Read this article today..."Blood Brothers....Hours after the bombs rained on Pearl Harbor, American GIs battled invaders in the Philippines. Their country abandoned them. Their captors tortured them. For the few who survived, the wounds are still healing."
KLP Note: Even though I have heard a presentation by a Bataan Death March Vet (who is most unassuming), and of course reading of this period, I didn't really understand the "why's of this part of WWII. Today I read this article. Now I understand why so many Americans of the Greatest Generation were forever scarred. Not only our Military, but each and every citizen of this country.
May we NEVER forget!! Forgive, perhaps....but NEVER FORGET!
Part 1 of 3...
Blood Brothers
modernmaturity.org
Hours after the bombs rained on Pearl Harbor, American GIs battled invaders in the Philippines. Their country abandoned them. Their captors tortured them. For the few who survived, the wounds are still healing.
by Hampton Sides
Well, it brings back a lot of memories," Malcolm Amos told me in a soft, gravelly voice. "I don't know whether it's good for my system to be here. Because there are no good memories in this place."
Amos and I were walking down the long rows of graves in the American Cemetery in Manila—a kind of tropical version of Arlington National—where 17,000 American soldiers lie buried beneath mango trees and riots of bougainvillea. Amos, a World War II veteran and former POW from a small town in Iowa, clutched a homemade walking stick he'd fashioned from bamboo. An amiable man in his late 70s, with downy white hair peeking from beneath his feed cap, he stopped from time to time to study the names.
'The Manila cemetery seemed to sprawl forever, the white crucifixes warping in the heat waves.'
I could only shake my head with a kind of dull incomprehension, an awed expression typical of my generation, I think, whenever we confront the magnitude of the losses suffered by those who fought the "good war." The Manila cemetery seemed to sprawl forever, the white crucifixes warping in the heat waves. There were names without bodies and bodies without names: Marble walls listed thousands of men presumed or known to be dead for whom no physical traces were ever found, while thousands of headstones marked recovered remains whose identities "are known only to God."
Amos, who had spent three years slaving in a prison camp 60 miles north of here, gazed abstractedly at the crosses. He said, "So many got sick and died, or were shot and bayoneted by the Japanese. I was one of the lucky ones, I guess."
Amos and about a dozen other World War II veterans had come to the Philippines with their families because they wanted to see the old battlegrounds and sites of their captivity. For these American veterans, coming back here to the Philippines is like revisiting the scene of a catastrophe, a landscape of wreckage and loss. On a sweltering day in May, these proud "ghosts of Bataan," hobbling on sore feet wracked with residual neuropathies from the beriberi they suffered during their vitamin-starved captivity, had come to lay a wreath for their fallen comrades in the white marble chapel on the grounds. In all, it's estimated that more than 10,000 Americans perished in the Philippines—during the doomed siege of Bataan and Corregidor, on the forced prisoner evacuation known as the Bataan Death March, in the Japanese-run POW camps, on ill-fated transport ships bound for Japan, or during General Douglas MacArthur's long, bloody retaking of the archipelago. As a whole, the American experience in the Philippines was one of the blackest chapters of our military history. And for men like Amos, the experience isn't entirely finished. It may never be.
Staring at the carpet of crosses, Amos shook his head, a peculiar smile of disgust forming on his face. "I made it back, though," he said, as if to reassure himself. "I made it back."
"Why do you think that was?" I asked him.
He clutched his cane a little tighter. "I don't know," he replied. "By the grace of God, maybe?"
He was emphatic about framing his answer as a question.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of a "date which will live in infamy" in his oft-quoted speech to Congress, it's usually forgotten that he alluded not only to the attack on Pearl Harbor but also, in the same breath, to the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. The attack on the largest island, Luzon, occurred the same day—within hours, in fact, of the bombing of Pearl Harbor (although the event is technically recorded as having transpired on December 8, since the Philippines lie west of the International Date Line). Swarms of Japanese planes took off from Formosa, now called Taiwan, in thick fog, vectored across the South China Sea, and struck nearly every major American installation on Luzon—airfields, shipyards, depots, warehouses. Even though word of Pearl Harbor had reached them, the Americans in the Philippines seemed incapable of believing that the war was truly on. Because of a series of bad decisions and communications errors on the part of the American command, as well as several turns of incredibly bad luck, the Japanese Zeros caught much of the American Far East Air Force on the ground at Clark Field north of Manila, parked wingtip to wingtip and refueling. In a matter of hours, the United States had virtually lost control of the skies. It was the "other" Pearl Harbor, the one we seldom talk about or study in high-school history survey courses—the Pearl Harbor that, for better or worse, Hollywood has never successfully grappled with.
Part of the American failure to respond can be blamed on an incredulity rooted in simple racism: The reputedly inferior Japanese military wasn't supposed to be an authentic threat. One of the men on our trip, a former tank radio operator named James Bogart, recalled the blasé mentality of the times. "We didn't really expect the Japanese to have the audacity to attack the all-powerful United States," Bogart told me. "We had heard that the Japanese were nearsighted and night-blind—and that they couldn't fly planes worth a flip." December 8 resoundingly disabused Bogart of a host of misconceptions.
In retrospect, it seems a little odd that Pearl Harbor should have become so thoroughly and instantaneously synonymous with our entrance into the war, when one considers that the stakes—human, material, and strategic—were just as high in the Philippines, if not higher. The attack on Luzon marked the beginning of something far larger in scale and duration—and far more horrific. Pearl Harbor, for all of its terrible carnage, was over within hours. The defense of the Philippines, our first great battle of World War II, would last four agonizing months. After the initial aerial attack, General MacArthur quickly retreated from Manila to the peninsula of Bataan, which, with its roadless jungles and steep volcanic headlands jutting out into Manila Bay, was better suited than the capital for a protracted defensive war. American and Filipino troops fought valiantly as their food and ammunition ran out. When defeat became certain, MacArthur was evacuated to Australia to build a new army. His ill-equipped, malnourished, malarial troops held the peninsula as long as they could. On April 9, 1942, they capitulated to the Japanese 14th Army. It was the largest surrender in American history. |
