Elizabeth M. Norman (34 page)

Still, weapon or no, malnutrition was killing people. Like a bullet or a bomb, it had become an instrument of war, slower than conventional weapons, to be sure, but just as lethal. And the nurses, who had witnessed the awful inventory of battle on Bataan and Corregidor, now cataloged casualties of another kind.

In September the camp hospital recorded seventy-five cases of beriberi (a disease caused by a lack of thiamine), twelve cases of pellagra (niacin deficiency) and four cases of scurvy (a condition attributed to insufficient vitamin C).

Beriberi took two forms: wet, the most common, and dry. Patients with dry beriberi developed raised and bleeding red spots on their skin and complained of painful hands and feet, and as their nerve endings lost the ability to transmit impulses to their muscles, they would suddenly lose control of their extremities. Their feet became so tender they walked very slowly and very carefully across campus, navigating between the pebbles and cracks as if they were negotiating a road filled with hot coals.

Wet beriberi was worse, a disease that made the extremities swell—swell so much, so grotesquely, the skin stretched tight and took on a
frightening luster. Usually hands and feet and arms and legs became so distended, the patient could not move. The wards filled with these bloated bodies, these moaning unfortunates, and the nurses tried to comfort them by placing pillows and blankets under their swollen limbs, but beyond this, and a transfusion of plasma or a shot of thiamine, both in short supply, there was little anyone could do. More often than not the patients would begin an inexorable slide toward death. First came intense pain, then a period of profound indifference to reality, then a coma and, finally and mercifully the end. Without protein the heart simply could not do its work.

Until October 1944 the hospital was recording an average of two deaths a month. That climbed to seven and threatened to go much higher.
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The elderly went first; malnutrition exacerbated their chronic ailments and ravaged their aging hearts. Then came the death of fifty-year-old Reynolds North, apparently of love. He was thought to have given so much of his portion to his children he starved himself to death, and his passing sent shivers through the other parents in camp who often went hungry so their little ones would live.

In the hospital the dying were screened off with sheets. Most people passed quietly, though some nights the moaning and death rattles from behind the hanging white linen filled the ward with a chorus of woe.

As the deaths mounted, disposing of the bodies became a problem. Until the summer of 1944 the dead were transported out of camp by a hearse, but a severe fuel shortage put an end to these trips, and the funeral parlor that interred the bodies from STIC began to send a pony and pull cart to retrieve the remains, often many days after the fact.

“Due to climatic conditions [the bodies] would decay very quickly and large rats would attempt to eat them until finally some of the other prisoners would cover the bodies with old boxes or whatever could be found that was suitable,” said Madeline Ullom in testimony for the War Crimes Office. The bodies were transported in wooden caskets, “old filthy boxes that had not been cleaned since the last trip, and usually were much too short, and as a result would have a terribly demoralizing effect on other prisoners due to the fact that under the existing circumstances they figured that they would no doubt be the next to go.”
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Marie Adams, a Red Cross director in camp, arranged these spectral pickups and deliveries: “The
funeraria
sent in a native
corromata
with a feeble little pony. Sometimes we would send three bodies out at once and they would have to be tied onto the little cart to avoid sliding off. In several instances, the end of the boxes had to be cut off to allow the longer
Western bodies to be placed therein and the boxes would be taken through the streets with the feet sticking out of the end of the box. In December 1944 the pony died and from then on the
funeraria
had to send in a little hand cart … with two small Filipino boys to drag it.”
²²

The American bombings of Manila through the early fall helped maintain morale in camp. People seemed particularly cheered when the explosions took place before the air-raid sirens sounded; the Japs had been caught off guard, they said, just like all those dead American boys at Pearl Harbor.

Mostly, however, the men and women of Santo Tomas just waited. When, they wondered, were the Americans going to land? Finally, on October 20, 1944, at Leyte Gulf, far south from the capital, a large force of American troops came ashore to liberate the Philippines. When word came over the hidden radio, the camp rejoiced. Many of the internees believed they would be home in time for turkey and all the trimmings, but a few no doubt understood that this was only a preliminary battle. Each of the islands would have to be taken, and there was still no indication that the allies had moved onto Luzon, the island where the main enemy force was waiting.

The Japanese in STIC reacted to the news with more inspections, more searches, more confiscations. Armed guards stormed into the hospital and ordered the nurses to open the locked cabinets where they kept medications, then the guards went through the wards, ransacking everything along the way. After a two-hour search they confiscated two typewriters and robbed the patients of their money.

This game of cat and mouse made the nurses angry, and their anger no doubt helped sustain them. They were determined, they said, to outlast their captors, so determined they began to celebrate a change in their physiology that, under normal circumstances, would frighten and trouble most women—they stopped menstruating.

In early 1943 a camp physician surveyed 1,042 women in STIC and found 125 had stopped menstruating. He concluded that their anxiety and fear had caused a nerve and hormone imbalance, and he called these cases “war amenorrhea.”
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The doctor tested the urine of two amenor-rheic women and found they had normal levels of pituitary hormone but no ovarian hormone. Once the women adjusted to camp life, most seemed to return to their normal cycle. Now, in late 1944, starving and afraid, many women across the camp again had stopped menstruating.

Menstruation is a woman’s biological signature, the body renewing and preparing itself to conceive life, to perform a function only women
can perform. Nothing is more unique to women, more naturally and inarguably feminine. “Now you’re a woman,” mothers would tell their daughters, after the girls’ first flow. But starving in Santo Tomas, the women of the Army Nurse Corps cared little for metaphors or symbols of sexual identity. With their bodies wasting away and their lives literally hanging in a dangerous biochemical balance, they did not want to lose one ounce of blood or body fluid and they desperately hoped their flow would dry up.

“I used to pray my period would stop,” Cassie said, “especially when I’d hear, Well, so-and-so missed her period again this month. I’d think, When the hell am I gonna stop this stupid business?”
²⁴

When one of their number would develop amenorrhea, the nurses would hold a small party to celebrate, and if a woman was unlucky and got her period, there was always someone to console her.

“I can’t afford this heavy flow,” Red Harrington told Laura Cobb. “Why is this happening to me?”
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T
HANKSGIVING DINNER WAS
a ladleful of rice with a cup of vegetable stew and a spoonful of green
camote
tops. Twelve people died in November. At that point the internees were living—enduring—on an average of 960 calories a day. The camp commandant complained that the children in STIC were pestering his army cooks with their begging. He warned parents to keep them away from the army’s kitchen. Another fuel shortage temporarily shut down the main camp kitchen and the internees could not boil water to cook rice.

Some people responded to their privations with humor. One of the camp cooks, for example, posted the following recipe:

Santo Tomas Emergency Biscuits

2 cups rice flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons shortening

1 teaspoon soda

1 tablespoon vinegar

Water to mix

Make a stiff batter. Roll batter on board. Dust with rice flour. Cut into biscuits with top of corned beef tin. Place in greased pan
and bake in hot oven till well browned. (Serve only when you have absolutely nothing else in the house—J.E.M.)
²⁶

In fact, Santo Tomas was seized by recipe mania, a kind of psychosis of imagination in which people tried to satisfy their cravings by copying recipes from cookbooks and magazines. Often they would gather to argue about their favorite dishes and discuss in great detail everything from the ingredients to the place settings. “A strange kind of madness swept the camp,” wrote Frances Nash.
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The most popular recipes were those rich in fat and calories. “Patients [in the hospital and clinics] would sit there with swollen feet from beriberi and scurvy and trade recipes,” said Anna Williams. “We wrote up whole recipe books, but it was only a banquet of words.”
²⁸

Edith Shacklette, ever the clinician, consulted with dietitian Vivian Weissblatt to make sure her fantasy lunch was nutritionally well balanced.

Avocado and grapefruit salad—tart French dressing
Cheese sticks—Melba toast (mustard with cheese)
Chicken a la king in paddy shells (make shells or use toast baskets)
Asparagus or peas
Ice cream with fruit sauce
Coffee
²⁹

Sally Blaine found a recipe in a novel. “I was reading
How Green Was My Valley
and the boy described a stew—I think he called it—that his mother made. It [had] potatoes and peas and carrots and a little bit of beef or lamb—yes, it was lamb, I think—and it sounded so delicious that I read the recipe over and over again as I read the book. Six months after I got back to the States, I got the book out of the library and turned to that recipe to read it—and it didn’t sound good at all.”

One day Sally stopped by a friend’s shanty after her shift at the hospital. “He gave me a cup of coffee and he had some bourbon and sugar. That just perked me up like nobody’s business. You’d be surprised what a tablespoonful of bourbon and a teaspoon of sugar would give you.”
³⁰

On another occasion Gwendolyn Henshaw was making ward rounds when a doctor pulled her aside. “He said to me, ‘Would you like a little meat?’ I hadn’t had any in a long time. I said, ‘Sure, what do you have?’ ‘Oh some meat,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you some.’ So he gave me a little bit in a dish and the next day, making ward rounds again, he said to
me, ‘Well how’d you like that meat?’ I said, ‘Well, it was pretty tasty. It tasted like young pig.’ He said, ‘Well that was cat.’ He’d caught the last stray cat running around camp and cooked it up. We ate everything. The pigeons all disappeared and God knows what else.”
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Minnie Breese wondered, “Who was going to make it first? The [army], the marines or the vultures?”
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Someone answered they hoped it was the vultures—at least they could try to eat the birds.

A woman in the bunk next to navy nurse Peg Nash told her that she did not want to be buried in prison camp. Please, the woman said, get me home, at any cost. Nash, swollen with beriberi, turned to the woman and smiled. “We can’t bury you here,” she said. “You don’t have any nice clothes to put on.”
³³

Their humor, however, always gave way to the truth: starvation is a slow assault on the body, an inexorable attack. Every day brings with it some small loss of function, and with each loss, each violation, the victim seems smaller, somehow less human than the day before.

“I’d wake up in the morning and when I’d stand up I’d start urinating [on myself],” said Sally Blaine. “It was absolutely so embarrassing, it was terrible. Some of the girls really flooded themselves in front of other people. Josie went to the camp central committee and she told them we’ve got to have more meat for these girls.”
³⁴
(Nesbit convinced the committee that if her nurses could not work, the ill and dying would really suffer and she managed to get them an extra ounce or two of meat a week, enough to quell most of the incontinence.)

Even the youngest and strongest of the internees began to fail. More than half the camp had swollen hands and feet. Their body chemistry was so askew from malnutrition, they were always dizzy with headaches or had toothaches, bleeding gums and sore tongues. More and more they complained of pain in their viscera, and the nurses and doctors began to notice a large number of cases of inguinal hernias and intestinal obstructions. With weak abdominal muscles and little fat to support and protect their vital organs, the slightest exertion could cause serious internal injury. Other patients developed intestinal obstructions from severe constipation and came to the hospital writhing in pain and vomiting. Across campus everyone seemed to walk at a snail’s pace, so anemic they had to pause frequently for breath or rest. To the nurses the camp took on a geriatric look.