Other refuge have I none;

Hangs my helpless soul on thee.

Leave, oh, leave me not alone;

Still support and comfort me.

—Charles Wesley, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”

Although weak, sick, emotionally drained, and physically exhausted from the Bataan Death March, these surviving prisoners of war found no relief upon their arrival at Camp O’Donnell, a miserable place located on a flat, bleak, treeless expanse of cogon grass. The Japanese attempted to cram about fifty thousand diseased and starved American and Filipino prisoners of war into a half-finished Philippine Army training facility originally intended for no more than nine thousand men; the facility lacked even the basic sanitation facilities.[1] Open-slit trenches overflowed with excrement. The stench was so overwhelming that the Japanese rarely entered the camp; when they did, they wore surgical masks.

The “welcome” speech by the camp’s commander, Captain Tsuneyoshi, was a hate-filled diatribe that few would ever forget. He made it clear that the prisoners, whom he referred to as dogs, were not considered prisoners of war but “members of an inferior race and we will treat you as we see fit. Whether you live or die is of no concern to us.”[2]

Many of the POW soldiers on Bataan had been suffering from malnutrition and various diseases, most often malaria and dysentery, but they had largely kept their conditions under control. However, with the ordeal of the Bataan Death March, a starvation diet, and lacking the most basic sanitation and medical supplies, prisoners began dying of these diseases. For example, with proper diet and medication, dysentery can be simply a case of mild diarrhea that goes away in a few days. For these POWs, on a starvation diet and lacking any medication, dysentery was deadly.

To the tragedy of these deaths from disease, the Japanese added additional deaths through abuse, torture, and executions—the beatings and beheadings continued. In two months, of the estimated nine thousand American POWs who entered that camp, more than fifteen hundred died and were buried in mass graves. The death rate among the Filipino captives was even greater, approximately twenty thousand, or about half of the Filipino contingent.[3]

After a few months, the Japanese realized that they needed a better place to serve as a prison. They chose Cabanatuan, an old Philippine Army base, located about sixty miles east of Camp O’Donnell. Camp O’Donnell was closed, and most prisoners were moved to Cabanatuan. The troops on Corregidor had surrendered about a month after the surrender on Bataan. They were taken directly to Cabanatuan and were already there when the Bataan prisoners arrived from Camp O’Donnell.[4] Not having endured the hike and having been better provisioned than those on Bataan, the Corregidor prisoners were in noticeably better condition.

Even though it was a larger facility, Cabanatuan was no better than Camp O’Donnell. Both were essentially extermination camps through Japanese neglect.[5] Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan were homes of the infamous Zero Wards, where thousands of prisoners with zero chance of survival were sent to suffer mind-numbingly painful deaths from beriberi, dysentery, and starvation. Hamblin described the scene at what was termed a hospital at Camp O’Donnell:

It is impossible to paint the picture with mere words. . . . There was no glass or screens at all in the openings [of the hospital building]. Flies few in and out at will, men were lying flat on their backs, tropical sores had set in, eating away at the flesh. Many with dysentery had soiled their clothes to the extent that they were unfit to wear and no way to wash them. So the clothing was thrown away, leaving the men naked and some without blankets. The filth and waste on the floor were cleaned out as best we could with shovels. Flies swarming around the filth would fly directly to the mess hall nearby. We carried bodies out and laid them on the bare ground in full view of the kitchen. They were stripped of all clothing and the clothing thrown in a pile to be burned. The bodies were then placed on bamboo stretchers and carried out of camp where they were put in shallow graves, their last resting place until Resurrection Day.[6]

East described a similar condition at Cabanatuan: “If you were sent to the hospital side of camp [the Zero Ward], you were sent there to die. Because your next move was to boot hill. I’ve been on burial details where we carried from fifty to seventy-five men a day out to boot hill and dumped them in a hole half full of water and very little dirt put over the bodies and the wild dogs would dig into the grave.”[7]

While death was common in these camps, it was not necessarily indiscriminate. Despair, discouragement, and loss of hope, especially when coupled with sickness, often led to death in those camps. Those, especially the youngest, without strong family connections at home, religious convictions, sense of purpose, or other reasons to survive lost hope, fell into a deep melancholy, and quickly slid into death by what the camp doctors called “inanition” (simply giving up).[8] In many cases, the question of whether you had a strong religious belief was a quite literal question of life or death. According to Davey, “Religion became a sustaining factor in the Japanese prison camps. There was never an idle Bible, and men often communed silently with their Maker.”[9]

As Davey explained after the war, “Many people died, literally lay down and died because they had nothing to cling to. They had no goals, no reason to put up with the suffering they were going through.”[10] Allen C. “Ace” Christensen, a Latter-day Saint soldier from Tremonton, Utah, wrote how they could always recognize those who had lost hope: “Those who gave up weren’t necessarily the sickest among us, but their lack of hope was invariably fatal. We could always recognize them. They would lay in their beds in a semi-fetal position and stare at nothing. By morning they would be dead—starved of hope.”[11] East recalled, “There were many times it would have been easier to lay down and die than live and many did just that. . . . I will always be grateful that I had been taught the gospel.”[12]

It seems that most POWs faced a time in their captivity when they found themselves discouraged, hopeless, and at risk of death—not from sickness, but from the lack of any reason to continue living. Christensen wrote of that moment, which came later in his captivity. Exhausted and discouraged, he had simply given up and quit working. Not unexpectedly, he was severely beaten by the guards. While lying in bed that evening, waiting for death to come and release him from this perdition, he picked up two pieces of paper he had managed to keep concealed. One was a picture of his parents, and the other was a copy of his patriarchal blessing. Christensen later recalled:

As I read the blessing, I thought of my grandfather, the patriarch who had given me the blessing, and my dear mother who had patiently taken down every word. The words softened me. Maybe there was a future for me. Then I studied my parents’ faces. . . . I’m sure they were praying for me. . . . I started to pray. [My mother] made us [he and his brother] promise that we would always live the Word of Wisdom. She told us that if we did, the Lord would bless us. . . . I did not feel like I could run and not be weary. As a matter of fact, my feet felt as though they were encased in very large cement blocks. But maybe I could walk and not faint. That day my spirits lifted. I determined that I would hang on. I had beaten my enemy.[13]

Christensen did not surrender to death. With renewed hope and faith in the promises made to him, he survived.

For Davey, this perilous time came in Camp O’Donnell with the death of his closest friend, Russell Sparks, whom he had come to love as a brother and who had saved his life on the Death March. Sparks slowly died in Davey’s arms from dysentery, with Davey helpless to do anything to save him. With Sparks’s death, Davey wanted to die too; his will to live was slipping away. Davey later wrote in a letter to Sparks’s parents, “When he died it seemed that half of my desire to return home died with him. We had planned so many things that we were going to do when we returned.”[14] This was the low point for Davey—and for his survival, it was a dangerous moment.

American servicemen carrying two of their dead for burial at Camp O’Donnell. Courtesy of the United States Air Force National Museum.

At this precarious time came another small but lifesaving miracle for Davey: a personal revelation. After praying one night, he fell asleep and had a dream. In the dream, he was in his parents’ home in Salt Lake City watching a lovely girl go in and out of his house. There was, of course, nothing unusual about seeing the old family house in a dream, but what made this scene peculiar to Davey was that he could not understand why this strange girl, whom he did not know, would be living in that house. The peculiarity of the scene was quickly replaced by a calm assurance that he would marry this girl. At that point, he knew that he could survive, marry, and have a family.[15] What Davey could not have known at that time was that the Jacobs family had recently purchased his family’s house in Salt Lake City. Dorothy Elizabeth Jacobs was the third oldest of the seven children and, while Davey was suffering in captivity in the Philippines, she was indeed walking in and out of that house as she lived there, just as Davey saw her in his dream.[16]

There was also something else that Davey could not have known at that time. As bad as things were for him then, the worst was yet to come. He would be a POW much longer than he would have then believed. Although he was then sick, he would become much sicker. Not only would he suffer from near starvation, he would also suffer from nearly every disease associated with malnutrition and almost every tropical disease imaginable, including beriberi (both wet and dry symptoms), malaria, pellagra, dengue fever, jaundice, and a variety of skin sores and infections.[17] He would also face more horrors, even greater than those of the Bataan Death March. But he would now face them all armed with the confidence that he would survive to marry and have a family.

Unlike these other POWs, we know little about Brown’s experience at Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan. However, after the war, Lieutenant Colonel Harry M. Peck, Brown’s commander, shared with Brown’s parents some thoughts. As later recounted by Ruby and her daughter Nelle, the colonel recalled, “Due to the extreme hardships, physical and mental and spiritual suffering they went through, . . . at times some of the boys acted more like animals than men. And he [Peck] found that difficult to cope with. Finally, when he had exhausted all his own resources, he would go to Lt. Brown and ask if he thought he could help. Bobby would take them off to one side, during the night . . . and talk with them.”[18]

“I do not know what power it was that he had,” the colonel said, “nor what it was he said to them, but I do know that [when] morning came these troubled ones had become men again, and were back in the human race and ready to face whatever lay ahead.”[19]

While brief, these comments from his commander are nevertheless revealing about Brown and his influence on others in those difficult times. We also know of one other incident involving Brown at Cabanatuan, as told to Ruby after the war by “one of the Baldonado boys” (likely either Private First Class José M. [Pepe] Baldonado or his brother Staff Sergeant Juan T. Baldonado), revealing another, more mischievous side of Brown. They were working in the kitchen preparing food for the Japanese officers. They were barely surviving on a half cup of rice per day, and the temptation to steal some of the food was almost irresistible. If caught, however, the punishment would be severe. After preparing the food for the officers’ supper in a large kettle boiling on a makeshift stove on the floor, Brown suggested that if they couldn’t have any, perhaps they should at least “season it up a little for them.” After posting a lookout, they surrounded the kettle and used it as a urinal.[20]

For both very practical and emotional purposes, to survive in that camp, a prisoner needed someone else he could trust and with whom he could share the burdens of daily prison life. Small support groups began to form: army/navy, Texans/New Mexicans, and religious groups. At Cabanatuan, there were several religious “subtribes,” and one author noted that “Catholics, Protestants and Mormons were particularly strong.”[21] Although there were no services or organization, some of the Latter-day Saint POWs were able to find each other and enjoy some “good gospel discussions.”[22]

For the relatively healthy prisoners, Cabanatuan was essentially a human warehouse to be held in until they were sent off as slave labor to toil for the benefit of Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” For the others, it was a place to wait, suffer, and likely die.

Now we turn to what had been going on in the meantime with the Fifth Air Base group at Del Monte Airfield on the southern island of Mindanao.

Notes

[1] Sides, Ghost Soldiers, 105; Lukacs, Escape from Davao, 77; Davey, “Last Talk,” 2. Davey states there were forty thousand Filipinos and approximately seven thousand Americans.

[2] Sides, Ghost Soldiers, 106; Shively, Profiles in Survival, 72.

[3] Lukacs, Escape from Davao, 79; Sides, Ghost Soldiers, 107; Davey, “Last Talk,” 2 (Davey attributes the greater death rate among Filipinos to their drinking contaminated water).

[4] Shively, Profiles in Survival, 79–81. Among the POWs from Corregidor was James Arlo Nuttall, a Latter-day Saint army private from Provo, Utah. He had been serving a mission in Germany when the war in Europe broke out and was transferred back to the United States to complete his mission in the Northern States Mission. After his mission, Nuttall joined the army to avoid the coming draft with the expectation that he would be out in a year, as so many others expected. Instead, soon after enlistment, he found himself in the Philippines among those making the last stand at Corregidor. Call, “Latter-day Saint Servicemen in the Philippine Islands,” 113–14. Nuttall was a POW on the Taikoku Maru, a hell ship from the Philippines to Japan. West-Point.Org., “Taikoku Maru Roster,” http://www.west-point.org/family/japanese-pow/TaikokuMaru/Taikoku-Index.htm. Nuttall survived the war and imprisonment. After the war he married, graduated from Medical School in Chicago, and set up a medical practice in Kamas, Utah. Sadly, he died of a heart attack at the early age of 33. “Kamas Doctor Dies at 33 of Heart Ills,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 25, 1952.

[5] Sides, Ghost Soldiers, 134; Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 18.

[6] Hamblin, “My Experience,” 12.

[7] East, “Army Life,” 13.

[8] Lukacs, Escape from Davao, 80; see also Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 270.

[9] Springgay, “Robert Gray Davey,” 30.

[10] Davey, “Last Talk,” 6. Similarly, Lt. Col. William Dyess wrote that “during the entire time I was in Japanese prisons I never saw an idle Bible.” Dyess, Dyess Story, 83.

[11] Allen C. Christensen, in Freeman and Wright, Saints at War, 300.

[12] East, “Army Life,” 15.

[13] Christensen, in Saints at War, 300–1. This story also appears in the March 1991 issue of the Ensign. Allen C. Christensen (as told to Renee Homer), “Two Pieces of Paper Saved Me,” Ensign, February 1991.

[14] Springgay, “Robert Gray Davey,” 30.

[15] Springgay, 30–31.

[16] Springgay, 63.

[17] Springgay, 19, 31–33, 63–64.

[18] Brown and Zundel, “George Robin Brown . . . His Story,” 24.

[19] Brown and Zundel, “George Robin Brown . . . His Story,” 24.

[20] Brown and Zundel, “George Robin Brown…His Story,” 19–20.

[21] Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 136.

[22] East, “Army Life,” 14.