War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

  The Japanese, believing that General King was an envoy of General Wainwright, refused to discuss terms of surrender with him. But King eventually convinced Nagano that he was there to surrender his own men, and didn’t speak for Wainwright, the overall commander of the remaining forces in the Philippines.

  Reluctantly, the Japanese accepted the unconditional surrender of only King’s troops on Bataan—but not those still holding out on Corregidor. When asked to surrender his sword, an act of great significance for the Japanese, King had to admit that he’d left his ceremonial saber in Manila. Instead, he took his Colt .45 automatic sidearm and laid it on the table.

  General King had now officially surrendered his troops, 66,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans. He believed that by surrendering, he had prevented a bloodbath. It was the largest contingent of U.S. Army troops ever to surrender to a foreign adversary. The only comparable event was the surrender of General Lee’s army in the Civil War—that, coincidentally, had taken place at Appomattox on the very same day in 1865.

  JAPANESE POW COLUMN

  BATAAN PENINSULA, PHILIPPINES

  8 APRIL 1942

  1700 HOURS LOCAL

  By 1600 on the day General King surrendered his army, it had begun. All along the Bataan front, Americans and their Filipino allies were laying down their weapons and moving out onto roads and tracks in the muddy jungle to be placed in clusters of several hundred in long columns by Japanese soldiers. It quickly became apparent that their conquerors had no intention of abiding by any of the civilized norms for the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs).

  For his part, General Masaharu Homma had a hopeless problem. He had no idea how to handle this many prisoners. Tokyo had given him instructions for how to deal with 25,000 prisoners, not the 78,000-plus that he now had—and that worried him. He had insufficient food, water, medicine, and transport for his own men—how could he possibly care for this many prisoners? And most troubling of all, he was already five months behind Tokyo’s war plan schedule.

  Homma devised the perfect solution. By the time they arrived at the POW camps, sixty-five to eighty-five miles north on the Bataan Peninsula, there had to be fewer POWs—a lot fewer.

  The situation was ripe for atrocity. The American and Filipino POWs began the agonizing march to the prison camps in what would become a brutal, unorganized extermination of horrific proportions.

  The anguish would continue for years in the prison camps, where the Americans and their Filipino allies would be tortured, starved, shot, and worked until they expired.

  The initiation into this hell on earth began with the sixty-five-mile odyssey of hideous pain and suffering that came to be called the Bataan Death March. It turned out to be one of the darkest chapters not just of World War II but of any war, anywhere. As they struggled up the muddy jungle path toward their place of confinement, it was a good thing that these emaciated survivors were unaware of the words of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, just three weeks after the Japanese attacked. Commenting on the U.S. government’s inability to relieve MacArthur’s beleaguered garrison in the Philippines, Stimson was heard to remark, “There are times when men have to die.”

  CHAPTER 3

  A HELL WORSE THAN WAR: THE BATAAN DEATH MARCH

  (APRIL 1942)

  At 1300 on 9 April 1942, after holding out for more than four agonizing months, the Allies finally ended the siege on Bataan. As ordered by General King, the 12,000 American and 66,000 Filipino soldiers on the peninsula reluctantly laid down their arms. Many had been wounded; even more were sick. Nearly all were exhausted, starving, and deeply demoralized.

  Many felt betrayed by their leaders, who had long promised that help was on the way. MacArthur, for weeks derided as “Dugout Doug” for commanding from the deep concrete tunnels on Corregidor, was, by the time of the surrender, being disparaged for having departed to Australia for his new command. Though some men escaped to continue to fight as guerrillas, fewer than 2,100 of those who had endured the battle of Bataan made it across the channel to join the defenders on Corregidor, where General Jonathan Wainwright vowed to fight on.

  For the next twenty-six days, the Japanese pounded “the rock” nonstop with air strikes, naval gunfire, and artillery. Many of the rounds fired at the fortified island were made in America and had been captured on Bataan. By 6 May, Corregidor’s “holdouts” could endure no more. General Wainwright surrendered unconditionally that afternoon. By noon the following day, the Japanese had assembled enough small boats and barges to begin transferring 15,000 dazed American and Filipino prisoners from the battered island to Mariveles, on the southern tip of the Bataan Peninsula. On 8 May, they began the long trek north, following the bloody footsteps of their countrymen on the “march of death.”

  Bataan Death March

  Among those who were surrendered on Bataan on 9 April, others who escaped to fight as guerrillas, and the handful of “holdouts” who joined Wainwright on Corregidor were Sergeant Richard Gordon, Private Andrew Miller, Private John Cook, and Medic Ralph Rodriguez, Jr. Their eyewitness accounts of what they and their comrades endured are testament to the worst and best of humanity: horrific cruelty and incredible courage.

  SERGEANT RICHARD GORDON, US ARMY

  Bataan Peninsula, Philippines

  9 April 1942

  When MacArthur realized that he could not stop the Japanese with his Filipino army, he reverted to War Plan Orange, which dictated that we withdraw into Bataan itself. What he failed to do, though, was to bring the supplies for the Filipino troops that had already gone north to fight the Japanese that had landed on northern Luzon. The army left behind tons of food and stuff that we desperately needed later on Bataan. So when we moved over to Bataan, we were already short of rations.

  On 12 January [1942], MacArthur issued orders to cut the rations in half. And on 6 February or thereabouts, they cut the rations in half again. And in March we cut them again. So by the time the Japanese were closing in on us, in April, we were already living on fewer than 1,000 calories a day. And it’s totally impossible, given the environment of that area and the rugged terrain, to fight on under 1,000 calories a day.

  Most of the supply ships had been sunk by the Japanese, who had a tight blockade around the island of Luzon. We ate canned salmon and rice twice a day during the last two months of fighting on Bataan. We kept holding out, figuring things had to get better. In the meantime, the weight of the men dropped off something fierce. And before we knew it, there was no combat effectiveness whatsoever.

  And then disease came in. Men came down with malaria and dysentery, and it spread like wildfire. By the end of March they were committing 1,000 malaria patients a day to the field hospitals. That left us with only about 30 percent of the troop strength to fight off the Japanese by the time we began the final retreat to the bottom of the peninsula, in the hopes of escaping from Bataan.

  Later on I heard that Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, made the statement “There are times when men must die.” But it’s a good thing I never heard about that remark until after the war.

  We sort of figured out that help would not be forthcoming. It never happened. But you know, from my point of view as a professional soldier, I could accept it. But most of the men were youngsters just drafted into the military, or National Guardsmen who had no training to speak of. For them it was a much more precarious situation.

  By the first week of April it was pretty clear that our military wasn’t going to be able to rescue the Philippines. We knew it all depended on the American Navy coming to our rescue. But since Pearl Harbor was destroyed, that pretty well sealed our fate.

  The first realization that we were in really deep trouble was when the order came to lay down our arms and surrender to the Japanese. Until then we didn’t think that surrender was possible. Many of the men cried when that order was issued. As bad as things had gotten, we were still holding out hope that somehow Uncle Sam would be able to bail us out. We’d been promised it so often rig
ht along for the four months that we were in Bataan that we had come to believe it. We believed it because President Roosevelt made a speech to that effect—that arms, equipment, and everything else was coming our way. General MacArthur had said, “Hold on . . . don’t give any ground. Food and help are on the way, hundreds of planes, and thousands of men.” And of course, you live on those rumors. But the rumors never came true. On 9 April we found out that nothing was coming.

  General Ed King had absolutely no choice other than to surrender, and it took a great deal of courage, knowing full well that he might be court-martialed after the war. General King knew he had the lives of [66,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans] in his hands. But the Japanese did not want to accept General King’s surrender. And there never was an official document called the surrender of Bataan. General King placed his .45-caliber pistol on the table they were sitting at and turned himself over to the Japanese. He wasn’t allowed to come back to the troops, but word came back by one of the staff officers that the surrender was in effect.

  But I didn’t surrender. I went with a group of other soldiers and my friend Elmer Parks further up the mountain to a place called Mount Bataan, in the hopes that we could avoid surrender. Two or three days later, we were scrounging for food or anything that was left behind, because we couldn’t find anything on the mountain. And when we came down, we ran into a Japanese patrol. They captured us, and about fifteen Japanese soldiers came out from the underbrush and began to beat the living daylights out of us. They took everything we had and walked us down the hill to where the main group was. As I passed I saw a U.S. soldier tied to a tree—he’d been bayoneted. It was Major James Ivey from San Antonio, Texas, and they’d used him for bayonet practice. He was bare from the waist up, and blood was still spurting out of the wounds.

  Bataan Death March

  The Japanese took us to a staging area, an assembly point for thousands of our soldiers, and threw us into this enclosure. At this time I lost contact with Elmer Parks, and didn’t find him again for forty years.

  When they threw us into this stockade it was the middle of the night and pitch dark and you couldn’t see anything. And there were thousands of men all over the place, lying down out of sheer exhaustion. There was no order or discipline, just thousands of men lying in an open field. There were no latrines, and the men who were wounded or who had malaria or dysentery just relieved themselves where they lay. The place was covered with feces and was a terrible mess. I found a place and lay down, waiting for the night to pass.

  PRIVATE ANDREW MILLER, US ARMY

  Nichols Field, Philippines

  6 May 1942

  After the first air attacks in December, we were moved from Nichols Field to Bataan—a peninsula with Manila Bay on one side and on the other side was the South China Sea. The Harbor Defense Group and their big guns on four different islands in the mouth of the bay protected the entrance to the bay. Corregidor was the biggest and best fortified of these islands. The idea was to hold out until the Navy could escort ships over to support us. Well, it never happened.

  When my unit got sent to Bataan we were positioned at about kilometer mark 133. I guess you’d call it the front line, but the Japs called it the main line of resistance. The Jap offensive started on 3 April on our left flank. They never shot where we were at all. They’d send an occasional artillery round just to let you know that they knew you were there. On the night of 6 April the medics came in and took the men who had malaria the worst back to one of the hospitals.

  On the afternoon of the eighth, we were on a hill, and they weren’t too far away from us, and quite a few men got hit. For some of the men the only thing we could do was ease their pain with a shot of morphine, because there was no way you could save them.

  But the sun finally came up and somebody told us that they were trying to arrange a surrender. Well, we didn’t think that was such a good idea. So we made it down to the beach and found an outrigger canoe. Then we started out for Corregidor, which was not such a smart move. The tide was going out, and there’s a current in the bay. We got out about a quarter mile or so, looked over to Corregidor, and saw nothing but smoke and dust. We looked back at Bataan and it was the same thing—a lot of fire, everything was a mess. Airplanes were all over the place. Looking out in the bay [we could see] silhouettes of the Jap navy out there. You couldn’t go to Manila, and the water was full of sharks.

  I escaped, and got over to Corregidor. My hunch was right. They had more food over there and it was much better. I stayed for almost four weeks, until Corregidor surrendered.

  PRIVATE JOHN COOK, US ARMY

  Fort McKinley Base Hospital

  9 April 1942

  Three days before the surrender, the Japanese launched a big offensive with a lot of air and artillery strikes. I was on the front line, up on a lookout tower, about fifty feet up on this platform built between two trees. It was in the morning and I was supposed to give a warning with a siren if the Jap planes came over. But they came in over Mount Mariveles, in the sun, about 9:30 and they dropped a 550-pound bomb and blew up eighty-eight people in the hospital ward even though it was marked with a big red cross.

  We worked for three days and nights without sleep, and the night before the surrender the nurses were ordered on a bus and aboard a barge for Corregidor.

  When we got the order to surrender, the medics at Hospital Number One used a piece of white sheet and Colonel Duckworth had the folded-up flag, and on top of that he had his web belt and his .45. The officers and senior NCOs took our guns and presented them to the Japanese Tank Corps.

  JAPANESE-HELD TERRITORY

  AMERICAN POW COMPOUND

  BATAAN PENINSULA, PHILIPPINES

  MID-APRIL 1942

  It quickly became apparent to the prisoners on Bataan that their ordeal had not ended when the guns fell silent. The Japanese had no food, water, clothing, or medicine to spare. In fact, many of General Homma’s soldiers guarding the prisoners were in as bad or worse shape than their American and Filipino captives. Japanese troops immediately “searched for weapons”—an excuse for stripping the prisoners of anything of value, not just watches, rings, rank insignia, and cigarettes, but boots, mess gear, canteens, packs, even clothing—the very things the prisoners would need most to survive captivity.

  Once the “search” was complete, the prisoners were randomly counted off into groups of one to three hundred men and led off into the jungle. As soon as one cluster departed, another was formed up and marched off—ignoring any U.S. or Filipino unit integrity that might have kept comrades together to help one another.

  By 12 April, all organization for moving tens of thousands of thirsty, wounded, sick, and starving men into the interior of Luzon had completely collapsed. There were far too few Japanese guards to keep order with such a huge number of prisoners and there was no order in the ranks whatsoever. When problems arose on the muddy, blood-soaked path, the guards used their bayonets and swords—their officers had ordered them not to “waste” ammunition—in order to keep the prisoners from getting out of hand. Deadly incidents happened infrequently at first, but quickly escalated in number as the march north degenerated into a chaotic, genocidal extermination. Weak and terrified American and Filipino troops who did not instantly follow orders or who fell out of ranks from wounds, sickness, hunger, or thirst were disemboweled or beheaded.

  A Japanese soldier beheads a U.S. prisoner.

  For most of those at the front of the column, the “march of death” took only a few days. But for the vast majority—perhaps as many as 50,000 others—farther back in the pathetic procession, it was a matter of weeks. And although there are no official reports, because the Japanese kept no records and the Allied officers weren’t allowed to, survivors estimate that more than 2,000 Americans and as many as 10,000 Filipinos perished on the trek.

  The Japanese also killed hundreds of Filipino civilians, often for merely showing basic human kindness to the prisoners. In one horrific, well-doc
umented incident, a Japanese soldier used his bayonet to disembowel a pregnant Filipino woman and ripped the woman’s unborn baby from her abdomen for her “crime” of offering some food to an American POW. The Japanese soldier then “mercifully” killed both mother and child.

  Camp O’Donnell POW compound

  Several thousand prisoners were routed to the little railhead town of San Fernando, where they were loaded aboard narrow-gauge railroad cars. In stifling heat, they were packed in so tightly that when the weakest expired from suffocation, wounds, heat exhaustion, or disease, they had nowhere to fall. Many of the men had dysentery and couldn’t control their bowels, and as a result the floors were covered with diarrhea, urine, and vomit. The stench was unbearable. When the train finally arrived at Kapas, the Japanese opened the boxcar doors and the prisoners tumbled out. The bodies of those who had died during the journey were tossed outside into a pile, drenched with gasoline, and burned.

  The terrible trek was a prelude to the horrors that would follow. Afterward, survivors estimated that there was a dead body every ten to fifteen feet along the entire route of the Death March. Yet there would be many times over the course of their confinement when the living would envy the dead.