Chapter 4
Santo Tomas Internment Camp was more ling a prolonged camp-out than a prison until the middle of February. By then there were over 3500 of us–Americans, British, Dutch, Burmese, Poles, Swedes, and many other Allied Nationalities–squeezed into three university buildings.
Thursday, February 12 began like any other camp day. The Loudspeaker, recently installed by the camp engineers, woke us at 7 a.m. with a recording of a popular tune. It was cleaning day and the forty occupants of classroom 46, where Mother and I still resided, stripped bedding from cots or desks or petates in preparation for the weekly bedbug purge. Mother fetched boiling water from a huge cauldron in the new kitchen while I took the slats from our iron cots to the newly created shower room. There we douses them and a fine harvest of bed bugs evacuated their flooded homes.
By then it was eight and, while the slats dried, Mother and I got breakfast from the kitchen shed, built by the STIC men with lumber and equipment supplied by the Red Cross. I hated the cracked corn mush that was served, but had been warned under dire penalty that I was to eat it, so I did.
Afterwards we reported back to Room 46 to be counted by Mrs. Rimmer, our room monitor. While we waited for the totals to be tallied, we made up our cots.
When the Loudspeaker failed to announce the end of roll call, Mrs. Farnes came over to chat. With her in room 46, were her two grown daughters, whose high heels and lipstick and tragic expressions I greatly admired. Mrs. Farnes told Mother how her older girl, Eleanor, was desperately worried about her fiancé, who was fighting on Bataan. Connie, the younger, shared her sister’s anguish, but Mrs. Farnes was more concerned about her two teenage sons, in a men’s room on the floor below.
The usual thirty minutes for roll call turned into fifty. A man from the Executive Committee came round, asking all the room monitors to count their people again. Still the totals did not tally. Then the Japanese sent a party of their own, which ordered us out into the hallway to be counted. When they left, speculation began in earnest. “Has someone escaped?”
Two re-counts later the Loudspeaker ordered the adults to their camp jobs and the children to school. The delay was not explained, which fueled rumors galore: there had been a mass escape from the gym; Earl Carroll had joined the guerillas in the hiss; the Executive Committee had vanished en masse.
During siesta, screams shattered the silence in the Main Building. They emanated from the Japanese barracks room, next to the commandant’s office on the first floor. The two-foot-thick walls of the building could not contain the cries of agony. Mother tried to distract me by reading the story of the Cat That Walked by Himself, that would not be tamed, and that went his wild lone way. Still the screams made chills run up and down my spine.
The screaming lasted for nearly three hours, generating more rumors.
The truth circulated after supper. One Australian and two British merchant seaman had gone over the wall after roll call the previous evening. That was no great feat, for the wall was only ten feet high, lightning on the inside was nil, on the outside sporadic and dim at best. The Japanese sentries could not cover every inch of the wall, and nor could the internee night patrol, which had been set up to enforce curfew and the no-liquor, no-sex rules.
The trio of seamen were strangers to Manila, stranded when their ship sank in the bay. Not knowing the streets and having no contacts, the sailors floundered toward the shore, where they planned to sail to Australia. Just after noon, five miles north of Santo Tomas, then ran into a patrol of Japanese M.P.’s, who returned them to camp at 2 PM.
Earl Carroll, bolstered by his newly discovered interpreter Ernest Stanley, and the room monitors of the two men were summoned by Commandant Tomayasu.
“How,” the Commandant wanted to know, “could three men be missing for so long without their absence being noted?”
“They must have gone right after the evening roll call,” Carroll replied through Stanley. “Until the next roll call there is no way to know if a man is missing.”
“You must find a way,” snapped Tomayasu. “This time I have been able to intercede with the military police to treat them leniently. Next time this will be impossible.”
At 5 p.m. the three sailors, beaten almost insensible, were removed from camp in a police ban.
The executive Committee composed a message read over the Loudspeaker at roll call that night, explaining what had happened and ending: “The commandant is very angry that his cooperation should have been requited in such a manner, and has stated that any recurrence will result in death for the escapeeps and very stringent restrictions for the internees. It is, therefore, very important that each person interned here take every possible precaution to prevent another escape.”
One man was not on hand to hear this message. Goldie Goldsborough had escaped. An old Manila hand, married to a Filipina, he had sons with the guerrillas. Camp consensus was that he would join them in the hills, and that the Japanese would increase the promised punishment for everyone.
Whether this second escape hardened the resolve of the Japanese military authorities, no one ever knew, but on February 14 Commandant Tomayasu told the Executive Committee that the three sailors had been court martialed and sentenced to death. The Executive Committee made every effort to have the verdict reconsidered, submitting a petition to the military authorities and trying to get officials of the Churches and the German community to intervene. Permission to contact friendly outsiders by telephone was refused.
On Sunday, February 15, at 11 a.m., the Military Police sent a bus to camp to collect witnesses. Tomayasu designated Earl Carroll as Chairman of the internees’ Central Committee, Ernest Stanley as camp interpreter, Charles E. Stewart and Gerald H. Pedder as the room monitors of the escapees, and Father Griffiths, an Anglican clergyman, to attend the execution.
A bus took the internees and the commandant’s party to Manila’s South Police Station, where the condemned men had been jailed for the past three nights. The trio, hands tied in front, were herded onto the sidewalk, then prodded aboard the bus. Their faces lit up at the sights of the five internees. It was obvious that the sailors did not know their fate.
Speech being prohibited, the trip proceeded in silence. Blakey Laycock, the forty-three-year-old Australian, was the first to notice the white armbands worn by three of the soldiers. He paled and slumped in his seat as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He had recognized the armbands for what they were–blindfolds. Britishers Henry Weeks and Tom Fletcher, both in their late twenties, took longer to notice them, but by the time the bus reached the Chinese Cemetary, they, too, realized that they were to be executed.
Laycock, Weeks, and Fletcher were lined up on a flat spot in the cemetary. Commandant Tomayasu read their sentence, which a Japanese interpreter translated. Father Griffiths calmed his own distress enough to speak to the men of the life of the spirits, and the efforts of the Committee to save them. Finally, he offered to take messages to their families after the war.
“My wife,” gulped Weeks, “we’d only been married a month when I left London. She may have had our child by now. Couldn’t that be considered?”
Without waiting for the formality of Stanley’s translation, Tomayasu, palms upraised, shrugged impotently.
Weeks, his hands still tied, groped for his hip pocket. Tugging awkwardly, he extracted his wallet.
“Her address’s there,” he mubled, as a soldier took the wallet and handed it to Griffiths.
Fletcher was too distraught to speak intelligibly, but Laycock was not.
“On what grounds are we being executed?” he demanded.
Stanley translated this time, and the Commandant replied, “For trying to escape.”
“Well then, how about a cigarette?” said the Australian.
Tomayasu acquiesced. Carroll produced a pack of Lucky Strikes and put one in each man’s mouth. As he was lighting Laycock’s, a Japanese guard stepped forward and lit the other two.
The condemned men smoke in silence. Aside, to Carroll, the Commandant expressed his dismay over the whole episode, which blemished the record of his exemplary, cooperative camp. He reiterated his hope that there would be no more escapes for the good of the whole camp.
Too soon the cigarettes were smoked. Guards shoved the trio toward their common grave, a ten-by-four foot hole about four feet deep. Laycock, Fletcher, and Weeks sat on it’s edge, dangling their feet. Soldiers blindfolded them, Laycock’s protests not withstanding.
Three soldiers took up positions on the opposite edge of the hole and from four feet aimed 25-caliber automatic pistols. On the first round Fletcher and Laycock fell on their faces. Weeks followed on the second volley. Groans rose from the grave. The soldiers emptied their pistols into the tangle of bodies. Still the groans came. Carroll started for the grave but Stanley restrained him, whispering, “You will lose face.”
Tomayasu sighed and said, “It is a shame my men did not have rifles.”
The soldiers half covered the moaning men with dirt, then waved over the Filipino grave diggers. Whether the groans ceased or were merely muffled by the earth Carroll could never say.
Father Griffiths performed the last rites, while the Japanese stood at a distance. Then the party withdrew. Just before he boarded the bus, Carroll looked back. Two soldiers where laying branches of bougainvilles on the grave.
The story of the execution spread like a rip tide through Santo Tomas. The children turned the trio into heroes, but the adults speculated on the consequences. They were not long in coming. Commandant Tomayasu ordered camp rules to be strictly enforced, and he cancelled all passes for internees with personal business in the city. He promised that the next time anyone escaped, his room monitor would be executed. Strangely, no mention was ever made of Goldsborough’s escape.
In public the Central Committee charged the men of the night patrol with escape prevention as their top priority. In private Earl Carroll questioned the reversal of Tomayasu’s promise of clemency. Obviously the commandant did not have the last word; the military was all-powerful in Manila now.
The execution belied Japanese assurances that we were being held in protective custody. STIC ceased to be a lark and became a life and death game to be played, not only against the Japanese, but also against one’s fellow prisoners, who were now perceived as having the power to imperil others.
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