The Leper Spy (6 page)

Alejandro Roces, a young man educated at the Ateneo, saw his fellow countrymen beaten in the streets, their hands tied behind their backs, chained to posts. He felt as though the Japanese were trying to break the spirits of Filipinos. Rather than growing scared, anger prompted Roces to join the resistance. Gustavo Ingles witnessed Japanese soldiers drive through his hometown, and when they saw young girls, stop the trucks and chase the girls down. The first-year Philippine Military Academy cadet was hurt and sad. The soldiers thought they could take whatever they wanted. Ingles felt he had to do something, so he began conspiring with his friends in San Juan.
What are we going to do about this?

T
he boys on Bataan surged and retreated, advanced and fell back, making the enemy earn every square inch of the hellish Florida-shaped peninsula, every cliff and mangled banyan tree, every bamboo thicket and tangle of wait-a-minute vines. They lost weight and sleep and caught malaria, dengue fever, hookworm, and beriberi, which caused the men to vomit and slur their speech and made their eyes flick around in their heads unnaturally. They carried guns that failed to fire and grenades that did not explode and letters that began “Dear Mama.” They heard regularly that a mile-long convoy of supplies was steaming toward the island, that B-17s and P-40s would soon appear in the sky, that relief was coming. General MacArthur was party to the lie, though he was unaware of it. He crossed to the peninsula from Corregidor to help boost morale. He talked to the rawboned Gen. Jonathan Wainwright and his junior officers and toured the peninsula, talking to his boys, encouraging them to keep up the fight.

“Help is definitely on the way,” he told the ragged soldiers. “We must hold out until it comes.”

It did not come, not that day nor any day thereafter. There were now more than one hundred thousand soldiers and civilians crowded onto Bataan, and supplies were lower than ever. The men kept fighting, though, and through gritted teeth they sang made-up songs that captured the dire frustration of their lost cause:

We're the battling bastards of Bataan:

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,

No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,

No rifles, no planes, or artillery pieces,

And nobody gives a damn.

The simple fact that the men had held off Japan from conquering the peninsula as December turned to January and January encroached on February, despite the empire's continuous supply of fresh troops and despite the fact that the Filipino soldiers were wearing coconut hulls for helmets, was noteworthy. Bataan was virtually the only spot in the Pacific where Japanese advancement had been stymied. They had found success everywhere else they had invaded: Singapore, Burma, Siam, Sumatra, Borneo, Wake, Guam, the Bismarks, the Gilberts. War planners knew Australia would be next. Japanese bombers had already made runs against the key port of Darwin. In less than two months, the Japanese Empire had grown to cover almost a seventh of the globe. The only real resistance was on the Bataan Peninsula, where American and Filipino troops had dug in to fight.

Henry Stimson, the US secretary of war, told Philippines president Manuel Quezon, “Your gallant defense is thrilling the American people. As soon as our power is organized we shall come in force and drive the invader from your soil.”

In the middle of December, Maj. Gen. George Moore, still on Corregidor, learned that Germany and Italy had also declared war on the United States, and each day that ticked past brought news that suggested the Axis powers, advancing across Europe and Africa and now the Pacific, had the war in hand.

But by the end of the month, most of the US and Filipino forces had retreated to Bataan, and they were proving hard to dislodge. “A final stand,” is what Moore called it.

President Roosevelt promised the full support of the United States in a special address to the people of the Philippines on December 28, 1941. He cabled Manuel Quezon after. “The people
of the United States will never forget what the people of the Philippines are doing these days and will do in the days to come,” he wrote. “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be retained and their independence established and redeemed. The entire resources in men and materials of the United States stands behind that pledge.”

On December 29, just before noon, Japan rocked the fortified Corregidor in its first aerial attack, with eighty-one medium bombers and ten dive-bombers dropping three-hundred-pound bombs. There were no friendly planes in the air, and there wouldn't be for the entire operation.

The medium bombers came first in formations of twenty-seven; then those broke into three formations of nine planes each, all of them below twenty thousand feet, crossing the island lengthwise. The first bombs fell on the hospital, the antiaircraft gun batteries, the officers' club, the Topside and Middleside barracks, the Topside water tank, the officers' quarters, the garage, ships in Corregidor Bay, and the navy gasoline storage dump at the tail of the island. Fires broke out as wooden structures and gas depots burst toward the sky. Power went out. Communication lines were disrupted. The antiaircraft firing batteries on the islands thwacked all afternoon, bringing down thirteen enemy planes, until the bombers nosed up to higher altitudes, outside of the guns' reach. The smaller strafing planes followed the bombers, hammering the antiaircraft gun batteries. Twenty men were killed and eighty wounded.

The following afternoon, outside the east portal to Malinta Tunnel, Manuel Quezon was sworn in as the first president of the new Philippine Commonwealth. In his short inaugural address, he spoke of air raids and of bombs falling on women and children and of Japan's superiority on air, land, and sea. Then he called for unity in the new fight.

“To all Americans in the Philippines, soldiers and civilians alike, I want to say that our common ordeal has fused our hearts in a single purpose and an everlasting affection,” he said. “My fellow
countrymen, this is the most momentous period of our history. As we face the grim realities of war, let us rededicate ourselves to the great principles of freedom and democracy for which our forefathers fought and died. The present war is being fought for these same principles.”

Following the ceremony, the Ninety-First Coast Artillery Band was to play the national anthems of the United States and the Philippines, but their barracks had been bombed and their instruments were burned.

H
er body was failing, and she was scared. So little was known about her affliction, and the void was filled with terror.

Though her husband's main interest was infectious diseases, he knew far more about tuberculosis, which caused some thirty thousand deaths a year in the islands, than leprosy.
Mycobacterium leprae
was among the first bacilli identified, back in 1873, but it remained a medical mystery. It wasn't part of the standard medical school curriculum, and few physicians bothered to learn about it. There was no vaccine for leprosy, and no one could say for sure whether it was hereditary or a contagious disease. It was commonly believed that you got leprosy by sharing food or drink with a leper or by touching an infected person.

In the Philippines, leprosy sufferers hid the early symptoms under clothing as long as possible, until it was no longer an option. When the lesions couldn't be covered, victims were ejected from their communities, becoming charity cases, outcasts, or beggars, forced to leave behind their lives, their jobs, their loved ones. Because of unfortunate wording in the Old Testament, leprosy was regarded in some cultures as a punishment for sinfulness, transforming sufferers' physical ailments into a moral condition. Stigmatized, they were driven into hellish government- or church-run colonies in the rural provinces, away from society.

There were some eight thousand known cases in the islands at the start of the war, but the chaos of battle had sent many more into hiding for fear they'd become the easiest casualties of the new occupying regime. This was not an irrational fear. In 1912, soldiers in a city in southern China rounded up lepers in their own colony, drove them to a pit, and shot them, women and children included. And then they burned the bodies. Fifty-three people died that day, and the massacre was met with public approval. More recently, in 1937, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, leprosy victims were promised an allowance of ten cents—a ruse—and when they gathered to accept the allotment, more than fifty of them were executed.

The American health authorities in the Pacific Islands adopted a policy of segregation and isolation, shipping the afflicted to far-flung colonies or medical facilities for treatment with an injectable form of chaulmoogra oil, the only drug that showed any promise. With the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States, those who weren't caught and dispatched to leper colonies were now stuck in cities with shuttered pharmacies.

Joey desperately needed medicine to keep her disease under control, but it was virtually impossible to get in the shredded city. Sometimes the drugs could be found on the black market, but the expense was so high, out of reach. So the leprosy ran rampant, attacking her body, destroying her flesh, and causing her joints to stiffen.

She couldn't just stay at home, in isolation, and waste away. She prayed, sought higher instruction, until one day she had an epiphany. If she believed anything, it was that even the lowliest could be a vessel, could be of service to the greater good. She thought about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who led France into battle, driving back the English and reclaiming the crown. If she was going to die, she would do so with dignity, face her fate with honor.

In the face of slow death, she decided to live, to use whatever was left to help her people. She approached a friend she knew to be in the underground resistance movement that had formed since
Japanese soldiers marched into the city on January 2, 1942. The network was vast, but the guerrillas lived in constant fear. The Japanese army was attempting to purge the city of guerrillas. Soldiers would cordon off a neighborhood, called a
zona,
and position sentries at every possible entry or exit. They would then call all residents out of their homes and force them to parade past a mole, a Filipino traitor wearing a burlap sack over his head. Known as the “secret eye,” the traitor would indicate with a nod or gesture when a suspected guerrilla passed. The soldiers then pulled that person from the line for questioning. Most never returned home.

Joey knew the risks. Still, she volunteered.

“I want to be a good soldier,” she told her friend.

“Then go underground,” he said. “I will give you a name.”

Her friend gave her the name of a man she knew well from the Ateneo. She was surprised to learn that he was a leader in the underground resistance. She was due for a lot of surprises. She tracked the man down and told him she wanted to work for the resistance.

“We don't take children,” he told her. She was only twenty-four.

“You'd be surprised what children can do,” she told him. “After all, Joan of Arc was just a young girl—not much more than a child—wasn't she?”

T
he bombers appeared again, three of them on January 26, and the sirens shouted, but there were no concussions to follow, not this time.

Leaflets fluttered down from the sky like wounded birds, spinning and somersaulting in the morning light, catching in the treetops and tumbling to the dirt. They fell over Corregidor and Caballe, El Fraile and Carabao and Bataan, into ravines and onto rooftops and at the feet of soldiers, tired and hungry and homesick.

On one side, a picture of a nude brunette sexily seated, her left hand in her hair, her face and breasts bathed in studio light. On the other was a note:

TICKET TO ARMISTICE
USE THIS TICKET, SAVE YOUR LIFE
YOU WILL BE KINDLY TREATED

F
OLLOW
T
HESE
I
NSTRUCTIONS

1. Come towards our lines waving a white flag.

2. Strap your gun over your left shoulder muzzle down and pointed behind you.

3. Show this ticket to the sentry.

4. Any number of you may surrender with this one ticket.

JAPANESE ARMY HEADQUARTERS

T
he general was prepared to die.

By all accounts, MacArthur had been unafraid to stand outside Malinta Tunnel, unflinching, without so much as a helmet, as Japanese bombers pounded the Rock into dust and ash. They didn't talk about defeat on Corregidor, but without the supplies and reinforcements Washington had promised, the men on Bataan stood no chance. Nor did the men on Corregidor. A colonel under MacArthur broached the subject, suggesting maybe Roosevelt had been bluffing about the support convoy to get MacArthur and his men to hold out as long as possible, to delay the Japanese advance south and essentially allow the United States time to protect Australia.