There is a house sunlit in shades of white and gray. There are Koi fish in ponds blanketed by lily pads, there are bamboo thickets and eucalyptus trees, and there is a brook that meanders to a greenhouse cooled by mist and fragrant from orchids.

Yet, an intruder of Schloat’s own making has worked its way into the house.
Paintings, in flashes of red, orange, yellow and black, are Schloat’s conjured images of a moment in World War II from which he was spared, but which still haunts him. They are of men consumed in flame, leaping in agony, running frantically, falling, melting, silenced in cinder and ash.
On December 14, 1944, 139 American servicemen were burned alive, shot and bayoneted to death by their Japanese captors on the Philippine island of Palawan. Schloat, an Army medic of Bataan, had been imprisoned with these men, but he escaped their fate.
Nearly two years before the massacre, Schloat tried to escape Palawan but quickly was captured. Inexplicably, the Japanese did not execute him, but transferred him to Bilibid, a prisoner of war camp in Manila.
He spent the rest of World War II there, shuttled between punishing confinement and a hospital bed, his body racked with dysentery, beriberi pellagra and scurvy.
Today, nearly 55 years after his comrades at Palawan met their ghastly end, Schloat has attempted to memorialize them--and draw attention to a war crime that in most historical accounts receives only passing reference.
“I don’t know why it wasn’t more prominently dramatized,” Schloat said recently. “All these guys died anonymously, terribly, for nothing.”

Haunting Visions

Between January and May, Schloat painted 77 images. Some are remarkable for their simplicity. Others leap from the canvas in a blur of abstraction. All of the paintings bear the names of the dead.
Two men, skin and bone, leap through the air, tumbling over one another. Orange flames swallow their feet and swirl off their shoulders. Glowing embers fly through their hair.

Fred Bruni. Harry Noel.
U. S. Army.
December 14, 1944.

One man, a kaleidoscope of legs and arms, melts away. His face is disappearing, eye sockets and cheekbone emerging. Tendrils of flesh trail off his elbow, his hip, his shoulder.

Vernon Rector.
U. S. Army.
Dec 14, 1944

Charles Schubert, his body a blur, screams at the heavens amid a flood of yellow and red. Kenneth Lindsay, in shards of white, black, blue and pink, falls to pieces.
These are among the visions hung in Schloat’s hallway, an otherwise sparse and airy corridor separating and office and bedroom from a garden room. Most of the acrylic paintings are framed on hardboard 2 feet wide and 6 feet long--dimensions Schloat chose to represent a coffin.

He says each painting took him about seven hours to complete. He worked in bursts, keeping his focus by tacking next to his canvas a photo he has attached to the back of all his painting. The photo, of rows of coffins draped in American flags and bearing the remains of 123 Palawan victims, was taken February 14, 1952, at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. The group burial remains the cemetery’s largest for those killed in World War II.

Schloat says he was strengthened by adrenaline during five manic months of painting, and the project is beginning to take hold on his emotions. The paintings have cast a morbid veil over the house.

“It’s getting difficult,” he said.
Schloat now is looking for an exhibit space for his work, and says he would like the paintings to become a traveling memorial. He has written to President Clinton and Senator John McCain, a POW during the Vietnam War, seeking support. But the only response he has received so far is a form letter from the White House.

One of Schloat’s paintings, however, hangs in the Escondido Municipal Gallery on Grand Avenue, as part of an exhibit featuring the work of local artists.
Much of the power in the paintings lies in the stark, stencil-like lettering of the men’s names. Well into the project, Schloat decided to add the name and branch of service of a man to each painting, along with the date of the massacre. The additions changed the paintings into something new. They became documents.

Few Survivors

An estimated 150 men in the Army, Navy and Marines were interned at Palawan at the time of the massacre. Only 11 are thought to have escaped. Of those, only a handful are still living. Eugene Nielsen of Ogden, Utah, is one.

Nielsen was a 25-year-old private first class with the Army’s 59th Coast Artillery on May 6, 1942, when he and 10,000 American and Filipino soldiers surrendered the island fortress of Corridor after a five-month Japanese bombardment.

Nielsen spent 6 months in a prison camp at Cabanatuan, north of Manila, before being transferred to Palawan.
There, 300 Americans were being forced to build an airfield at Puerto Princess.

Nielsen was part of a crew ordered to crush rock and coral, back-breaking work in stifling heat. Random brutality was common on Palawan, he said, and the men suffered routinely from dysentery, scurvy, beriberi and other ailments.

By late 1944, half the men at Palawan had been transferred to other camps, leaving 150 POWs to complete the airfield in December. American bombers were attacking the island, sending the Americans and their Japanese guards running into crude air-raid shelters.

On the morning of December 14, Nielsen said, the Japanese guards were unusually quiet, standing idly as the Americans filled bomb craters on the runway. “they all stood around, never saying a word,” he said.
At about noon, the Americans were taken back to camp. Nielsen remembers seeing two American P-38 fighter planes circle overhead and fly on. The Japanese yelled at the men to get into the shelters.
About 30 inches wide, 40 inches deep and 50 feet long, the earthen shelters were covered with planks of wood, and each had one entryway and one exit. Only one man could enter or leave at a time. Each shelter held about 50 men.

Nielsen worked his way toward the far end of one shelter and peered outside. He saw guards carrying 5-gallon cans of gasoline toward the shelters and Japanese officers holding rifles. One of them, swinging a large sword over his head, walked to an American still in the open and beheaded him.

The man, C. C. Smith, a Navy seaman second class, was from Guntersville, Alabama. “He was a good kid,” Nielsen said. “They called him greasy because he was a little heavy.”

Pandemonium followed as the Japanese poured gasoline into the shelters and lit an inferno, Nielsen said. They then tossed grenades inside, following the explosions with machine-gun fire. Most of the men who escaped the shelters immediately were shot or impaled with bayonets.

Nielsen was near a fence at the edge of the camp. On the other side was a cliff that dropped 40 feet to the beach.

When his shelter ignited, Nielsen said, he heard a swoosh and saw the rush of flames consume his comrades toward the entryway.
“I think that’s when I realized this was it,” he said. “You make a break for it or you die.”

Nielsen said he ran for the barbed-wire fence and dived through, tumbling down the cliff and breaking his fall by grabbing a tree branch. Most did not get that far.

Nielsen remembers hearing one man, Army Cpl. Erving Evans from Huron, South Dakota, begging a Japanese soldier to shoot him rather than use a bayonet.
“They were bayoneting guys down low and making them suffer,” Nieosen said.

At the bottom of the cliff, Nielsen hid first in a small cove, where he watched Americans who made it to the beach die in a sea of blood as Japanese soldiers shot them from above.
Nielsen hid in the cove with 12 men, but one by one the others were shot by patrols of Japanese soldiers.

Worming his way under a pile of trash, Nielsen said, he lay undetected until late in the day, when a Japanese soldier uncovered his foot. Miraculously, he left him for dead.

Seeing another patrol closing in, Nielsen jumped into the water, shielded his head from view with a large coconut and swam backward into the bay. Japanese soldiers on the cliff saw him and fired. Nielsen swam frantically underwater. One bullet struck him in the leg. Two grazed his ribs and temple, knocking him momentarily unconscious and nearly drowning him.

Nielsen said he continued swimming and as darkness fell he disappeared from view in the gently rolling waves. He estimates he swam 8 miles that night, reaching the other side of the bay before dawn and collapsing on the beach.

Over the next few days, he reunited with a handful of other American survivors and was shepherded by Filipino guerrillas to the southern tip of Palawan. There, Nielsen and his comrades were picked up by American troops and flown to freedom.

Food Dreams

Schloat knew nothing of the fate of the Palawan POWs. Imprisoned in Manila, he waited out the war consumed by starvation and illness. He found some solace in a journal in which he exercised a boyhood hobby, meticulously drawing native plants, insects and reptiles he found at the camp.

Crafted from paper pilfered from a city administration building, Schloat and other inmates assembled such journals, filling them mostly with wildly fanciful descriptions of food.
“All we thought about was food,” Schloat said. “Talked about it and dreamed about it.”

Schloat says he had three diaries, but only one remains. Its contents are haunting. In pages and pages of tiny, neat script, Schloat described restaurants in San Francisco, copied diagrams and text from scientific books he found at the hospital, and created elaborate lists of food.

One surreal passage describes an idyllic cottage on a Southern California sea cliff, graced by a vegetable garden and orchard “with every variety of fruit tree that will grow.”

Bilibid prison was liberated by American forces on February 4, 1945. Four days later, Schloat wrote in his journal that General Douglas MacArthur passed through “with a cheery ‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ Fellows who saw him on Corregidor in ‘41 say he looks 10 years younger.”

Six months later, American planes dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing an end to the war.

When Schloat returned home, he found a brief article on the Palawan massacre buried on an inside page of the Los Angeles Times. Determined to document his wartime experiences, he saved his journal and began to write scattered notes.

A career as an animator with Disney, Hanna-Barbera and Filmation followed. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, Schloat self-published his memoirs in a paperback book he titled “FREEDOM! Bataan-POW-Pvt.”

Nielsen worked as a materials manager at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah for 36 years after the war. In 1992, he traveled with his daughter, Lorna Nielsen Murray, to Palawan and walked the beach where he had seen men lying dead in the surf.

On the beach were huts, women doing laundry and children running about, said Murray, a high school teacher in South Jordan, Utah, who spent years researching the Palawan massacre.
“The whole trip was very, very healing,” she said. Yet emotional and physical scars remain.
Murray says her father has experienced heart trouble over the years and suffers from claustrophobia.

Schloat says he is losing feeling in his feet and hands--a late manifestation, he thinks, of the malnutrition he suffered half a century ago.

Not by coincidence, both men raise vegetables in carefully tended gardens. Schloat says he stores extra food in the house. “I never, ever tire of going to the supermarket,” he said.

Unanswerable questions also linger.

"I wonder why I was allowed to live and others didn’t,” Schloat said. “That’s incredible, because there are so many ways during a war that anyone can die.
“Maybe there was a purpose in my living, and perhaps the paintings are the purpose.”

By Bruce Lieberman, Staff Writer
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Monday, August 30, 1999