Tears in the Darkness Read online

  TEARS IN THE DARKNESS

  The Story of

  the Bataan Death March

  and Its Aftermath

  * * *

  TEARS IN THE

  DARKNESS

  * * *

  MICHAEL NORMAN

  and ELIZABETH M. NORMAN

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2009 by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman

  Map copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey L. Ward

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & Mclntyre Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2009

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from “Red Sails in the Sunset,” written by Jimmy Kennedy and Hugh Williams. Used by permission of Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Norman, Michael, 1947 Oct. 2–

  Tears in the darkness : the story of the Bataan Death March and its aftermath / Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-27260-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-374-27260-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  1. Bataan Death March, Philippines, 1942. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, Japanese. 3. Prisoners of war—United States—History—20th century. 4. Prisoners of war—Philippines—History—20th century. 5. Prisoners of war—Great Britain—History—20th century. 6. Prisoners of war—Netherlands—History—20th century. I. Norman, Elizabeth M. II. Title.

  D803.P6 N67 2009

  940.54'7252098991—dc22

  2008047163

  Designed by Abby Kagan

  www.fsgbooks.com

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  FOR

  JOSHUA

  AND

  BENJAMIN

  I am very calm. Let the months come, and the years, they’ll take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me.

  —Erich Maria Remarque,

  All Quiet on the Western Front

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  MAP OF THE BATAAN

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  GHOSTS

  ONE

  GOING TO GROUND

  TWO

  MORE LIKE A HIRED HAND

  THREE

  HAWK CREEK

  FOUR

  LEAVING

  FIVE

  WHISKEY, WAGES, AND THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  SIX

  MAKING MAGIC

  SEVEN

  ONE LAST LOOK

  EIGHT

  “A FINAL DETERMINATION”

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  IMAGINE, AFTER EVERYTHING, THIS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  * * *

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  THE TITLE of this book comes from a literal translation of the ideograph, or kanji, for the Japanese word anrui (on-RUE-ee).

  The word and the image it conveys are meant to explain the kind of pain and sorrow that, literally, cannot be seen. Among English idioms, the metaphor that best expresses this is “a broken heart.”

  It is true that some men—men of greed, ambition, or raw animus—love war, but most, the overwhelming number who are forced to bear arms, come home from the killing fields and prison camps with anrui, “tears in the darkness.”

  THE DRAWINGS that appear throughout the book are taken from the sketchbooks of Ben Steele and were made during his six decades as an artist and teacher in Billings, Montana.

  TEARS IN THE DARKNESS

  * * *

  GHOSTS

  THEY WERE STATIONED far from home when the fighting started—seven thousand miles across the Pacific from San Francisco in a large archipelago that stretches north and south for a thousand miles between Formosa and the Dutch East Indies in the warm tropical waters of the South China Sea.

  Compared to some of its neighbors, the Philippines, an American possession since 1898, was a bit of a backwater. None of Singapore’s sparkle or the hustle of Hong Kong, but the guidebooks of the day called the place “paradise,” and the books were right. Manila was beautiful, palms leaning gently over the seawall along the bay, the night filled with the sweet scent of kamias.

  Besides its charms, paradise had the best deep-water port in the southwest Pacific, and in 1941 that port, that strategic transit point, made the Philippines valuable to the Japanese and American generals and admirals who were furiously preparing for war, a war in the Pacific almost everyone in uniform believed was at hand.

  On December 8, eight hours after it attacked the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Japan sent its bombers and fighters against American air, infantry, and naval bases in the Philippines. Two weeks later, 43,000 Japanese troops invaded the islands.

  Waiting for them was a large force of American and Filipino defenders, more than 130,000 men, untried and ill trained, most of them. The Japanese pushed them back and back again until they were forced to retreat to a small thumb of land on the west coast of Manila Bay, the peninsula of Bataan.

  There, in jungle wastes and tangled woodlands, they dug trench lines and bunkers, an army of Americans and Filipinos preparing to fight for their lives, the first major land battle for America in World War II.

  Starting in January 1942, the Japanese took the peninsula under siege and left the Americans and Filipinos cut off from all help and supplies. The two sides fought for ninety-nine days, the Japanese taking horrendous casualties, the Americans and Filipinos falling back under the Japanese assaults from one “final” defense line to another. At last, on April 9, sick and starving, without an air force to protect them or a navy to relieve them, the men of Bataan surrendered.

  More than 76,000 Americans and Filipinos under American command laid down their arms—the single largest defeat in American military history. The sick, starving, and bedraggled prisoners of war were rounded up by their Japanese captors and made to walk sixty-six miles to a railhead for the trip to prison camp, a baneful walk under a broiling sun that turned into one of most notorious treks in the annals of war, the Bataan Death March.

  It is impossible, so the locals say, to walk the ground where this story takes place, the jungles and woodlands and savannas of the Philippines, without feeling the presence, the lingering tenancy, of the men who once fought there—Americans, Filipinos, Japanese. Perhaps that is why at night, Bataanese villagers in their nipa huts often think they hear history stumbling along in the darkness outside their doors.

  Some nights it is voices they hear, voices begging for food and water, voices pleading for their lives. Other nights it is the sound of shuffling feet, thousands of feet heavy with fear and fatigue, dragging north through the dust mile after mile up the Old National Road.

  All of this is memory, of course, the memory of the old ones who lived along the route, or their children and children’s children who tell and retell the stories of Bataan as if they were reciting from sacred texts.

  As the events of 1941-1942 passed into the hands of historians, both the battle for Bataan and the death march became symbols, the former as a modern Thermopylae, a stirring last stand, and the latter as a crucible of courage, the courage to continue on a walk to the grave.

  In some sense these conceits were true, but when the dross of propaganda and myth is skimmed from the surfac
e of history, what’s left, in this case, is an example of the miscarried morality and Punic politics that underlie every appeal to arms—the bad leadership, the empty promises, the kind of cruelty that crushes men’s souls. Proof too that the instant the first shot is fired, the so-called rules of war, guerre de règle, give way to guerre à outrance, war without clemency or quarter.

  So much suffering leaves any piece of ground spectral. Little wonder, then, the locals along the road hear voices, and the survivors of that battle and march, old men now, keep the company of ghosts.

  BEN STEELE came of age as a cowboy, or an echo of a cowboy, which in his time, the early decades of the twentieth century, was probably the same thing. He grew up in a pine-log house by a crystal spring in the shadow of the Bull Mountains on Montana’s eastern plain. By the time he was eight he could ride, rope, and shoot. He herded cattle, he drove horses, he tended sheep. Alone at night on the open range he slept in a circle of rope to keep the snakes out of his bedroll. In 1940, just before his twenty-third birthday, he joined the Army Air Corps and was shipped to the Philippines to fight the Japanese. After ninety-nine days of battle he became a prisoner of war and spent three years behind barbed wire and watchtowers. Every day he was starved or beaten by his keepers: “the Bug,” “Mickey Mouse,” “the Killer.” He never forgot those faces. They insinuated themselves in his psyche, permanent residents now, along with wild mustangs, sheepherders, ambling cowboys, and antelope gamboling through the sage. This is all in his sketchbooks.

  THE SKETCHBOOKS are stacked on shelves and in closets, black buckram and hardbound, most of them. They date from his first days in art school, more than thirty volumes of trials and exercises—sixty-one years of sketching and painting every day, searching for the perfect line, the exact color, the proper balance and emphasis, proportion and perspective. At ninety years plus, a lifetime of trying, as artists say of their work, to “get the thing right.”

  On occasion he works from models in a studio or tramps out to the prairie to sketch a scene. He likes to draw horses. He hasn’t been on a horse in nearly twenty-five years, but his respect and affection for the animals run deep, back to the blizzards of his boyhood when his horse would lead him through a blinding whiteout back to the safety and warmth of the pine-log house at Hawk Creek.

  By and large, however, the leaves of his sketchbooks hold his ghosts: page after page of prisoners of war and the Imperial hohei who guarded them, the men who held Ben Steele captive for one thousand two hundred and forty-four days.1

  He cannot say why after six decades he still sketches the faces that followed him home from the camps, the faces of old comrades in prison rags, and the faces of the Japanese soldiers who herded them from place to place and kept them penned behind barbed wire.

  These ghosts pop up everywhere in his sketchbooks, sometimes like rogues in a gallery but as often as not singly in quick profile or thumbnail, sometimes on the same page with bucking mustangs and cow ponies or, like interlopers, peering in from the edges of landscapes, intruding on the cottonwoods and sage.

  In the early sketchbooks, the ones he filled after the war while attending college and during his first decade as a professor of art, the drawings of his keepers and his comrades tend to be imitative, realistic, the faces filled with the meanness and misery of war, as if the artist’s aim was to document his experience.

  After a certain point, however—ten years postbattle, perhaps fifteen—the drawings become simpler, less emotive. No longer are the faces rendered with the kind of shading and crosshatching that create tone and mood. Most are simple line drawings in pen-and-ink, quirky enough to qualify as caricature. In his later work the prisoners look more hapless than hopeless, hoboes in bedraggled dress, and the guards appear more often than not as comic grotesques, a little lunatic or just plain goofy.

  This is “perspective and proportion” of a different sort, and it has nothing to do with either the geometry or the grammar of art. Ben Steele, brown eyes aglint, almost always wears a smile, like a man who knows he finally “got the thing right.”

  * * *

  ONE

  HE ENLISTED on the advice of his mother, Bess.

  In the late summer of 1940, Ben Steele was working as a camp tender at a large sheep outfit east of town. It was hard, sometimes filthy work, but the freedom of it made him happy—on his own every day, riding a horse or driving a rig between the far-flung camps of the sheepherders, delivering mail and supplies, sleeping in the open, wrapped in an oilcloth, staring up at a big sky dark with bright stars.

  One weekend that summer Ben Steele’s mother and father drove out from Billings to visit. His mother had an idea. He’d been a ranch hand most of his life, she said. He was twenty-two now, grown up. Maybe it was time to consider something else. She’d heard on the radio that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had just signed a law creating the first peacetime military draft. The inaugural call-up, she said, was scheduled for late October.1

  “You know, I’ve been thinking,” she went on. “You really ought to get in before they draft you. Maybe if you do, you could, you know, do what you want in the army?”

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to wear a uniform, but since he usually took his mother’s advice to heart, he tucked her suggestion away, and a while later, over a smoky campfire perhaps or riding the green hills and valleys, he remembered something; the boys he knew from Billings who had enlisted in the army were usually sent west for training to the golden valleys of California.

  He thought, “Going to California—that sounds good. A little adventure.” And on a nice warm day in mid-September, he borrowed a car, went into town, ambled over to the Stapleton Building on Twenty-eighth Street and into the recruiting station there, where he found a sergeant sitting at a desk.

  “I want to go into the army,” he announced.

  “Well now,” the recruiter said, looking up at the lean ranch hand standing in front of him, “we have the Army and we have the Army Air Corps, which one you want?”

  Ben Steele knew nothing about soldiering, but some years earlier a couple of fellows up at the Billings Municipal Airport got themselves a Ford Tri-Motor (a propeller under each wing and one on the nose) and for a dollar a head started taking people for a ride. It wasn’t much of a ride—the plane took off from atop the rimrocks, circled the Yellowstone Valley below, and a few minutes later landed to pick up another load of wide-eyed locals. But that short hop stirred something in Ben Steele.

  “The Air Corps?” he said. “That sounds real good. Give me that!”

  A few weeks later, on October 9, 1940, a month shy of his twenty-third birthday, Ben Steele stood in a line of enlistees at the United States Courthouse in Missoula, Montana, raised his right hand, and repeated one of the republic’s oldest oaths: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic . . . So help me God.”

  LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, like every American who read the newspapers, listened to the radio, went to the movies, and watched newsreels, Private Ben Steele of the United States Army Air Corps was convinced his enemies would be German. Japan was a threat, all right—that fall, in fact, America cut its shipments of scrap steel and iron to Japan—but Germany, threatening all Europe, was the menace of the moment.2

  The Germans had invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. By the time Ben Steele arrived at the induction station in Missoula in the fall of 1940, the German Luftwaffe had been bombing Great Britain for three months.

  Reading about all this in the Billings Gazette or listening to it on KGHL radio, the most popular station in that part of the West, most Montanans wanted no part of the trouble overseas. Like the rest of America, they were focused on finding jobs and recovering from the Great Depression, not crossing swords with the saber-rattling Germans. In a national opinion poll conducted the week Ben Steele enlisted, 83 percent of the those surveyed said they did not want to send American troops overseas
.3

  Young men looking for a job or a little adventure don’t pay much attention to opinion polls. The army was offering a paycheck, plus “three hots and a cot” and perhaps a chance to travel. Since they had no feel for the killing and dying in Europe, no sense at all of facing Panzer tanks and Stuka dive-bombers, the ranch hands, soda jerks, delivery boys, and railroad workers on their way to training camp with Ben Steele were full of brio and eager for action.

  “If war’s gonna come, I wanna be in it,” Ben Steele thought. “Hell, I want to be over there where it’s happening.”

  Saturday, October 4, 1941, San Francisco

  Blue sky, bright sun, seventy-two degrees, a good day to set sail for paradise.

  On a pier off the Embarcadero, the men of the 19th Bombardment Group, United States Army Air Corps, waited in long queues to board the United States Army transport General Willard A. Holbrook, a lumbering troopship used to ferry men and matériel to American bases overseas. In the ranks on the wharf, moving slowly toward the gangway, was Benjamin Charles Steele, serial number 190-18-989, a newly minted private. He had been in uniform nearly a year now, and he liked the life of a soldier. The army had given him just what he wanted, a chance to cross the mountains and see the Golden Land.

  California wasn’t as golden as he’d imagined, but he liked it well enough. Training camp was a dusty tent city on the dry brown flats at March Field near Riverside. The boys from the cities and suburbs thought these accommodations “kinda primitive,” but the men who had been ranch-raised looked around and saw luxury: tents with wooden floors and gas stoves, hot showers nearby, latrines that weren’t buzzing with flies, and a mess hall that served seconds if a man wasn’t sated.