Elizabeth M. Norman (26 page)

But all that acreage and all those amenities were really an illusion, for inside the buildings life was lived belly to back. In each dormitory, the internees were allotted only the space occupied by their metal beds or bamboo cots, not one inch more. To relieve the oppression of such tight quarters, the prisoners soon took to building small outdoor sheds, or “shanties,” as they liked to call them. At night the internees were confined to their dormitories but the Japanese allowed them to spend their days in their shanties. Made of scraps of lumber, woven palm mats, tin, blankets and bamboo, the rough-hewn pieds-à-terre were the internees sanctuaries.

The shanties were built in clusters on the open lawns and gently sloping grounds among the acacias and cyprus, and in time the clusters began to look like subdivisions and took on names: Glamourville, Foggy Bottom, Garden Court, Southwest Territory, Out Yonder and Jungletown. Sometimes the “citizens” of these small towns elected unofficial mayors and chiefs of police. They surrounded their little shacks with flower beds or climbing vines or privacy hedges, then carved out grids or footpaths and named them Fifth Avenue, Hollywood Boulevard, MacArthur Drive, Papaya Lane, Camote Road. In time the shanty owners became the camp elite, the people who seemed to have the most control over their tightly circumscribed lives.

T
HE MILITARY PRISONS
in the islands came under the rule of the Imperial Japanese Army. To a Japanese soldier, surrender and capture were dishonorable acts, and the Japanese guards treated allied military prisoners with contempt and abject brutality, beating, torturing and murdering them. The civilian internment camps, however, such as the one at Santo Tomas, were, during the early years of the war, governed by the Department of External Affairs, part of the Japanese occupation authority, and the bureaucrats whose business it was to cage up thousands of foreign nationals looked on those in their charge with simple indifference and neglect.

The commandant of Santo Tomas was a civilian, R. Tsurumi. When the camp opened in January 1942, he ordered the first group of internees to set up their own administration to manage the camp’s day-to-day affairs. He also told them they would have to use their own funds to supplement
the subsistence, or maintenance, allotment provided by the Department of External Affairs. And so the first men and women to enter Santo Tomas in early January formed two management boards, the Executive and advisory committees. These policy and oversight councils, composed of British and American businessmen, managed every aspect of camp life and enforced camp rules. By the summer of 1942, with the population of the camp now in the thousands, the internee government had set up sixteen subcommittees to regulate their diurnal exigencies and affairs: food, housing, medical services, education, sanitation, recreation and discipline and so on.

The Japanese gave the Executive Committee a financial allotment that amounted to thirty-five cents per person per day to run the camp. This pittance was applied to the purchase of all food, utilities, medical supplies, construction and maintenance and sanitation materials—in short, all the myriad and manifold expenses of maintaining a sixty-acre campus-turned-town and the feeding, housing, clothing and keeping alive of a population that would come to number 3,800 men, women and children.

In many ways the disparate talents and skills of the group helped the internees to survive. Some were good at building a government, others at rebuilding a generator. Plumbers repaired broken pipes while shoemakers resoled shredded sandals. A number of people joined labor gangs to clean the buildings and grounds or work in the camp kitchen. Teachers worked in camp school with the children or organized extension classes for the adults. In the late winter of 1942, the eleven navy nurses captured in Manila when the army retreated to Bataan were sent to Santo Tomas and assigned to the camp hospital working under Laura Cobb, who was later named hospital superintendent.

Work made the time pass more quickly, so it was not hard for the Executive Committee to marshal volunteers or enforce a rule that every able-bodied internee had to work at least two hours a day. A gang of fifty men were detailed to dig up an old landfill in the northeast corner of the campus and convert some seven and a half acres into a camp vegetable garden. At first the labor of digging out old cans and bottles, tilling the soil under the tropical sun and carrying water in five-gallon cans across hundreds of yards of ground was hard on these bankers and bureaucrats, but, in their parlance, it paid off. In time they were able to harvest and send to the camp kitchen thousands of pounds of eggplant, okra, corn and
talinum
(a green leafy vegetable).

Some people came into the camp with money, a lot of it, others with
only the clothes they had on their backs. The Finance and Supply Subcommittee worked hard to make sure everyone—rich or poor, society matron or street prostitute—had the basics: a subsistence diet, minimal clothing, essential medical care. Anything else, anything extra, the internees had to provide themselves.

The Japanese allowed Filipino fruit and vegetable vendors into the camp, and internee entrepreneurs were given permission to purvey clothes, housewares, ice cream, candy and coconut milk. In time there was an internee-run coffee shop and a Filipino laundry. To mitigate profiteering, the Executive Committee set up an official camp store that sold secondhand clothing and a camp canteen that offered soap, sugar, flour, vinegar and canned goods, all at cost plus 10 percent.

Thus Santo Tomas was, in some ways, a porous prison, with official merchants, marketeers and mongers coming and going throughout the day. And adding to this flow of goods and services was a daily contingent of unofficial suppliers as well, Filipinos mostly, the relatives, friends or former employees of many of those behind Santo Tomas’s walls.

Every morning these good samaritans would queue up at the Package Shed, a tiny wooden hut near the nipa-palm buildings occupied by the camp guards at the iron front gates. There the samaritans would deliver to their imprisoned friends and relatives bundles of food, clothes, household items, money, and chairs, tables and building materials for the shanties. Japanese guards checked each parcel for weapons, liquor, notes and other contraband, but they were not as vigilant with bundles leaving the camp, and often the samaritans walked away carrying bundles of dirty laundry with messages tucked inside—a love letter, perhaps, to a husband or fiancé suffering the dreadful deprivations and torture of Japanese military prison, or a secret intelligence report to the underground resistance movement in Manila or the guerrillas fighting in the mountains and the hills.

In time the package line became a kind of town square, a gathering spot. The guards had orders to prevent any contact between the samaritans and the internees—packages were dropped off and labeled for later distribution—but each day hundreds of internees collected inside the main gate to catch a glimpse of their kin, couriers, deliverymen and package carriers, and soon there developed dozens of private codes and secret languages between those behind the iron fence and those who approached it.

Most spoke to one another in a kind of prison-camp pantomime, swaying in a particular way or hopping on one foot or the other. Others
scratched themselves in a certain way or at certain spots. Many worked out complex signals with head and hand movements. Standing back from the crowd and watching all this, it sometimes appeared that the crowd inside at the front gates was afflicted with a series of nervous disorders. No one, of course, could begin to imagine what the Japanese made of this daily show.

Porous as it was, however, STIC was still a prison, and one day in February the Japanese decided to underscore that point. Three restless internees—Englishmen Thomas Fletcher and Henry Weeks and Australian Blakely Laycock—had gone over the wall at night and had been recaptured. Back at camp they were hauled into a room next to the Japanese commandant’s office and beaten so severely their cries and screams echoed for hours in the warm afternoon air.

The next day the Executive Committee posted a notice, obviously edited by the Japanese, saying that the men had been severely punished and were being transferred to another camp. Two days later the internees of Santo Tomas learned that the men had been court-martialed and condemned to death, and the following afternoon the head of the Executive Committee, an American businessman named Earl Carroll, and two room monitors from the dormitory where the escapees had lived were driven to a Chinese cemetery. There they saw Fletcher, Weeks and Laycock standing in a ravine by a freshly dug grave. The Japanese wanted to send a message to the internees, and Carroll and the room monitors were meant to deliver it. What happened next comes from an account Carroll gave to A.V.H. Hartendorp, the secret camp historian.

The men were led to the edge of the grave … and now made to sit side by side on the mound of earth thrown up, their feet dangling in the hole.… Three of the soldiers … drew their pistols … and, standing on the other side of the grave, facing the blindfolded men, fired at their hearts. Fletcher slumped against Laycock, the man in the middle, and both fell forward into the hole. Weeks remained seated and was shot once more before he toppled. Carroll heard the men groaning as the soldiers stepped to the edge of the grave to look in. The one detailed to end the life of Weeks fired a third shot. Then all three soldiers fired their pistols into the grave. The groans still continued, and Laycock and Weeks were given still another bullet each. The Commandant shook his head, saying to Carroll … that it was too bad his men had not been equipped with rifles. Groans still sounded from the grave, the soldiers returned, one of them laughing, and fired another volley of three shots.… Some Filipino cemetery workers now approached to fill
the grave. They were ordered back until the soldiers themselves had first thrown in some earth, the groans, even then, having not entirely subsided.
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B
Y THE SUMMER
of 1942 the society of the camp and its routine had been well established.

Food and medicine aside, the biggest problem in STIC was boredom, the dunning routine of staying alive. Work was the best antidote, and right behind that was the satisfaction of learning something new. The Education Subcommittee created an elementary and high school, with a faculty of twenty-three and a student body of almost six hundred. Meanwhile the college professors interned at STIC offered courses for their fellow internees in Spanish, French, Tagalog, Japanese, Latin, art, music appreciation, typing, shorthand, mathematics, business theory and English as a second language. The Recreation Subcommittee offered golf and calisthenics lessons and organized leagues in baseball, basketball, volleyball and soccer. The Religious Subcommittee set up services and Scripture classes and crafted “The Ten Commandments of STIC,” a behavioral code that stressed honesty, cooperation and decency.
⁴
The Entertainment Subcommittee marshalled the professional musicians and entertainers in camp. David Harvey MacTurk, an impresario known to everyone as Dave Harvey, produced vaudeville shows, sing-alongs and plays. His first revue included a sword swallower, a tap dancer and an accordion solo. Harvey was a natural impresario and his stand-up routines on camp life drew large audiences, sometimes as many as two thousand people. At one show he shocked the audience when he walked to the center of the stage and in a low but firm voice began to carefully recite the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Slowly the members of the audience rose to their feet as they listened. The Japanese did nothing, apparently believing that Harvey’s little monotone was just some idle patois between jokes.

Like all small cities, STIC had its miscreants. The Committee on Order had to deal with the handful of adult ne’er-do-wells who refused to work and instead spent their hours drinking smuggled liquor or home brew. Then there were the thieves. In a place of pervasive want, everything had some value to someone and the camp Fagins stole everything from a Longine watch to a simple spoon.

The Committee on Order also dealt with people who regularly broke curfew, and among the regulars were those inamoratas and inamoratos caught in flagrante delicto. The Japanese, reserved by nature and prudish
in society, had forbidden public displays of affection. They even forced husbands and wives to sleep apart in segregated dormitories. (At one point the commandant proposed putting up a large tent in a corner of the campus so married couples could couple during the day in common coitus, but the internees rejected this nonsense.) If a woman became pregnant, the Japanese jailed the responsible husband or boyfriend and confined the woman in a special hospital outside the camp. Thus the men and women of Santo Tomas were forced to pursue their passion surreptitiously, so they met, at first, in the shadows and quiet corners of Main Building or, later, during the day, in their shanties. A number of women exchanged sex for money, food, clothing, whatever they needed to survive, but no one really censored such behavior. Some social mores fall away on survival’s steep slope.

Overall the morale of the captives, given their material losses and deprivations, was remarkably high, and this spirit was sustained, in part, by the daily broadcasts of the camp radio station. For two hours every morning the Japanese allowed internee disc jockeys to play music and make announcements over a system of loudspeakers. The music was primarily old standards and big-band tunes—for reasons no one could explain, the Japanese forbid them to play jazz—records that the disc jockeys had collected from their fellow prisoners. Secretly this same crew built a shortwave radio and monitored foreign stations to collect the news. They could not, of course, relay this information directly over the loudspeaker; the Japanese fanatically censored everything in camp. So the deejays devised a kind of code, playing records that suggested the course of the war and the Allied advances and victories. For instance, when the tune “There Will Always Be an England” came on the air, it was easy to guess that Great Britain had weathered yet another Nazi blitz.