Behind Japanese Lines (9 page)

Vernon Fassoth, William's son, spent part of his time in the camps, part of it searching for Americans, and part of it scrounging the battlefields of Bataan for arms, dynamite, TNT, or anything else potentially useful. He echoes his father's claim that food was plentiful and medical care was as good as could be expected in the circumstances. He acknowledges that, despite this, camp morale was frequently low and that at least one inmate committed suicide from despair. Some of the malaise he attributes to trouble that developed between his father, who wanted the camp to be simply a place of rest run on a civilian basis, and some of the commissioned officers in it
who wanted to run it as a regular military encampment. Most of the latter eventually left after repeated arguments with the elder Fassoth.

Henry Clay Conner, whom I never knew but who had escaped from Bataan and was in the Fassoth camp for a time, wrote an account of his experiences soon after the war. He blamed most of the trouble in the camp on two considerations: (1) Most of the men were hungry, sick, and still frightened or shocked by their recent experiences, and so were extremely “edgy”; (2) Worse, some of the officers insisted dogmatically on the prerogatives of rank, while the enlisted men took the view that since all hands were now in the same fix, rank should cease to mean anything.
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My own recollections do not jibe with any of these exactly. Because I was sick in bed so much of the time that I eventually acquired several bedsores, it is certainly possible that much went on that I knew nothing about and that my impressions of life in the camp are not to be taken seriously. Be that as it may, I will record what I can remember. It seemed to me that nearly everyone was sick and dispirited much of the time. Barbarities there may have been, but I don't believe they were nearly as commonplace as Monaghan indicates. I certainly wanted to live to kill Japanese one day, and this may well have been true of Volckmann too, but I also remember his friend Blackburn telling me one day that Volckmann was frequently so despondent that he, Blackburn, feared that Volckmann might do something foolish. I do not recall food being plentiful, as the Fassoths indicate: quite the reverse.

One conclusion about it all is obvious: human memories, especially after the passage of years, are highly fallible. Another is that what seems shameful, intolerable, or unprecedented to one person may seem to another only what has to be expected in extremely trying circumstances. For myself, I remember the Fassoth camp as a place where I suffered from something or other constantly but for which my predominant sentiment is deep gratitude.

Fassoth himself had good luck for that time and locale. After establishing the third camp he finally surrendered to the Japanese in the spring of 1943, perhaps from resentment at the laziness and ingratitude of so many of the men he had befriended.
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The Japanese imprisoned him for the rest of the war at Cabanatuan with military POWs rather than with civilian detainees at Santo Tomas in Manila. Surprisingly, he was treated humanely. The Bernia brothers were not so fortunate. Vincente was killed by the Japanese while helping to defend another camp established by Colonels Merrill and Calyer of the Thirty-first Infantry. It was said that his brother Arturo was
wounded, then captured by the Japanese, who trussed him to a pole like a pig and carried him into the jungle to an unknown fate. Both Bernias were as truly heroes as any Filipino or American in uniform.

In the late summer of 1942 my prospects looked dim indeed. I still lay in bed much of the time, beset each day by the alternating chills and fever of malaria. Vernon Fassoth and others would carry me outdoors periodically in the hope that sunlight might do me some good. My malaria was complicated by beri beri, which swelled my hands, feet, and face to such a degree that when they were touched indentations remained in the flesh as they might in putty. Finally, I had yellow jaundice, which activated my kidneys eight or ten times a night.

Whatever food we had fell into two categories: that which made the bowels inoperative and that which made them uncontrollable. The best one could do was alternate the intake. I felt like the man who sat with one foot in a bucket of hot water and the other on an ice cake and who, when asked his temperature, answered “average.” It is incredible what the human body can bear; marvellous how hard it is to kill a strong young person, short of cutting off his head. My personal resiliency still amazes me, in retrospect. By the time the war ended I felt strong and healthy again. I decided to stay in the Air Corps and resolved to try to realize my onetime ambition to become a fighter pilot. I succeeded in passing the stringent physical and mental examinations required, and survived in a pilot training program in which one-third of the aspirants washed out. If someone had asked me, in 1942, if such a metamorphosis was possible, I doubt that I could have summoned sufficient strength even to laugh at him.

Filipinos had a lot of intriguing medical beliefs and practices. Their effects varied from bizarre to lethal. Henry Clay Conner, who like me owed his life to friendly Filipinos, relates that early in 1942 a Negrito tribesman once brewed an herb called
dita
and gave it to him for his malaria. In two days the chills and fever abated and Conner felt vastly better. When he tried to secure more
dita
on his own, however, he was warned by an educated Filipino, the brother of a doctor, that while
dita
did not harm Negritos it often caused people less tough to end up deaf, dumb, blind, or dead.
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In my case, one day a Filipino around the camp commiserated with me and told me that if I wished to recover I should drink the blood of a black dog. The thought was sickening, especially since the blood was to be secured by cutting the dog's throat, but numerous Filipinos regarded it as a sure-fire universal remedy. I was so desperate to recover that I had become willing to try anything, so I agreed. When
some of the repulsive stuff was actually brought to me in a coconut shell, I could down only one swallow. Nothing beneficial happened. Maybe my faith wasn't strong enough.

Then I was told that work would help me. I did not believe I had the strength to do even ordinary camp chores until I saw the man who slept next to me, Lt. Bob Reeves of ordnance, breathe his last. We rolled his body in a bamboo mat and held services. Soon three others died, and it was obvious that more were sliding downhill inexorably. I decided I had to work, no matter how I felt. So I did a few chores, vomited, and repeated the sequence.

How this personal medical experiment would have turned out I will never know, since it was cut short by the enemy on a bright moonlit night, September 26, 1942. What happened was surely inevitable. The camp itself was at an elevation of at least four thousand feet. Just to bring in sufficient food to keep us alive was difficult and required many porters. Eventually the Japanese caught one, an Igorot tribesman. They tortured him fiendishly and learned the location of the camp. Then they put a white shirt on the man and tied a rope to him so they could keep track of him in the dark. They caught the Filipino guard at our outermost outpost fast asleep. They tied a rope around his neck too, and forced him to guide them the rest of the way. The guard at the outpost nearest our camp they slashed to shreds with a samurai sword as he clutched desperately for the field telephone. Having thus achieved complete surprise, about two hundred Japanese, each with a miner's lamp mounted on his head, descended on the camp, screaming like banshees and shooting wildly.

Oddly, I now owed my freedom, and likely my life, to the diseases that had heretofore nearly killed me; specifically, to what they had done to my kidneys. When the raid came, I was outdoors, on the opposite side of the barracks from which the attack was mounted, urinating for perhaps the twentieth time that day and rolling a cigarette from home-grown tobacco. The tobacco I had cut carefully and carried in a small bamboo tube. When the attack came, I panicked and started to run, but I was so weak I fell, in the process dropping my tube of tobacco. So treasured in miserable circumstances are even the smallest pleasures that I fumbled about to retrieve the tobacco before I even tried to run again. Small difference: at once I fell again and lost my tobacco for good. This time I realized that I was simply too weak to run, so I walked to the brink of a nearby creek, dropped over the bank, followed the meandering streambed for some time, then crawled out on the other side and melted into the primeval forest. As I
worked my way through bamboo thickets, I could hear the ping of Japanese rifles behind me.

Back at the camp the Japanese broke into the barracks, with their head lamps shining, and ordered everyone out. One GI broke and ran, simultaneously striving desperately to wrestle his .45 out of the musette bag on his back. He barely reached darkness outside when a Japanese soldier hit him over the head with a bayonet. The .45 fell out of the American's hand into the camp garbage pit, unseen by any Japanese. Six other Americans indoors were caught in bed. Like me, they survived by a fluke. The Japanese, finding them unarmed, spared their lives. Three Filipino men and a baby were not so lucky. The invaders butchered the men with bayonets. When the baby began to cry, one of them seized it by the feet and struck off its head with one slash of a sword. Then the victors set fire to the camp and burned it to the ground.
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Before the Japanese onslaught we had gotten two advance warnings that the enemy had learned of our whereabouts. We had, as a consequence, moved farther back into the mountains. Writing years afterward, William Fassoth said sixteen of us then came back to the camp, believing that the Japanese would not raid us after all, that ten of us escaped during the actual raid, and that six were taken prisoner by the enemy.

Walter Chatham, who was one of the six seized, remembers only seven of us left in the camp and thinks I was the only one who escaped. Walter should know the straight of it, since the invaders took him away after they burned the camp; yet I believe he was mistaken on two different counts. I distinctly recall hearing several shots from a .45-caliber pistol well before daylight. The most likely explanation for this would be that some sort of Japanese-American gunfight took place, perhaps out of Walter's sight or hearing. Second, I don't believe I was the only one to escape, as I will relate shortly.

Only many years later did I learn how fortunate I had been to get away. Those captured were turned over to the Kempeitai, the Nipponese equivalent of the Russian NKVD or modern KGB. All six of them were promptly put in one four-by-four cage, from which they were let out only once a day to relieve themselves. There they were kept for three weeks. Walter Chatham, though only a corporal, was the highest ranking man, so he was interrogated. His captors grilled him interminably about the Bataan campaign, but since he knew nothing important about U.S. dispositions or plans he could tell them nothing. Enraged, they beat him repeatedly with a blackjack, then
with a baseball bat. Then they clamped his hands to a table, shoved bamboo slits under his fingernails, and lit them. The splinters and the heat split all his nails, and he passed out from the pain. The Kem-peitai men then doused him with water to revive him, after which they repeated the tortures. At other times during the three weeks they stepped on his bare feet with hobnailed boots, split his skull with a baseball bat, and threw him down a stairway.

Had I been captured at the Fassoth camp, almost certainly I rather than Walter would have been put through this ordeal since I was a staff sergeant and outranked him. Weak and wasted as I was, a mere wraith of perhaps one hundred pounds, I doubt that I would have survived.

For the next several weeks I lived much like a man who has just broken out of prison: hurt, hungry, hunted, and hiding. After managing to get some distance from the Fassoth camp in the middle of the night, I stopped on top of a ridge and slept until dawn. All that remained of the camp was a thin wisp of smoke that drifted upward in the still of early morning. As I sat gazing at it pensively, there was a sudden thrashing sound in the underbrush nearby. My pulse leaped, then subsided, as I spotted another survivor from the camp, a man named Mackenzie. I have long since forgotten whether, like myself, he escaped when the Japanese attacked or whether he was one of those wiser individuals who had retreated into the hinterlands when we had been warned that the enemy knew of our whereabouts. I called to him softly. He froze until he located me, then came forward joyously.

Mackenzie had some tobacco and matches, so we began our day by smoking a cigarette and pondering our next move. We decided to go down into the lowlands. We crossed a cogon grass field and then a stream that ran down a deep ravine. As we made our way down hillsides, I thought increasingly of the shoes I had been compelled to leave behind at the Fassoth camp. My feet were so swollen from beri beri that my toes were cracked open underneath. I walked on my heels to avoid the short, sharp grass shoots that grow at the base of the six-to-seven-foot cogon grass, but the uneven terrain and my weakness caused me to strumble frequently and bring my torn feet down heavily on the spiky grass. Then I would sprawl awkwardly to escape the intense pain, and grab frantically at clumps of cogon grass to ease my fall. For some time we proceeded thus, Mac walking and I staggering, until we came to an inviting mountain stream full of
suso
. A
suso
is something like a freshwater oyster, a creature that lives in a shell stuck to a rock. We pried some off rocks in the stream, built a little
fire, put some water in a bamboo joint, and boiled them. When cooked,
suso
can be popped out of their shells with a sharp rap of the heel of one hand against the other, or by banging them against a rock. We ate ours with relish, but inadvisedly topped off our dinner with some green papayas, which promptly produced diarrhea.

Farther on we came to a deserted hut where we decided to spend the night. By now a different kind of foot trouble was developing rapidly. Back at the Fassoth camp, at the time of the Japanese attack, when I had stumbled away in the dark, I somehow acquired a deep gash on the top of my right foot. It is possible that I was grazed by a stray enemy bullet, though I so hated even to think that a Japanese might have hit me that long afterward I refused the offer of a Purple Heart. It is more likely anyway that I simply cut my foot somehow when running or falling. Whichever the case, by now the wound had begun to fester, usually the prelude to a tropical ulcer unless treatment was prompt. This was not a trivial prospect. Tropical ulcers are slow to heal even if treated, and we had no medicine of any kind.