Tears in the Darkness (34 page)

 

On average they had covered the distance in five to seven days, days of depredation and duress. They were weak and sick and had reached their limit.

For the Japanese support troops and staff officers billeted in San Fernando, the parade of men shuffling through the city was quite a spectacle, and Imperial soldiers turned out in large numbers to gawk and ogle at their trophies.

“They're staring at us like animals in a zoo,” Ben Steele thought.

Meanwhile large crowds of Filipino civilians gathered along the streets, searching the passing columns for their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers.

As the prisoners waited in the holding compounds to entrain, they began to exchange stories, lurid catalogs of what they had seen on their long, brutal march north.

Here, for example, was a Filipino soldier talking about a massacre he said he had witnessed while hiding in the jungle. Hundreds of men, he said, prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs, had been bayonetted to death in a secluded spot near the Pantingan River. Impossible, thought doctor Alvin Poweleit, and yet there was something “sincere” in the man's voice, something authentic.
⁶⁹

A week or so later, Captain Pedro L. Felix, bleeding from bayonet wounds and shaking with malaria, appeared at his family's house in Manila. Felix, a staff officer with the 91st Division, Philippine Army, said he'd been in hiding and on the run since April 12, the day the Japanese massacred hundreds of his comrades at the Pantingan River.

 

ON APRIL 11,
what was left of the 91st Division and two other units surrendered near Bagac on Bataan's west coast, and the Japanese ordered them to begin moving east, on their own, along a dirt road, Trail 8, across the middle of the peninsula toward Balanga. On the morning of April 12, the prisoners, roughly fifteen hundred Filipino officers and men (their American advisers were left behind, Felix said), came to the Pantingan River and were taken into custody by Japanese infantry from the 65th Brigade encamped there. The Japanese used the prisoners as laborers to help repair a small wooden bridge, then they marched them across the river and up a series of switchbacks into the dark green foothills of Mount Samat, stopping, finally, about a mile and a half
above the river at the intersection of Trail 8 and another jungle road. Here, spread out in the rough terrain, were more clusters of Japanese troops.
⁷⁰

Just then, about noon, a Japanese army command car came up Trail 8 and stopped about thirty yards from where the hundreds of prisoners were being held. An officer alighted, big brass, Felix thought, judging from the obeisance paid him, and one of the Japanese soldiers standing among the prisoners told Pedro Felix that the officer was in fact the commander of the 65th Brigade, General Akira Nara.

The general called a conference, and all the Japanese officers in the area—the four in charge of the prisoners and others from the infantry units encamped along the trail—gathered around him. When the meeting was over, the general left, and almost immediately the Japanese began dividing the prisoners into two groups, officers and NCOs in one group, privates in the other. The privates, roughly eleven hundred men, were told to start walking east on Trail 8 toward Balanga. The Filipino officers and noncoms, meanwhile, some four hundred men, were formed into three columns, then more Japanese soldiers appeared, carrying strands of telephone wire.

They bound each man's hands behind his back, then leashed one prisoner to the next, creating chains of men. The chains, fifteen to thirty men in each, were marched to the edge of a ravine. The first chain was told to face the ravine; the other rows of men were lined up to the rear. Standing behind the first chain of prisoners were Japanese soldiers with fixed bayonets, as well as officers and noncoms with their swords drawn, waiting.

A Japanese civilian who spoke Tagalog stepped forward to address the prisoners.

Mag kaibigan, pasensya kayo. Kung kayo ay nagsurrender agad, hindi namin kayo papatayin. Ngunit maraming napinsala sa amin. Kaya pasiensia kayo. Kung mayroon kayong gustong hingin, magsabi lang kayo.

 

Dear friends, pardon us. If you had surrendered early, we would not be killing you. But we suffered heavy casualties. So just pardon us. If you have any last wish before we kill you, just tell us.

Some men asked for a cigarette, some for food and water. Many begged for their lives.

Pedro Felix, the last man in the first row facing the ravine, asked to be executed by rifle shot or machine gun fire. At least, he said, “kill us facing front,” facing their executioners.

The Japanese refused.

Then an officer gave a signal.

From his position on the extreme left, Pedro Felix glanced down the line and saw three heads go flying.

He took a deep breath and held it.

The first thrust caught him in the right shoulder. The second came out his front. He dropped to his knees and fell on his side. The third stab hit his backbone, a thud. The fourth was like the second, through and through.

He was tumbling now—the chain of men had been pushed over the side—and came to rest halfway down the slope. He tried to lie still, dead still. Japanese soldiers were prowling the slope, finishing off anyone who moved.

Felix bit his lip and tried to hold his breath. Lashed to him on the right was Luciano Jacinto, a young lieutenant. His compadre was writhing and kicking, and in his death throes he flipped the lower part of his body on top of Felix, shielding him from the buzzard squads prowling the slope.

That night Felix slid out from under the corpse, raised his head a little, and looked around. It was quiet. He was alone, he thought, alone among the dead.

His pain at that point was unbearable. Why keep suffering? he asked himself. And he started to push his face into the soft earth of the slope. He pushed until he was exhausted, then gasping, rolled over, took a deep breath, and rested.

He had more strength than he'd realized, perhaps enough to get away, and he began to think how he might free himself from the chain of dead men.

He wriggled this way and that, and after much effort was able to get the connecting strand of wire to fall across his mouth so he could gnaw it. Three hours later he had finally chewed himself free, but his hands were still bound behind his back.

During his chewing he thought he had heard someone groaning, and now he called out in the dark.

Ano, buhay ka pa? Nakakalag ka na ba?
Anyone still alive? Have you freed yourself?

“I'm alive,” a voice came back.

His name was de Venecia, a lieutenant. A big man, he'd been bayonetted eleven times. He was weak but able to free Felix, who then freed him.

Both men were thirsty, and Felix crawled among the corpses, checking canteens, but could not find a drink, so he and de Venecia decided to leave the killing ground to look for water.

Too weak to stand, they dragged themselves backward on their buttocks along the bottom of the ravine. Soon de Venecia stopped.

“I can't go any farther,” he told Felix. “Leave me here. If you reach Manila, contact my family.”

Felix built a fire—at least he could make the dying man warm—then set out again. Sometime before dawn he reached the banks of the Pantingan River and happened upon three more survivors. In the days that followed, the four men made their way north, then east across Mount Samat to Pilar, where a Filipino doctor dressed their wounds. From there Felix joined a group of Bataanese refugees on their way to the relative safety of Bulacan Province. And on April 24, dressed like a peasant and riding in a horse-drawn calesa, he arrived in the Malate section of Manila, his home. He had returned from the dead, he told his family. And then he began his astonishing story.

 

PRIVATE YOSHIAKI NAGAI,
a hostler with the 122nd Infantry, had come down with malaria, and by the morning of April 10 was so sick he had to hold on to his horse's harness to keep himself standing. Teeth clenched, head pounding, his face dripping sweat, he finally stumbled into the regimental bivouac along the Pantingan River and collapsed. A friend put a cool cloth on his forehead and he soon fell into a deep sleep.
⁷¹

The next morning his squad leader sent him to the regimental surgeon, who gave him a shot of quinine. He slept well that night, but in the morning when he tried to raise himself and join his comrades in their breakfast circle, he still could not keep his feet.

Small groups of Filipino and American soldiers had been giving themselves up since the afternoon of April 9, and now more and more of them were beginning to appear along the Pantingan River. No one had ever seen anything like it, not even the men who had fought in China.

“What a lot of prisoners coming out,” they said.

To Nagai these
horyo
looked hungry and “worn out”—gaunt, bearded men, some groggy and reeling in the heat, most carrying backpacks or gunnysacks on their shoulders. Down the trails and out of the bush they came, dropping their loads and raising their hands, one after another, so many it seemed like they'd never stop.

These miserable
horyo,
Nagai thought, were a sure sign of victory.

“We have won,” the
hohei
told one another. “We have won the battle.”

The more they reflected on their good fortune, the more, naturally, they began to think of those comrades whose luck had run out. The Summer Brigade had taken heavy casualties, and hundreds of wooden boxes and cans of
nakigara,
“remains,” were waiting to be sent home. Now, here, with their hands up, were the ones responsible for all that loss, all that mourning.

Here were the men who had “rained” bullets and shells on them day after day. America had fought with its factories, Nagai thought, Japan with its “flesh and blood.”

Living so long with danger had changed him, he thought, changed his comrades, too. Looking at the
horyo
emerging from the hills he felt more than
kirai,
simple scorn. He found himself filled with
dai-kirai,
hatred.

For months he had hated the enemy in the abstract, the enemy as evil. Now, by the Pantingan River, he hated them in the particular.

Here were the very men who had made his life so hot, so hard, so damn miserable.
Hai,
yes, he knew the rules, he'd read the
Senjinkun,
the military code—“do not punish them if they yield”—but he thought, “How can we stick to the rules?” Comrades had been killed, good Matsuyama boys butchered.

“How can I forgive them so easily?” he asked himself.

Besides, these
horyo
had disgraced themselves. In the middle of a battle they had laid down their arms and raised their hands, a shameless act for any soldier. Should such men be received with respect? What did they think they were going to get, “a welcome, a bath, a rest?”

He wanted revenge, assumed his comrades felt the same way. They had been trained to “destroy” the enemy to exterminate him. Well, here he was.

And just then, sometime after breakfast, the word came down, no one knew exactly from whom or where. It spread from platoon to platoon, company to company, upriver and down, then among the men camping in the hills.

Korosu no da,
“We are going to kill them,” kill them all.

Well, this was just “a continuation” of the two sides “killing each other,” Nagai thought, not an epilogue to the battle but an extension of it. If there was a difference between fighting and butchery, he didn't see it. And neither did most of his comrades.

They cared nothing (knew nothing, most of them) of international treaties and conventions protecting prisoners' lives and rights.

Rights?
Horyo
didn't have rights. Their lives belonged to the Imperial Army now, and the Imperial Army wanted its due.

“We are going to stab them to death,” the
hohei
were told. “And soldiers from each company should be in on it.”

It wasn't an order, exactly. More like an opportunity. The prisoners were going to be killed, this was something that had to be done, and it would be agreeable, harmonious, if a few men from every unit in the regiment took part in the work.

Some men volunteered right away, but a number held back.

“I don't feel like stabbing those who put their hands up,” they said.

“Just do it once,” their comrades came back.

Kekk
da,
“No thanks,” the dissenters said.

“Then we will go.”

And off they went. A short time later, several returned, looking bewildered and asking to be relieved.

“It's too much for me,” some said. “Let me change with someone.”

Yoshiaki Nagai wanted to take part in the killing. He had been at battle for ninety-nine days and “every day” had “started and ended with madness.” It was always kill or be killed. He had reached a point, he thought, where he could kill “without feeling anything.”