A medic’s survival through prisoner of war hell

“War is hell,” U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman said late in life. He had proved it in 1864, laying waste to a swath of Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah, helping to shorten and win the Civil War. War became more hellish in the 20th century, proven very specifically by the Japanese Imperial Army’s treatment of allied prisoners of war in the Bataan Death March after the Philippines fell in 1942.

Yet men do remain humane and compassionate through unimaginable deprivation and the hell of being a prisoner of war and a slave laborer in a mine in Japan. Henry Chamberlain probably survived his capture in April 1942 and over three years as a prisoner of war because of his humanity. Chamberlain, a greater La Conner resident, tells his story in “The Medic,” Shelter Bay author Claire Swedberg’s new book, just published by Stackpole Books.

Subtitled “A World War II Story of Imprisonment, Hope, and Survival,” hope – and generosity – are the remarkable traits that brought a small town Nebraska 19 year old through the war, a military career, a 2017 visit to the mine in Japan and to recounting his story to Swedberg, who has written two other World War II prisoner of war histories.

Chamberlain’s military career started with his request to transfer from his rifleman position to medical training.

“I don’t want to kill people,’” he told his sergeant.

He told Swedberg, “’Somewhere in my religious training I’d learned that much.’ Never.

It wasn’t right,” though he was the top sharpshooter in his training class.

As a boy, medicine was his aspiration, his empathy raised by weeks in the hospital with diphtheria.

Trained as a medic and surgical technician by the U.S. Army, he was sent to the Philippines in October 1941.

From that December, when the Japanese invaded the Philippines, through late 1944, he worked at field hospitals, first for the army, then in POW camps.

The prisoner hospitals from the war’s start were overcrowded, understaffed and not equipped with medicine, supplies or tools for the most basic bandaging of wounds, much less any surgery. There was no electricity and water was in short supply. Without anesthetics, a patient was held down by a group of men and only stopped struggling when passed out from the pain. Surgeons strived to finish before the patient recovered consciousness.

The Japanese deliberately withheld life’s necessities: food water, medicine, shelter, clothes and healthcare.

The prisoners lived a cruel irony of wasting away from starvation rations of rice balls and little water and walking and sleeping in layers of excrement, urine and vomit. Everyone was starving. Everyone was sick with malaria, parasitic worms, diarrhea and dysentery. Sores and open wounds were common and flies, mosquitoes and maggots swarmed onto the men. Their ordeal only worsened as the years advanced.

The medical staff were weak from the same illnesses. You wonder how they kept going. Chamberlain’s training informed his self-care. Once, dizzy and queasy, “he fought for his balance and climbed to his feet. He knew one thing – getting up, moving his muscles, circulating his blood – was the only way he would stay alive.”

We understand Chamberlain’s perseverance through short backstory chapters. His upbringing, alone with his mother and in poverty, made him resilient and resourceful, critical qualities for survival as a prisoner of war.

His story is one of incredible inventiveness and ingenuity, from keeping a folding razor knife hidden from prison guards to using it to carve sandals, ladles and plates and for shaving heads. He grew a “dandelion farm,” the seeds creating new generations of plants for harvesting. He salvaged small cow bones, dried and pulverized them and saved and shared pinches as calcium-rich nutrients.

However graced by it, he had a special quality of empathy that fit him to his vocation. He volunteered for the “death detail,” which carried dead patients to burial pits. He reflected “he had often been the last to speak to the man when he was living, and now he would be the last to see him to his grave. He had been physician, minister and undertaker.”

War is hell created by a society’s leaders. The Japanese guards that brutalized their prisoners with beatings, kicks and slaps were treated that way by their superiors. They gave back worse to the prisoners, bayoneting them with slight or no provocation. In the march to Bataan prisoners were forced to walk barefoot on jagged stones. When they fell, guards kicked them and let them lie. Many died en route.

After guards ransacked his possessions and took photos of his mother and girlfriend, Chamberlain attacked the guards. In turn they beat and kicked him and burned him with lit cigars, injuries that took weeks to heal.

The section of being sent to Japan is titled “Hell Ships.” Life became even worse for the prisoners as the war worsened for the Japanese. In Japan, the entire population struggled. Allied aerial bombings made civilians homeless. They lost everything.

In September 1945 a rescued Henry Chamberlain, in a U.S. Army truck, threw his food rations to a mom clinging to her baby.

Swedberg provides a vivid, eye level, in-the-moment narrative of Chamberlain’s war, from his stateside training at a fit 165 pounds, to his bag of bones existence at the mine in Japan in 1945, counting the ribs and vertebrae of his comrades.

The book’s last words are his: “War never ends.”