Part 2-Blood Brothers....WWII The Phillipines....
The story of the Philippine defense is the subject of countless books, yet it is a story that has somehow failed to cross over into popular consciousness with the simple, lasting force of D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and, yes, Pearl Harbor.
Why is this? In part, it may have something to do with sheer distance—the Philippines lie 7,000 miles from San Francisco, a world away. As a country of professed democratic idealists, Americans have never felt entirely comfortable with the notion that we "owned" this culturally unfamiliar colony of 7,000 islands located somewhere on the other side of the planet.
Another explanation for the relative obscurity of the Philippine invasion is that it's frankly an uncomfortable story, a story that violates our national myth of invincibility. We Americans like to think we don't lose wars; we don't even lose battles. Pearl Harbor was a special case, we've always contended. We prefer to couch it as a single lightning act of bald treachery—a sneak attack that caught us, somewhat forgivably, flat-footed. The defense of the Philippines, on the other hand, was a much truer test of arms. While it also started as a sneak attack, it very quickly became a full-out land war. And it ended with a most inconvenient fact: We lost.
'The veterans stared intently out the windows as half-remembered vistas spooled by them, the air-conditioned coach comfortably gliding over the same terrain that had taken them, as captives, so many terrifying days to stumble across.'
The story of Bataan is also uncomfortable because it implies, in a sense, a national betrayal. We let these soldiers down. Our lack of preparation was appalling. We put them in a place where they couldn't adequately defend themselves. We promised them ammunition and medicine and supplies that never arrived. We left them stranded on this little neck of jungle, their backs against the sea. As the famous war correspondent John Hersey wrote at the time, the truth came to the men of Bataan "in mean little doses." One Japanese officer likened the American predicament on Bataan to that of "a cat entering a sack." The men were forced to fight on rations of 1,000 calories a day, with rusty, antiquated equipment that dated back, in many cases, to World War I.
"Bataan was sort of another Alamo, with certain variations to it," said Richard Gordon, a retired Army major who fought with the 31st Infantry on Bataan's frontlines. A stalwart 80-year-old man with crisply etched memories of his ordeal, Gordon was one of the veterans who accompanied us on our trip back to the Philippines. "You put men out here to do battle with a far superior enemy. And you don't support them. When that happens you're throwing men's lives away. We were told, 'Hang on, hold out, help is on the way!' And after a while we began to give up on these little propaganda sheets that told us these things. We're stuck out here. We have an Uncle Sam somewhere. We just don't see him—in any form." Starving in their foxholes, feeling abandoned by their country, the men of Bataan took to singing a chant that would become their company slogan, a chant that they recite even today: "We're the battling bastards of Bataan, no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam ... and nobody gives a damn."
Earlier in our trip, I had spent time with Gordon and his comrades on the Bataan Peninsula. In the port town of Marivales, on the southern tip of Bataan, hundreds of Filipinos came out to greet our entourage. As we stepped off our chartered tour bus, the locals draped sampaguita flower garlands around our necks and, their cheeks braided with tears, welcomed their brothers-in-arms back to the province of Bataan. We revisited the sites around Mount Samat, where some of the fiercest battles took place, where the tattered jungles had smoked and raged after nearly four months of continual fighting. Gordon and his friends recalled the desperation of their doomed defense, the sweaty camaraderie, the relentless shelling. But more than anything else, they seemed to remember the sharp burn of hunger. Near the end, they were forced to venture into the jungles and scavenge for wild game. "Anything that was moving was ours," said Gordon's friend and fellow infantryman Humphrey O'Leary. "Water buffalo, monkeys, pythons, iguanas, parrots, snails. We were reduced to a situation where we would eat anything. It was that bad."
In March of 1942, when General MacArthur was ordered to leave the Philippines, the troops began to understand the magnitude of their predicament. "All of us could see we were going down the tubes," recalled Jim Bogart. "No army can fight a war when they're starving like we were. If I'd been asked to make a charge, I couldn't have done it. I had malaria and dysentery, and I'd already lost 40 pounds. We couldn't believe we'd been completely abandoned."
Finally, the Filipino-American men surrendered. The Japanese force-marched them 65 miles north to a temporary enclosure called Camp O'Donnell. The prisoners were in no condition to walk, but the Japanese prodded them along anyway; if a man couldn't keep pace, he was shot, bayoneted, or beheaded. In the end, more than 600 Americans and as many as 10,000 Filipinos are believed to have died during the week-long plodding atrocity that came to be known as the Bataan Death March.
We had traveled to Luzon, in part, to trace the winding route of the Death March, through the rice paddies and cane fields of the Bataan Peninsula. As our chartered tour bus chuffed up the main coastal road, past the drowsy barrios of Cabcaben, Limay, and Balanga and the malachite-green slopes of Mount Samat, it was hard to imagine the gloom and devastation that hung over this place in April of 1942. The veterans stared intently out the windows as half-remembered vistas spooled by them, the air-conditioned coach comfortably gliding over the same terrain that had taken them, as captives, so many terrifying days to stumble across.
One incident on the Death March remained particularly vivid in Richard Gordon's mind. A young American soldier was lying by the side of the road, alive but in the throes of a malaria attack. A Japanese tank came down the road. At the last second, the tank driver, seized by a cruel whimsy, deliberately swerved and crushed the ailing American. The next tank in the column went over the man's limp body a second time, leaving it pressed flat into the pavement as though it had been steamrolled. "You stand there watching a human being flattened, well, that sticks in your mind forever," Gordon said. "It was deliberate murder. He was nice, easy prey, just lying there. I'll never forget that sight. I'll go to my grave wondering how people can be that inhumane."
Yet the Death March was only the beginning of the long ordeal. In the prison camps, these men suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes. They endured three years of gratuitous and often surreal mistreatment which, as they've come to the end of their lives, they still can't fully understand. They buried legions of their comrades because their guards denied them even the most basic of medicines. They saw friends tortured and beheaded. Every day their dignity was stolen.
We visited the site of one of the camps, Cabanatuan. It had been one of the largest American POW camps ever established on foreign soil, with as many as 9,000 men living there. Today it's just a clearing in flat rice country, with a discreet white marble memorial listing the names of the nearly 3,000 men who perished there. The morning we stopped by, water buffalo could be seen dozing in their wallows in the surrounding paddies. Children raked newly harvested rice along the shoulders of the road. A range of notched mountains, the Sierra Madre, clawed at the hazy sky. The young Filipinos in the neighboring village didn't quite know what to make of our procession of mostly elderly American tourists in Rockports and floppy hats, squinting in the sun, pointing at things that weren't even there.
Once, Malcolm Amos saw nine of his fellow prisoners shot because one man had tried to escape. The doomed men dug their own pit, then kneeled by the edge for the executioner to shoot them, one by one, in the back of the head, dropping them into their shared grave. On another occasion, Amos saw an American tortured by the camp guards. They stuck a tube in his mouth and turned on the hose until the water pressure filled up his stomach. "Then they jumped on his abdomen," Amos said, wincing with palpable disgust, "until his innards was just torn all to pieces."
"For three years, we were always living on the edge here," Richard Gordon said, "wondering what they were going to do to us, where the next beating would come from. I don't think there's a man who went through that experience who doesn't have some sort of psychological scarring—that certainly includes me. It takes a permanent bite out of you." |
