7

PRISONERS OF WAR OF THE JAPANESE

“In the witch caldron of a Jap prison,” Dr. Alfred Weinstein wrote, “G.I. Joe fought for his life with all the breaks against him.”¹ On the very day in December 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial forces invaded the Philippines. The American commonwealth had been home to a major American military base since the Spanish-American War. American troops surrendered in April of the following year. For troops captured near Manila, the Bataan Death March was a confrontation with horror. Sources indicate that about 80 percent of the American prisoners of war (POWs) in Japanese captivity took part in that death march.² The first bombshell to reach Washington was an account about American POWs authored by William Dyess, an officer in the United States Army Air Forces.

Dyess, survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines on April 9, 1942. The Death March followed the Allied loss at the Battle of Bataan. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese did not separate Jews from other prisoners in most cases. Antisemitism did not exist as it did among the Nazis. What follows in this officer’s account is the testimony of a non-Jewish fighter pilot, attempting to describe the unbearable: the brutality of the death march, in which prisoners were forced to walk in the sun without helmets, water, or food. They suffered constant harassment, beatings, terror, murders, and beheadings. Sick soldiers were denied medicine and often water and normal food rations. When the revelations of the airman reached Washington, officials decided not to publish the unsettling information until late January 1944. The War and Navy Departments feared that if published earlier, the information might be detrimental to the war effort and trigger retaliation against prisoners. It would also have worried the parents of servicemen stationed in the Pacific. The report of the fighter pilot William Dyess was therefore classified “secret.”

Eager to return to combat duty in the Army Air Forces after returning to the United States, Dyess, who had been promoted to lieutenant colonel, died tragically while flight-testing a P-38 with a mechanical problem. In January 1944, roughly a month after his deadly accident, the Chicago Tribune received permission from government censorship to release the account of his war experiences. The lines authored by the pilot are eloquent. They are an understatement of the barbaric deeds of some of the Japanese guards, but they provide a sense of what the captives, Jews and non-Jews alike, endured: “I have tried to put into words some of the things that I have experienced and observed during all these past months, but I fail to find words adequate to an accurate portrayal. If any American could sit down and conjure before his mind the most diabolical of nightmares, he might perhaps come close to it, but none who have not gone [through] could possibly have any idea of the tortures and the horror that these men are going through.”³ Dyess’s observations as a POW were later confirmed by the memoirs of two American prisoners who successfully escaped with him from Davao.⁴ Their experiences of resilience under barbarity provide context through which the expression of Jewish identity, when it occurred, can be fathomed. Sharing the same urge as Dyess to write a testimony, Alfred Abraham Weinstein, a Jewish surgeon who served in the Philippines, accounted for his war experiences in a memoir published in 1948: “I wrote a story. I had to write it. Every fiber of my brain and body which had survived forty months in prison camps cried out for it. It had to be written from memory. I had written four diaries. They were all destroyed. The first I buried under the lonesome pine towering Little Baguio, Bataan, in the Philippines, the night before we surrendered to the Japs, in April 1942. I returned to the encampment, overgrown by jungle, three and a half years later. Tropical rains had mildewed the diary and red ants had eaten it.”⁵

The physician gave the second diary to a prisoner operating a secret radio at Cabanatuan prison, located north of Manila, but never heard from him after the war’s end. Weinstein had to destroy his third diary when the Japanese secret police, the Kepei Tai, burst into the Shinagawa POW hospital in Tokyo looking for a clandestine short-wave radio set operated by the prisoners. Weinstein tore up the last diary when he was transferred to the Omori punishment camp in Tokyo in the summer of 1944 after being accused of not cooperating with the Japanese. It was there that he faced the notoriously sadistic disciplinarian Watanabi, nicknamed “the Bird” or “the Animal.” Such nicknames were given to guards to avoid punishment when they thought the prisoners were saying their names. “The Bird,” infamous for being a psychopath, relished in inflicting harsh daily beatings.⁶ In Omori, POWs used coded phrases to inquire about the level of danger they would have to cope with each day. “What’s the position?” they would ask. The prisoners knew they would have a few moments to breathe when the reply that followed was “the Animal is in his cage.”⁷

Before being transferred to Japan, Weinstein and his fellow prisoners painfully adjusted to life in captivity in the Cabanatuan prison camp. In that place of confinement, personal statements of Jewish identity stood out like a stifled flame unexpectedly rekindled, interwoven with deep reflections on “mankind with his veneer of civilization stripped away.” Weinstein’s memoir is a document illustrating how American prisoners coped with the threat of mental and physical disintegration. Twenty-two thousand American soldiers were captured by the Japanese Imperial forces after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. The surgeon was one of four thousand to survive.

Who was that resilient American serviceman? Born in Boston in 1908, Weinstein moved to Atlanta in 1938 after the successful completion of five years of postgraduate research work in surgery and cardiology. In addition to his private practice, he taught surgery at Emory University in Atlanta. He interrupted both his teaching and practice to enlist in the United States Army in 1940 and volunteer for service in the Philippines. He was a chief surgeon of General Hospital Number 1 in Bataan when the Americans surrendered to Japanese forces. A POW for three and a half years, he provided medical treatment to his fellow prisoners, although he himself was underfed and weighed about a hundred pounds. His heroism and resourcefulness when medical equipment was lacking earned him five battle stars, three Presidential Citations, two Purple Hearts, and a Bronze Star. He was awarded the latter decoration for preventing “what might have become a wholesale decimation of American Prisoners of War” by “saving the lives of many comrades” during a diphtheria epidemic in the POW camp. He left service with the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Medical Corps.⁸

Back in Atlanta, the then thirty-eight-year-old physician—whose mental and physical injuries took many years to heal—asked crucial questions: “Does man continue to love his brother when steeped in disease, chronic starvation, and death? Why did the Japs behave like Japs? How much punishment can man take before he loses his divine spark of humanness? What role did the minister and the priest play in keeping that spark flickering? How low in animal like behavior can a man sink and still revert to manliness?”⁹

This chapter attempts to shed light on these issues, emphasizing the Jewish perspective as expressed in the physician’s memoir and in archival material. It also aims to show the patriotic aspects of the Jewish experience of servicemen in World War II. It is a fact that as far as the Japanese were concerned, Jewish GIs were first and foremost American nationals. This aspect emerges in Weinstein’s memoir, whose provocative questions pave the path of our research.

WHY DID THE JAPS BEHAVE LIKE JAPS?

Although living conditions in Japanese prison camps were dire, there was no separation of Jews from others, as was often the case for American and Allied soldiers in Nazi slave labor camps, where Jews were starved and worked to death—if not murdered.¹⁰ Jew hatred was largely nonexistent among the Japanese Imperial forces. They considered white people as a group that could be submitted to the worst conditions, as they became deprived of their humanity after surrendering. It is significant to recall that in the Japanese military, it was honorable to kill oneself instead of being captured. In that light, prisoners could be subjected to various atrocities including arbitrary murder, mutilations, and forced labor coupled with malnutrition and chronic disease. The archival film Know Your Enemy: Japan introduced a tenet of Japanese ideology from an early period through to World War II. This recurrent motto read: “The Sword Is Our Steel Bible.” It endowed Japanese soldiers with a quasi-divine mission focusing on the absolute dedication of their lives to their emperor and on obedience to their superiors.¹¹

While in POW camps of Bilibid, O’Donnell, and Cabanatuan in the Philippines, Weinstein and his fellow prisoners received helped from Hanna Kaunitz, an Austrian Jewish refugee in Manila. She benefited from the fact that, being Austrian, the Japanese occupiers did not consider her a Jewess but the national of an ally. The Japanese did not pay much attention to the fact that she and her family had fled Nazi-dominated Austria. Together with her physician brother Fred Kaunitz and other Jewish refugees mentioned in Weinstein’s memoir, Hanna joined the “Blue Eagle,” an underground resistance movement, and contributed to the survival of many prisoners. The group smuggled medicine, food, and money into POW camps, often with the help of altruistic men and women from the Philippines.¹² No wonder Weinstein dedicated his 1948 memoir to Hanna Kaunitz, who became his wife and “whose love kept a spark of life flickering in a dying body.” The American surgeon had met her in Manila before the attack on Pearl Harbor. No incentive to cling to life could have been stronger. Weinstein’s strategy of survival included observing the Japanese guards’ psychology and picking up their language as fast as he could. Sensing that his Japanese captors would not provide prison camp clothes, the surgeon preciously kept “a complete civilian outfit that Hanna had smuggled into Camp O’Donnell.”¹³ Resourcefulness coupled with an acute understanding of psychology were key assets for survival. Weinstein focused on signs of humanity around him instead of succumbing to the drudgery of meaningless prolonged confinement and the pangs of hunger. This focus helped him retain his identity.

He admired the role and efforts of chaplains in comforting dying servicemen, even when he had doubts about “the morality” of telling dying soldiers they would live: “If a patient looked as if he might kick the bucket, we called in the chaplain to give him the last rites, collect personal mementos, and write last messages. These men were trained to give religious consolation and comfort in a calm, tender manner. Their appearance meant to the wounded that they were seriously ill, yet, it did not have the same disastrous effect of a flat, ‘Yes, you’re gonna die’ coming from a medical officer.”¹⁴ In other cases, chaplains strengthened the faint hope still held by enslaved POWs. As noted, Jewish laymen took it on themselves to perform this role when there was no chaplain of their faith.¹⁵

THE LAYMAN’S EFFORT TO KEEP A HUMANE SPARK FLICKERING

Weinstein related a striking expression of Jewish identity in this place of confinement. His rendering of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in the Cabanatuan prison camp reveals to what extent the observance of such a day conjured memories of his Jewish heritage. On many occasions, the medical corpsman praised the initiatives of Christian chaplains in the POW camp, who sometimes denied themselves food—as did Chaplain Tiffany—so that weaker men could eat. At a time when people were reduced to animal-like behavior in the sense that their minds could only think of food, such conduct instilled hope in humanity. In the absence of a Jewish chaplain, Lieutenant Jack Goldberg, an “ex-amateur pugilist from New York City,” assembled the Jewish prisoners on Friday nights in his galley. This, too, instilled men with faith in humanity and revived a sense of Jewish belonging. On Yom Kippur, a religious service was improvised under the open sky.

On Yom Kippur, we met near the little entertainment stage in the open field before the sun went down. . . . Of the several hundreds of Jews who started prison life in Cabanatuan, there was less than eighty alive in the closing days of 1943. We straggled toward our house of worship under heaven’s roof from all parts of camp: Americans from New York and San Francisco, refugees from Vienna and Berlin who had volunteered for service at the outbreak of the war. Old Kliatchko appeared before us as the broiling-hot sun dipped toward the serrated edge of the Sierra Madre Range which overlooked the camp.¹⁶

Yom Kippur became a time of encounters in the unlikely space of a POW camp. American servicemen from different corners of the United States met on that meaningful day of the Jewish calendar and encountered European Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution and extermination. Kliatchko was an American Jew of Polish descent who had married a Filipino woman; they had raised thirteen children together while growing rice peacefully in the plain of Luzon. Kliatchko had learned enough liturgy in a Warsaw rabbinical seminary in his teens to make this day of awe matter for all. He, too, had fled eastern Europe to the United States after a bloody pogrom. After becoming American, he volunteered in War World I and was sent to the Argonne Forest, where he fought during a murderous campaign. He stayed in the American military for years, ended up and retired in the Philippines where he raised a family. At the age of sixty-two, the man volunteered again to fight for America in an engineering outfit. He served through the Bataan campaign, then was captured and interned in the Cabanatuan prison. There, he was responsible for the carabao herd, which he took out to graze. On Yom Kippur, he recited Hebrew prayers he never thought he would remember, leading the High Holy Day service.

He wore his old-type campaign hat with its wide floppy brim, a sun-bleached kaki shirt with its tails hanging free over neatly patched shorts, and a pair of wooden skivvies. He threw a shredded white-silk tallith (praying shawl) with its fringe of tassels over his bowed shoulders. The deep bronze of his cheek bones, separated by a powerful nose, was heightened by the massive curly white beard that flowed over his chest. He raised his sunken brown eyes heavenward and began the haunting Hebrew melody and prayer of Kol Nidre.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits; Who forgiveth all my iniquity; who healeth all my disease; Who redeemeth my life from destruction.”¹⁷

That evening remained etched in the mind of Alfred Weinstein. The precision of his description of Kliatchko, reminiscent of Moses leading his people, proves it. Weinstein’s elaborate prose and literary treatment of the event reveals the transcendence achieved in a place of captivity where nothing spiritual or uplifting was meant to happen. Praying to be saved from destruction, praying not to be broken in spirit, and imploring to be forgiven for sins assumed a particular significance in the Japanese prison camp and led to introspection capable of spiritual regeneration. The anxiety of the moment could foster a personal dialogue with the Creator. During the most solemn moment of the holiest day in the year, Yom Kippur, past vows can be annulled while reciting a prayer called “Kol Nidre” (all vows) in Aramaic. For American servicemen, the miniature prayer book for New Year and the Day of Atonement provided explanations of the importance of “the broken word” at a time of repentance for the past year’s transgressions: “It is certain that the source of the prayer may be traced to this fundamental principle in the Torah, the sacredness of the plighted word; for as the touch of the dead defiles the body, so does the broken word profane the soul. ‘He shall not profane his word; he shall do all that proceedeth from his mouth’ (Num. 30.3).”¹⁸

On that evening, while attending the improvised religious service, surgeon Weinstein and the Jewish American prisoners did not behave like the impersonal beings their Japanese tormentors forced them to be. Through its values and exigencies, Jewishness prevented the dissolution of the prisoners’ identity, providing a rare instance of spiritual elevation from the place of confinement. In that light, prayers were regenerative. Weinstein recalled that during the incantation of prayers, the Japanese guard looked at the assembled men with curiosity. “Ragged GIs” walking along the alley on the way to their barracks cast glances at this uncanny gathering. The Jewish prisoners gathered for the Day of Atonement expressed or renewed their relation to God. Apart from God’s unity, the Creator’s relation to man is the most important doctrine of Judaism.¹⁹ “Inspire with courage all who wait for Thee”—these words struck Weinstein as he focused on the flight of birds in the reddening sky.

The red ball of the sun dropped behind the purple mountain. In the fast-falling twilight, little white ricebirds wheeled and turned. . . . Eyes blurred with mist, the scene before me faded. I saw the synagogue in which my family were gathered in prayer and supplication; its high vaulted ceiling with doves of peace flirting about the painted billowing clouds; the colonnaded ark of the covenant with its red-velvet drapery and Ten Commandments of Moses embroidered in white silk; the golden eagle with its outspread wings surmounting it; the painting of the Wailing Wall of the Temple on the wall behind it; the crouching, snarling lions of Judah, tails lashing, hovering protectively over it; the silk flags flanking it; on the right, the American, on the left, the flag of Zion with its two horizontal sky-blue stripes and its three broader white ones, the blue six-pointed star of David, flaming in the center. I saw my father standing at the tabernacle, his blue eyes fixed on the Bible. I saw a little old gray-haired woman in the balcony turning the pages of her prayer book salted down with the tears that dropped from her cheeks while she dreamt of her son ten thousand miles away.²⁰

Weinstein’s well-crafted literary rendering conjures up symbols of Judaism. In the richly decorated synagogue whose setting he reminisced, the American flag and eagle were enmeshed with Jewish elements; his identity as an American rose as a major component of his Jewish identity. A Reform Jew, Weinstein conveyed the importance that Jewishness assumed in relation to the family circle and the congregation. His moving text culminates with an image bridging the gap between a son imprisoned in the Pacific and his mother, praying for his return, her eyes blurred by tears. All mothers of servicemen sent overseas must have felt the same way when opening a prayer book, no matter what their religion.

Weinstein reiterated his admiration for chaplains of the three main American faiths: “They built chapels out of scrap wood and transformed them by the magic of their words into places of worship.”²¹ But on that memorable Yom Kippur, there was no chapel available, no Jewish chaplain, and yet magic was induced under the “heavenly sky” at sunset. Supplications on the Day of Atonement bridged two worlds miles away. The barbed wires of the prison camp were trespassed. The transcendence of the prayers together with man’s power to remember was instrumental in bringing about a quasi-magical transformation. One of the questions raised in the medical corpsman’s memoir found an answer: yes, man can “revert to manliness” no matter how “low in animal like behavior” he sinks under the pressure of his captors.²² He needs the right environment that he can transcend with prayers. At least, this was possible in Cabanatuan. In that respect, Kliatchko, like each POW, was a “product of his environment,” as suggested by Dutch Chaplain Chaim Nussbaum, who was a POW of the Japanese on the River Kwai.²³ On that Yom Kippur, the American serviceman from Poland became a symbol of the frailty of the human plight, with its ability to “revert to manliness.”

The sunset sent streamers of orange and purple far-flung into heaven. Kliatchko’s deep vibrant voice rose to meet them. Beating his chest with clenched, gnarled fist at the end of each sentence, he prayed for forgiveness:

“For the sin which we have sinned against Thee under stress or through choice;

For the sin which we have sinned against Thee openly or in secret . . .

For all these sins, O God of Forgiveness, bear with us, pardon us, forgive us.”

By the light of the flickering stars and the quarter moon, I looked at the intent faces of my neighbors: stubby Captain Berkelheimer, the medic detachment commander, the razor-faced Lenk brothers, refugees from Czechoslovakia; stalwart Ben Hessenberger, carabao driver, refugee from Germany; sway-backed Captain Bennison. They didn’t know it but they were attending their last Yom Kippur service on this earth.²⁴

With these lines, the reader understands that these men were not inscribed in the Book of Life—including Ben Hessenberger, a refugee from Europe who had enlisted in the United States Armed Forces of the Far East and fought along with American servicemen.²⁵ Weinstein ended his retelling of Yom Kippur in the Cabanatuan prison with the sounding of the shofar, an improvised, curved carabao horn that the layman blew symbolically at Kol Nidre, the beginning of Yom Kippur. In normal conditions, the shofar is blown at the end of the Day of Atonement, or Neilah (the closure of that day). The adjustment of religious practices fit the circumstances of captivity, for that evening the prisoners immediately returned to their shacks. In that interval of spiritual freedom, some experienced an uplifting feeling of Jewish belonging. In Cabanatuan, as in most places of drudgery and imprisonment, a sense of Jewish brotherhood arose from sharing the same fate.

ENSIGN JACK GORDON, A POW WITH A JEWISH SENSE OF DESTINY

In the Breman Archives in Atlanta, Georgia, there is a copy of the 1948 edition of Alfred Weinstein’s book, Barbed-Wire Surgeon: A Prisoner of War in Japan. Dedicated to Sam Gordon, a friend and colleague, the handwritten lines read: “To my dear friend Sam whose brother Jack was my bunk mate in misery for two years; a misery that was brightened by his smiling face and words of cheer when I was about to crack up.”²⁶

Who was Jack Gordon, the serviceman capable of soothing others and boosting morale? Born in Atlanta on March 16, 1920, Jack volunteered in the United States Naval Reserve and was promoted to midshipman on February 14, 1941. The handsome, blue-eyed twenty-one-year-old ensign was reassuring, optimistic, and humorous in the letters that eventually reached his mother. Sadie Gordon was divorced. Her life revolved around her sons, both of whom served in the American military. Excruciating letters from Gordon’s tormented mother to naval authorities exemplify the anguish of all parents who strove to locate their missing sons overseas. The documents in the Gordon family archives housed at the Breman Jewish Heritage Museum show that Jack wrote long letters as frequently as possible, requesting his mother write a twenty-five-word letter every day to help him reconnect with home. The sustained link with his beloved mother was essential for his survival; hatred of the Japanese who had enslaved him was not enough to help him cling to life. But it was a well-known and dreaded fact that many letters were thrown away instead of being given to overwhelmed censors. Although Sadie Gordon was desperate, not knowing what had happened to her son, she found the strength to write to Admiral Chester Nimitz of the United States Navy. She received a handwritten letter dated January 14, 1943, from the commander in chief of the Pacific Ocean areas who commanded Allied air, land, and sea forces. Signed by Nimitz himself, it reads in part: “I fully appreciate your anxiety over the fate of your son, and sincerely regret that I cannot help you to communicate with him. . . . There is every chance he will return to you in good shape—a little thinner perhaps, unless he likes rice! Thus far, contact has only been obtained with a very small percentage of American prisoners of war, so your failure to date must not discourage you.” The admiral, who served both in World War I and World War II, must have known that Jack had been admitted as a cadet at West Point before joining the Naval Academy. He perhaps knew that Jack was to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He also must have known that Mrs. Gordon had two sons in the Pacific. Samuel served as a surgeon in Guam as soon as he qualified at Emory University in Atlanta in 1942. Jack Gordon sent many letters from Cabanatuan to his mother in which he regretted to inform her that he was disease-ridden and “past the hunger stage.” He wrote that he knew that “the American forces [were] here and unable to save us.”²⁷

Prior to his promotion as midshipman in 1941, as mentioned, Jack obtained in 1939 an “appointment and admission as cadet” at the prestigious West Point Military Academy. He sat long hours taking difficult examinations in various subjects, including mathematics, physics, history of the United States, English literature, economics, and government. He finally decided to enroll in the Annapolis Naval Academy.²⁸ His oath of office is worth recalling because he lived up to it, even while captive under the Japanese: “I, Jack Benjamin Gordon Jr., do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”

This document from the Navy Department, Bureau of Naval Personnel, expresses the sacred character of the engagement the ensign took on February 14, 1941. The mention of God’s help made the appointment even more solemn for the patriotic Jew, even though in America, the reference to God is customary when taking an oath. His love for the United States of America and willingness to sacrifice his life for his country appeared in most of Gordon’s letters, even those whose words were drastically limited by his imprisoners. In one such formulated card, he asked his mother not to forget to buy war bonds. A letter dated January 23, 1942, from Ensign Jack Gordon was sent from Corregidor to his brother, Sam. It sounds like a farewell letter, as if death was the only way out of the prison camp.

When you tell your kids about the uncle killed in P.I. tell them how I liked to travel, of the many new and different things I did—and I have done more than the average of my age. But also tell them of the hell of war. For it is terrible that we must kill humanity to hope to better it. . . . Bub, do not let mother grieve over my dying. Remember, I’ve enjoyed life, I have lived, and death holds no fear or punishment. It is only the end. From here on there is no more war, worry or fear. All ends. But do not let it end for mother. See that she travels, meets new people, wears new clothes, and enjoys many more years of happiness. . . . Well, my death will be miserable from the point of conventions—dirty, filthy, stinky. There is nothing honorable about death in war. Regardless of how terrible my conditions, I have no fears. My only regret that I could not give my mother more happiness. My fears, worries, troubles have all ended. I am merely following in the pattern of life laid out for me when I was born. That is something none of us can escape. I have never forgotten the words you gave me of advice just before I saw you last. “Fight hard. Give all you have. Never give up.”²⁹

Jack was a Reform Jew from Atlanta whose grandfather, an immigrant from Kovno, Lithuania, was a peddler with a pack on his back. Jack Gordon confessed to his brother that his service for the country had made him more mature: “I feel ‘mellow’ now that I do not think I’ll be able to laugh again.” He pointed out the main reason for his personal change: “Men are being killed, torn to bits, and cut to pieces.” He reiterated in different ways his transformation: “And that has changed me from the carefree college kid to an old man—in just one afternoon. C’est la guerre.”³⁰

Refusing to indulge in self-pity and only giving out elements permitted by censors, Jack Gordon expressed a notion in Judaism suggesting that the time of death is determined at birth. However, he mentioned that his state of weakness did not enable him to follow his mother’s advice to pray to strengthen his faith. A letter dated January 30 was more optimistic, ending with a wishful thought: “When I step down on the good old USA.”³¹

Sadie Gordon was notified that her son Jack had been reported missing in action on May 6, 1942, following the capitulation of Corregidor on that day. On March 23, 1943, after sending many distressed letters to the naval authorities, she learned that he was a POW in the Philippines.³² Formulated letters or postcards with a minimum number of words in which prisoners would underline responses from a set list of words and stamped by censorship enabled Jack to inform his family that he could not receive any letters at the prison camp and that they should write through the Red Cross in Geneva. The heading of his formulated card, rather than a proper letter, bore the French words “Service des prisonniers de guerre” with Japanese characters underneath. Gordon noted his name, nationality, and rank. No mention of religion was included. The navy ensign had to briefly fill in seven points below a heading that read “Imperial Japanese Army.” The first three points are worth quoting for their bureaucratic aspect. His place of internment indicated the Philippine Military Prison Camp, Section 1. A second point let him evaluate his health: excellent, good, fair, or poor. Knowing Gordon from his previous letters, it is not surprising he underlined the first choice to reassure his mother. A third point led him to underline (through choices printed on the form) that he was “not under treatment.” The link of his prison camp with the Red Cross was a reassuring sign both for prisoners and relatives—there were prison camps unknown to the Red Cross authorities where life was closer to agony than to life itself. In the bulk of the letters sent to his mother, some much longer than fifty words, Gordon thanked her for the vitamins, coffee, and chocolate he asked for and finally received through the Red Cross. In his correspondence to his mother and brother, patriotism is a leitmotif. To the latter, Jack reiterated his willingness to sacrifice his life for his country. As exemplified in his correspondence, he maintained his dignity, an essential element for survival when threatened daily by various humiliations.

THE PRISONER OF WAR EXPERIENCE AS A STIGMA

Suggesting that war comprises the genius of killing, General Patton stated in his own dramatic and provocative way: “No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”³³ In that respect, Gordon, later depicted as a hero by the Annapolis Institute, would have been defined as a “loser” by Patton. Such a depreciative point of view about unlucky servicemen would be echoed some seventy-five years later with polemics about POWs by President Trump.³⁴

Jack Gordon was finally herded with thousands of fellow prisoners aboard the Japanese Oryoku Maru. Reverend John E. Duffy, the chaplain on board the ship, later recounted that he was impressed by Gordon’s empathy for fellow servicemen. In a letter to Sam Gordon in 1950, the Christian chaplain, who served as the First Corps chaplain under General Wainwright in the Northern Luzon campaign and in Bataan, mentioned that his brother Jack was “one of the great unselfish who have crossed my pathway.” “Bayoneted and left for dead on the death march.” Although he was thought dead, Duffy had survived the Bataan March. He first met Jack in the Bilibid prison in Manila in mid-October 1944. There, Jack, like fellow POWs, was forced to do heavy work. The chaplain became better acquainted with him on the Oryoku Maru, the ship under attack at Olongapo, Luzon, on December 14–15. Survivors of this harsh transport named the Japanese vessel a “Hell Ship.” Such sea transports were justified by the fact that American forces were retaking the Pacific Islands. The Japanese thus moved thousands of POWs to prisons in Japan. In cramped conditions, many POWs suffocated and died. Adding to this hellish experience, the Oryoku Maru, on which Jack Gordon was confined, was attacked several times by American bombers in mid-December 1944, a target for American forces who did not know the vessel was packed with American and Allied POWs. The Japanese intentionally did not mark it as such. Records of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (RG38) documented the ordeal of another serviceman, John M. Jacobs, who was also in Bilibid prison in Manila and ended up on the Oryoku Maru: “The prisoners had been so crowded in these other holds that they couldn’t even get air to breathe. They went crazy, cut, and bit each other through arms and legs and sucked their blood. In order to keep from being murdered many had to climb the ladders and were promptly shot by the guards. Between twenty and thirty prisoners had died of suffocation or were murdered during the night.”³⁵ Jacobs took off his clothes and shoes, dived into the water, swam ashore, and managed to escape while three American planes were sinking the ship.³⁶ Jack Gordon’s ordeal ended differently. Duffy, the Christian chaplain who made his acquaintance, provided an account of Gordon’s help to fellow servicemen. They boarded another ship near Olongapo Naval Station, Subic Bay, Luzon, due to the sinking of the Oryoku Maru.

When the five hundred of us got in this hold we had nothing but squatting room. . . . Just as we had finished eating our chow we heard air plane motors and then all hell broke loose. Four bombs had been dropped in our hold by the allied fliers. . . . The naval doctors followed. But we had a mess on our hands; over three hundred dead and most of the rest wounded. I knew we had to clear the mess and make room to make the wounded more comfortable. I called for volunteers among the non-wounded and unseriously [sic] wounded to stack the dead on one side of the hold. Your brother Ensign Jack Gordon was one of those who volunteered and did a wonderful job getting the dead all together on one side of the ship. He was not seriously wounded but had a couple of flesh cuts from bomb fragments. After the dead were cleared and a place was cleared where the legless and the armless and the seriously wounded could be cared for, Jack was quite helpful in trying to comfort the wounded and feed them during the three days and nights we were confined in the hold with no medical care from the Japs. He was a fine outstanding man. I never knew his religion. It never mattered to me. In fact, I knew he believed in God and could care for his fellowman. We were all American and comrades and he was a real comrade to his fellow soldiers in one of our darkest hours.³⁷

Stacking the corpses and caring for the wounded demonstrated a single Jew’s empathy—part of the spirit of Judaism. Ensign Jack Gordon was among the twenty soldiers the chaplain recommended for a Bronze Star, awarded posthumously, as Duffy wrote to Sam: “Your brother, as I remember it, died early in the morning of January 29th some distance from Japan and was buried at sea the day before the rest of us landed on the island of Kyuchu. You and your family have every reason to be proud of him. He served his country well. He willingly helped his fellow prisoners in their darkest hours and gave unselfishly of himself reflecting great credit on his parents, his family, and his country.”³⁸

A letter dated August 8, 1945, from the secretary of the navy in Washington stifled the faint hope of a mother. It informed her that her son, “previously reported a prisoner of war, is now known to have lost his life on 15 December 1944.”³⁹

The official document was signed by James Forrestal, then secretary of the navy and later secretary of defense. The date given for Jack’s death does not correspond to that provided by the Christian chaplain in a 1950 letter, but it does match the dates of the American bombings and consequent sinking of a transport ship to Japan. A search for the ensign’s name in the National Archives, in the World War II Prisoners of War Data File, yields the following results: “Gordon Jack B. Jr, serial number 097687, in the United States Navy, White (racial group code), a resident of Georgia, in the Southwest Pacific Theatre, Philippine Islands.” It is noted that Gordon had been in the POW camp of Cabanatuan. His latest report date, in 1944, was on a POW transport ship in the December sinking (Oryoku Maru, Brazil Maru, Enoura Maru); it is noted that he died in transport from Olongapo to San Fernando, Philippine Islands. His “status” indicates “Executed, Died in Ship’s sinking or Result of Ship Sinking, Shot While Attempting Escape.”⁴⁰ No mention is made of his internment in the Bilibid prison, where he was deliberately starved and enslaved like his fellow inmates.⁴¹ One is led to wonder how the young ensign died: was he torn into pieces by a bomb, like many of his buddies, or did he try to dive and escape as is the duty of all American POWs? Chaplain Duffy mentioned that he had dysentery before he died and was “buried at sea.” The sea was the final resting place for thousands of POWs under the Japanese, in the company—ironically enough—of the formerly dreaded sharks.⁴² The treacherous blue stretches of water were also the final resting place for numerous aircraft pilots, navigators, and bombardiers who were downed, hit by flak, set aflame by kamikaze pilots, or, too often, victims of deadly mechanical failures in training.

When Gordon’s mother learned that her younger son was in the hands of the Japanese, she suffered a mental breakdown, though she was comforted by Sam’s cards and letters from Guam. In November 1946, a column published in the Atlanta Journal announced that Sadie Gordon, a prominent woman in B’nai B’rith, had died “suddenly.”⁴³ This case study suggests that the ordeal of captivity psychologically affected not only POWs but also their parents.

A WOMAN CAPTIVE OF THE JAPANESE: SECOND LIEUTENANT MAGDALENA ECKMAN

Sixty-eight American army and navy nurses who provided medical aid on the front lines in the Philippines remained in Japanese captivity for three years after the battle of Corregidor. Among them was a Jewish army nurse from Pine Grove, California. Second Lieutenant Magdalena Eckman (Hewlett) was held prisoner in the Santo Tomas internment camp, previously a university campus in Manila. The story of these American women remained untold until the late 1990s.

Two women authors found that “POW army nurses were discouraged from talking about their combat and POW experiences even to their families. At redistribution centers and in reorientation programs, the POW experience was presented to these women as a stigma and they were told that it was time for them to become ‘ladies again.’”⁴⁴ At the Sonoma County History and Genealogy Library, volunteers discovered documents in a filing cabinet about Magdalena Eckman, born in 1910 in Contra Costa County, who worked as a nurse for a few years on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. On March 1, 1941, she was called to active duty from Palo Alto. The thirty-year-old Army Corps nurse was assigned to the unit defending the harbor of Manila and Subic Bay, on the west coast of the island of Luzon. She became a POW after the Japanese victory. Altogether, over thirty-five hundred prisoners, including civilians, were held in captivity in Santo Tomas. Magdalena Eckman, like the other nurses, continued caring for the wounded for three years. Medical supplies were insufficient; food was scarce. For her, imprisonment under the Japanese implied not only starvation but also degradation, together with the constant need to be resourceful. Santo Tomas was extremely overcrowded, with unwholesome hygienic conditions.⁴⁵ And yet, Magdalena continued to treat the wounded, implying an almost constant state of horror, if not terror.

The volunteers of the Sonoma Genealogy Library found that after the war, Second Lieutenant Magdalena Eckman married Thomas H. Hewlett, an army physician captured in the Philippines and taken to a POW camp in Japan. They later divorced. As a retired colonel in the United States Army, Hewlett wrote and published a short memoir about his captivity to inform about the Japanese atrocities and exorcise his war experiences. He expanded on the acute and common diseases during internment under the Japanese, such as bacillary dysentery and respiratory diseases, with which he had to deal as a doctor. Hewlett also described the “psychological problems” endured by prisoners of the Japanese. The following passage, published in 1978, is revealing of the amplitude of the psychiatric casualties of World War II and the underrated nature of the issue.

I am troubled that the V.A. [Veteran Administration] can recognize a broad range of psychologic and social problems in our current society, and not be cognizant of the fact that some of the patterns they encounter in former P.O.W.’s are long term results in individuals who had no help available when the emotional or psychic traumas occurred during long confinement. The philosophy of the prisoner of war is a strange one, individually developed to make survival possible in the most hostile environment. . . .

The language problem was ever present, interpreters either Japanese or English speaking tended to put themselves in a command position, so they created an atmosphere of distrust. One prisoner of the A detail was executed for attempting to learn to read Japanese. He was utilized as the target for a bayonet drill by the guard detail. His body when examined showed over 75 stab wounds.⁴⁶

The sharp analysis of a former POW followed by this striking example of cruelty unveil the disastrous effects of psychic trauma that often reappears among the elderly when hyperactivity slows. After the war, it was not unusual for former POWs to resort to verbal or physical aggression and be diagnosed as having “Depressive Neurosis” or an “Anti-Social Personality.” But the criteria of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were not determined until thirty years after the Second World War.⁴⁷

Following her divorce, former servicewoman Magdalena Eckman threw herself into her work, a suitable diversion. Director of nurses in the department of obstetrics of the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, Eckman, under the name Madeline Hewlett, became a nursing superintendent at Sonoma Valley Hospital but died one year later, in 1973, at age sixty-three.⁴⁸ The weight of her trauma and her former husband’s trauma as World War II veterans must have been unfathomable.

WAR CAPTIVITY AND PTSD

Another Jewish POW of the Japanese who survived the Bataan Death March, Harry Corre expressed his point of view about the inevitability of PTSD among servicemen in war zones, a pathology only recognized by the American military in the early 1980s: “There is no soldier who has seen any kind of combat action . . . who has witnessed any kind of horrible scenes of bodies being blown apart, or suicide bombings or IEDs [improvised explosive devices], who can come home without having PTSD.”⁴⁹

Prolonged confinement and reduction to impersonal beings or victims by the Japanese left open wounds for many years. Alfred Weinstein, for instance, had to write a memoir, the controlled and admirable writing of which was most probably cathartic for him. In the Omori punishment camp, the sadistic Watanabi strove to destroy prisoners’ subjectivity and identity by forbidding and severely punishing meaningful relations with other POWs and guards. In an article entitled “I Made My Peace with Japanese War Criminals,” published in 1963, Weinstein strove to convey why it took him so long to come to terms with his past as a prisoner of the Japanese. He confessed that “the sharp sound of Japanese speech, heard unexpectedly in Atlanta, terrified me for years after my imprisonment had ended.” He further explained his initiative to travel to Japan.

I wanted to pay homage to the widows of the two prison guards who had befriended me. I wanted to try to forgive Watanabi, a member of the secret police who had tried to beat me to death and had succeeded in breaking my windpipe and arms. I wanted to make my peace with several other Japanese war criminals whom I’d helped put in jail and who had served sentences and had been released.

Why had I delayed 18 years for this reunion? I’d wanted to see another generation of Japanese young folk grow up so that I could meet them and say “I cannot hate you because of the sins committed by your fathers.”⁵⁰

As a human being capable of empathy for others, Weinstein paid tribute to the two guards who had displayed compassion for him. From 1945 onward, he exchanged photographs with the widow, son, and daughter of Nishino-San, one of the guards who had “befriended” him (in his words) at the POW camp at Mitsushima. Nishino-San died in a railroad accident in 1959. Called “the one-armed gentleman” by the prisoners because of his kindness, Nishino-San had lost an arm fighting in China in 1939. Another guard, Nishigaki-San, nicknamed “the Boy Scout,” was instrumental in boosting Weinstein’s low morale. Eighteen years later, when the surgeon met the two widows in the “crooked streets of Tokyo” with the help of American Ambassador Reischauer and his attaché, he told them stories about their husbands.

I recalled the great gift of hope that Nishigaki-San gave me when I was a prisoner of the Japanese. He was tiny and walked with his little hands clasped behind his back, his head forward and shoulders hunched. We were climbing a mountain, trudging toward a mining hospital to borrow a few surgical instruments for an emergency operation and some B vitamins. All P.W.’s had beri-beri and death struck the camp daily. I was sick of living and deeply despondent. Nishigaki-San turned to me and said quietly: “Mosukoshi, senso owari.” His words translated were: “Don’t give up. Soon, the war will be over.”⁵¹

Although he suffered from “tuberculosis of the lungs,” Nishigaki-San lived another seven years, thanks to medication Weinstein sent him and passed away in 1952. But the surgeon maintained contact with his widow through gifts and letters. When Weinstein met the twenty-year-old son of Nishino-San, the other trustworthy guard, he told him stories about his father’s empathy for the beaten prisoners. When Nishino-San was unable to appease the sadistic guards, he would “physically put his body between their rifle butts and a helpless America P.W.” In that moving Tokyo encounter, the two widows “proceeded to load [him] with presents.” During his long-planned visit, Weinstein summoned up the courage to meet his former captors: “I looked for others—friends and enemies—in Japan. Watanabi Gunso, the sadist who had tried to kill me was dead; he was executed after his war crimes trial in 1946. Dr. Tokuda, who had used American POWs as guinea pigs was still in in Sugamo Prison. Dr. Fugi, who had sent me to the Omori Punishment Prison for ‘failure to cooperate with the Japanese,’ was living 60 miles out of the city. He wrote that he ‘didn’t know what I was up to’ and refused to see me unless he was compelled to.”⁵²

Dr. Fugi’s accusation had turned Weinstein’s survival under the Japanese into a hell. But he apparently did not feel any guilt about his decision to “punish” Weinstein. The latter, on the contrary, needed to reach out to him to find some sort of peace of mind. Unlike the adamant Fugi, Captain Kubo, former commander of the Mitsushima prisoner camp, met with Weinstein. The surgeon recalled the hard slave labor he did under Kubo’s supervision. Like all the POWs, he was ordered to cut and haul timber during the bitter cold winter in the Japanese mountain area while beriberi took its toll in cardiac deaths. Kubo eventually found a way to alleviate some of the prisoners’ exhausting labor. It was a spark of humanity.

Eighteen years later, Weinstein and his wife, Hanna, met Kubo at a dinner in Tokyo. In a peaceful atmosphere in which the surgeon used his rusty Japanese, they all listened together to “the plaintive sounds of the string samisen and watched the geisha girls in rice-powder make-up dance.” In that setting, the former captor and prisoner talked about their war experiences.⁵³ With these words, Weinstein concluded the report about his encounters in Tokyo: “I was glad I had returned to Japan—the home of the fanatical military extremists who had bombed Pearl Harbor, broken my body, and destroyed thousands of my friends captured in Japan and Corregidor. Why was I glad? Since my visit I no longer tremble with fear when I hear Japanese spoken. I no longer have desire for revenge.”⁵⁴

In his well-wrought article, Weinstein used the word “Japan” almost as a leitmotif, as if to get accustomed to the new representations it evoked. According to neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, when the desire for revenge is no longer overpowering, the healing process can begin. Former POWs whose need for revenge is obsessive remain prisoners of their harsh past.⁵⁵ A feeling of coming full circle is sensed in the title Weinstein chose for his article: “I Made My Peace with Japanese War Criminals.” Significantly, the article appeared in the Quan, a publication of the “American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, which included any Unit or Force of the Asiatic Fleet, Philippine Archipelago, Wake Island, Mariana Islands, Midway Island, and Dutch East Indies.” One may wonder if Weinstein was trying to persuade himself and others that he had found the “closure” expected by patients under therapy. The medical corpsman admitted that his body was “broken” but did not dwell on his mental wounds, knowing that he had no choice but to cope with traumatic memories. He did so until his death in 1964, at the age of fifty-six.

FROM PRISONER OF WAR TO SURVIVOR AND WAR HERO

During his survival through forty months in several Japanese prison camps, Alfred Weinstein provided medical treatment to his fellow prisoners although he himself weighed only 105 pounds because of severe malnutrition. After the war, he continued to be his brothers’ keeper—a Jewish concept—sending medicine to the guards who had shown empathy to him and others. He left military service with the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Medical Corps, decorated several times for saving the lives of many comrades.

The change of perceptions from POW to survivor and hero took several decades. In 2015, ninety-one-year-old Harry Corre was invited to speak in military forums about his path from POW to counselor of veterans. His acquired social status entitled him to be chosen as technical adviser for the film Unbroken, directed by Angelina Jolie, about the war experiences of American airman Louis Zamperini.⁵⁶ As with Holocaust survivors, a former POW like Corre could share his experience and validate the representation of reality.

Numerous others had to deal with severe PTSD all their lives. Such was the case of radar operator Staff Sergeant Norman Sellz, whose plane was downed while he flew over Tokyo on a mission. His twin brother, Edward, also a radar man, and their family were informed that he was missing in action. When his plane was downed, he was captured by Japanese civilians, who beat him and locked him in a dungeon, where he suffered more torture. When Sellz returned home on August 29, 1945, his father, a Russian soldier who had been captured for four years as a POW of the Germans in World War I, could better understand his lifelong trauma than others.⁵⁷

***

In a space of confinement where indifference to others is the norm—the better to dehumanize the POWs—it is striking to uncover occurrences of religious transcendence. Spirituality was a considerable psychological aid for survival.⁵⁸ Yom Kippur in the camp of Cabanatuan assumed a special relevance for the prisoners praying to be inscribed in the Book of Life. The regenerative experience of religiosity during improvised religious services temporarily overrode the hierarchy among POWs by bringing prisoners together. Their bond was a feeling of Jewish solidarity and brotherhood. In this context, laymen were social actors able to uplift servicemen’s morale. The meaningfulness of prayers is probably best illustrated by letters sent to the wife and son of an infantryman, Aben Caplan, taken prisoner on the German side of the Rhine in January 1945. A technical sergeant who spoke German, he hid his Jewishness from his captors, but some decisions were difficult to take. Burying the miniature prayer book from the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) would have been like losing his inner strength: “I had a prayer book in my pocket . . . and there I was tempted to get rid of my prayer book. Yet, I recalled how I had just recently called upon God for the saving of my life and the protection of those I loved.” Finding other Jews among the prisoners, the infantryman managed to hold religious services in one of the POW camps where he was interned.⁵⁹

After the war, keeping busy to avoid ruminating about the past was a must for veterans, who could not be understood by those who had not shared their war experiences. Alfred Weinstein chose life and with it, empathy for the few guards he met. Instead of hating the Japanese people, he looked for interactions with his former captors. The Jewish value of empathy liberated him from the obsessive idea of revenge. This positivity helped the physician when he sank into depression. Yet the question he formulated in his memoir remains an existential issue: “How much punishment can a man take before he loses his divine spark?” The two good-hearted Japanese guards gave him lessons of humaneness that resonate today: “Man can remain compassionate, if he wills it, even when surrounded by a mass of evil men.”⁶⁰

Ensign Jack Gordon did not survive the transport on a Japanese Hell Ship targeted by American bombers as medical corpsman Weinstein did. The latter was grateful to Gordon for cheering him up when they were both captives in prison camps in the Philippines. Morale-boosting was essential to survival, and camaraderie provided the strength necessary to overcome ordeals.