Conduct Under Fire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - The Prettiest Girl in the World

  Chapter 2 - Pearl of the Orient

  Chapter 3 - Red Sunset

  Chapter 4 - Invisible Enemies

  Chapter 5 - Exodus

  Chapter 6 - Rendezvous

  Chapter 7 - Opening Salvos

  Chapter 8 - Never Surrender

  Chapter 9 - “Help is on the way”

  Chapter 10 - “Wherever I am . . . I still love you”

  Chapter 11 - “We are not barbarians”

  Chapter 12 - “I go to meet the Japanese commander”

  Chapter 13 - Limbo

  Chapter 14 - Horyo

  Chapter 15 - “The last thin tie”

  Chapter 16 - The Good Doctor

  Chapter 17 - “The Japanese will pay”

  Chapter 18 - Bridge over Hell

  Chapter 19 - Bad Timing and Good Luck

  Chapter 20 - “Action Taken: None”

  Chapter 21 - The Arisan Maru

  Chapter 22 - Fire from the Sky

  Chapter 23 - Total War

  Chapter 24 - Darkness Before Dawn

  Chapter 25 - Mission of Mercy

  Chapter 26 - Coming Home

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  INDEX

  Praise for Conduct Under Fire

  “Conduct Under Fire is an intimate and meticulous account of cruelty, courage, and extraordinary human resilience in the hellholes of Japan’s WWII prison camps and more. Glusman also introduces the little-known deaths of over ten thousand American POWs by ‘friendly fire,’ and ends his story with the massive rain of firebombs that brought the war home to the Japanese. He has, indeed, cast an unflinching gaze on the ‘fire’ of hell on earth.”

  —John W. Dower, author of Embracing Defeat and War Without Mercy

  “Glusman takes us on an extraordinary journey through the battles of the Pacific, and then into the horror of the Japanese POW camps, via the story of his father and three fellow doctors. There are moments of courage and cowardice, caring and cruelty, as these four physicians struggle under severe circumstances to preserve the bodies and heal the souls of their fellow men.”

  —Jerome E. Groopman, MD, Dina and Raphael Recanati Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and author of The Anatomy of Hope

  “A marvelous book, a wonderful reminder, lest we forget, that medicine is not a business, not a trade, not a degree course, but a calling. These four were called and the story of how they answered, and the tale of their suffering, their courage and their heroism is humbling, inspiring, and a wonderful read. I pray our generation is never tested in this fashion, but if we are, the standard for integrity, compassion and bravery has been set.”

  —Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country

  “A real page-turner . . . Glusman has truly done a masterful job not only researching and detailing a largely neglected story, but also putting it all in the proper context. It is beautifully written and a fitting tribute not only to his father and his father’s comrades, but to all the POWs who shared their singular and horrific experience.”

  —Jan K. Herman, resident historian, U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery and editor of Navy Medicine

  “Conduct Under Fire is a triumph. John Glusman has the historical breadth and literary grace of a William Manchester, but a modern even-handedness all his own.”

  —David Haward Bain, author of Sitting in Darkness and Empire Express

  “Seldom have I read a book more committed to telling the historical truth, no matter how many inflated reputations get punctured and how much gaseous rhetoric about the ‘Good War’ is dispelled. [Glusman] more than balances these harsh truths with the heroism of these forgotten Americans, from the doctors to the officers and men they never ceased struggling to save. . . . Conduct Under Fire is a must-read.”

  —Thomas Fleming, Military History Quarterly

  “A moving, informative, and well-documented account of aspects of World War II that are often overlooked. . . . I highly recommend this book.”

  —Harold D. Langley, Ph.D., The New England Journal of Medicine

  “Riveting . . . A harrowing account of a brutal clash of cultures that reads like a novel.”

  —Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute

  “Masterful.”

  —Parameters, U.S. Army War College

  “A compelling account of courage and sacrifice. . . . Over a third of

  American POWs of the Japanese died in captivity; with grace and clarity,

  Glusman gives a keen sense of loss to that statistic, and a heroic dignity

  to those that survived—a major achievement indeed.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A thoughtful, humane meditation on war and family history, full of myth-busting truths.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Thoroughly absorbing . . . A very notable addition to the literature on its harrowing subject.”

  —ALA Booklist

  “Interviews with veterans from the Australian, British, American, and Japanese forces, coupled with the use of diaries, letters, and war crimes testimony, make this essential.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONDUCT UNDER FIRE

  John A. Glusman is editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has been a contributing editor to The Paris Review and has written for numerous publications, including The Economist, The Washington Post Book World, The Christian Science Monitor, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with his wife and three children.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005 Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © John A. Glusman, 2005

  All rights reserved

  Portions of Conduct Under Fire appeared in different form in The Virginia Quarterly Review and Travel + Leisure.

  Excerpt from Dusk by F. Sionil José

  Photograph credits appear on page 570.

  Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

  eISBN : 978-1-101-11784-2

  CIP data available

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For Jenny, Isabel, and Graham

  Patriot
ism is selfless. And it is not the generals who are the bravest—they usually have the means to stay away from the battle and thereby lengthen their lives. The bravest are usually those whom we do not know or hear about. . . . It has always been the many faceless men, those foot soldiers, who have suffered most, who have died. It is they who make a nation.

  —F. Sionil José, Dusk

  A NOTE ON NAMES

  Throughout Conduct Under Fire I have followed the Japanese custom of using family names first and given names last. In some English-language translations, the name order is reversed to conform to Western style, in which case I have referenced names in the Notes and Bibliography exactly as they appear in print.

  Prologue

  GOVERNMENT RAVINE has fallen off the map. None of the Filipinos we meet on this tiny tropical island have heard of it. My father remembers its general location, but it has been nearly sixty years since he was on Corregidor, bivouacked with the U.S. 4th Marines on the night before he became a prisoner of the Japanese.

  We step through four-foot-high talahib grass, mindful of the fact that we are in a natural habitat for pythons and vipers. We skid down a mud-slick embankment, grabbing onto eucalyptus saplings for support. I keep my eyes on exposed, gnarled roots, only to feel a dangling vine, as brown as twine, wrapped around my neck. The shade of the jungle canopy offers respite from the blistering sun. The trees are more mature, and we can make out remnants of an old dirt road at the top of a ridge that drops steeply to the sea. By his account, there should be a cave to the east where there was once a battalion aid station, but we have yet to find it. Perhaps he is mistaken after all.

  They called it “the Rock.” A formidable maritime fortress in the mouth of Manila Bay, Corregidor endured 300 air raids and one of the heaviest artillery bombardments of World War II during a grueling siege. The surrender of Corregidor by Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright on May 6, 1942, marked the chilling defeat of U.S. and Allied forces in the Philippines and the culmination of a series of lightning Japanese victories in the Pacific, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the capture of Guam, Wake, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. With the fall of Corregidor, my father, one of roughly 12,000 men captured on the Rock, began his three-and-a-half-year odyssey as a prisoner of war.

  We are in the Philippines to retrace a journey that began with hope and purpose in August 1941 and ended in the ashen ruins of Japan in September 1945. My father is eighty-six years of age and surprised by my interest. I am curious about a chapter of his life that in some ways is still being written. He comes to welcome my questions, a bridge between two men, two generations more than forty years apart, one of which has known war, one of which has not.

  Like many former POWs, he has spoken little with his family about his wartime experiences. An Army Distinguished Unit Badge with Oak Leaf Cluster. An American Defense Service Medal with Base Clasp. An Asiatic-Pacific Area campaign medal with one bronze star. A Philippine Defense ribbon with one bronze star. A newspaper clipping from the New York Herald Tribune listing him as “missing.” A photograph of the medical staff of the Kōbe Prisoner of War Hospital in Japan dated November 1944. These are the mementos of my father’s war.

  As children, my brother, sister, and I glimpsed these artifacts as rarely as we heard the tales behind them. Shards of memories came to light and were then tucked away, along with the navy uniform he stored in a government-issue footlocker that we rarely saw open. Only one incident can I recall with any clarity: my father and his buddies were once so hungry that they killed, skinned, and ate a cat. It appealed to a boy’s delight in the grotesque, lent him a certain stature, and we inquired no further except to ask how cat tastes. “Gamey as hell” came the reply.

  In retrospect it is odd but understandable that we grew up knowing so little about World War II, the most devastating war in human history. Fifty million lives were lost, 2.35 million Japanese died, 406,000 Americans were killed, and 78,976 Americans were listed as missing.

  Between September 1940, when Congress enacted the Selective Service Act, and August 1945, 31 million American men registered for the draft and 16 million men and women served their country. The war mobilized civilian participation to an unprecedented degree. Nearly 2 million American women worked in defense factories; 59,000 women joined the Army Nurse Corps. Some 56,000 physicians volunteered for duty.

  My father was not a combatant; he was a doctor, whose battles were fought on the frontline of disease. A lieutenant ( junior grade) in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, he was stationed on Bataan and then attached to the 4th Marines on Corregidor. As battalion surgeon in a campaign led by the army six years before the first Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) units came into being, his role was to help, not harm.

  As if wars could ever be neat, clean, surgical operations, the war in the Pacific has been called a dirty war, a “war without mercy,” as historian John Dower described it. Many American soldiers were instilled with racial stereotypes of the Japanese as treacherous, savage, subhuman. Roosevelt and Churchill themselves vowed to crush the “Barbarians of the Pacific.” Such language bore a striking resemblance to the conception propagated by the Japanese of Westerners, who were, said the Japanese schoolbook Cardinal Principles of the National Polity, “intrinsically quite different from the so-called citizens of Occidental countries.”

  The Japanese viewed Americans in particular as soft, self-indulgent, and individualistic. The Japanese, by contrast, belonged to the genetically pure “Yamato Race,” a tribe of “One Hundred Million” whose superiority lay in conformity. As shidō minzoku, the leading race, their goal, expressed as hakkō ichiu, or “Eight Corners of the World Under One Roof,” was the subjugation of all other Asians and the replacement of Anglo-American imperialism with a new world order. Under Emperor Hirohito, this became the essence of their kokutai, or national polity.

  U.S. and Filipino troops fighting on Bataan and Corregidor suffered horribly from hunger and disease. “They were expendable,” to borrow the title of W. L. White’s book about John Bulkeley and Motor Torpedo Boat (MTB) Squadron 3 published in 1944. Sacrificed on the altar of hubris, they were the casualties of an American military strategy known as War Plan Orange-3 that was doomed to failure. They were promised that “help is on the way” by General Douglas MacArthur while Roosevelt advocated a policy of “Europe First.”

  Japanese soldiers on Bataan confronted similarly harsh conditions, but they had reinforcements whereas the American and Filipino troops had none. They were indoctrinated with the code of bushidō—the way of the warrior—and the belief that there was no greater glory than to die in the service of the emperor.

  The Pacific POW, said E. Bartlett Kerr, “underwent an experience unlike that of his millions of fellow veterans.” Of the approximately 193,000 Allied prisoners of the Japanese in the Pacific, 36,260 were American.

  POWs were systematically deprived of food and medicine. They were humiliated, beaten, starved, and in the worst instances tortured and executed. Their fate hinged on their own ingenuity, the “will to live,” as one American doctor put it, the occasional kindness of camp guards and commandants, and sheer good luck. It was a war in which absolute power was punished absolutely.

  Forty-two percent of the 25,580 U.S. Army and Navy personnel captured in the Philippines never returned. My father was one of the lucky ones. Like many prisoners of war, he could not have endured on his own. Fred Berley, George Ferguson, John Bookman, and my father, Murray Glusman, were a group—a team, as it were—of four navy doctors. From disparate backgrounds, they were dedicated to their professions, devoted to their patients, comrades in hardship and healing. All of them were decorated. As doctors, their perspective on war and captivity was unique, but none would valorize their experience. If they suffered under the Japanese, they also experienced moments of genuine compassion.

  Three of them survived. One never made it home. The war defined them as young men, and while its imprint faded with time, it rem
ained a palimpsest beneath the narrative of their lives. It colored their language, surfaced in their dreams, tempered their outlook, and sketched, however faintly, the world they created for their children. But they would rather bury their memories than exhume them.

  “We did nothing extraordinary,” my father said with characteristic understatement. “We lived in extraordinary times.”

  In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud wrote that one of the sins of contemporary education was its failure to prepare future generations “for the aggressiveness of which they are destined to become the objects.”

  This is the lesson I learned from my father and his buddies.

  This is their story.

  1

  The Prettiest Girl in the World

  HE WROTE TO HER almost every day, short letters, long letters, recollections, reminders, anecdotes and little jokes, dreams from the night before, and imaginings of their future, handwritten or hammered out on his new Hermes typewriter. It was November 1939, and he couldn’t bear to leave her, nearly quit the damn navy when he saw Shanghai fade away.

  They had met in Washington, D.C., in January of that year. He was in Naval Medical School, having earned the rank of assistant surgeon, lieutenant ( junior grade); she had been living and teaching in Madison, Wisconsin. From the moment he first noticed her petal-white complexion, pert apple cheeks, and luxurious black hair, he couldn’t stop looking at her, couldn’t stop thinking about her. So when he was ordered that spring to report to the Asiatic Station once he had completed his postgraduate course of instruction, he slyly popped the question: “Do you think you can handle servants?” “Of course I can,” she replied without equivocation.