by Ray C. Hunt
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.
Chapter Three
The Bataan Death March
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.1
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, f
or reasons unknown, then gave me back a canteen—which still another guard promptly took away from me again.
This was typical of Japanese unpredictability. Any Westerner who had much to do with the Japanese was invariably struck by how their psychology differed from that of Occidentals, and by their abrupt changes of mood. One moment they would be calm, smiling, reasonable, even generous: the next, storming in some inexplicable rage and acting like savages. An American Jesuit who spent the war years at a college in Manila wrote a perceptive book about the Philippines under Japanese occupation. He ascribed the sudden shifts in mood among the Japanese to their lack of an underlying philosophy or fixed religious faith. Some of their philosophical and moral ideas came from Confucianism and Buddhism, which are more truly attitudes toward existence than religions in the Western sense; and some have been derived from Shintoism, which is basically a mixture of animism and ancestor worship without either a rational view of the cosmos or a moral code. Then, in modern times, this variegated ancient legacy has been overlaid lightly by a mixture of Christianity and rationalism, a combination that has never been entirely reconciled and digested in the West itself much less in the non-Western world. The vast divergences among all these traditions, not to speak of what resulted when they were muddled together, he thought, had produced fundamental instability in the Japanese character.2 Needless to remind the reader, I never tried to analyze the Japanese at this level, but I can testify that they were extraordinarily capricious.
Examples of their unpredictability abounded during the first days of our captivity when everything was still wondrously disorganized. Robert Mailheau, a fellow survivor of the Death March, was once near a Japanese battery that suffered a direct hit from an artillery shell fired from Corregidor. The battery and its whole crew were blown to bits. Perhaps a hundred American and Filipino prisoners nearby let out a spontaneous cheer. While this was great for their morale momentarily, one would expect that it would have been followed by some swift and terrible retribution. Yet, for whatever reason, the Japanese did nothing.
Where I was, a guard would sometimes stop us periodically and take one or more men out of a group to fix a stalled truck, drive pack animals somewhere, or do some other menial chore. Once while we were still in the extreme south of Bataan, I was picked, with half a dozen other men, to dig some foxholes. While we were busy at it, the heavy mortars on Corregidor opened up on us. All we American diggers hit the dirt at once, as we had been trained to do, but the Japanese just laughed at us and stood unconcernedly in the open, seemingly confident that none of the shells had their names on them. Apparently they had never heard the admonition that the shell to fear is not the one with your name on it but the one addressed “To whom it may concern.” Their bravado in such cases also helps to explain why Japanese casualties were so much higher than American.
Another time I was removed from the road and forced to help a Japanese company prepare a bivouac. Here one of the guards spoke to me in English. I asked him where he had learned the language. He said he had been trained in Yokohama to be a teacher of English. I then asked him which side he thought would win the war. He replied thoughtfully, without the customary Japanese menace or boasting, that he believed Japan would. He added that the training he had undergone in Japan was tougher than anything he had experienced so far in combat, so rough in fact that some of his fellow trainees had committed suicide rather than endure it. He said he hated the British, but about Americans he was silent. From this manner I guessed that he was opposed to the war and not sanguine about its ultimate outcome.
After a few days the guards got better control of things and our regimen became appreciably tougher. Instead of straggling in small groups or even alone, we were now marched in large groups, three abreast, on the left side of the road, so southward bound Japanese vehicles to our right would not be impeded. It was now, too, that the real atrocities began, at least where I was. Guards trotted up and down the columns clubbing men into line with rifle butts, stabbing laggards with their bayonets, and shooting or bayoneting to death anyone chronically unable to keep up, all this accompanied by a fusillade of verbal abuse. Our captors, who had been taught that to become a prisoner of war was a disgrace, repeatedly taunted us with accusations of cowardice and sneered at our inability to keep pace. Heartbreaking acts of savagery multiplied. One poor fellow behind me jumped into a stream as we crossed a bridge. A guard raised his rifle to his shoulder and waited. As soon as the man surfaced, he was shot in the back. Another time I saw what was left of a human body after it had been run over by a tank on a hard-surfaced roadbed. It looked like a wet sack. I saw many men bayoneted and then abandoned to suffer a slow, agonizing death in the dust. I watched a general being clubbed until he was a bloody, unrecognizable mess. As for myself, I was clubbed many times for no reason other than sheer malice.
So we stumbled along, mile after mile, through heat and dust, tortured by hunger, thirst, diseases, and the accumulated effects of three months on short rations. The popping of .25-caliber Japanese rifles grew more frequent as more and more men proved unable to maintain the pace of the march. After a while nobody even looked back to see who had been shot this time. Only once did I see a Japanese officer so much as reprimand a guard for brutality. In that case the guard had deliberately crushed the glasses of a man whom I happened to know, a forty-five-year-old sergeant, William T. Moore. The officer grabbed the guard and knocked him down with a blow from his fist—one of the commonest modes of enforcing discipline in the Japanese army.
Night was, if anything, worse than daytime. We would simply be herded into a field and enclosed with barbed wire. It resembled nothing as much as putting cattle into a corral, save that our plight was sorrier. Since it was near the end of the dry season, the fields were mere bare ground and dust, without grass. Here thousands of men, without food or water, were packed in so closely that one could not shift his body without causing discomfort to others. Worse, there were no toilets, and by now maybe a third of us had dysentery. There we lay in mind-numbing squalor, soaked in our own body wastes and those of others, waiting for dawn to resume the man-killing march.
Judging from what I have heard and read since World War II, our captors must have handled the distribution of food more humanely in other parts of the march than where I was. Bob Mailheau says that on a couple of occasions he and a few others simply walked up to a Japanese cook and made motions indicating that they were hungry, after which they were given some rice. I was not so lucky. I was fed a little rice on the day I was put to work digging foxholes. For seven days after that the Japanese offered us no food at all in regular chow lines. All of us would have died had not the general disorganization that prevailed for three or four days enabled us to scrounge a little food in various ways. When the guards were few and otherwise occupied, we could sometimes dig up a few camotes (Philippine sweet potatoes) in fields. Now and then a friendly Filipino would furtively hand or toss us something from along the roadside. Once in a while a person could grab something edible off a bush or tree along the road. It is possible that an individual Japanese guard might have handed me a rice ball on an occasion or two, though I don’t remember it. I did go three days in one stretch with no food at all, and later as a guerrilla also went three or four days without food on a few occasions. The sensation is odd. The first day one is hungry, the second much more hungry, and the third ravenous, but on the fourth day the process begins to reverse itself.
Lack of water was worse than lack of food. Though we passed many artesian wells and clear streams, the guards would rarely allow us to fill our canteens. The only places from which they let us drink freely were muddy, slime-covered carabao wallows, probably because it afforded them an opportunity to humiliate us.
Just why the Japanese should have treated us with such unrelieved and unnecessary brutality has been the subject of much learned and unlearned conjecture since 1945. Some have ascribed it mostly to Japanese administrative incapacity and unpreparedness, and to the foulu
ps that are inseparable from war; some have attributed it to sheer Japanese savagery, regarding it as proof that the Nipponese are not yet civilized; some have seen it as Japanese retribution for the racial discrimination to which they have been subjected by white people, noting in particular how the Japanese never missed a chance to humiliate Americans in the presence of Filipinos; others have charged it to the samurai tradition in the Japanese army and to the brutality of its training methods; still others have claimed that it was due merely to the guards on the Death March being the dregs of the Japanese army. People with considerable knowledge of Japanese history and culture have maintained that, while Japan has drawn abreast of the Western world in science and technology, it is still centuries behind in the development of humanitarian attitudes. It has even been suggested that the cruelty of the Japanese on the Death March and in prison camps was due to nothing more complex than a desire to avenge their own heavy casualties in the Bataan campaign and to work off their frustration at having been compelled to postpone their projected invasion of Australia.3
I believe there is some substance in every one of these explanations. Even so, I think the most important factor was different, and simpler. Most of the guards seemed to me to be ignorant farm boys, no doubt irritated by our inability to understand and respond quickly to commands given in Japanese, but at bottom concerned mostly to demonstrate how tough they were, to show off in front of their buddies, to let everyone know that they were real men who shrank from nothing.
As the days passed, the horrors mounted. By now virtually every prisoner had been stripped of everything he owned save the tattered clothes on his back. Anyone found with Japanese money, photographs, or souvenirs in his possession was executed. The guards appeared to assume that such items must have been taken off dead Japanese soldiers. Beheading was the favorite mode of execution, and the guards began to show us posters graphically illustrating our fate should we be caught attempting to escape. A typical poster showed a Japanese soldier, both hands on the handle of a samurai sword moments after it had passed through the neck of a kneeling prisoner. As I trudged along, rage and hatred welled up from the depths of my soul and engulfed me. I resolved to escape, or die trying.