Elizabeth M. Norman (33 page)

Still, all of this, the harassment by the Japanese and the tension that comes from forcing some four thousand people to live belly to back, paled in the face of the advancing hunger.

In March the bread issue and sugar ration were cut in half. In June, the peanut supply was reduced. Fish and vegetables supplied by the Imperial Army were, more often than not, spoiled or rotten when they arrived. The internee leaders, who still had access to what was left of the camp funds, decided to buy bananas and a few pigs, but the purchase amounted to only a few mouthfuls per person. Breakfast now was usually cornmeal mush, a cup of coconut milk and a banana (every other day the camp cooks added a tiny bit of sugar to the mush); lunch was corn soup, a little rice and ginger tea; supper consisted of cooked rice, boiled corn and white radishes (two or three times a week they’d add a few shards of fish to this gruel).

Then, as spring moved into summer, rations were cut again. The adults in camp went from a diet of 1,490 calories a day to 1,180 calories, less than half what the average person requires to maintain minimum health. The bananas were gone and rice became a periodic, rather than regular, staple. As a substitute camp cooks turned to
camote
, a fibrous sweet potato, but this simulacrum played havoc on the weakened intestines of the internees.

Now the main kitchen and hospital kitchen served only two meals a day. It was not unusual to see children scrounging through garbage cans by the Japanese army mess hall for scraps of food. (In her testimony for the American War Crimes Office, Hattie Brantley told investigators: “At frequent intervals during 1944 … I witnessed the slaughter of cattle by the internees for consumption by the Japanese; no part of this meat was allowed to the internees but occasionally the internees were given the bones of the cattle.… I had frequent occasion to witness the Japanese sentries eating meals that had been brought to their posts and these meals during this entire period included a sufficiency of fresh eggs and citrus fruits and an abundance of rice; part of this rice was frequently thrown away.”)
⁷

At the camp mess hall, people waiting on line for something to eat fainted from hunger. A survey conducted by the internees showed that on the average the men in camp had lost 31.4 pounds, the women 17.7 pounds. (Many individuals lost as many as fifty pounds. Eleanor Garen and Red Harrington, for example, lost some forty pounds each. Cassie, who weighed 145 pounds before the war, now was approaching 100.)

The malnutrition led to a variety of ailments: neuritic pain (inflammation of the nerves), parasthesias (numbness in the hands and feet), ocular pain (sharp ache in the eyeballs and blurred sight or double vision), pellagra (raised red spots on the skin that eventually become dry and
scaly, and bleed), ariboflavinosis (sores on the lips and a red and swollen tongue) and anemia (reduced red blood cells causing extreme fatigue and weakness). The lack of proteins and vitamins led to small epidemics of measles, whooping cough, bacillary dysentery, and left almost everyone else dizzy with headaches.

Josie Nesbit, a veteran clinician normally self-possessed in the presence of suffering, was unnerved by the changes she saw taking place in her nurses.

“Their eyes gradually sank deeper into hollowed cheekbones,” she noted. “Their gait slowed down more and more as their strength grew less. Even their shoulders drooped noticeably.”
⁸

The ache of hunger left their tempers short and their moods incendiary. Sally Blaine, twenty-nine years old, from Bible Grove, Missouri, a pretty and petite woman with curly brown hair, had a run-in with a bunkmate.

“Every night she’d come ask me after the lights were out, ‘Sally, are you hungry? Wouldn’t a steak taste good? Would you like to have some chocolate pie?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, be quiet! Please don’t talk about it.’ But she always wanted to talk to me about food and I would dream of chocolate cake,” Sally said. “I didn’t really care that much about chocolate cake except if I had sweet milk to drink with it. I’d dream of chocolate cake and in the dream I’d start to drink my milk and it would be buttermilk when it got to my mouth. I didn’t like buttermilk and the bad taste would awaken me.”
⁹

At Los Banos the internees were starving as well, and Red Harrington and Page Nelson began to quarrel. “We were both practically chewing on each other,” said Harrington. “We got awfully snappish toward the end. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.”
¹⁰

The Santo Tomas Ladies Baseball League canceled its season; the nurses and other women on the teams did not have enough energy to lift a bat.

The internees inundated the camp commandant with letters of protest, letters that told him they were starving to death. The commandant considered the matter, then told his prisoners that their profound loss of weight was likely due to “prolonged internment, separation from families, and lack of regular communication.”
¹¹
The Imperial Army, he went on, could not be expected to satisfy the dietary predilections and native tastes of its European and American captives. And why should it? In prisoner-of-war camps in the States, American jailers did not try to find Japanese food for his countrymen. The world was at war, the commandant
reminded the internees, and they should be more patient and less disagreeable. Their health was fine, he said, but if they wanted more food, perhaps they should consider making handicrafts to sell to the Filipinos or maybe they might try breeding fish in the campus swimming pool.

In the face of such absurdity and prevarication the internees tried to husband their strength and fight their despair. Cassie, twenty-seven years old and in her prime, was so enervated by malnutrition she navigated through the day like a crippled octogenarian:

We lived on the second floor of Main Building. We had a stairway to the second floor and the stairs were on two levels. You went up, say, six steps, then there was a landing, then you had another eight steps to go. Well, it got to the point where you had all you can do to make the first set of stairs when you discover that you have to sit down and take a breather before you take on the next set of stairs. They had to make benches and put them there on the landing [so people could rest]. The writing was on the wall.
¹²

On June 7 a rumor spread that the Allies had invaded France, and when the internees’ secret radio confirmed the news, the camp disc jockey followed his morning announcements on the loudspeaker with the song, “Over There.”

Throughout the day the camp buzzed with speculation. Maybe now, people said, maybe finally, American forces would return and rescue them. The gamblers in camp laid odds they’d be home by Christmas. One of the nurses fashioned a foot-high doll from rags, dressed it in a khaki uniform and hat and named it the Any-Day-Now Doll.
¹³
Other nurses formed “The Day Club,” their motto—“If not today than surely tomorrow.”
¹⁴

The Japanese reacted to the Allied advances with another round of repression. No more impromptu meetings or social events; in other words no gatherings at all without official permission. At the same time, lightbulbs and matches were rationed.

The harassment, of course, only made the hunger worse, and the hungrier they became, the more they turned their backs on the conventions of society, the rules that give daily life its rectitude. Food began to disappear regularly from the camp kitchens, the fish-cleaning areas and the vendors’ stands. The common want was undermining the common good.

•   •   •

T
HE SUMMER WAS
hot, the days heavy with boredom, fatigue and worry. The camp waited for rescue but rescue was nowhere in sight. In the sky above Manila, Japanese Zeros buzzed one another in mock dogfights. Inside the walls the sentries and guards prepared fighting positions and practiced combat drills.

As fall approached there was still no sign of a fleet or an invasion force. Then on September 21 the waiting turned to wonder.

The camp had just settled into its morning routine. Cooks were trying to figure out how to stretch the camp’s rations for dinner, the nurses were at work in STIC’s hospitals and clinics and many people were trying to summon enough strength to weed their garden patches and coax their vegetables to grow. The morning sky was noisy again with the buzz of aircraft, and the gardeners working their little patches looked up and cursed the racket coming from above the clouds. Then, all of a sudden, the planes broke through the thick cover, and those on the ground were startled by the markings on their wings—white stars and blue circles, the insignia of American aircraft!

The allied raid clearly surprised the Japanese and the city erupted with the sound of antiaircraft fire. Inside STIC the guards hustled the internees into their quarters and posted armed sentries at the entrances. A crowd gathered in the lobby of Main Building.

“They’re here,” people cried, tears welling up in their eyes. “Thank God, they’re here.”
¹⁵

Some of the men swore that two of the aircraft had dipped their wings over the camp, a salute or perhaps a signal, they said.

At the hospital the nurses hugged and kissed one another. A few even tried to dance a little jig.

The raid lasted two hours, and from beyond the walls the internees could see smoke rising in the direction of Manila’s waterfront. At 3:00
P.M
. a second wave of planes appeared overhead, and the internees celebrated all over again. Camp cooks marked the occasion with a double serving of rice and vegetable-meat gravy for dinner. Tomorrow, some people told themselves, tomorrow they would be eating hamburgers.

The commandant ordered a 6:00
P.M
. curfew and the internees spent the evening watching the western sky light up with the orange glow of a hundred fires. After the evening announcements the camp disc jockey
played three songs: “Pennies from Heaven,” “I Cover the Waterfront” and “It Looks Like Rain in Cherry Blossom Lane.” In her diary Edith Shacklette wrote, “Glorious.”
¹⁶

Every day thereafter air-raid sirens sounded across the city. The bombings clearly were a prelude to an invasion, but it was anyone’s guess when the invaders would arrive, where they would land or how long it would take to liberate the camps. The Japanese had a huge force in the islands and they were dug in and well fortified. Perhaps the allies planned to first rout them from the southern islands of Mindanao, Cebú, Negros and Samar before attacking the largest land mass, Luzon, where the heart of the Imperial Army, some 275,000 troops, was waiting. And it was on Luzon, of course, where the Japanese had collected most of their civilian and military prisoners. Surely, some said, they would come to Luzon first and liberate the camps—Bilibid, Cabanatuan, Los Banos, Santo Tomas.

During a lull in bombing, the Japanese army put another two hundred soldiers in Santo Tomas. The new troops immediately began bayonet practice on the plaza and close-order drill on the playing fields. They turned the cupola on Main Building into an observation post, a good point from which to direct artillery against an advancing enemy. It did not take long, of course, for the internees to figure out that these measures would make Santo Tomas a target for allied bombers and cannons. And they sent a letter to the commandant accusing him of using them as human shields. The commandant’s reply was brief:

The Government of the United States has not been officially informed that the Santo Tomas University was to be used as an internment camp. Therefore, officially it has no protective status. However everything possible will be done to protect the internees of the camp to the fullest extent.
¹⁷

So they were on their own. The internees set up air-raid drills, dug bombing trenches, set aside blankets to cover the windows, put fire buckets in every room, established a first aid station in the library.

On the morning of October 15, American bombers returned, and the War Prisoners Department of the Japanese Imperial Army reacted to the new round of raids by again cutting the supply of food.

The result was a diet of less than 1,000 calories a day, with only 24 grams of protein, 202 grams of carbohydrates and 12 grams of fat per person.
¹⁸
Navy nurse Dorothy Still had almost no body fat and so little
control over her abdominal muscles, she was sure she could feel her intestines and stomach bounce with each step.

That fall the International YMCA sent two hundred ducks to STIC, and some of the internees dreamed of a duck dinner, but the birds yielded so little meat, cooks ended up serving a dollop of ground duck over a scoop of rice. On the camp bulletin board the kitchen crew wrote: “Two hundred ducks, 293 lbs gross, 190 lbs net; the ducks were starving too.”
¹⁹

Some people started eating weeds—flowers and roots. (Dorothy Still took a chance on another species, an indigestible green with sharp edges that cut her rectal sphincter muscles and made her bleed.) Most people simply waited on line for peelings from the kitchen. (A few of the nurses grew a little
talinum
and okra, then fried their meager harvest in the cold cream that came in Red Cross kits.)

A number of internees were convinced that the Japanese were trying to kill them, literally starve them to death, but more likely than not the enemy’s policy, if it had one, was simply indifference—the Japanese did not care whether their captives lived or died. The Americans and other foreign nationals were an afterthought, an annoyance for an army of occupation that would soon be an army under attack.