Blood Brothers: A Medic's Sketch Book Part 8

Nightly Toll: Each day we transferred the most seriously ill patients to the hospital, where there were small amounts of extra food. In spite of the daily transfers, each night several captives died in the barracks. Many of the captives refused to go to the hospital seeing it as the last stop before death.

Mess Halls: There were eleven mess halls in camp-each with one or two large concrete stoves at one end. Large iron caldrons held the rice or soup to be cooked. During the rainy season, there were serious problems getting the wood to burn.

It often appeared that the mess crews were better fed than other captives. The daily diet consisted of two hundred to four hundred grams of a poor grade of rice, containing fine gravel and insects, about one hundred grams of weeds (from carabao wallows), and, on a rare occasion, ten grams of "one" of the following: sugar, coconut oil, beans, camote (sweet potato), corn, or meat. The diet was usually below eight-hundred calories daily, of which protein and fat were less than fifty calories.

Captives, who were able to earn a pittance by hard labor on labor details or on the farm, could supplement their diet with an occasional banana, egg, a few peanuts, or a few mongo beans.

A few captives raised small gardens growing vegetables for their own use. As they ripened, the produce had to be carefully watched to prevent theft. Some captives trapped stray dogs, some ate lizards, gra.s.shoppers and even earthworms.

With food from every available source, the daily diet rarely reached one thousand calories. Fat and salt were almost never available.

Slow Starvation: Starvation, the scourge of the Orient for centuries, devastated the captives held by the j.a.panese; it was not a starvation bred of poverty, but starvation bred of brutality, sadism and neglect.

Murder would have been more humane; execution more legal. A slow, tortured death, however, was more in keeping with the desire of the j.a.panese to make the "Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor pay dearly for having challenged 'Dai Nippon."

We were hearing so much about the "Death March" and "Camp O'Donnell,"

I have decided to include several paragraphs on each:

Bataan "Death March": The "Death March" began April 9th, when the j.a.panese General Homma demanded that General King surrender his 80,000 Fil-American forces on Bataan "Unconditionally."

Since Gen. Homma's prizes, Corregidor and the Philippine Islands, still lay before him, he had no time to worry about the captured Fil-American forces. His shock troops, tanks, trucks, cars, cavalry, artillery, and infantry occupied the only highway from Bataan to the central plain. They were getting into position (on the grounds of Hospitals I and II) to sh.e.l.l and bomb Corregidor into submission. "Why the dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! They're using us as shields to fire on Corregidor."

At the same time, j.a.panese guards between Marivales and Limay were rounding up the 80,000 hungry, sick, confused, and exhausted captives to march them north on the same highway in groups of one hundred in columns of four.

Guards were continually barking orders: "Get on the highway!

Hully! Hully! Hully! Kura! Stop! Get off the load! Speedo! Sona b.i.t.c.h!

Kura! Get on the highway! Stop!" They used their weapons to enforce their directives.

The "March" began at Marivales, proceeded "on foot" for about sixty miles, then by box car for some twenty miles and finally another ten miles "by foot" to Camp O'Donnell. "It was hot, hot, hot and dusty!

There was no food; there was no water!" Most captives did not have canteens. Those who attempted to fill their canteens in the ditches besides the road were frequently bayoneted; anyone who couldn't keep up was slapped, clubbed or

bayoneted in full view of the others.

Heard along the march: "During the day, we had to travel along the highway when it was not being used by heavy equipment going south."

"At night, we were placed in barbed wire enclosures; sometimes there was water; more often there was none." "As the days pa.s.sed, the stench of death became very p.r.o.nounced; bodies were laying along the highway in all stages of decomposition swollen, bursting open, and covered by thousands of maggots."

The Korean guards were the most abusive. The j.a.ps didn't trust them in battle, so used them as service troops; the Koreans were anxious to get blood on their bayonets; and then they thought they were veterans.

"If you fell, you were dead!"

"There were things you didn't want to see! There was the captive that the j.a.p trucks and tanks had rolled over until he was just a flat 'silhouette' in the pavement."

"The heat was terrible!"

"The j.a.p kept poking me with his bayonet; fear gave me the strength to go on."

"To have a close friend a buddy to help you might be the difference between survival and death."

"As the days pa.s.sed, the compounds holding captives at night became filthy; sick and dying almost filled the areas. The dead were not being buried. The terrible odor was sickening."

"Sometimes when the compounds were crowded, they marched us all night."

"I had 10,000 teeny blisters on the bottom of my feet."

"The compound was full of people a lot of dust, dirt and filth; I just fell into the dirt and slept."

"People were going crazy they were 'nuts!' sometimes talking to themselves, sometimes screaming!"

"We all had dysentery, and there was no water. Usually there was no food."

"We finally reached the train a few box cars with doors closed in the hot sun they were stifling hot like a furnace."

"We were jammed one hundred to a car standing room only. Men fainted, but there was no place to fall down."

"They didn't open the door until we reached the destination.

The living and the dead just fell out."

"Sit down and be counted!"

"When we had reached Capas, it was pandemonium, j.a.ps and captives all milling around. They tried to count us as we rested."

"Then we were told to line up-in columns of twos. We started the march on a dirt road some six miles to Camp O'Donnell."

"Some captives had marched all the way from Bataan close to one hundred miles."

"It wasn't the march that killed us; it was the continual delays along the march the standing in place for two or three hours at a time without food or water."

"If you stepped out of line, you were apt to have a bayonet in your gut."

The exact number of dead from the "Death March" was probably known only to G.o.d. The best estimates were anywhere from 12,000 to 17,000.

Deaths at Cabanatuan: During the first eight months of camp, deaths totaled 2,400. Some thirty to fifty skeletons, covered by leathery skin, were buried in common graves each day. The j.a.ps issued doc.u.ments certifying that each death was caused by malaria, beriberi, pellagra, diphtheria, in fact, anything but the real cause starvation and malnutrition.

After the war, when the Graves Registration searched the Cabanatuan cemeteries, they found and disinterred 2,637 bodies.

Sanitation: From the beginning of camp, sanitation was a serious problem. Flies, including the blue and green bottle types, were present everywhere. Maggots thrived in the latrines, weakened the walls, resulting in cave-ins, and sometimes engulfing the visitor.

Daily rains further weakened the walls.

After several months some engineer officers, under the leadership of Major Fred Saint of Elmhurst, Illinois, organized a sanitary detail, and succeeded in building deep septic tank type latrines that would not cave in. They applied lime daily to control flies and maggots.

Gradually they dug ditches along all walks and around all buildings in order to promote draining and to prevent quagmires.

Labor Details: The camp had not been in operation many days before the j.a.panese requested that the American headquarters furnish labor details of various sizes and types to work both inside and outside the camp. Although an occasional detail would be commanded by a very cruel j.a.p guard and unbelievable brutality followed, the men on some details had reasonable guards, received extra food and remained relatively healthy.

Wood Detail: On good days, a firewood detail went to the forests to get wood for the mess hall stoves.

Rice Detail: One to three times each week, a rice detail composed of from five to ten carabao carts, an American driver for each cart, and several j.a.p guards, drove to market in the town of Cabanatuan to pick up one hundred pound bags of rice for the mess halls.

Outside Details: Details were taken to many places in the Philippines to build and repair roads, bridges and airfields and to load and unload ships in the port area of Manila. Several details of Americans were taken to Bataan to make a j.a.panese movie, ent.i.tled Down with the Stars and Stripes! Periodically, a detail was taken to j.a.pan.