Hearts, minds of POWs were in their hands

We’re the battling bastards of Bataan,

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,

No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,

No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,

And nobody gives a damn.

*

THE fall of the Philippine archipelago to the Japanese during World War II was a devastating blow to U.S. strategies in the Pacific. After their attack on Pearl Harbor and a streak of victories at Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, Japanese forces claimed Manila in January 1942. The outnumbered Allies retreated to malaria-ridden Bataan on the western side of Manila Bay; the Allied military headquarters moved to the safer tunnels of Bataan’s southern neighbor, Corregidor Island (known as “the Rock”).

Two months later -- with surrender seeming inevitable -- Gen. Douglas MacArthur was ordered to Australia by President Roosevelt, leaving behind increasingly desperate defenders of Bataan who got by on half-rations of food, medicine and ammunition. On April 9, 1942, more than 70,000 sick and starving Filipinos and Americans finally laid down arms and, on the following day, began a Japanese-led death march to prison camps in northern Bataan. Thousands of captives perished or were murdered along the way, while the remaining Allied forces on Corregidor surrendered in May 1942 after relentless, brutal shelling. (In one 24-hour period, an estimated 60 tons of bombs fell). Roosevelt’s strategic decision to focus on the war in Europe had placed these stranded Pacific forces at the mercy of their captors.

John A. Glusman’s “Conduct Under Fire” is, in part, a stirring chronicle of four friends -- George Ferguson, John Bookman, Fred Berley and the author’s father, Murray Glusman, all U.S. Navy doctors -- who had escaped Bataan only hours before the peninsula fell and, after fleeing to Corregidor, joined the ranks of more than 190,000 prisoners of war.

The bond forged by these four men was flavored by different upbringings, outlooks and temperaments. Ferguson and Berley were Roman Catholic career military officers originally from the Midwest; Bookman and Glusman were Jewish New Yorkers who considered themselves civilians in uniform. From their initial incarceration at the decrepit Bilibid Prison in Manila to their later removal to Cabanatuan POW Camp No. 1, the quartet’s ethos was “one for all, all for one.” In February 1944, a case of amebic colitis kept Ferguson in Cabanatuan while his buddies were prodded onto trucks by armed Japanese guards. They were sent to a string of internment posts in Japan where the will to survive, the moral fabric of camp life and the hope of repatriation grew increasingly thin, despite the Allied comeback in the Pacific.

Glusman writes that his father hardly ever discussed his 3 1/2 --year ordeal when the author was a child. All he really knew about his father’s experiences was that he and some friends had once been so hungry that they hunted, skinned and ate a cat. But in 2001, after being hired to write a magazine article about Corregidor, Glusman traveled with Murray to the Philippines and Japan, visiting the battlefront hospitals, municipal prison and internment sites where his father spent the war repairing bodies and minds while watching other men deteriorate from hunger, disease and despair.

The resulting book is a rich cornucopia of finely etched details and a masterful medical and war historiography that looks at the wretched camp conditions in Bataan and elsewhere. When epidemic waves of dysentery engulfed the prisoners on Bataan, for example, their Japanese captors ordered every man to catch 50 flies a day to limit the spread of fecal-borne germs. Soon, writes Glusman, flies became currency that could buy a haircut or a shave.

The author’s clinical descriptions are equally vivid:

“Cabanatuan shuffle wasn’t a new dance but the characteristic gait of men suffering from beriberi, peripheral neuritis or ‘rice brain’ [starvation-induced dementia] .... Teenagers suffering from rice belly had shrunken thoraxes and distended stomachs, their cheeks hollow, eyes sunken in, chest concave, making them look little old men.”

While the prisoners experienced inhumanity at every turn, they occasionally turned the tables on their captors. One POW fashioned fake sulfa antibiotics, complete with a pharmaceutical company logo, and sold them for $1 apiece to the guards for treating venereal disease.

It is well-documented that atrocities were committed by some Japanese soldiers upon their prisoners -- humiliation, beatings, starvation, calculated mistreatment of the sick and wounded and, in the worst cases, cannibalism, torture and execution by bayoneting and beheading. What Glusman’s account adds is the weight of medical witness and nuanced discussion of the disparate philosophical frameworks of the two cultures at war and how each influenced treatment of POWs.

Although Japan never ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of POWs, the imperial rescripts of Hirohito’s father and grandfather tacitly respected the rights of these prisoners. By the 1940s, however, the Japanese Field Service Code disdained (both for its soldiers and, by implication, its internees) the ultimate value of life. Instead, the “Senjinkun,” as the code was called, emphasized privation, austerity and duty over self-preservation. A soldier, the code stated, should never “suffer the disgrace of becoming a prisoner.” Seppuku, or ritual suicide, was encouraged as an alternative.

The kamikaze fighters might be most familiar to some readers, but as Glusman points out, the Japanese militarists’ plans for their own civilians were equally chilling. In June 1945, Glusman writes, the Osaka police chief issued this directive: “Due to the nationwide food shortage and imminent invasion of the home islands, it will be necessary to kill all the infirm old people and the very young and the sick. We can’t allow Japan to perish because of them.”

There’s no happy ending to a book like this, but some comfort lies in knowing that three of the four men -- Berley, Bookman and Glusman -- survived and returned home after their season in hell. The author writes that their friend Ferguson died in October 1944 -- the victim of an American torpedo attack on a Japanese ship covertly transporting POWs to serve as slave laborers in Japanese industries. It took several hours for the Arisan Maru -- on which Ferguson spent his final days -- to sink, during which time the crew took the only two lifeboats on board. With little wreckage to keep them afloat, 1,792 prisoners perished at sea -- one of the greatest losses of American lives in a single maritime disaster.

Glusman is courageous for detailing the immense toll from “friendly fire” by American submarines and bombers. He doesn’t shrink from discussing other aspects of the Pacific War that don’t always present Allied forces in a positive light: MacArthur’s egoism and unpreparedness for the near-certain fall of the Philippines; six months of Allied firebombing of Japan (which yielded twice as many civilian casualties as the total Japanese military losses in 45 months of war); the moral consequences for Japan of allowing Hirohito and others to remain immune from prosecution and for Hirohito to continue as sovereign ruler as a condition of peace.

Glusman also allows his father to answer one question that still haunts us all: Should the U.S. have deployed the forerunner of the modern nuclear bomb to end the war? Murray Glusman was convinced that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ultimately saved American and Japanese lives.

“To wish that it hadn’t been dropped,” the author adds, “is to wish that my father hadn’t lived. I am not so much a baby boomer as a child of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Glusman has written a book with important lessons for anyone who is alive today because a parent or grandparent made it through World War II. “Conduct Under Fire” also deeply honors those who suffered and died on both sides of the conflict. No one who reads this book will ever be able to regard their sacrifice as a distant historical event, especially when POWs such as Army Lt. Henry G. Lee speak to all future generations in the poem “Group Four,” which was written in Bataan on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1943:

*

We’ll have our small white crosses by and by,

Our cool, green lawns, our well-spaced, well-cared

trees,

Our antique cannons, muzzles to the sky,

Our statues and our flowers and our wreaths.

We’ll have our bold-faced bronze and copper plaques

To tell in stirring words of that we saved

And who we were, with names and dates; our stacks

Of silent rifles, spaced between the graves.

We’ll have our country’s praise, here below

They’ll make a shrine of this small bit of hell

For wide-eye tourists; and so few will know

And those who know will be the last to tell

The wordless suffering of our lives as slaves,

Our squalid deaths beneath this dripping sky,

The stinking tangle of our common graves.

We’ll have our small white crosses by and by. *