Part 3 of 3--Blood Brothers - WWII The Phillipines
has been said that Bataan was a "dress rehearsal" for Vietnam. Certainly the experience there offered important lessons (about military preparedness, overextension, and commitment) which the planners in Vietnam seem generally to have ignored. As in Vietnam, the Bataan men found themselves fighting against an extremely foreign enemy in unfamiliar jungles of tropical Asia, waging a battle that was doomed to fail. And as with Vietnam soldiers, the men of Bataan had to return home with a certain unspoken stigma, the awkward status of having "lost." Many of the syndromes and illnesses that have come to be associated with Vietnam veterans were suffered 25 years earlier by the American captives of the Japanese: nightmares and night sweats, bouts of profound depression, various mysterious symptoms that VA hospital doctors were reluctant to diagnose and treat, and all the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder (although it was not then dignified with a name).
'In prison camp, the men often called themselves "ghosts."'
Fred Baldassarre, an industrial engineer from Hayward, California, was all too familiar with these symptoms. Baldassarre is the son of a now-deceased Bataan veteran, and he had come on this trip, in part, to understand some of the peculiarities in his father's character. "I don't ever recall him not fighting that war," Baldassarre told me one afternoon over San Miguel beers. "He couldn't stop fighting it. The war was always in his head—like ambient noise. He was probably the most affectionate human being I've ever met, but at the same time he was prone to these incredible rages of temper. He would just snap. He was a very tough guy, but certain things would make him bawl like a baby. When I was draft age during the Vietnam War, he would get hysterical when the little envelopes came from the draft board. He would plead with me, 'Don't go.' He was willing to do anything to help me become a draft dodger. He'd say, 'You have to trust me on this. You don't want to go to war.' He just flat out told me, 'I've served enough for both of us. You don't have to go.'"
Malcolm Amos's daughter, Lanae Hagen, recalled very similar experiences growing up in Iowa. "When I was a kid you could always tell when Dad was in one of his moods," she said. "We'd wake up in the morning, and his mattress would be on the floor. We'd find the radio out in the yard. Sometime during the night, he had thrown it out the window, broken the glass. He didn't even know he'd done it. My mom had to have her own bedroom. We knew that we just had to leave him alone when he'd get in one of his moods. 'Cause there was no dealing with him." (Shortly after our trip, Lanae Hagen succumbed to longstanding heart and lung disease.)
Another child of a Bataan veteran who accompanied us was Charlie Wyatt, a businessman from Houston. For Wyatt's father, the war manifested itself in a ritual. "Every week he'd go down for a haircut, and he'd always get a manicure," Wyatt told me. "I think that he was trying to rid himself of all physical traces of what he went through in the camps. You see, the Japanese had pulled out all of his nails once. If he could look at his hands and see that they were clean and free and nice-looking, well, he was trying to push that to the back of his mind. Then all of a sudden something would happen. He'd be thinking of the pain he'd been through and then boom—he'd black out. We had no idea when it would occur next. Once it happened while he was driving a car. He was taking me to school and all of a sudden-boom!—we're in a ditch, smashed into a tree, and my head's up against the windshield."
Many of the Bataan veterans have been unable to shake their belief that Washington abandoned them. To this day, they continue to feel a sense of bitterness. In prison camp, the men often called themselves "ghosts." Not only did these guys look like ghosts after three years of captivity, but they felt as though they'd been forgotten by the land of the living—and by their own country. One can easily make the case that, in terms of scope and duration, their ordeal exceeded anything suffered by our armed forces in any other conflict throughout our history. And yet this December, like every December, the country will pause to note only Pearl Harbor Day.
In an interesting way, though, the fall of Bataan was intimately linked to Pearl Harbor, a direct aftershock. The original war plan had called for MacArthur's troops to fall back to the Bataan Peninsula and hold out for a few weeks until the Navy could steam across the Pacific and supply them with reinforcements of food and munitions. But, of course, therein lay the problem: There was no Navy. The Pacific fleet had been virtually destroyed at Oahu, although it took a while for MacArthur to realize the full extent of the loss. Without warships to break the Japanese blockade, it was extremely difficult for sufficient shipments of supplies to reach the men of Bataan. Briefly, the War Department in Washington weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed.
By late December, Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided in Winston Churchill that they had regretfully written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that later was to become famous, Stimson had remarked, "There are times when men have to die."
Die they did—by the thousands. Given all the hideous trials they had to endure, it's remarkable that any of them survived at all. In a way, I came to think of the men with whom I was traveling as the ultimate survivors, supreme beaters of the odds. Not only had they lived through the misery of a four-month siege, an infamous forced march, and three years in squalid prison camps, they'd also somehow survived the tricky reimmersion into American society (so many of their comrades had died during those first few years—of depression, alcoholism, and various sordid combinations of residual illnesses). And then these men had managed to get through 55 years of living to reach the unthinkable: a ripe old age.
Throughout our trip, I was continually amazed at how stoic they were. They had accepted their terrible lot with enormous stores of grace. Each man had his own set of strengths that saw him through his ordeal—love of family, faith in God, a prodigious sense of humor. True, they all had scars, little quirks of prejudice. They refused to buy Japanese cars, refused to throw rice at their own daughters' weddings. But most of them had learned not to hate the Japanese people, because they understood that, as one of them put it, "the hate consumes you." There are, we must all know by now, no "good wars," and this one, for these men, was especially bad.
It is a hallmark of the survivor to find something positive in the midst of an experience of great tragedy. Near the end of the trip, I asked Humphrey O'Leary if he had gained anything from all his suffering—an insight perhaps, a small kernel of wisdom.
"You know," he said, "a man can adapt himself to anything. His natural resources, his instincts, will always come through. You'd be surprised how your mind can work when you're in a fix!"
O'Leary chuckled quietly to himself. Then he fixed me with a penetrating stare. "Never underestimate a person," he said. "This is something I learned. It takes a lot to kill a man if he doesn't want to be killed."
Hampton Sides is the author of Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission (Doubleday, 2001). |
