by Oliver North
By 24 April, more than 54,000 American and Filipino prisoners were crammed into an area of less than one square mile in western Luzon. The captives called this hellish place Camp O’Donnell. The Japanese called it a “prisoner processing center.”
Malnourished and weak, many prisoners were too feeble to even go inside huts and were laid out on palm-frond mats. There was scant shade; the sun beat down upon them unmercifully. As they lay in their own feces, ravaged by swarms of flies and mosquitoes, they were plagued by malaria, gangrene, dysentery, typhoid fever, and other tropical diseases the doctors had never seen before. Men began dying at the rate of fifty a day. And then things got worse. Within six weeks, one of every six Americans who had survived the Death March was dead.
When they could, the POWs would bury the deceased. But it was the beginning of the rainy season and the torrential downpours constantly washed the bodies out of the shallow graves. The Japanese guarding the prison didn’t seem to care. They had built Camp O’Donnell as a place from which they could ship “healthy” POWs to Japan and Manchuria as slave laborers. Those too weak or wounded to be shipped out were simply moved a few miles farther into the jungle to other camps, like the infamous Camp Cabanatuan, to await death or release. Few dared hope of escape or rescue.
SERGEANT RICHARD GORDON, US ARMY
Camp O’Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
May 1942
The day after the surrender, the Japanese got us up at the crack of dawn and started marching us north, in groups of about 300 at a time. It was every man for himself. A lieutenant colonel had been wounded and he was unable to stand. They put him on a stretcher and asked for volunteers to carry him. I was one of four who carried that man all day long. We kept asking for relief, because it was hot and getting hotter. No one came near us to relieve us. When we put that man down that night we went in four different directions, because we knew that the next day, if we were still on the detail, we would not physically be able to make that march.
I think that the Japanese made sure they didn’t let units march together. Units are much more difficult to control than a loose group of prisoners. Generally speaking, they didn’t allow that to happen, and just broke up our military units.
One loose group of 300 would lead the first day, and another group would lead the next. We wondered how the Japanese would treat us. What they had done in China had been played on newsreels almost nightly in Manila theaters. We saw what they did to Chinese women and soldiers—raping, beheading, shooting—so we knew what they were capable of. But naively, we didn’t think that we would have to suffer that inhumane treatment as Americans. But we did.
When General King had tried to arrange to use our own vehicles to transport us out of the Bataan area, the Japanese refused.
They gave us no food at all. Some may have gotten a rice bowl somewhere, but not in my case. They would not let you break ranks to go for water. They would allow stops for water, but they were few and far between. So as a result, men would break ranks and go to some stagnant pool on the side of the road and begin to drink. And the Japanese would yell, get them back in ranks—or if they wouldn’t get in ranks fast enough, they shot them.
In my case, training was the difference between my survival and perhaps not surviving, because I had been trained in how to preserve water. I had one canteen, and I would put a little of that water in my mouth, swish it around, get a little trickle down my throat, and spit the rest back into my canteen. Hardly Emily Post etiquette, but an effective way to keep what water you had.
But most of these men came overseas untrained and not acclimated to the Philippine climate. They couldn’t tolerate it. The sun in the Philippines is incredibly hot, especially at noontime. And every day at noon on that march, the Japanese would stop us. Every time they stopped they conducted a shakedown. We were all warned before the surrender, just before we were all captured, to have nothing on us that was Japanese. We were told not even to keep some of the propaganda leaflets that they dropped on Bataan, which [they felt] showed that you had ignored their offer of surrender. But many of us had money we had taken off dead Japanese soldiers during the fighting. In my case I had a diary that some Japanese writer had kept. I got rid of it real quick—even before the surrender. If they caught you with something like that, there was an immediate execution.
Each time we stopped on the march, the Japanese put us into an open field with no shade, no trees around, and made you take your hats off and sit there all through their lunch hour. That was deliberate. It made you lethargic, to the point that you were in a stupor. That way you couldn’t run away.
I saw a young American soldier who passed out from trying to walk in that heat. He just collapsed where he was, close to the road. A Japanese tank, moving south as we moved north, deliberately ran over him. And behind that tank, the other tanks swerved to run over him.
A Filipino soldier in the column ahead of us was alongside the road as our column passed. He was on his knees and I watched as a Japanese soldier beheaded him. I don’t know why.
I saw a Japanese soldier beat a woman with the butt of a rifle because she was trying to hand food to one of the prisoners.
We marched like this for—in my case—eight days. They knew we were dying for food and water, and they weren’t going to let us have it.
At the end of the eight days, we arrived at a huge metal warehouse that had held thousands of sacks of rice. But it was empty when we got there. The Japanese pushed us inside that warehouse, as many prisoners as they possibly could squeeze in. We were standing like the subway at rush hour.
When we were all inside they shut the windows and door. The sun beat down on that place and men died in the night because of the heat and closeness, and from being ill to begin with.
The next morning when they opened the door for us to come out, there were a lot of dead men left behind. The Japanese took those people and threw them into a big open hole, poured gasoline on them, and set fire to them.
We were marched further up the road to a town called San Fernando, where they had trains with boxcars waiting for us. They shoved as many people into those boxcars as they could get inside, standing up, with no room to move. Every now and then, some would die, but we were packed in so tight, they couldn’t fall down. We finally ended that train ride, and when we got out of those cars, there were dead men in every car. Once again, the Japanese piled them off to the side and set fire to them.
When we got to our destination we started marching again. Men were dehydrated from being in that warehouse, in the boxcars, and being forced to sit in the noonday heat, and many more of them died.
If we had known it was going to be eight days of inhumane treatment and abuse, with so many dying or executed, I think there might have been an attempt at mass escape, despite the risk. But no one had any idea how long it was going to take, because the Japanese kept telling us, “Just a little way up the road we will stop for food and water.” It was a lie, of course, but they kept telling us that, like bait dangling in front of you. Those things never materialized.
The Japanese marched us to a place called Camp O’Donnell, which was to be our first prison camp. We had to stand in the hot sun and wait about an hour or so, until the camp commander came out. He gave us the full, ten-course description of what would happen if we tried to escape. We were searched, and if they found anything they didn’t like, those people were executed on the spot.
The conditions at Camp O’Donnell were indescribable. We were assigned to certain barracks, and we found ourselves with a single water pipe for 3,000 men. Men went without water even in that prison camp, many of them too weak or sick to wait in line for hours for a drink.
We thought that when we got to O’Donnell that our lot in life had improved, only to find ourselves in the Black Hole of Calcutta. I was ordered to burial duty, and after a while you couldn’t even recognize the corpse you were taking out. So I could very easily have buried my friends and never kn
own it.
CORPORAL RALPH RODRIGUEZ, JR., US ARMY
Camp O’Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
May 1942
Before the surrender I packed my medic’s bag with a couple of bottles of paregoric and a good-sized bottle of iodine. And those are the two things that I used throughout the Death March. I put iodine in the water and the paregoric to give out because it numbs pain a little and helps if you have diarrhea. It also has alcohol in it, and it builds you up a little bit.
I barely got through the areas where they stood you one against the other. I guess from lack of air or something, I passed out. A lot of the men hadn’t eaten for at least two, three days or more. You can’t march very far in a hundred degrees, much less half-starved. On the first night, there were some people ahead of us—the airfield was full of people. During the evening, late, we started coming across men who were sitting down or couldn’t move, or were lying down sick, asking for help. Right away the medics started to try to help them out, but as soon as you start helping them, here come the Japs with their bayonets.
The Japanese struck the butt of the rifle in one man’s face, broke all his teeth and nose and everything. I saw the Japanese pursue one who got behind a fruit stand and he shot him, and then he came up cleaning his bayonet.
One time they made us run—maybe because they were just mean. God was with us, for after making us run, they stopped us about two, three o’clock in the morning. We lay down alongside the road. I couldn’t find any comfortable spot to lie down, because it looked like a bunch of rocks. But the “rocks” happened to be turnips. And we all ate turnips. I ate my share of them after cleaning the dust off a little bit.
PRIVATE ANDREW MILLER, US ARMY
Camp O’Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
June 1942
After the surrender of Corregidor they put us on ships and took us across Manila Bay to a town called Maclarin, right outside the base where I started the war, at Nichols Field.
Then they marched us the full length of Dewey Boulevard to Bilibid Prison, the equivalent of Atlanta or Leavenworth. They herded us all in there. After a couple of days they started to take us out, 1,500 at a time, put us on trains, and took us to a town where we would stay overnight. The first four groups of 1,500 ended up at Cabanatuan Three, and there were 6,000 men there.
The first four days of June 1942, the majority of the men from Camp O’Donnell were moved. That place was a mess. A lot of men died there.
PRIVATE JOHN COOK, US ARMY
Camp O’Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
May 1942
When we got to Camp O’Donnell there were around 200, 250 deaths a day. Filipinos and Americans were dying. They would put two bodies that were so scrawny on one of the straight pole field stretchers, and they would carry it to the burial ground. They would dump them in the open pit.
When I got to Camp O’Donnell most of us had malaria and beriberi. I didn’t know that we had diphtheria, dysentery, typhoid fever, and stuff like that. The sickest people had yellow jaundice, typhoid fever, or dysentery. They were so skinny it was pathetic and you thought they were about ready for their graves.
One morning I had mess duty and was stirring the lugow pot—like a rice pot—with this fellow Clark. We were working on the Zero Ward. Zero Ward meant that you were there because you were expected to die soon. At that time there were about twelve of these scrawny guys on Zero Ward. It was just getting daylight and the poor fellows were standing there with their beat-up mess kits waiting for rations. Then I said, “Clark, come here.” And I pointed to a rat in the cooking pot, in the lugow for breakfast. “Clark, we can’t eat this stuff. What are we gonna do?”
Clark said, “I’m gonna go back behind the stove and push down the window. And you just flip it out there and they’ll never see it.”
I flipped that darn rat out there and there were ten or twelve guys who saw it and soon there wasn’t one scrap of that rat. They ate it, bones and all.
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
AUGUST 1942
Within weeks of the fall of Corregidor, Filipino civilians—many with relatives inside the complex of Japanese POW camps—began to get word to the outside world about what had happened on the Death March and about conditions inside the camps. U.S. and Filipino guerrillas, operating in the jungle-covered volcanic mountains, passed information about the camps and the POWs to allied intelligence officers. And while conditions inside the camps remained deplorable, the Philippine underground was eventually able to smuggle small amounts of medicine and some supplies into the camps.
Claire Phillips was the American bride of Sergeant John Phillips, fighting with the 31st Infantry when Bataan surrendered. He was sent to Cabanatuan, where he died of malaria, dysentery, and malnutrition. Claire, alone and living in Japanese-occupied Manila, was determined to avenge her husband’s death. She made contact with a Philippine resistance organization, which provided her with false Italian identity documents. Since Rome and Tokyo were allies, this would keep the Japanese from becoming suspicious of the attractive young American.
Claire, now known as “Dorothy Fuentes,” started a nightclub for Japanese officers.
She called it Club Tsubaki and opened its doors in October 1942. “Tsubaki” meant “camellia” in Japanese and also meant “hard to get.” The beautiful Filipino women who worked with “Dorothy” in Club Tsubaki were amazingly effective in eliciting information and military intelligence from the officers who frequented the club. The Japanese nicknamed Claire “High Pockets,” because she had a habit of hiding her tips in her bra. Unbeknownst to her generous customers, Claire used the money to buy quinine and other medicines that the Philippine resistance organizations smuggled into the POW camps. POW camps.
Claire Phillips
Robert Taylor
A key member of Claire’s spy and smuggling web was a highly respected and devout Army chaplain, Major Robert Taylor. Ironically, it was the gift of a signed Bible from “High Pockets” to Chaplain Taylor that almost got them both killed.
Shortly before the United States liberated the Philippines, a prison guard conducting a routine search of the chaplain’s belongings found the Bible. Within days, Japanese military intelligence arrested Claire. Though they tortured her and the chaplain, neither of them divulged what they knew of the other. Both survived the experience, and after the war, both the U.S. and Philippine governments recognized Claire for her heroism.
The courage of Claire Phillips, Chaplain Robert Taylor, and hundreds of others—mostly Filipinos—helped to ease the desperate plight faced by tens of thousands of prisoners seized in the most ignominious defeat ever suffered by the U.S. Armed Forces. Unfortunately, the good news of their bravery would remain unknown to all but a few Americans for several more years. And in the months after Pearl Harbor, good news was something the American people desperately needed.
CHAPTER 4
REVENGE FOR PEARL HARBOR: THE DOOLITTLE RAID
(APRIL 1942)
Stunned by the surrender on Bataan and the broad scale of Japanese attacks in the Pacific, many Americans saw the war they had sought to avoid as a succession of military disasters. Pearl Harbor had awakened the “sleeping giant,” but since December 1941 it had seemed as though there was little that the giant could do to stop the onslaught.
On 1 January 1942, representatives of twenty-six countries, calling themselves the United Nations, signed the Atlantic Charter, drafted by Roosevelt and Churchill. In it, the signatories pledged to “wage total war” against the German-Japanese-Italian Axis. But the document had little immediate effect on the global battlefield. The headlines in U.S. newspapers continued to carry a steady stream of bad news from around the world.
In the Pacific, it certainly appeared as though the Japanese were invincible. Guam—the first American territory to be seized by a foreign power—fell only hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The tiny garrison of Marines
and sailors on Wake Island had fought back valiantly against overwhelming odds but had finally succumbed on 23 December. Forty-eight hours later, on Christmas Day, the British surrendered Hong Kong, the crown jewel of their Far Eastern colonies.
The Japanese didn’t take time off to celebrate the new year or their victories. As they reinforced General Homma’s effort to crush opposition in the Philippines, they moved simultaneously to seize French Indochina, Thailand, Malaya, and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, and moved against the British in Burma. By 15 February, when Singapore fell—just over two months after Pearl Harbor—the Japanese had killed or captured more than 150,000 British, Australian, Dutch, and Indian troops. Four days after the fall of Singapore, Japanese carrier-based aircraft bombed Darwin, Australia, sinking thirteen Allied ships and razing the port.
On 23 February, a long-range I-class submarine shelled the coast of northern California and incendiary flares attached to small balloons started forest fires in Oregon. Though militarily insignificant, the attacks on the U.S. mainland caused panic in Washington. The American press, distracted by these events, barely covered a real disaster on 27 February in the Java Sea. There the Japanese destroyed a hastily cobbled together U.S.-British-Dutch task force and eliminated the last remnant of Allied naval power anywhere near their Home Islands or newly seized possessions. From that point on, the Americans were virtually fighting alone against the Japanese in the Pacific.
In an effort to slow the Japanese advance, every available submarine and all three carrier battle groups of the Pacific Fleet were thrown into the fight. Though poor torpedoes and inexperienced crews limited the initial effectiveness of the U.S. subs, the carriers scored some successes.
