How Wounded Soldiers Lived Inside an Underground Hospital at the Front

On the island of Corodor at the mouth of Manila Bay, there is a hill with a hole cut through it. In the spring of 1942, a thousand wounded American and Filipino men lay inside that hole in the dark while bombs and shells came down on the rock above them at a rate of about 12 every minute. They could not leave.

 Most of them could not stand up. This is where those men slept, what they were fed, how they were operated on, and what happened to them in the last week of the siege. Melinta Hill, Corodor, December 1941. The tunnel through it had been cut by Army engineers between 1922 and 1932 using convict labor brought out from Bibid prison in Manila.

 The main passage ran east to west for a little over 800 ft, 24 ft wide, and 18 ft high. Line throughout in concrete with a double track electric rail line down the center of the floor. It had been dug to store ammunition. By the end of that December, it held an army headquarters, a national government, and a hospital.

 Number one, the address. The hospital was not simply a corner of the main tunnel. It had its own system of passages running north out of the hill, about a dozen laterals of its own and its own entrance on the north face of Minta, so that casualties did not have to be carried the full length of the headquarters corridor.

Inside, the layout branched again. You came off the main tunnel into a hospital lateral and off that lateral ran more laterals. One held the operating room. One was the mess. One was the nurse’s quarters and eight of them were wards. The central hospital corridor ran roughly a 100red yards of bare concrete under electric bulbs strung along the arch.

 Anne Bernatitus, the only Navy nurse left on the island by that April, described the place simply as laterals off laterals. There were no windows anywhere in it. No ward had natural light. No patient could see the sea that lay 200 yd away on either side of the hill. And for a man who could not walk, there was exactly one way out, and it was the way he had come in.

 Number two, how it filled up. The hospital opened the war with roughly 500 beds and finished with a thousand. To understand how it got there, you have to look across the water at Batan, 2 and a half miles to the north. The two field hospitals on that peninsula had each been laid out for about a thousand patients.

 By the end of March 1942, each of them was holding more than 5,000 in the open air under the trees with red road dust settling over everything. On the 29th of March, Japanese bombs fell on hospital number one and killed or wounded more than a 100 patients who were already lying down. When Baton collapsed in the first week of April, about a 100 Army nurses and one Navy nurse were brought across to Corodor under shellfire in the early hours of the 9th.

 They arrived at a hospital that was already full. Men coming off baton in those days genuinely believed they had reached safety. One of them, a former bomber crewman named Ed Witkim, remembered walking into Minta and finding officers and enlisted men in freshly washed and starched uniforms, living as though the war had barely inconvenienced them and congratulating himself on making it to a haven.

 That impression lasted a matter of days. From that day, the tunnel also took the island’s own casualties from the beach positions and the gunpits, and the island was being hit harder every week. Number three, the bed. A bed in Minta was a steel frame bunk stacked two high set in rows down a concrete lateral about 15 ft wide.

 That was the whole of it. There was no ward window and no corridor to walk. When the baton nurses arrived, nobody had prepared space for them. And that first night, they slept two women to a bunk. For the patients, the arithmetic never improved. A man with a shattered thigh bone or an abdominal wound lay on his back with the arch of the tunnel three or four feet above his face in a row of men in the same condition for as long as it took which in that hospital could run to weeks.

 He heard everything that happened in the lateral. He heard everything that happened outside and unlike the staff he could not go to the entrance for 5 minutes of air because he could not get there under his own power and there was nobody free to carry him. Whatever the tunnel was doing to the people working in it, it was doing more of it to the people lying still.

 Number four, the air. Menta had been built with electric blowers to push fresh air along the laterals, and the tunnels ran on diesel-driven generating sets. On paper, that was ventilation. In practice, officers living inside described it as poor with extra fans rigged wherever they could be fitted and a capacity nowhere near adequate for the numbers.

The air being pushed in came off the surface of an island that was on fire. Outside there was parched dry season earth, burning brush, and the fumes of high explosive, and all of it was drawn down into the laterals and held there. Underneath that sat the smell of several thousand people who had not had a proper wash in weeks.

 And there was one problem no blower could touch. Every heavy shell that struck the hill sent a shock through the concrete, and the shock shook dust loose from the arch overhead. Dust falling from a tunnel ceiling onto an open wound or onto a tray of laidout instruments is not a discomfort. It is a source of infection, and in 1942, there was very little in the cabinet to answer it with. Number five, the ration.

Everyone on the rock ate twice a day. Breakfast was at 8:00 in the morning. Supper was at 4 in the afternoon and there was nothing between them except whatever a man carried in his pocket. One naval officer kept a piece of bread in his shirt for the middle of the day. The food was canned corned beef, canned salmon, rice, bread, and whatever canned vegetables and fruit were left in the storage laterals.

 Nothing was fresh because nothing fresh had reached the island since December. Healthy men lost weight steadily. That same officer lost 25 lbs across four months and began to notice his gums and his teeth going as the vitamin deficiency took hold. Now carry that into the wards. A body rebuilding torn muscle and knitting broken bone needs more protein and more vitamin C than a body at rest, not less.

Every wounded man in Minta was trying to heal on a ration that was already quietly starving the fit men carrying him from the operating lateral to his bunk. There was no separate diet for surgical cases because there was nothing separate to give them. A man 3 days out from an abdominal operation got the same canned corn beef at 8 in the morning as the gunners on the north beaches and somebody had to carry it down the lateral and feed it to the men who could not sit up on two fixed sittings with a staff that was already short. Number

six, operating in the dark. The generators and pumps that gave the tunnel its light, its air, and its water were themselves vulnerable to the pounding overhead. Heavy concussion on Melinta Hill worked against them constantly, and the practical result was a hospital that went black without warning.

 Nurses in the ward said they never knew when they were about to be standing in total darkness. In a ward, that was survivable. In the operating lateral, it was a different problem. And the answer became a coresman standing at the surgeon’s shoulder holding a flashlight on the field while the operation carried on. Consider what that actually describes.

 An abdominal case open on a table in a concrete tube with no windows under a handheld light while the hill above takes artillery fire. The surgery itself was ordinary wartime work. cutting away dead tissue, amputating, closing bellies, setting fractures. Nothing about the medicine was exotic. The conditions were what made it hard, and the man on the table knew none of it, which was very likely the only mercy in the room.

 The nursing court on the island numbered about 150 at its peak against a thousand beds and a casualty stream that never stopped. So, the ratio on any given shift was not something anybody wanted to write down. Number seven, the door. Everything Melinda could not give a man came down to one thing.

 Air air and daylight were outside and outside was where the shells were. Men who could still walk went to the tunnel entrances at dusk to smoke and stand in open air for a few minutes before turning in. And that ordinary habit produced one of the worst nights in the hospital’s history. On the evening of the 25th of April, a 240 mm shell burst outside the west entrance where a large group of men had gathered to do exactly that.

 They rushed for the gate. The blast had slammed it and it could not be opened from the outside. Then a second shell came in. The nurses on duty worked through the whole of that night. And one of them wrote afterwards that she wished she could forget it. That is the shape of the place in a single event. the safest ground on Corodor and a doorway that killed the men standing in it because they wanted to breathe.

 If this is the kind of history you want more of, one place rebuilt hour by hour rather than arrows moving on a map, subscribe and stay with the channel. There is more of the tunnel to come. Number eight, water and washing. Corugador had a few wells, but the bulk of its water had always been barged across from Baton and stored in tanks above ground, which is to say in tanks with no protection from anything falling out of the sky.

 When Baton went in April, that arrangement went with it. By the 4th of May, the water supply was reported as low and low on an island holding 12,000 people, a thousand of them in hospital beds, is a clinical problem before it is anything else. Washing was cut to almost nothing. Baths were rare.

 Staff washed their own clothing in buckets and hung it out to dry after dark because in daylight there was nothing on the surface of that island worth standing next to. All of that lands hardest in the wards. A hospital that cannot wash bedding, cannot wash bodies, and cannot wash hands as often as it should in a tropical climate with dysentery already loose in the population is fighting on two fronts at once.

 The tunnel’s plumbing had been designed in the 1920s for a garrison, using it as an air raid shelter for a few hours at a time. It was now carrying a resident population in the thousands day and night for months. Number nine, what the bombardment felt like from a bunk. From the 24th of March, there was no real break day or night until the end.

 Around the 12th of April, the Japanese moved their artillery down the Baton Peninsula to short range and began directing it with observation balloons, which meant accurate fire from guns as large as 240 mm. On the 29th of April, the Emperor’s birthday, the bombardment ran without pause from 7 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon.

 On the 2nd of May, two of Wayright’s staff officers decided to count and gave up after 5 hours. Their figure was at least a dozen bombs and shells striking the island every minute. Roughly 3,600 rounds carrying something in the order of 1.8 million pounds of explosive. Across the siege, the rock absorbed more than 300 full-scale air raids.

 And on the worst days, something approaching 16,000 rounds. A man on his feet can flinch, duck, move. A man in a bunk with his leg and traction takes every one of those up through the frame of the bed. Number 10. Who else was in there? The hospital never had the tunnel to itself. As the shelling stripped the surface of the island, Filipino civilians whose homes were on Corodor went underground with everyone else, and there was no sanitation provision for them because no plan had ever imagined them being there.

 Colonel John Vance, one of Wayright’s staff officers, set it down plainly in writing afterwards. People relieved themselves where they stood, and the empty ration cans they were issued were simply added to the filth on the pavement. Malaria and dysentery had already come across from Baton inside the bodies of the men being carried in. Flies did the rest.

 So the picture of an underground hospital as a sealed, clean, controlled environment needs to be put away entirely. It was a set of concrete tubes on one shared air supply holding a thousand patients, several thousand soldiers, a headquarters staff, a government, and a displaced civilian population with nowhere else on the island to go.

 The same tunnel system also held the food reserve, the ammunition, and the machine shops. So, the flies moving between the latrine areas and the ration stores were moving through the wards on the way. Number 11. What Four Months Underground did to people. This part rarely makes it into the accounts and it is the part the men themselves talked about afterwards.

Being safe and being helpless. At the same time turns out to be very hard to sustain. Inside Melinda, nobody could shoot back and nobody could leave and the hill shook several times a minute for weeks on end. Colonel Vance wrote that almost everyone in the tunnels was overwhelmed by what he called the psychosis of doom.

 Scattered self-inflicted wounds were recorded, and some men took their own lives. People stopped tracking the day of the week. Officers described a 24-hour working day with nothing to mark one day off from the next. No mail, no news from home, and no recreation of any kind. For the patients, it was worse again because a man in a bunk had nothing at all to do with his hands.

 The staff at least had work in front of them, and work is a defense. Number 12. The last week, Japanese landing barges came into the Northshore on the night of the 5th of May, and the fighting on the beaches was close and short. By the morning of the 6th, the casualties had overwhelmed everything. Bodies were stacked in the main tunnel just outside the hospital section, waiting for a slackening in the shelling that would let a burial party go out, and the shelling did not slacken.

 Then Japanese tanks reached the east entrance and drew up across it with flamethrower teams beside them. Waywright did the arithmetic. More than a thousand sick and wounded men lying in the laterals, the nursing staff among them, and stores of ammunition and gasoline in the same tunnel system against tank cannon that could fire straight down a concrete corridor 800 ft long.

 He ordered the firing stopped at noon. 3 days before that, the hospital’s chief nurse, Glattis Meer, had been offered one of the last seats out on the submarine spearfish and had turned it down because she could not see how a person walks away and leaves the wounded behind. 55 Army nurses were still working the hospital laterals when the Japanese came into the tunnel.

 They went into captivity alongside their patients, and most of them were not free again until 1945. Melinda is still there. You can walk the main tunnel today and the hospital laterals still branch off into the dark. Most of them empty and some of them collapsed and never reopened. Standing in it, the thing that is hardest to hold in your head is not the shelling.

 It is the arithmetic of a thousand men lying still in a place with no windows on two meals a day, breathing the smoke of their own island for 4 months, with the only exit being a doorway that could kill them. They were not in a hospital that happened to be underground. They were in a hole in a hill that was doing the best it could.

 If you want the other half of this story, the open air hospitals on Baton, 3,000 patients under the trees with no roof over them at all and red dust across everything. That one is coming next. Subscribe so you catch it.