by Peter Eisner
“She told me that the living conditions in the place where she was in Bataan were extremely difficult due to the lack of food and the prevalence of malaria,” Roxas later said. “To save the life of her child, she had decided to make the sacrifice of separating from her, and she asked me to take care of her in my house.”
After several days Claire got word back from Carling’s workers that the child and the nursemaid had made it safely and that Judge Roxas, as kind and welcoming as expected, had taken them in. He wrote back that Dian and Lolita were doing fine. It was unlikely they would have problems with Japanese authorities, mostly because they appeared to be Filipinas and were not traveling or even leaving the house. The judge knew and understood that Claire missed Dian and expressed deep concern about Claire’s life in Bataan, but he agreed with Carling and warned her not to come, at least not right away. He even checked with Filipino friends inside the newly established government to see if he was being overly cautious.
• • •
His talks with his Filipino government contacts confirmed his concerns. “I agreed with the opinion of my friends that it would be very dangerous for [Claire] if the Japanese would come to know that she was an American who went to Bataan with the army, and that it was also dangerous for me if the Japanese happened to know that I was showing interest on behalf of an American.”
Occupation authorities, he warned, “required official passes to go in and out of Manila, especially from persons of the white race.”
Claire remained with the kind and welcoming Sobreviñas family in the little village above Dinalupihan. They confronted the daily uncertainty of finding food while doing what they could to remain healthy. Sometimes bands of long-tailed macaques robbed their meager food stores at night. People started to trap and eat them, overcoming a traditional fear that capturing monkeys for food was bad luck. One American soldier hiding in the jungle mentioned having beaten a tree monkey to the ground, but said that when the primate looked up at him, he could not handle killing it. Occasionally there was string beef for purchase or meat from water buffaloes—the docile animals that served as beasts of burden throughout Luzon.
On March 31 Claire was jogged awake when rats crawled into her hut; she wrote in her diary that she “kicked the rats off covers all night” and wrapped herself tightly in the covers, hoping the rats and the mosquitoes would not bite.
More Than a Dozen Tremors
Bataan, April 1942
THE EARTH ITSELF began to shake, the great equalizer beneath every one of them. A strong earthquake rolled across the Philippines after midnight; the magnitude was 7.3, capable of major damage, but its center was beneath the sea about two hundred miles south of Bataan, off Mindoro. Some of the starving soldiers on Bataan thought it might be divine intervention to prevent the surrender to come. “Was God going to rescue us in the final hour?” Felipe Buencamino III, a Filipino soldier, wondered as he prepared for the formal surrender the next day. “My heart beat fast. . . . I was sure something would happen . . . to turn the tide of defeat . . . but nothing did . . . and I waited and waited till I fell asleep.”
A dozen tremors followed, but divine intervention was not in store. The quake and aftershocks registered strongly in Manila, causing some damage but less than expected. Claire was jogged awake in her hut in Bataan, as were the internees at Santo Tomas; boulders swayed, water supplies sloshed, earthen huts and concrete buildings cracked. The quake, strong as it was, shook deep below the sea and damage was slight.
More rats than ever had been turned out from every hiding place. Poisonous vipers and crushing pythons were dislodged when the earth shook. The Aeta pygmy people hunted the snakes set out by the temblor and had no qualms about eating them. All mammals, reptiles, and insects were edible if they could be caught. Claire saw at least one nine-foot python that had been hacked before it could attack. Besides pythons, there were cobras and other poisonous snakes to worry about; given the negligible chance of finding antivenom, an attack would be fatal.
Death stalked the mountains. Sickness overtook the fear of war. Claire’s diary became a list of tending to the dead. “Five more deaths by malaria,” she wrote. “Twenty now.” A few days later the total number of deaths from malaria had crept up to twenty-five. Increasingly, the days in hiding were spent washing and burying the dead. Now and then, Claire was able to nurse one or two people back to health, but not often. Claire felt that hope was abandoning them. She counted thirty deaths on March 28 and worried whether she would survive. “One son and one daughter [got] fever[s] today. Guess I’m next.”
Of twenty huts in their hideout, all but three had been abandoned by early April; “all others moved down hill to get away from fever up here,” she wrote in her diary. Anyone who did not leave was either too sick to stand or was caring for those people. “In the three huts we are thirty, and all but eight are down with fever. That keeps us eight very busy. I have six under my care now.” A few days after the earthquake, Claire awoke in the middle of the night to what she thought was guns blasting “so loud we must shout to be heard.” There was no sleep at all on the night of April 14. The next day someone said that the infernal noise was an explosion at a Japanese ammunition dump. Suddenly there was no more fighting. The Americans in Bataan had been ordered to surrender. As they pulled back, the combined U.S. and Filipino forces were trying to burn and destroy anything that might be useful to the Japanese. The villagers on the hill, those who were upright, considered moving now with word of the American defeat. “We’re in a tight spot, but can move,” Claire wrote. “Pray we come through safe.”
The Death March
Bataan, April 9, 1942
I don’t think his story has been told back in the United States and I think it ought to be.
—LIEUTENANT BEN S. BROWN, A FIGHTER PILOT, RECALLING CAPTAIN WILLIAM E. DYESS AND THE DEATH MARCH
THE TEMBLOR was nothing compared with the exhaustion, after weeks of depleted rations, felt by the troops, already decimated by disease and starvation. The morning after the earthquake, Major General Edward P. King, the commander of forces on Bataan, knew that he had only one alternative. After informing his commanders and ordering that all weapons be dismantled, military gear destroyed, he sent a message across Japanese lines with his “ignominious decision” to surrender.
The decision came after months in which the U.S. forces had withstood seemingly insurmountable odds. The U.S. and Filipino forces held their own for a time with the fervor of men ready to keep fighting until reinforcements arrived. Despite their uneven training, the combined forces scored a significant victory when Japanese invaders attempted to outflank entrenched American positions in the so-called Battle of the Points along the western coast of Bataan. Of an estimated two thousand Japanese troops on hand when the series of battles began on January 22, only forty-three survived when it was over on February 8.
The valiant defense had been a major source of concern for General Homma, who had been expected by his superiors in Tokyo to secure final victory by now. His troops also were war weary and suffering from tropical diseases but could expect better supply lines and the arrival of fresh fighters when they needed them. The American victory in the Battle of the Points came with the recognition on both sides that MacArthur’s forces, increasingly exhausted and facing dwindling food supplies, could not survive indefinitely.
On February 7 MacArthur sent a message to Washington that included dire warnings. At best, only half of his original force was in fighting shape; the other men had been wounded in battle or were sick or starving. “Their spirit is good, but they are capable now of nothing but fighting in place on a fixed position. All our supplies are scant and the command has been on half rations for the past month.” With no supplies or reinforcements in sight, he wrote, “you must be prepared at any time to figure on the complete destruction of this command.”
A series of messages between Washington and MacArthur’s
Corregidor fortress led to Roosevelt’s order on February 22 that MacArthur withdraw to Australia so that he could reorganize an offensive war against Japan. MacArthur delayed until March 11. As he left Corregidor for Mindanao on a patrol boat with his wife, Jean, their son, Arthur, and aides, MacArthur looked back at the troops he was leaving behind at Corregidor. “On the dock I could see the men staring at me. . . . My eyes roamed that warped and twisted face of scorched rock. Great gaps and forbidding crevices still belched their tongues of flame. The desperate scene showed only a black mass of destruction.”
From Mindanao, MacArthur and family survived a perilous B-17 flight to northern Australia, evading Japanese planes whose pilots could not have known their valuable target. A month earlier Japan had begun punishing bombing runs on the naval port and Allied air base at Darwin in the lightly defended and sparsely settled Northern Territory of Australia. MacArthur and company landed at Batchelor Airfield, forty miles south of Darwin, and switched from the B-17 to another transport plane. Ten minutes after MacArthur left the airfield on that plane for a flight toward Alice Springs, Japanese planes blasted the tarmac where he had stood. MacArthur and family then transferred to a narrow gauge railway for Adelaide. Reporters were waiting for him en route at Terowie Station, about 135 miles north of Adelaide, where he issued his famous pledge. He told reporters that President Roosevelt had ordered him to regroup and plan an offensive against the Japanese. “A primary objective,” he said, “is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”
MacArthur encountered panic in Australia, where leaders and the populace were traumatized by fears of a full-scale Japanese invasion. He rejected an Australian defensive strategy of effectively circling the wagons and ceding a vast swath of northern and western Australia to eventual conquest. Instead, he promoted an offensive into the heart of Japanese-held territory at historic speed, into New Guinea and beyond—“to make the fight for Australia beyond its own borders. If successful, this would save Australia from invasion and give me an opportunity to pass from defense to offense, to seize the initiative, move forward, and attack.” MacArthur’s passionate arguments reversed Australian defeatism into “almost fanatical zeal” to succeed. Long before notions of victory, however, tragedy lay ahead in the Philippines.
• • •
On Bataan, three weeks after MacArthur’s flight, General King determined that now only 15 percent of his original 120,000-member combined U.S. and Filipino force was in fighting shape. On April 9 he surrendered before Colonel Motoo Nakayama, senior operations officer for the Japanese Fourteenth Army, with a simple request. He begged that his troops be treated well. “We are not barbarians,” Nakayama replied.
General Homma and the Japanese command did not anticipate the number of American prisoners they now saw emerging from the hills to surrender. Homma had prepared for about 25,000 prisoners, who were to be transported about sixty-five miles north to Camp O’Donnell, a former Philippine Army training facility near the town of Capas. Trucks and trains were not sufficient for three times that many POWs; food and health facilities were not available in sufficient quantity. The Japanese had not realized the fragile condition of most of the American and Filipino troops. Homma was a moderate in Japanese military circles, a democrat by nature, a cultured man who had traveled widely in the United States. His intention of treating the American prisoners with kindness and restraint sounded sincere. Speaking impeccable English, he told one of the prisoners who emerged from the jungle, Colonel James V. Collier, “Your worries are over. Japan treats her prisoners well. You may even see my country in cherry-blossom time. And that is a beautiful sight.”
Whether because of the overwhelming numbers or his inability to control his subordinates, the treatment of the POWs was grotesquely different. The Japanese began to corral their American prisoners the same day of the surrender in stages up along Bataan’s eastern road. Portions of the road were in firing range of Corregidor, where ten thousand Americans were under siege and were not part of the surrender. Japanese artillery fired from the beach and drew return fire from Corregidor that left some of the prisoners in the line of fire. A number were killed or injured. Within hours of surrender on April 9, the Americans were prodded onto the road at the start of a trek that became known as the Bataan death march. Mostly starving and thirsty prisoners were forced to march north for hours in the wilting sun.
“It would have been an ordeal for well men,” said Captain William E. Dyess, who marched and survived. “Added to the strength-sapping heat and blinding dust were the cruelties devised by the Jap guards. Considering our condition, I often wonder how we made it. We had had no food in days. Chronic exhaustion seemed to have possessed us. Many were sick. I know men who never could remember arriving at Orani. They were like Zombies, the walking dead of the Caribbean.”
The march northward was a horror show of inhumanity. Sadistic Japanese guards brutalized and slaughtered the Americans and Filipinos at will. When the POWs tried to stop at streams or begged for a drop of water, some were just forced back in line; others were bayoneted on the spot. Japanese guards looted money, rings, watches, and other artifacts from the prisoners. When one Japanese soldier found a man with a lighter marked “Made in Japan,” he lopped off the man’s arm with a sword. One guard decapitated an army captain for the crime of carrying Japanese yen in his pocket.
Day and night they were forced onward.
“I wondered whether the Jap buzzard squad was following us as it had,” Dyess recalled.”A flash and the crack of a shot answered my question. The executioners were on the job to kill or wound mortally every prisoner who fell out of the marching line. All through the night, there were occasional shots. I didn’t count them. I couldn’t.”
Many factors explained the Japanese treatment of the Americans. Some of the Japanese soldiers were sadists, no doubt. However, the Japanese foot soldiers were educated to view the Americans with disdain because they were less honorable and less duty bound than were subjects of Imperial Japan. They were told that their American adversaries might often be taller than they were, but they also were weaker in moral character and less likely to put up a strong fight. Propaganda also said that the U.S. military command would deal fiercely with insubordination—as if the Japanese themselves would not behave in the same manner. Half-baked analysis of the American fighting spirit filtered out throughout the intelligence community; the word was: They may be strong in numbers, but Japanese fighters are superior.
“When the battle becomes fierce,” a Japanese command document said, “the [American] officers and enlisted men dislike being moved up to the front lines; and again due to the prolonged war, they are homesick, bored, etc. Afraid of being punished severely, there are many who show a front superficially, although they are dissatisfied.”
There were other cultural factors. For the Japanese, surrender was the lowest of disgraces, and American prisoners were unworthy of sympathy. In terms of field training, the Japanese were used to longer marches without readily available trucks and jeeps for transport. On surrender, General King suggested that the Japanese transfer his men with American vehicles. His advice was disregarded, and there probably were not enough operable vehicles to do the job quickly in any case.
Survivors began stumbling into Camp O’Donnell mostly by foot, sometimes by train, a few days after surrender. Waves of soldiers kept coming for several weeks until they were crammed into the fifty-acre camp. Hundreds of Americans and thousands of Filipino prisoners had died along the march route from mistreatment, hunger, disease, and outright murder, and thousands more died at Camp O’Donnell before it was ordered closed at the end of 1942. Many of the surviving Filipino prisoners were furloughed in early July and allowed to return to their families. Thousands of Americans were moved to Cabanatuan, about forty-five miles east of Camp O’Donnell. It took months before news of the atrocities reached MacArthur and officials in Washington.
Escape
and Evasion
The Mountains Above Bataan, May 1942
IN THOSE EARLY DAYS of the Japanese occupation, John Boone could only hope to gather enough troops and ammunition to fight a guerrilla war. However, after starting with several dozen men and eight World War I bolt-action Springfield rifles, his luck changed. An old Filipino stumbled into his camp one day, a man too old to fight but bringing tantalizing news. “I know where there are guns,” he said. “Many guns and much ammunition.”
With the old Filipino as his guide, John Boone organized his first major insurgency mission, accomplished with surprising results even before his guerrilla army was fully constituted. He took advantage of the chaos after surrender and gathered up more volunteers, a corps of Filipino civilians willing to retrieve surrendered American weapons before the Japanese had a chance to seize them. Under Boone’s command, teams of three dozen Filipinos hiked down to sea level just south of the main coastal highway that Claire had once used to drive to Pilar. “We knew we would find weapons there,” Boone said. “But we were amazed to find . . . great quantities of medical supplies.” It was almost a field hospital supply of ointments and antiseptics and bandages, but also drugs, including large amounts of quinine tablets. This was lifesaving medicine.
