A holiday for defeat, a silence for the march
Walking in the mall yesterday, I wondered if young people enjoying the school holiday truly appreciate Araw ng Kagitingan (Day of Valor). We commemorate the day the combined United States and Filipino troops surrendered to the invading Japanese Imperial Forces. April 9 is a holiday for defeat, and what follows is silence on April 10, the beginning of the Bataan Death March.
On the surrender, 75,000 Filipino and American soldiers became prisoners of war, made to march on foot from Bataan to San Fernando without food or water. Those who rested or held up the line were beaten, others randomly executed. The Japanese were overwhelmed; they didn’t expect so many prisoners. After the speeches and floral offerings on April 9, we return to the usual grind and forget April 10.
Scrolling online through mostly American firsthand accounts was gut-wrenching. On the US Air Force homepage, I read James Bollich describe the situation. It was scorching hot, and food rations had dwindled such that they had to slaughter Army mules for sustenance:
“We were running out of food … That’s when we tried to get extra food by going up into the mountains. People ate monkeys, snakes, lizards, just about anything that they could find. [Later on] essentially what we were living on was a slice of bread made out of rice flour, covered with gravy made out of water, and rice flour. We were essentially starving to death and weren’t in any shape to fight, and the Japanese easily broke through our front lines.”
After the surrender on April 9:
“We were told to destroy all of our arms and ammunition. Finally, here came the [Japanese]. They lined us up, counted us, and started us out on what is now known as the [Bataan] Death March … We had no idea what was ahead … I’ll never forget our old first sergeant, when the surrender came, he said, ‘We survived the war, the Japanese are going to take us and put us in a prison camp. We’ll get fed, have water, rest, and just sit and wait out the war.’ That guy was dead within three weeks after we were captured. It didn’t turn out that way at all.
“They took our wallets, anybody who had a ring, they took those, took our dog tags. Then they began to beat us. They beat us with rifle butts, sabers, clubs, anything they could get their hands on. That went on all day long. They wouldn’t let anybody have a drink of water or let us rest, and they didn’t feed us.
“And then I think it was around the middle of the second day that people began to collapse. We hadn’t had water in a day and a half, and in the tropics, it’s almost beyond what you can take. And of course, once anybody collapsed, the Japanese immediately killed them; it looked like they were really trying to kill us all.”
On road trips to Baguio as a boy, I remember counting the Death March markers on the road to Capas. People who now enjoy the convenience of NLEx and SCTEx will not be reminded of the horrors of the Death March, as recounted by another survivor in Newsweek of Feb. 7, 1944:
“A Japanese soldier took my canteen, gave the water to a horse, and threw the canteen away. We passed a Filipino prisoner of war who had been bayoneted. Men recently killed were lying along the roadside, many had been run over and flattened by Japanese trucks.”
On the MacArthur Memorial website was a grade-school activity that used primary sources on the Death March. It had a telegram and postcards. The telegram was to Been Steele’s parents in the US, informing them that their son was alive and a prisoner of war in the Philippines. Red Cross postcards were fill in the blanks as follows:
1. I am interned at HEADQUARTERS FOR MILITARY PRISONERS #3. 2 My health is EXCELLENT; good; fair; poor. 3. I am—injured; sick in hospital; under treatment; NOT UNDER TREATMENT. 4. I am—improving; not improving; better; WELL. 5. Please see that ___is taken care of. 6. (Re: family) LOVE TO THE FAMILY AND DON’T WORRY. 7. Please give my best regards to EVERYONE.
In another Red Cross card, Steele indicated that he was in Prison Camp 3, he was in excellent health, and with a 50-word limit for a message typed:
“Dearest Mother, Received several letters and a box. Certainly, thank you. Am looking forward to brighter days at home. Feeling fine, hoping this finds you all likewise. Give everyone my best regards, your loving son, Ben.”
We now know all those messages were a lie. The Japanese read and censored the mail. Surviving the March was one thing, surviving Camp O’Donnell was another. It was a cesspool with flies, mosquitoes, and overflowing latrines. What they lacked in food and water was made up with: dysentery, malaria, pneumonia, beriberi, and blood poisoning. If interned at O’Donnell, I would have wished I were dead.
Online primary sources bring the horror of World War II to life and make us wish never to experience a world war ever again. However, we really need a website with Filipino accounts to appreciate the war fought on our shores, from our viewpoint.
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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net
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