When admitted to the camp hospital, POWs, with few exceptions, exhibited attitudes of hopelessness and despair.  The hospital ended up being just a place to die as there was little or no medicine to treat the critically ill. [1] Japanese soldiers taunted sick prisoners as they entered the gates of the hospital at Cabanatuan. Ex-POW Tony Bilek remembered walking through the hospital gate at Cabanatuan and observing “a number of Japanese soldiers milling around ... as we moved by one of the soldier made like he was digging a grave. His companions burst out laughing. I was too sick to care.” [2]  The hospital at Cabanatuan consisted of ten barracks with a kitchen and two small wooden buildings used to isolate those with dysentery and malaria. The entire hospital was separated from the rest of the camp. [3] Each ward held about a hundred men. A man had only about two feet of space allotted him.  The wards had one lower and upper deck.[4]  Ex-POW Mario Machi described the terrible ordeal of those men sleeping on the lower deck, “Serious arguments that often turned into fist fights arose when a man with an uncontrollable case of dysentery sleeping on the upper deck sprayed the man sleeping below him with excrement … there was little that could be done.” [5]

 

With attitudes already disheartened over their hospital admittance, POWs at Cabanatuan whose condition worsened became extremely agitated when the doctors sent them to Zero Ward. The ward was named thus because those interned therein had zero chance of survival. POWs, at Cabanatuan, with advanced stages of dysentery and malaria ended up in Zero Ward. All Japanese POW camps had similar wards though they may not have been named Zero Ward. For example, at Camp O’Donnell, another POW camp in the Philippines, the ward was referred to as St. Peter’s Ward.[6] In Burma, the ward was simply called Death Ward. [7] The appalling conditions of Zero Ward and others like it affected the morale of the men within and those outside as well. Galen Marten, a former POW pointed out, “When you hit Zero Ward you were about gone from malaria or dysentery. Your life span was measured in days or hours. Zero was the end of the line.”[8]  Every day, at least twenty five died therein.[9]  Andrew Aquila, an ex-POW remembered witnessing a fellow POW beg the doctor not to send him to Zero Ward. The man cried, “If you do (send him to Zero Ward) I’ll just give up.” The POW was sent to Zero Ward anyway, but because of his fighting attitude he received extra rations and survived. [10] Former POW, Mario Machi, a medic who attended patients in Zero Ward, remembered another man who refused to die. Machi described the man as feeble with only enough strength to whisper. The man asked Machi for some salt. “He explained (to Machi) that if he had a little salt, he might be able to eat some rice to regain his strength.”  Machi affirmed the man’s courage and fortitude convinced him the man could survive. Therefore, Machi got the salt for the man. After six months, the man regained his strength and was dismissed from the hospital.[11]

POWs hospitalized in Zero Ward that showed an attitude with a conviction to live were the exception rather than the norm. Ex-POW Irvin Alexander explained “That ward had more than its share of dead each day … a mere handful of patients who entered the Zero lived to go on their own feet.”[12] Most men accepted their fate with less drama and soon died. They had already given up before being admitted to Zero Ward.  Ex-POW John Falconer confessed, “Death was easier than living.” [13] Another former POW, Mark Herbst M.D. added, “Men died that should have lived … if a man wanted to die, he did.” [14]   A POW, entering Zero Ward, was asked by the POW doctor, “Do you know why you are here?” The POW replied, “Cause I am going to die.” [15] The POW doctor asked this question in order to see if the POW had enough fight left in him to survive. The attitude of the POW upon entering the hospital would indeed govern whether or not the POW received the medical treatment he needed to survive.