I stowed the package under my bedding, then strolled quietly over to the barred window that looks out over the “sacred circle” and guardhouse. The sentries were seated around a table—nothing unusual astir.
I carried the box into the toilet and opened it under the light. It contained a sack of sweet smelling coffee and a box of cigars. Not that the coffee wasn’t welcome, but I decided to try the tobacco first. The Japanese drink coffee, but they don’t smoke “stogies.” I wasn’t the only one who knew that. Underneath the cigars was a message. (I can’t write down how this contact was made, but will remember it.) This was a dummy run that St. M. [a courier who smuggled messages into Bilibid] had tried and it worked to perfection. Her note mentioned that she doesn’t intend to use this method again, but outlined other plans for contact after the first of September.
—POW diary excerpt,
Thomas Hayes
60
Dr. Thomas Hayes was an American spy. The Philadelphia native was forty-four years old when the Japanese captured him on Corregidor. A graduate of George Washington University medical school, he spoke several languages. He joined the Navy in 1924 and was recruited by the intelligence corps. In 1940, he arrived in the Philippines aboard the USS
Milwaukee
.