Behind Japanese Lines (6 page)

We grasped at every expedient imagination could devise to add something to our shrinking daily ration of watery rice mixed with canned salmon. The best one was to make rice cakes and pour a little Eagle Brand condensed milk on them, but this could be done only occasionally because the milk was chronically in short supply. Then we did the next best thing, undertook “moonlight requisitioning” of whatever pigs and goats could be found on Filipino farms. We also hunted deer and small game in the jungle. We tried eating carabao, the huge water buffalo Filipinos use as draft animals, though carabao meat is better suited for making saddles than for steaks. Before long we butchered and rationed all the cavalry horses. Even General Wainwright's favorite horse, Joseph Conrad, ended his military career not in battle but on a menu. Toward the end of the Bataan campaign we were eating anything that walked, ran, crept, swam, or flew, and much that did none of these.

The creatures I hated most to eat were monkeys. It was bad enough that monkey meat was so tough and stringy that it seemed to grow right out of the animal's bones. The worse part was killing the monkey in the first place. I shot one out of a tree for food once. It fell at my feet, still alive, and looked at me in the most pathetic way imaginable, seeming to say, “Why did you do this to me?” I am not sure what it proves, but after seeing and experiencing the malice and ferocity of the Japanese I could kill one of them without a qualm, indeed I became eager to kill as many of them as possible, but I could never kill another monkey.

An animal I did try hard to kill was the iguana, a large lizard with
a forked tongue and a hide like a crocodile. Though iguanas are ugly, repulsive creatures, their meat is sweet and tasty, much like the white meat of chicken. One of my bitterest disappointments on Bataan came when hunting iguana at a time when I was famished. I spotted a big one, sighted in carefully on its head with my Springfield .03, pulled the trigger—and the gun misfired. The lizard had also sighted me, meanwhile, and flicked its tongue about menacingly. As quietly as I could, I ejected the faulty cartridge, slid another into the chamber, sighted in just behind the animal's front leg this time, and slowly squeezed the trigger. The iguana crumpled. Without bothering to reload, I stepped forward to pick up my victim. Alas! it was only playing possum. It scrambled off abruptly and disappeared into the jungle. Many a broken heart has been due to disappointment in love, and I've had a few; but heartbreak due to hunger is worse.

By early March some of our pilots had gotten so weak from lack of food that they could no longer fly. Our senior air officer, Gen. Harold George, then interceded with Gen. Edward P. King, at that time General MacArthur's chief of artillery, to get some food from Corregidor for them. Before the supplementary rations were given to the pilots of the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron, Ed Dyess called in several of us sergeants, explained the situation to us, and asked us how the men would respond to such an arrangement. We replied that they would accept it. Dyess later wrote in his book that he had never been more proud to be an American. No doubt that was the way it seemed to him; and I will say for us that we did understand the necessity of the action, but inwardly we were resentful. The pilots were officers and we were enlisted men. They had decent quarters while we slept outdoors on the ground amid mosquitoes so thick that by dawn our eyes were often swollen shut from their bites. Now, when we were all half-starved, the officers were to get extra food as well.

Each day the enemy crowded us into a smaller area. Scores of thousands of hungry, sick, weak, and increasingly dispirited American and Filipino troops, burdened additionally by hordes of hapless Filipino civilians, milled around in the stifling heat, clouds of dust, and numberless mosquitoes. Bombs fell among us day and night by now, often starting fires in bamboo thickets, for it was then the dry season. Artillery, both American and Japanese, roared incessantly. No literary description of hell could have exceeded it. It was evident that the end could not be far off.

It has been charged that the fall of Bataan was not inevitable, but was due to Allied bungling and slackness: to endless confusion because officers did not know what their subordinates were doing and
one unit was ignorant of the intentions of others; to inadequate defenses, lax discipline, and hordes of inexperienced Filipino trainees; to the hijacking of rations by both Americans and Filipinos; and above all to the greater will of the Japanese to fight and absorb losses. The enemy, after all, was also short of food and medicine, also had thousands of men in hospitals and, contrary to legend, did not outnumber us.
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There is considerable truth in this indictment, but it underrates the most important component of war, which is psychological. An army is defeated, after all, if one of two things happens; it is physically exterminated, or it no longer believes that victory is possible. The Japanese might have been sick and hungry, but we were more so, as the dreadful toll on the subsequent Death March showed. More important, our foemen knew they could eventually get additional food from Japan, while we had no such assurance of outside succor. They also knew they could get troop reinforcements if these were needed, while we were reduced to
hoping
for reinforcements, and our hope grew dimmer with each passing day. By now our air force was virtually gone, and few experiences in modern war demoralize ground troops more than constant pounding from the air when they know retaliation is impossible. Finally, in every other theater of the war the Japanese were winning, while we were losing. Numbers or no, by April 1942 the Bataan campaign had become a mismatch, both materially and psychologically.

A few days before the final collapse there occurred one of those curious events that could take place only in the American army, though it was not without dismal practicality. We were asked if we wanted to take out $10,000 GI life insurance policies. Given the circumstances, I would have taken out $100,000, but $10,000 was the limit. Nobody quibbled over premiums. Later I discovered that the names of policy subscribers were radioed out.

We were also told that if we wrote letters to our loved ones these would be sent out. I wrote many. Though not one of them got through, my own outlook brightened after each letter. It was a good way for a scared soldier to get some things off his chest.

April 8, 1942, was the last day of the Bataan campaign for the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron. By now our air force consisted of four patched up, mongrel planes. Ed Dyess ordered Lt. Jack Donaldson to take one of them, mostly a P-40, load it with thirty-pound fragmentation bombs, and look for some Japanese troops who were reported to be near the Bataan airstrip. If he was unable to find them, he was to return and land. If he found them, he was to bomb them and then fly
on to Cebu about three hundred miles south. Jack dropped his bombs, rocked his wings to us on the ground, and headed south. Capt. O.L. Lunde also flew south in a Seversky P-35 with another pilot stuffed into the baggage compartment. Dyess then ordered Capt. Hank Thorne and Lt. Ben Brown into the remaining P-35, one on the other's lap in the pilot's seat, with another pilot in the baggage compartment. They also headed south. We in the ground crew then changed a cylinder in the last plane, a beat-up collection of scraps that had originally been an old civilian Ballanca. Aboard it were Lieutenants Barneke, Robb, Coleman, Short, and Boelens, and General Mac-Arthur's propaganda chief, Carlos P Romulo. The overloaded relic barely got off the runway, flew right over the heads of Japanese troops advancing down the main road on the east side of Bataan, and was able to limp across the strait to Corregidor only when those on board threw all their baggage into Manila Bay. It was the end of the line.

Most of us then retreated a short distance south to Mariveles Bay. There we threw away the firing pins from our rifles, stacked the neutered arms, and awaited the arrival of the new rulers of Luzon. I was bewildered. I had never gotten much information about anything pertaining to the war in my three months on Bataan. For a much longer time than was reasonable, I had expected that we would eventually be rescued, mostly, no doubt, because I wanted so badly to believe it. Like so many Americans, in uniform and out, I had simply assumed that no matter what the situation the United States was bound to prevail in the end. The thought of old-time regulars near retirement and fuzzy-cheeked pilots, not to speak of myself, becoming prisoners of the Japanese, had simply never entered my consciousness. It was also to be the last time I was to see most of the men in my outfit. Ed Dyess, then a captain, was to survive an incredible array of hardships and escape from a prison camp on Mindanao, only to die in a training mishap in California a few months afterward. Lt. Sam Grashio survived and escaped with Dyess, and I regained contact with him years after the war; but most of the others were gone for good.

Though I did not know it at the time, when General King surrendered the American army on Bataan on April 9 some American officers complied to the letter, others encouraged their men to escape into the hills, and still others looked away and left the decision to each individual. Most of us around Mariveles had no choice. We did not relish the idea of capitulating, and we did not know what to expect, but the Japanese were all around us. We could only watch their dive bombers blast away at Corregidor, and wait.

The last free action of the U.S. command was in some ways a grimly appropriate finale to the campaign. They broke out the few remaining food stores and told us to eat whatever we wanted. After being starved for so long we stuffed on corned beef, canned peaches, and hard shell Christmas candy—and promptly came down with diarrhea.

By now (1986) there is nothing new that even a survivor can say about the Bataan Death March. The travail of some 75,000-80,000 beaten, bewildered, sick, and hungry Americans and Filipinos who were bullied, badgered, taunted, stabbed, starved, and shot by their Japanese captors on a hellish march of some eighty miles in stifling tropical heat has long since passed into history as one of the most spectacular and revolting atrocities of World War II. It was also one of the most important events of the Pacific war, for the shared sufferings of Americans and Filipinos strengthened the bond between the two peoples and heightened the animosity of both toward their brutal conquerors.

For many reasons, there will never be anything better than general estimates of how many died on the march. Nobody among either captors or captives attempted to keep records. Thousands of Filipinos and a much smaller number of Americans managed to escape during the march, but nobody knows how many of them died alone in the mountains and jungle, or how many of the Filipinos made it home and quietly became civilians again. Thousands of both peoples died in O'Donnell and Cabanatuan prison camps after the march was over, but it is impossible to distinguish between those who expired from the belated effects of the Death March and those who perished from the cruel regimen in the camps themselves.
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More than forty years after the event my own memory of it is as inexact as the guesses that have been made about casualties. I was weak, sick, and confused then, and my predominant impression was that the rest of the world was as muddled as myself. Discipline had
broken down completely in the last days before the surrender. Men either milled about aimlessly or sprawled in the dust like dogs, too tired to move.

When the Japanese found us thus, they seemed only slightly better organized than we were. Moreover, armies have always found it difficult to handle prisoners of war, especially large numbers of them. The Japanese had expected to have to deal with about 25,000 military prisoners around May 1. Now, suddenly, three weeks earlier, they had at least three times that many on their hands, with perhaps a quarter of these civilians. No proper preparations had been made to deal with such numbers. At least as important, the Philippine campaign had already taken much longer than the high command in Tokyo had anticipated, so the minds of General Homma, the Japanese commanding officer on Bataan, and his subordinates, were primarily on the rapid reduction of Corregidor, which blocked the entrance to Manila Bay and compelled postponement of their plan to invade Australia. The disposition of prisoners they regarded as a minor matter. Various portions of the task were given over to several different Japanese officers, no one of whom coordinated the activities of the others.

In this atmosphere, just short of chaos, one group of prisoners would start walking from a certain place one day, another group would set out from somewhere else ten hours later, still another from a third locale the next day, and so on. As we tramped along the only road up the east coast of Bataan, we were joined at irregular intervals by small bands of men coming down jungle trails to surrender, and continually impeded by a steady stream of Japanese tanks, trucks, and soldiers pouring southward to begin the assault on Corregidor. These southbound Japanese took up much of the road, kicked up a horrendous cloud of dust that seemed to hang forever in the humid heat, and frequently struck at the heads of staggering prisoners with their rifle butts or bamboo sticks. Thus, when I say that I don't know how long I was on the Death March it indicates more than personal loss of memory; it was symptomatic of the whole enterprise. In the most straightforward sense, I endured twelve days: we surrendered on April 9 and I escaped on April 21; but I don't remember how many of those days I actually spent marching down the road accompanied by Japanese guards: seven or eight most likely, possibly ten.

Because we prisoners were scattered along so many miles of road and had started the trek in so many different places at different times, the experiences of a given group were often considerably different from those of others; hence the widely varying accounts of survivors.
To me, the first days of the march were distinctly easier than those that followed. We started off in what army wits used to call “a column of bunches”: small groups of soldiers and Filipino civilians, mingled indiscriminately, sauntering down the road, sometimes with Japanese guards nearby, sometimes not. Now and then a guard would search a prisoner and take whatever possessions he happened to fancy. I was stopped once by a guard who took my sunglasses. Later others successively took my ring, my watch, and finally my canteen, though another Japanese, for reasons unknown, then gave me back a canteen—which still another guard promptly took away from me again.