1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  On the other hand, the U.S. Navy, operating on its parsimonious between-the-wars budget, did no such thing. To save money (a torpedo then cost approximately $10,000 ($100,000 today), before the war there had not been a live-torpedo test-firing since 1926 and, where practicable, navy orders had been for torpedo-firing vessels to practice-fire at beaches or other places where the dummy “fish” could later be collected and reused. A heavy price was paid in lives and ships for this folly. A third reason for the resounding defeat of the combined southwest Pacific fleet was the lack of communication caused by language differences. For example, Admiral Doorman on his doomed Dutch cruiser De Rujter could lead the Allied forces into the Java Sea battle only by flag signaling to his fellow vessels, “Follow Me,” like something out of eighteenth-century warfare.

  In retrospect, it could be argued that the wiser choice would have been for the British to have evacuated the Malay peninsula and saved its 85,000 troops to fight another day, for the 32,000 Dutch, British, and Australian troops on Java to have done the same, and for the 12,000 American troops in the Philippines, who could have left on Hart’s warships before the Japanese invasion, to have done so as well.* And it certainly might have been smarter to have sailed the nine cruisers and eleven destroyers of the Allied forces to Australia, where they could one day be assembled alongside a mightier armada.

  One factor as to why they did not can probably be laid to pride or, if you prefer, arrogance. Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines were colonial possessions and, as such, were “property.” Few responsible persons or authorities are willing to see their property stolen before their very eyes. Finally, the Allied nations never quite understood the forces Japan was marshaling against them, and by the time they did it was too late. But all that was in retrospect.

  In the Philippines, from early February until April 1, an ominous calm descended over Bataan. There was only sporadic artillery fire and patrolling by the Japanese, but everyone understood that with reinforcements they were regrouping for a big push. The American food shortage naturally grew worse. Reports circulated that practically all the monkeys, lizards, and snakes on the peninsula had been devoured. Fewer and fewer held out hope for the big relief fleet from the United States.

  The big push began on April Fools’ Day, just as Doolittle’s fliers were steaming toward Japan. Suddenly the entire American line erupted with explosions from Japanese heavy guns. Enemy airplanes circled above Bataan hundreds at a time, from dawn to dusk, bombing and strafing anything and everything, and “a gray pall of smoke and dust hung over the peninsula.”2

  The Japanese began dropping incendiary and phosphorous bombs, which, it being the dry season, started great forest fires, causing the American forces to flee or be burned alive. Then large columns of Japanese infantry and tanks began crashing through the American lines, isolating units from one another. Not knowing what else to do, Wainwright on April 8 ordered an attack. He must have known it was futile, but nothing else was working and, from Australia, MacArthur had ordered him a week earlier: “If food fail[s], prepare and execute an attack upon the enemy.”3 The men on Bataan complied but only halfheartedly and, by day’s end, their firing dropped away; they jammed the roads and trails in a mad rush to get away from the advancing Japanese. That night a gigantic series of explosions rocked southern Bataan and reverberated to Corregidor. Fire and flames shot thousands of feet into the air and the event startled all who witnessed it. An artillery major asked what was going on and was told, “It’s all over.” They had blown up the ammunition dumps.4

  The same artillery major who was at headquarters in the Malinta Tunnel watched General Wainwright speaking on the phone with General Edward P. King, senior commander on Bataan. “’You can’t surrender!’ he shouted. ‘You can’t!’ As he listened intently his gaunt frame seemed to sag in on itself. Tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘Why don’t you attack with I Corps?’ he asked. We clearly heard a voice say: ‘I Corps no longer exists.’ General Wainwright slumped into his chair.”*5

  In fact it was all over—at least the fighting on Bataan. Every fiber of Wainwright’s body and soul told him that American soldiers do not surrender, had never surrendered; at Valley Forge, Gettysburg, even during the slaughters at Fredericksburg, both Manassas battles, Chancellorsville, and on and on, there had been setbacks, defeats, retreats, but not surrender—never before in the history of the United States had an entire army surrendered. But Wainwright accepted the inevitable. “Let me say here that I have no criticism of General King for accepting the situation and surrendering. It was a decision which required great courage and mental fortitude. He had either to surrender or have his people captured or killed piecemeal [and] this would most certainly have happened to him within two or three days.”6

  After more than a week of constant combat the starving and sick soldiers on Bataan could go on no longer. Ninety percent (mostly Filipinos) had no shoes and their clothes were in tatters; their ammunition was mostly used up; many had had no sleep whatsoever for the past two or three days. One unit reported taking 2 percent casualties per hour from Japanese artillery fire alone. The two U.S. Army corps on Bataan simply ceased to exist for purposes of organized resistance, and it became practically “every man for himself.”

  By dawn next day General King was in a jeep with two other officers in search of the Japanese commander. All he could find was a Japanese colonel who offered no negotiations or terms except unconditional surrender. Under the circumstances, King had to comply. The colonel also demanded King’s sword and became furious when the general told him he did not have one. The matter was finally settled when King offered the Japanese officer his pistol instead.

  Those on Corregidor—there were some 10,000 to 15,000 of them now, their ranks swelled by those lucky enough to find a craft to help them escape, as well as several dozen army nurses who had been evacuated—watched in grim fascination as the firing finally stopped. One officer remembered, “As the afternoon drew to a close, we saw long columns of men moving north from Marivales [the little port town on the tip of Bataan]. White flags dotted the columns. I was glad that the ordeal for those men was over. They could rest now, and receive medical attention.”7

  This last observation raised perhaps the grossest example of false hopes in the history of the world. The men got no such things. Instead they became victims of the most studied cruelty that Americans and Filipinos alike had ever had or would ever have to endure. Starving and ill, the 78,000 U.S. troops started northward on the infamous sixty-five-mile Bataan Death March, in which about 10,000 of them either perished from starvation, thirst, or other health problems or were murdered by sadistic Japanese guards. Because this monstrosity has no dearth of firsthand accounts, no doubt exists that the ordeals these soldiers experienced were beyond embellishment. If any of those men had thought that stories they had read of Japanese atrocities in China might have been exaggerated, he would soon find out, to his dismal regret, that they were not.

  In the beginning, what most members of the Death March remembered was the noise and confusion. And the dust. As Homma’s army poured south into lower Bataan by the tens of thousands there was scarcely room on the roads for both them and the 78,000-man chain of prisoners moving north. The Japanese came marching in units, interspersed with truck convoys or tanks or jeeplike vehicles carrying officers. The Japanese guards were constantly shouting and screaming in a language unintelligible to the Americans and Filipinos, so that when the guards wanted their prisoners to move off the road to let a Japanese column pass, they resorted to clubbing the men or prodding them with bayonets.

  Then there was the eternal dust stirred up by so many thousands of feet and by the Japanese vehicles, a fine, powdery dust four to six inches deep, which nearly strangled the men and burned their eyes and clogged their pores in the 90-plus-degree heat as if they were wearing a rubber suit. Ralph Levenberg, an air corps sergeant who had been fighting as an infantryman since the destruction of the planes,
remembered, “It reminded me of what it might have been like when the Jews exited Egypt into the desert—no one knowing where they were going or what they should take or how long it would take to get where they were going. The Japanese were just in a rush to get us out of their way.”8

  Private First Class Blair Robinett’s first encounter with a Japanese soldier did not go well. “He stepped out, came across, and took my canteen out of its cover. He took a drink, filled his canteen from mine and poured the rest of my water on the ground and dropped the canteen at my feet. When I bent down to pick up my canteen he turned around and hit me on the head with his rifle butt.”9

  Presently the Japanese became a little more organized. They began to separate the prisoners into groups of a thousand or so, with about sixteen guards each, whose tempers did not improve but became demonstratively worse. “A short distance away, an American fell behind. He was bayoneted in the throat. He gasped for air, then was dead.” The Americans could not comprehend the Japanese. As Homma’s convoys passed the prisoners, some of the Japanese soldiers would wave and smile while from the next truck men would strike out with rifle butts or bayonets, which left many Americans lying in the dust after the truck drove on by. At one point the marchers passed a sugarcane field and several men, including an air force pilot, tried to get at the cane. “When they got to the edge of the field, the Jap guards shot them down and clubbed the wounded survivors to death.” And yet: “Another group, seeing the sugarcane field, ran over and cut some of the juicy stalks. The Jap guards entered the field to help themselves.”10

  A young infantry lieutenant on the march chronicled what he saw and felt throughout his ordeal as a prisoner of the Japanese. His name was Henry G. Lee, from Los Angeles, and his poems were written in POW camps on scraps of paper and sometimes on shreds of cloth or canvas. Late in the war, before he was starved to death by the Japanese, Lee buried his collection of verse for what he hoped might be posterity, which he finally achieved after the war, when U.S. soldiers investigating the Japanese prison camps dug up his works and sent them to his father. They were published in 1948 under the title Nothing But Praise and represent some of the best poetry to come out of World War II. He wrote of the Bataan Death March.

  Prisoner’s March

  (Death of a Friend)

  So you are dead. The easy words contain

  No sense of loss, no sorrow, no despair.

  Thus hunger, thirst, fatigue, combine to drain

  All feeling from our hearts. The endless glare,

  The brutal heat, anesthetize the mind.

  I cannot mourn you now. I lift my load,

  The suffering column moves. I leave behind

  Only another corpse, beside the road.11

  Several accounts refer to a grisly incident in which an American soldier, obviously ill, was staggering and reeling along when a column of Japanese tanks appeared in the opposite direction. A Japanese guard “grabbed this sick guy by the arm and guided him to the middle of the road. Then he just flipped him out across the road. A tank pulled across him. Well, it killed him quick. There must have been ten tanks in that column and every one of them came up there right across the body. When the last tank left there was no way you could tell there’d ever been a man there. The man disappeared, but his uniform had been pressed until it had become part of the ground.”12

  The guards used the occasion to enrich themselves from their pitiful charges. Wristwatches and rings were taken. One man had his teeth knocked out because a Japanese admired his gold fillings. Rings were often a source of consternation because many of the men’s fingers were swollen as a result of suffering from edema and the rings would not come off. In that event, the guard sometimes chopped off the finger to get at the ring. Sometimes he chopped off more than one. Another great fear was being found with anything of Japanese origin, as the first-in-line marchers soon found out. The Japanese immediately assumed the item had been taken from the body of a dead Japanese soldier and the prisoner was killed on the spot. The fact is, many of the prisoners had been in Manila for months or longer and had purchased watches, pens, wallets, combs, shaving mirrors, and such from the many Japanese-owned shops that lined the streets. Word spread back along the line of march and all things Japanese were quickly disposed of.

  The prisoners quickly learned to help their weaker comrades along since those who dropped out were not allowed to rest but instead were routinely murdered, often in grotesque fashion. The Japanese were fond of using their swords, and the march slowly began to wind past dozens of decapitated American bodies. Rifle shots cracked out incessantly, for behind each group of marchers was a squad of Japanese guards, finishing off any stragglers. Two soldiers were carrying between them their captain, who was almost prostrate with dysentery, but they were falling farther and farther behind. “Finally, one of the men at the rear of the column, who kept watching for guards, yelled to us that a Jap was coming. By now we were dragging [him]. When the guard got to us he rammed his bayonet right through the captain. Naturally we dropped [him] and ran up and got into the middle of the column.” For the men near the rear of the march it was even more traumatic, since they had to pass by all the thousands of bodies killed ahead of them. Practically all of the men had dysentery. If they stopped by the roadside to relieve themselves, they “were ordered to eat their own excrement. If they refused, they were either bayoneted or shot.” On more than one occasion Americans were ordered at bayonet point to dig holes and bury their sick comrades alive.13

  This went on, day after day, night after night, for nearly a week under the broiling sun for sixty-five agonizing miles. The Japanese rarely allowed the men to stop for water. If the marchers ahead had halted for some reason, and the prisoners behind found themselves beside a stream, or even a slimy ditch, it was risking almost certain death to try and get at the water. On more than one occasion, when the men were finally allowed to drink from a ditch or stream by the roadside, more often than not they found the water contaminated by bloated, maggot-infested bodies. There was no food from the Japanese, except an occasional small rice ball. The only bright spot in the whole affair was that when the marchers passed the dozens of little Filipino villages along the route they were often greeted by women and children offering them gifts of rice, water, sugarcane, or fruits.* Some of the women cried, and some of them died—the Japanese did not take kindly to Filipinos helping their enemies. One pregnant woman trying to help was shot and then bayoneted in the stomach for her kindness.

  One officer recorded later, “Some people think there was one Death March. There were many Death Marches.” This was all too true, even when the march was over. Finally they reached the town of San Fernando, where there was a railroad with a line of old-time steel boxcars baking in the tropical sun. “Into the oven we went. The heat from inside hit us in the face. They packed us in just as tight as you can be packed in. In fact, I know there were people who never stood on the floor. They were being held up by their friends. Everyone at first started yelling and screaming. It was worse than anything that had gone on before. Once in a while the train would stop and some Jap guards would open the doors so we could get some fresh air. Then is when we’d get the dead ones out. If we could we’d lift the corpses and pass them over to the door.” The men were panicky, vomiting and excreting until everyone’s shoes were filled with filth. Some hours later they reached their destination, a hellhole called Camp O’Donnell.14

  Actually, they did not reach O’Donnell proper but were still eight miles west of it. The “camp” was a partially completed American airfield and here the 78,000 (less some thousands dead) soldiers were incarcerated. The Japanese had decided that O’Donnell was to be the POW camp until the remaining 10,000 holding out on Corregidor were taken; then some other plan would be made. Meantime, they would stay in this place, featuring long and partially completed barracklike huts with thatched nipa-palm roofs enclosed by barbed wire and machine-gun-ready guard towers.

  When they got to Camp O’ D
onnell the men learned for the first time what their status was vis-a-vis “prisoners of war.” They had none. The Japanese had refused to ratify the Geneva Convention of 1929 in which prisoners of war were to be treated humanely, with honor, and maintained by the imprisoning country according to the standards of the International Red Cross. Instead, on that occasion the Japanese stated that “real improvement of prisoners depends, in the final analysis, on the humanitarian sentiments and goodwill of the belligerents.” The reason was that in the Japanese mind surrender was a criminal act; the surrenderer was a traitor; his family would live in perpetual disgrace and his name would be erased from any mention in his village records; he should first have committed suicide (hara-kiri). This attitude did not lead to “goodwill,” or to any sentiments most people recognize as humanitarian.

  General King tried to address this notion in a speech to the prisoners at O’Donnell when he told them, “You may remember this. You did not surrender. You were surrendered. You had no alternative but to obey my order. I did the surrendering. I am the one that has the responsibility, let me carry the responsibility.”15 The Japanese were unmoved. The camp commander, Captain Yoshi Tsuneyoshi, soon delivered a ranting jumping-up-and-down harangue in which he compared the prisoners to dogs and told them, “You think you are the lucky ones? Your comrades who died on Bataan are the lucky ones!”16

  For the prisoners, Camp O’Donnell was as close to hell on earth as they would ever remember. For the tens of thousands there was exactly one water spigot. Sergeant Charles Cook recalled, “If I wanted a drink of water, I got up in the morning and headed for the water faucet. There would already be hundreds waiting in line. I’d wait in line all day. The water would run a while, then they’d turn it off. So I just waited and took my chance.”17