---

 

SEVEN

 

 

 

 

BY NOON on April 9, most Filipino and American field commanders had gotten the word to give up, and the jungle hills and hollows of Bataan were speckled with the white flags of surrender.

Like all men facing the dark, the defeated waited for the worst, convinced the worst wouldn’t happen. They’d heard the stories, of course. Japan’s reputation as a brutal occupier had been written across the world’s front pages—the wholesale looting, the violation of women, the wanton murder of civilians, the execution of unarmed prisoners of war—but most soldiers thought such stories exaggerated, made up to sell newspapers, and they did not believe them, or did not want to believe them.

So what if the Japanese were barbarians? They had to abide by the law, didn’t they? The international law of land warfare that prohibited the mistreatment of prisoners of war.1

“Everything is going to be all right,” officers assured their men. “Just stick together, and don’t worry.”

 

AFTER THEY DESTROYED their gear and gobbled the food they had left, most men sat down where they were to await the enemy. They were beaten men now, trying to shake a growing sense of shame. Some told themselves that disease and hunger had defeated them, not the Imperial Japanese Army, but they could not shake the feeling that they had just flat-out given up, and as they smashed their weapons against the nearest tree, the first of many acts of obeisance that would be required of them, some men wept.

“The little bastards,” said Corporal Brown Davidson of Denver, Colorado. “They’ve beaten us.”2

A handful of Americans refused to surrender and either disobeyed General King’s order or sought leave from their superiors and headed for the hills, hoping to slip through Japanese lines and make their way north to the Zambales Mountains, a staging ground for guerrillas.

Hundreds of Filipino soldiers tried to evade capture as well. They chucked their uniforms, borrowed civilian clothes from Bataanese villagers, and passed themselves off as locals or made their way to the peninsula’s eastern shore and paid fishermen there to ferry them across the bay to Manila, Cavite, Bulacan.

Private Humphrey O’Leary couldn’t decide what to do—dissemble and disappear, or talk some sense into his buddy Phil Murray.³

O’Leary was the son of an American expatriate who had fought in the Spanish-American War and had stayed in the islands to marry a Filipina. When the Japanese invaded, Humphrey O’Leary quit his job at his father’s construction company in Manila and, since he held U.S. citizenship, joined the American 31st Infantry.

He was taller than the average Filipino, skin was lighter too, and growing up he often passed for white, a puti. Now, sitting in a circle of American soldiers down by the beach, waiting for the Japanese, he watched his white comrades, his friend Phil Murray among them, smear their faces with sand and dirt.

It was laughable, all this rubbing. Loko-lokos, idiots, what were they thinking, that they could pass as natives?

Humphrey leaned close to his compadre.

“Come on, Phil,” he said. “Don’t be foolish. You’re too white. The Japs will see right through that.”

Murray stopped rubbing.

“Tell you what,” Humphrey said. “I’ll stay, Phil. We’ll sweat it out. “We’ll make this together.”

 

CONFIDENT his April offensive would bring victory on Bataan, General Homma had ordered his staff to prepare a plan to clear the peninsula of prisoners. The campaign for the Philippines was not over yet; Homma still had to take Corregidor, the American fortress and command center blocking access to Manila Harbor. Bataan was to serve as a staging area for the invasion, and the Japanese had to move their prisoners off the peninsula before they could use it as a base to attack the tiny island out in the bay.

The evacuation plan stressed expediency: Guards were to marshal the prisoners in groups on the Old National Road, the peninsula’s main artery then start them marching north to a railhead in San Fernando, sixty-six miles from the tip of the peninsula. Along the way Japanese supply troops were to set up feeding and aid stations and provide trucks to ferry the sick and wounded. At San Fernando the prisoners would be put on trains to Tarlac Province, disembarking in Capas, the station closest to their ultimate destination, Camp O’Donnell, a Filipino training post the Japanese had converted to a prisoner-of-war camp.

Expecting the battle to last the month, the planners set April 20, more or less, as the day to complete their preparations. Since their intelligence estimates were at best a guess, they could not say how many prisoners they would have to manage, but they guessed no more than fifty thousand.

The plan seemed sound, as far as it went, which is to say like all military plans it reflected the miscalculations, misjudgments, misbeliefs, and misintentions of its makers. Of course, at war nothing runs true to plan.

 

WITHIN HOURS of the surrender, 14th Army Headquarters realized its estimates, and thus its plans, were worthless. Reports from the field indicated at least twice the number of prisoners and refugees headquarters had expected, 76,000 soldiers and 26,000 civilians.

Everywhere the Japanese looked, there were prisoners. On the roads, in the hills, on jungle trails—squads, platoons, and companies of them, twenty here, two hundred there, a thousand at the airstrip in Mariveles. None of the hohei had ever seen anything like it. What a spectacle.4

The scene reminded Private First Class Jinzaburo Chaki of a photograph in a Tokyo newspaper, a front-page picture from Malaya showing great masses of British prisoners at Singapore.

“We have done the same thing here on Bataan!” he told himself.

Like all victorious troops, the hohei at first were fascinated with their captives, eager to get a close look at the men who had been shooting at them.

Private First Class Tasuku Yamanari thought the Filipino soldiers looked “like children, hungry children” begging for the dry biscuits the Japanese carried in their kits. The hakujin, however, the white men, Struck many hohei as oni, the devils they had been told about in training. Tall, hairy creatures with big noses and skin the color of a cadaver, ugly men, soft men, men without a fighting spirit, a will to win.

“How could they give up with this many soldiers?” Sergeant Tozo Takeuchi asked himself. And how could a hohei have anything but contempt for such men?

 

THEY KEPT PUSHING HIM down the trail, and his pack became heavier with each step, but Ben Steele wasn’t going to let himself fall again and take another beating.

When the group of prisoners reached the Old National Road east of Mariveles, the Japanese soldiers took their packs back, and Ben Steele and the other men were made to join a much larger mob of prisoners squatting in the sun on the side of a hill facing Manila Bay.

He was glad to be rid of his load but worried about what was ahead. These soldiers looked angry.

Hate! Ben Steele thought. “Hate is sticking out all over them.”

 

BY LATE AFTERNOON on April 9 most of the captured Filipinos and Americans had been gathered at assembly points along an eight-mile section of the Old National Road at the tip of the peninsula.

Corporal John Emerick of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, had been captured in the hills above Mariveles and was herded down to the airstrip there, then forced into line with hundreds of other men. An interpreter was telling them to empty their pockets and spill the contents of their bags and packs on the ground in front of them.

“You have guns, knives, anything,” he said, “and we kill you. We kill you instantly. Right? Instantly.”5

And then the searchers set to work picking through the men’s pockets and rifling their clothing and gear, and it soon became clear that the search for concealed weapons was nothing more than a shakedown, a treasure hunt for cameras and flashlights and mechanical pencils and fountain pens (especially Parker Duofolds—“Pah-kah,” the guards would demand, “Pah-kah pen”), sunglasses, mess kits, blankets and mosquito nets, safety razors and blades, terry cloth towels, extra clothing, rings and jewelry of all types, and, best of all, watches, American watches—that Hamilton or Bulova, that gold Lord Elgin with the jeweled works and pearl face.

The prisoners were too exhausted to protest and did not want to provoke the line of soldiers with pitiless faces holding those long bayonets, but as the Japanese stripped them of their possessions, many Americans started to seethe.

To them the signet rings, wristwatches, and fountain pens with gold nibs were more than graduation or birthday gifts or luxuries long wished for and purchased after months or years of putting money away. They were “personal property,” and property was an expression of the pursuit of happiness, one of their unalienable rights. A section of land, an automobile, a quarter horse, a watch—emblems of the opportunity, part of the freedom they had sworn to protect.

 

THE HELL with the bastards. Some men dug holes in the dirt and buried their valuables where they sat. Others in silent rage tossed their keepsakes and curios from home into the bushes.

Here and there a man ripped the cuffs of his trousers or the seams of his shirt, then worked some small keepsake into the secret space.

Men with string or thread hung their watches and rings around their necks and down their backs.

One soldier secreted a ring in his mouth and secured it to a molar with a piece of dental floss.

Waiting to be searched, tank corps crewman Bernard FitzPatrick of Waverly, Minnesota, watched out of the corner of his eye as two guards worked their way down a line of prisoners and stopped in front of a soldier wearing a wedding ring.6

“Waifu?” asked one of the guards, smiling and pointing to the ring.

The American nodded and the guards moved on . . . and FitzPatrick got an idea. He turned his college class ring upside down so only the band was showing. The first guard passed by without noticing, but the second was suspicious and told him to turn his hands palm up. Bernard FitzPatrick hesitated. He’d worked hard for that ring, four years of studying and classes, and he did not want to give it up.

The second guard was shouting at him now, and the first was reaching to detach his bayonet from his rifle.

“For God’s sake, Fitz,” a friend said, “give ’im the ring. They just cut some guy’s finger off because he wouldn’t.”

 

THE AMERICANS thought them “thieves,” “thugs,” “crooked bastards,” but the average hohei was no more larcenous than his enemies. American pockets were full of “souvenirs,” loot taken from Japanese prisoners or stripped from the bodies of Japanese dead.

Get rid of your Jap stuff, quick!

What Jap stuff?

Everything, money, souvenirs. Get rid of it!7

The word went around quickly, and at the airstrip in Mariveles men began to toss away their spoils, most men, that is.

A Japanese private searching a young Air Corps captain found a few yen in the man’s pocket. The guard hissed his disapproval and summoned an officer. The officer looked at the money, then forced the American to his knees. Some of the men standing nearby swore they saw a glint of sun on the officer’s sword as he brought it down on the young captain’s neck.⁸

Watching the officer wipe the blood off his blade, some prisoners started to think they’d gone back in time, awoken in another era. Who were these cold-eyed men who carried swords and cut off fingers and heads? Medieval marauders? A nightmare let loose upon the day?⁹

 

“ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN,” Sergeant Richard Gordon of New York told himself. Anything.

Gordon and another soldier from the American 31st Infantry, Corporal Elmer Parks from Anadarko, Oklahoma, had been hiding in the bush high on Mount Bataan. When surrender came, they started down a trail to the Old National Road. Along the way they came upon an abandoned truck, cranked it up, and continued down the mountain. Parks was driving fast and almost ran over a Japanese soldier who jumped out from behind a banyan tree.

“What the hell do we do now?” he said, as the truck skidded to a stop.¹⁰

Gordon glanced around. The Jap seemed to be alone. They could shoot the bastard, run him over maybe and hightail it into the bush. All of a sudden Richard Gordon heard a rustle. More Japs, a lot more, surrounding them, hands reaching up and yanking them out of the truck.

They started on Parks first. One clown hit him on the head with a rifle butt and sent him sprawling, and the rest joined in with their fists and boots. Now it was Gordon’s turn.

The first blow caught him in the face and filled him with fury. He had come of age in the streets of New York, a rangy kid from Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, and when the punch landed square on his nose, he thought, “Son of a bitch! I’ve never put up with this kind of crap in my life and I’m not going to start now.”

They hit him again, and again, and he thought, “Okay, so you take a beating, you take a beating and you live.”

 

THEY SEEMED to go off without warning, stoics one moment, lunatics the next.

They beat the prisoners as viciously as their sergeants and lieutenants beat them—slapped them, punched them, kicked them, boxed their ears, bashed their skulls, broke their bones.

They beat them for looking this way or that, for moving or not moving fast enough, for talking or keeping still—beat them for everything and for nothing at all.

It was their duty to beat the prisoners, and for some their pleasure as well. The same sadists who had turned the training barracks back home into crucibles of cruelty roamed the lines of helpless horyo, inveighing them with orders they did not understand then slam-banging them for being bakana, stupid.

 

ARMY MEDIC Sidney Stewart, standing in the ranks at Mariveles waiting to be searched, watched a guard coming down the line punch a soldier in the face. The soldier was young, a fledgling, and afraid, and he cried out in pain—a form of protest, as the Japanese saw it, that always invited more punishment. The guard raised the butt end of his rifle and bashed the soldier in the head. The boy sagged to his knees, groaning, and the guard raised his rifle for another blow. This time, he split the boy’s skull. The American twitched and shuddered in the dirt for a few moments, then he was quiet and did not move again.

Watching this, Sidney Stewart felt a “black hatred” begin to “boil” in his brain. He had thought himself a Christian man, small town (Watonga, Oklahoma), and full of faith. His religion had carried him through the bombing of Manila and the battle of Bataan, but this, standing there watching a guard bludgeon a comrade to death, this seemed to mock and reprove his piety, and the urge “to tear” his enemy “limb from limb,” to “kill for the sheer pleasure of killing,” overwhelmed him.11

 

APRIL 10, the day after surrender, the Japanese started their prisoners walking.

Groups of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred and more were herded into lines or loose formations (sometimes flanked by a brace of guards at either end, sometimes not) and told to get on the road. The ragged, disorganized groups of men set off at intervals. Half the 76,000 captives began the trek April 10 near Mariveles, at the tip of the peninsula, but every day for some ten days thereafter at various points along the thirty miles of road between Mariveles and Balanga, the provincial capital, roughly halfway up the peninsula, yet another rabble of Filipinos or Americans would come down from the hills or emerge from the jungle, and the Japanese would gather them into groups and head them north up the Old National Road.12

To label the movement a “march,” as the men took to calling it, was something of a misnomer. During the first few days of walking there were so many men on the road, one bunch following closely behind another, they appeared a procession without end, prisoners as far as the eye could see, mile after mile after mile of tired, filthy, bedraggled men, heads bowed, feet dragging through the ankle-deep dust.

They walked the sixty-six miles in stages. For those who started at the tip of the peninsula, stage one was a stretch of road that ran east nine miles to Cabcaben. There the road turned north and proceeded along Bataan’s east coast some twenty-seven miles, passing through the town squares of Lamao, Limay, Orion, Pilar, Balanga, Abucay, Samal, Orani, and Hermosa. At Hermosa the Old National Road turned west toward Layac Junction, then northeast for eleven miles across a torrid, sandy plain to Lubao, then continuing northeast to San Fernando—in all from Mariveles 66 road miles, 106 kilometers, 140,000 footfalls.

Some days the prisoners trekked ten miles, other days fifteen, twenty, or more. And hard miles they were. More than half the Old National Road on Bataan was a rural road—its base stone and crushed coral, its surface fine sand—built for the light traffic of the provinces. Four months of army convoys had churned up the hardpan, leaving potholes and sinkholes that tripped the men and shards of gravel that sliced up their shoes and boots.

They walked in the most torrid time of year, tag-init, the Filipinos called it, the days of dryness, the season of drought. From March to May the sun hung flame white and unshrouded in the Philippine sky, searing everything under it. By early afternoon the air was an oven, the hardpan as hot as kiln bricks.

 

______

 

LIEUTENANT SAMUEL GOLDBLITH of Lawrence, Massachusetts, started walking at Mariveles with a full pack—an extra uniform, underwear, socks, blanket, raincoat, shaving kit, stationery, mess kit, canteen, and a pink cotton towel, a keepsake from his wife’s trousseau. It wasn’t long before he had pitched everything save his canteen, mess kit, and Diana’s pink towel, which he used as a mantilla to keep the sun from baking his head.13

Goldblith guessed he was bound for a prison camp somewhere in the islands, but where he could not say. One rumor had them being interned in Manila’s Bilibid Prison, another had them bound for the railhead at San Fernando, but this information was of little use or comfort since few men were familiar with the local geography and had no real sense of the distances involved or the difficulty traversing them. They were walking, that’s all they knew, walking in the heat and dust, eyes burning and throats parched, wondering where they were going and when they would get there.

Richard Gordon happened to be walking in a group that included Brigadier General Clifford Bluemel. Gordon had seen Bluemel in action and remembered him as “a spicy little bastard.” Somewhere between Mariveles and Cabcaben, the Japanese had grabbed the general and started him walking, and along the way some of the guards decided to have a little fun.

They circled the general, then made him squat with his fingers locked behind his neck and started turning him in circles. When he lost his equilibrium and toppled over, they laughed—oh, how they laughed—and when he fought to keep his balance, his poise (“The man is a tough nut,” Gordon thought), they kicked his feet out from under him and howled that much harder.¹⁴

The looting went on as well. Units of Imperial Infantry were encamped beside the Old National Road, awaiting new orders and watching the parade of prisoners. Though most prisoners had been stripped clean by the time they reached Cabcaben, now and then a hohei resting along the road would get curious.

Sergeant James Gautier, an Air Corps mechanic from Moss Point, Mississippi, felt a hand grab his shirt and pull him out of formation. Another shakedown, he reckoned. All he had left was his wallet, and the Japanese was flipping through the folds, looking for something of value when he came upon a snapshot of a woman.

“Waifu, Waifu?” the Japanese soldier said. Gautier nodded, then the soldier dropped the picture in the dirt, stepped on it, and ground it with the heel of his hobnail boot.15

So this is what it meant to be a prisoner of war, thought Robert Levering, a Manila lawyer from Ohio who had volunteered to serve on Bataan. This is what it felt like to “come to the end of civilization.”¹⁶

 

PAST MARIVELES that first day, the highway ran flat for a few miles, then rose sharply in a series of steep switchbacks that had been cut into the side of an escarpment. The precipitous switchbacks were known as “the zigzag.” Unfolded, this accordion section of road was less than a mile, but its angle of ascent—520 feet in less than two-tenths of a mile—was so acute that the back-and-forth climb was a tough one, especially at the height of the hot season. And for men left weak and exhausted by disease, hunger, thirst, and fear, the ascent was torture.

One hairpin turn after another blocked the marchers’ view and made the climb seem endless: another incline, another turn, another incline, up, up again, up some more.

On the outside turns, the road dropped off sharply into deep ravines, stories deep, many of them, with boulders, stumps, trees, and tangled underbrush waiting at the bottom.

The labor of climbing the switchbacks under a tropical sun left the men gasping with each step, and it was not long before some of them began to collapse and crawl to the shoulder of the road.

The guards accompanying the first columns climbing the zigzag seemed to ignore the dropouts, but prisoners in later columns began to spot bodies at the bottom of the ravines, bodies wearing familiar uniforms.

 

PROM THE TOP of the zigzag the road ran flat and east, seven and a half miles to the seaside town of Cabcaben on Manila Bay. Along this stretch the marchers now began to encounter an increasing number of Japanese trucks, tanks, and horse-drawn artillery, all moving south to stage for the invasion of Corregidor.

Many of these trucks carried troops, and as these vehicles passed the columns of prisoners, Japanese soldiers would lean out with a bamboo staff or a length of wood or the butt end of a rifle and, like a polo player bearing down on a ball, swing their cudgels at the heads of the men marching along in the crowded ranks on the road.

They fractured a lot of skulls, smashed a number of jaws, dislocated scores of shoulders. Now and then a truck would swerve sharply toward a column, and the Japanese riding shotgun would throw his door open to catch a marcher flush in the face.

“Let’s stay on the inside row in the column,” Humphrey O’Leary told his friend Phil Murray. “If we march on the other side, the Japs will bash us in the head.”17

Here came a truckful of soldiers holding lengths of rope as long as whips, lashing laggers on the road. One whip caught a prisoner around the neck, and the Japanese in the truck started to reel him in as the truck kept going. The poor man was twisting this way and that, dragging through the cinders. About a hundred feet later he was finally able to free himself, and he got to his feet, clothes shredded, skin lanced and bleeding, and looked back down the road.

“You bastards!” he yelled after the truck. “I’ll live to piss on your graves.”¹⁸

 

A MILE beyond the top of the zigzag, the columns of prisoners passed the entrance to one of the large American field hospitals, part of the headquarters and service area that had been tucked in the American rear. The Japanese had bombed and shelled the service area often during their second attack, fire that left the hospital in ashes. Now wandering among its charred ruins were scores of wounded Filipino soldiers who had been treated there. Many were still in their hospital pajamas or bathrobes, grimy now with dirt and soot. Their wounds and stumps were beginning to suppurate and their bloody bandages and dressings needed changing.

Major William “Ed” Dyess of Albany, Texas, an Air Corps pilot in the line of march, watched Japanese guards herd the sick and wounded Filipinos out of the hospital grounds and set them walking. To Dyess these “bomb-shocked cripples” had a look of “hopelessness in their eyes,” and they stumbled along stoop shouldered for more than a mile before “their strength ebbed and they began falling back through the marching ranks” and to the side of the road.¹⁹

Zoeth Skinner of Portland, Oregon, came astride a Filipino amputee hobbling along on crutches. Japanese infantrymen camped along the way yelled and laughed at the cripple, poked him with sticks, tried to make him stumble. A while later farther up the road, Skinner noticed a tail of white gauze dragging in the dirt ahead of him. At the other end of the tail, twenty feet forward, was a man with a bandaged leg, struggling against his wound, his dressing unraveling as he walked.20

 

AT FIRST the marchers tried to keep their sense of society, their culture of comradeship, and help one another. The lucky ones, men like Humphrey O’Leary and Phil Murray, were able to “buddy-up” and watch out for each other, but in the chaos of the surrender and the first commotion of captivity, friends became separated, and men like Ben Steele and Richard Gordon and Dominick Giantonio of Hartford, Connecticut, found themselves in the ranks of strangers, lending a hand when a hand was needed.

“Get up!”

“Let’s go!”

“Don’t fall, they’ll get you.”

Against despair, however, each man had to struggle alone. Ed Dyess got a “sort of sinking feeling” every time he saw a Ford or Chevrolet truck bearing Imperial Japanese Army insignia, prewar American exports (or a little piece of home, as Dyess saw it) packed now with enemy troops who jeered at him as they passed by.21

Colonel Richard Mallonée from Utah was a veteran of the old horse-drawn artillery, and when he felt low he distracted himself by studying the equipage of his Japanese counterparts. Each time a horse-drawn limber and caisson came along, Mallonée noted the condition of the animals—Were they in good flesh? Well-groomed and properly harnessed?—and the bearing of the men riding them.²²

Lester Tenney of Chicago set goals for himself. Make it as far as “the next bend in the road,” he thought, or up to that “herd of carabao in the distance.” He also had a dream—“Without a dream,” he figured, his “resolve would weaken”—a dream of home. He held hard to the image of his wife, Laura, his reason, he told himself, for living. And to keep his dream safe, he tucked a picture of her in his sock, telling himself it gave each step purpose.²³

 

THE SUN was inescapable. It blistered their skin, baked their shoulders and backs, beat on their heads. Some men had managed to keep their helmets, some wore hats or caps or took rags and handkerchiefs and knotted the ends to fashion a sort of cap, but many men had no cover at all and walked bare-headed under the blazing sun.

The sweat soaked their clothes and streamed down their faces. It mixed with the thick dust and created a kind of gray sludge that ran into their eyes, stuck in their beards, caked on their clothing. They looked like ghosts of themselves mantled in gray, tramping along in a pall.

As each ragged group of men reached Cabcaben, the southernmost town on the peninsula’s east shore and the place where the Old National Road turned north up the coast, they were halted and put in a holding area—a dry rice paddy, field, or section of runway at Cabcaben’s jungle airstrip. From what the men could tell, there were a number of these marshaling yards in Cabcaben, places where the disorderly processions of prisoners from Mariveles were reorganized.

In the holding areas, the men were made to sit feet to back for hours at a time before moving on (the “sun treatment,” they came to call it). At last, when they were ready, the guards rushed in among them, screaming, kicking, and flogging the men to their feet, then herded them onto the road where they were arranged into regular marching columns, three or four ranks across, a hundred to four hundred men in each column, with a handful of guards assigned to walk the flanks and bring up the rear.

By now the prisoners’ hunger was starting to gnaw at them. They had been half starved before surrender and most had not had a scrap of food since. Even more pressing was their thirst. In the chaos at Cabcaben, only occasionally did the Japanese allow the prisoners to fill their canteens from a nearby stream. Most went without water and they rapidly dehydrated and began to suffer heat exhaustion: their temples pounded with pain, their heads felt afire, they became disoriented and wobbly with vertigo.

Back on the road, the guards yelled at them to pick up the pace.

“Speedo,” they shouted, walking or riding bicycles beside the formations. “Speedo! Speedo!”

Some guards, laughing, started their columns running.

 

BEN STEELE was watching for socks.

Men were starting to blister. Big blisters, the size of a half-dollar, blisters in clusters, breaking and bleeding with every step. Some men used sharp rocks to make slits in their shoes and boots, makeshift sandals, but their feet were so swollen the skin just bulged painfully through the openings. Others removed their footwear and walked barefoot, wincing with every step.

He had to find dry socks or soon he too would be hobbled. Ben Steele pawed through packs and bags abandoned along the road. Finally, somewhere north of Cabcaben, he saw what he’d been looking for.

A corpse lay on the shoulder just ahead. The dead man was wearing garrison shoes, low quarters instead of work boots, and the laces were untied and loose.

Ben Steele removed one of the shoes, stripped off the sock, and was reaching for the other foot when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a guard headed his way and dashed back to his place in the column.

“What the hell were you doing back there with that dead guy?” said one of his fellow marchers.

“You gotta take care of your feet,” Ben Steele said, “or you’re not going to get very far.”

 

MEN HAD BEEN PALLING by the wayside since the zigzag, but the guards had been so busy collecting all the captives and getting them on the road that they had paid the dropouts little attention. After the prisoners were put in columns at Cabcaben, however, the guards in charge of each formation started watching their prisoners more closely, and now when a man went down, a Japanese was soon standing over him.

“Hayaku täte!”

The order was unintelligible but the meaning of the kick that followed, the hard toe of a hobnail boot, was clear. Get up! Get up immediately or . . .

The fallen tried to raise themselves, tried to pull their knees under them, push up on all fours, but their heads, thick from fever, pulled them down, and their muscles, wasted by months of malnutrition, collapsed under them.

“Hayaku! Hayaku!”

 

THE JAPANESE type 30 bayonet was twenty inches long, overall, with a fifteen-inch blade. The weapon looked more like a Roman sword than a knife-bayonet, and when it was fixed to the end of a fifty-inch Arisaka rifle, it gave the hohei a kind of a pike, a five-and-a-half-foot spear.

The average Japanese foot soldier prized his bayonet. It was a symbol of his office, a twentieth-century warrior nodding to his samurai forebears. He would wear his bayonet home on leave in a scabbard. No other modern force spent so much time practicing with cold steel or developing in its men the stone heart to use it.

If a prisoner was straggling, lagging behind the formation or slowing it down, most guards would just jab him in the lower back or buttocks, a quick poke deep enough to hustle him along and make him rejoin the formation. (After a guard stabbed Sergeant Ed Thomas of Knox, Indiana, in the right buttock, he told himself he could run “all the way to Manila” if he had to.) If a man failed to raise himself, however, he usually got the blade to the hilt.24

A young American in Sergeant Tony Aquino’s group had fallen face-first to the gravel roadbed, and a guard at the rear of the column ordered the marchers to halt. He kicked the young American in the ribs and shouted at him to stand up, but the soldier got only as far as his knees before he collapsed again. The guard kicked him harder. (Come on compadre, Aquino thought, get up, get up!) The young American raised his head (Aquino could see blood spilling from the man’s mouth) and reached out, as if to ask the guard for help.

The guard put his bayonet to the man’s neck, shouted, and drove the blade home. The American rocked back on his heels and rose up on his haunches, then the guard jerked the blade free, and the boy toppled over in the dirt.

So it was going to be a death march, Aquino told himself, “death on the road to nowhere.” Falter and fall, he thought, and “there you will stay.”25

When a sergeant in Joe Smith’s column fell to the road, two of his comrades broke ranks to help. A guard from the rear of the column came running and shouting, and he beat the Samaritans back into line, then wheeled about and bayonetted the man on the ground. As Smith came abreast of the scene, the guard was struggling to free his weapon. He had driven the blade so deep that he had to put his foot in the small of the man’s back and pull the rifle with both hands to wrest it free.²⁶

 

THIRST is a warning, the brain reminding the body that its essence is being spent. On an average day, an average man requires two to three quarts of water. The body is liquid, 60 percent of the chemical equation of life, and the brain is always metering the balance. If the level drops just 2 percent, the hypothalamus sends out an alarm—the urgency for water, the craving to drink.

The men on the death march were drying up. As their bodies tried to conserve fluids, they stopped sweating and urinating. Their saliva turned adhesive and their tongues stuck to their palates and teeth. Their throats started to swell, and their sinus cavities, dry and raw from the dust and heat, pounded with a headache that blurred their vision. Some men got earaches and lost their hearing. A guard could shout “Hey!” (kora!) all he liked, but a man down from dehydration, dazed and deaf with heat fever, would never hear the warning or sense the watchman’s fatal approach.

 

THERE WAS WATER all along the route, plenty of it. On the way to nowhere the men on the death march passed one artesian well after another. In the towns the wells had spigots; on the outskirts they flowed freely from an open pipe, usually within a hundred feet of the road where parched men could see the water gushing in the air, see it bubbling, smell (or so some imagined) its fresh scent.

The guards were under orders to keep their columns moving. They might stop to make way for one of the convoys headed south, or they might pull up at a certain point to wait for their relief, but unless a superior had ordered them to stop, or they had covered the distance assigned them that day, they dared not allow their formations to line up for hours at a bubbling pipe. Japanese section chiefs patrolled the road, and any guard who failed to enforce marching discipline was yanked aside and beaten on the spot.

So the marchers had to sneak a drink on the run or during a rest break, and the only “water” within easy reach lay in the bottom of the drainage ditches, carabao wallows, and small stagnant pools beside the Old National Road.

During a rest a Japanese officer watching Ed Dyess’s column allowed a few men to collect their comrades’ canteens and fill them from a wallow. It was a foul drink, putrid and brackish. Gnats and flies swarmed above green scum on the surface, and the water gave off a “nauseating reek” that made the men retch, but Dyess and his comrades held their noses and “drank all [they] could get,” aware that what they were gulping would likely lay them low.

From their first days in the islands, soldiers were warned not to drink from pools of standing water or slow-running streams, mediums for the pernicious microorganisms that cause dysentery. Some knew that tincture of iodine rendered the water safe, but only a few medics and a handful of others had a bottle of the disinfectant. The rest simply ignored the risk. And on the road north from Cabcaben to Balanga, it was not unusual to see soldiers crazed with thirst on their bellies around some stinking sump or muddy cistern. Just like cats, thought Richard Gordon, “lapping up milk from a saucer.”27

 

SOME MEN were so dehydrated, the neurotransmitters in the brain started to shut down. In the pathology of dehydration, they became “functionally deranged.” A few developed visions, hydrohallucinations—the cool mountain spring, the pristine waterfall. Most simply lost their minds, their sense of reason.

Only a madman would ask the enemy for water. Robert Levering thought one of his guards “seemed a little friendly” so he pointed to his mouth and mimed drinking from a canteen. “Mizu nail!” the guard shouted, no water, and gave Levering a good smack on the side of the head. Men who begged for a drink were clubbed with rifle butts, wooden cudgels, or golf clubs the Japanese had looted along their way. And it soon became clear to those men who had any sense left that the key to survival was not in finding a drink but in controlling the urge to seek one.28

 

BEN STEELE was drying up. His tongue was swollen and he felt himself gagging on it.

He looked at the sun. Not a prairie sun, he thought. This one was hotter, less forgiving. No trees, no buildings, no shade.

He stripped off his T-shirt and draped it over his head. Somewhere north of Cabcaben he got his first sun treatment in an assembly area. Must have been more than two thousand men sitting in that damn field.

Why the hell were the Japs doing that? Didn’t make any sense. Mean bunch of bastards.

Back on the road he was choking again. Man next to him had some water.

“Hey, gimme a drink, will ya?” Ben Steele said.

The man kept walking.

“Come on buddy, I’m in bad shape. Whadaya say?”

“Here,” the man said, relenting. “Don’t take it all, you understand?”

Farther on, walking in the first rank at the head of a column, Ben Steele caught a glimpse of something at the side of the road. A half-gallon tin can . . . and it was half filled with water! An offering from one of the locals, he guessed.

Now he was the one with a drink, and other men began to pull at his sleeve and implore him.

“Water! Come on, water!”

When the can was empty, he would dip it in a rice paddy, a wallow, a drainage ditch.

He didn’t share with everyone, just those he couldn’t ignore.

“Gimme some water, dear God, please!”

“Here,” he’d say, “don’t take all of it.”

 

THEY’D BEEN WARNED. Interpreters had addressed the columns: “You must maintain your organization. You must keep your position. No break, no break without Japanese permission.”²⁹

But at almost every artesian well along the way, some soldier insane with thirst would break formation and run for the pipe. Sometimes a guard would raise his rifle and drop the miscreant on the run, and sometimes he would wait and put a bullet in the prisoner just as the man reached the pipe and was bending down to the clear bubbling water.

When the men in Sidney Stewart’s column came upon “a cool mountain stream,” their guards shouted for the formation to stop. Stewart took a deep breath. The ground along the riverbank “smelled mossy and wonderful” and the water looked “so dear, so cool, so delicious.”

“If only I could throw myself down into the water and lie there feeling it rush over my body,” he thought.

The prisoners waited for the guards to tell them to drink, “waited and waited.” After a time one man could wait no longer. He ran from the ranks, plunged his face into the stream, and in an instant a Japanese sergeant was standing over him, unsheathing his sword. What happened next happened so fast that Stewart caught it only in flashes—the sword clearing its sheath, the sound of a blade descending (“a quick ugly swish”), the head rolling down the bank into the stream, bloodying the water that hundreds of men were waiting to drink.30

North of Cabcaben, the Old National Road had been part of the battlefield, and the land on either side of the road, once lush with nipa palms and shady narras, had become a waste of black stumps and brown bomb craters. Littering this charred landscape were the incinerated hulls of tanks, smashed trucks, and twisted cannon, America’s matériel “advantage” now a melancholy reminder of America’s worst defeat.

Dead men and animals littered the field as well. More often than not, the corpses lay where they fell, marking their last stand. (During a rest John Olson happened to glance at an embankment and saw the body of a Philippine Scout, helmet still on, frozen in the act of climbing through a bush. Whatever had killed the soldier had caught him in midstep, and there he stood, “in suspended animation,” Olson thought, one hand holding on to the bush the other reaching through it to clear the way.) A number of these remains were floating in the rivers and streams or lying half submerged on the banks, decomposing rapidly in the heat and defiling the water.³¹

Still, men stopped and drank, drank with the dead. Even water polluted by a corpse was better than no water at all. The bodies reeked and were so bloated their skin was beginning to split, but Zoeth Skinner drank his fill, and so did Robert Levering and James Gautier and Preston John Hubbard. They held their noses and looked away from the grotesques floating nearby, swollen black from lying in the sun, and they drank that awful effluent by the canteen and bucket full. James Gautier forced himself to stick his head back into the water for a second drink. “Lord,” he prayed, “keep me from getting sick.”

 

BY THE THIRD DAY of the march, men were regularly dropping to the road or staggering out of formation—men with fever, men with dysentery, men too weak to go on. Now, however, instead of rushing up to dispatch the dropouts, the guards on the flanks started to ignore them.

“Why?” Sidney Stewart asked himself. “Why are they leaving them when they had killed them before?”

The answer was soon apparent. Stewart heard the report of a rifle behind him, at the very back of his column, then he heard another shot, and a third.

In other columns prisoners began to notice the same thing. Soon the men marching at the rear of those formations confirmed what their comrades were beginning to suspect—some of the guards had formed “cleanup” crews, or, as the marchers took to calling them, “buzzard squads.”

“Oh, God, I’ve got to keep going,” Stewart thought. “I can’t die like that.”32

By that point, the Old National Road was lined with fresh corpses. Hundreds of dead, sprawled on the shoulders, strewn in the drainage ditches.

First Lieutenant Ed Thomas of Grand Rapids, Michigan, caught sight of his captain and company commander lying in a ditch, dead from a bayonet wound. “His marching days are over,” Thomas thought. And Bernard FitzPatrick kept passing corpses clad in faded blue hospital pajamas, Filipinos mostly, the cripples and amputees who had left their beds in the field hospital after the Japanese had assured them they were free to walk home.³³

In the heat the bodies began to rot, and it wasn’t long before great swarms of flies were feasting on them. During the day dogs and pigs joined the flies, and at night the smell of death lured large carnivorous lizards down from the hills, but it was the crows that commanded the carrion, crows standing wing to wing on the bloated bodies, tearing at the flesh, crows roosting patiently on the wire fences along the road or, as Private Wince “Tennessee” Solsbee noticed, always circling overhead, waiting for their next meal to drop.

“Y’all go away, big birds,” he said. “I’m not fixin’ to die yet.”34

The bodies also attracted the attention of Japanese tank and truck drivers.

Murray Sneddon of Glendale, California, watched a convoy of trucks bear down on two bodies in the middle of the road. The first truck struck the first body with its right front wheel and left an imprint on the corpse. The trailing trucks followed the same line, and after they had passed, all that was left were two silhouettes in the dirt, outlines that hardly looked like men. It won’t be long, Sneddon thought, before those bodies will be “nothing more than . . . oil spots.”³⁵

Richard Gordon stood horrified as a column of tanks crushed an American sergeant who had fallen asleep on the shoulder, and Brown Davidson came upon remains that had been run over so often, all that was left intact was a hand lying nearby. To Ray Hunt of St. Louis the remains on the road looked like “wet sacks.” Major John Coleman of Wellington, Texas, thought them swatches of cloth, khaki cloth, until he stepped on one and slipped. “Good God,” said Marine Private Irwin Scott of Dallas, “we’re marching on our own men.”³⁶

 

BEN STEELE believed in God, but he did not think of himself as a man of faith, a religious man.

Back home he rarely spent Sundays in a pew and never wandered out to the prairie to listen to the tub-thumping evangelists call the Holy Spirit into their tents.

The Holy Spirit, he noticed, was nowhere in evidence on the Old National Road. How many of the men begging for a drink had gone to their deaths with the words “Please, God!” still on their lips?

He wasn’t angry at the Lord. He was just being realistic. Faith wasn’t going to feed him or slake his thirst. He had to focus on the next wallow or well or that guard, the one up ahead there raising his rifle and aiming at a Filipino who had broken ranks and was running to a stand of sugarcane. (The bullet caught the poor kid in the back and sent him sprawling, and the guard, over him now, was pulling the trigger again.)

Ben Steele thought, “Okay, this may happen to me, but all these other guys are alive and I’m not any worse off than they are, so I’m going to hang in there as long as I can. If there’s going to be anybody left alive from this, I’m going to be one of them.”

 

BY THE FOURTH DAY of the march, they were desperate for something to eat. Ray Hunt’s hunger was textbook: The first day he felt empty, barren, vacant; the second day he had sharp pains in his esophagus; the third day he was obsessed with thoughts of food; the fourth day he felt nothing, a sure sign he was starting to starve.37

The men in James Gautier’s column, resting in a field during a change of guard, started digging with their fingers for derelict vegetables—camotes, a native tuber, and radishes. They dug like dogs pawing at the dirt, dug here, dug there, dug so many holes the field “looked like it had been freshly plowed.”³⁸

Army doctor Paul Ashton of San Francisco was dubious when the men around him got the idea to eat a banana plant and started tearing away the stalk’s leaves and outer layers to get at its core. The meat of the plant looked a lot like celery but tasted bitter like tree bark. Worthless, Ashton concluded. Might as well eat cardboard.

Captain Sam Grashio of Spokane, Washington, and his march mates made a meal of some horse feed, oats a Japanese hostler had chucked because they were crawling with weevils.³⁹

As their formation passed stands of sugarcane, a few of the men around Sergeant Charlie James of New Mexico managed to snatch some stalks from a nearby field. Later James noticed that after he had chewed a hunk of cane and spit it out, the men marching behind him would scoop up the masticated mouthful from the dirt and “chew it again.”⁴⁰

The Japanese, meanwhile, were feasting on captured American food. A number of Imperial Infantry units were garrisoned along the road between Balanga and Cabcaben, and at intervals they had established what appeared to be food dumps—stacks of crates and boxes bearing American brands.

Ed Dyess’s formation stopped across from one such cache, and an aging colonel boldly crossed the road, pointed to the piles of food, and in sign language he asked the guard for something to eat. The guard grinned for a moment, then picked up a can of salmon and smashed the colonel in the face, laying his cheek open to the bone.

Passing through Pilar, Paul Ashton spotted a food dump piled high with cases of Vienna sausage. Wasn’t that thoughtful of the rear-echelon boys, he thought. The American Quartermaster Corps had been hoarding all that food during the battle, saving it, as it turned out, “for the Japanese.”41

 

THEY LIVED in their keepers’ world now, a world of conformity. Deru kui wa utareru, Japanese mothers warned their children, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

Don McAllister was obviously doing something wrong. Each time a convoy passed his column, the Japanese in the trucks tried to hit him or kick him in the head. He seemed to be doing more dodging than most of the men around him and he wondered, “Why are they kicking at me?”

Then his friend Brown Davidson noticed something: circling the crown of McAllister’s campaign hat was a bright red braided cord.

“Take that damn thing off your hat,” Davidson said. “It gets their attention.”⁴²

Private Saturnino Velasco and his pal Corporal Freddy Burgos were also attracting more notice than they wanted. Mestizos, half white and half Filipino, they were conspicuously taller than their countrymen, and the guards had been hammering them.

Velasco was getting the worst of it. He had been a student at Ateneo de Manila University when the war broke out, and to distinguish himself from his classmates he had grown a beard, a thick red beard. Now at every change of the guard, some incensed hohei would confront him.

“Kora! Americajin?”

“No! No!” Velasco would say. “Filipino . . . Filipino.”

“Filipino, no beard,” the guard would come back, and Velasco would get another thumping.

Then he got an idea. The next time he saw an angry guard headed his way, he yelled, “Spaniard!”

The guard was suspicious. “You, Spaniard?”

“Yes, yes,” Velasco said, nodding vigorously. “Spaniard, Spaniard.” And he would snap to attention, shout “Viva Franco!” and give the Falangist stiff-armed salute. (He gave this performance several times a day until at length he found an old razor and hacked the rust-red whiskers from his face.)⁴³

So they learned to dissemble. Men who since birth had been taught to stand out and distinguish themselves now were careful to conform, conceal, sublimate.

“Don’t attract attention,” they told one another.

“Keep your head down.”

“Keep your mouth shut.”

“Just keep moving.”

 

BEN STEELE had a cowboy’s constitution and a camp tender’s legs (all those Montana mornings running miles after some horse he thought he’d hobbled the night before), and now, as he pushed himself forward, he reminded himself of all those years of hard work on rough ground and found it easier to keep on his feet.

As a rule he stayed at the front of the column, often in the first rank, a good vantage point to spot trouble or look for food and water.

Watching the guards on the flanks, he soon noticed they were leaving a lot of space between them. It occurred to him that at those distances, a guard would have to be a helluva shot to hit a man, so from time to time he broke from the line of march to run for water or stalks of sugarcane. (He thought of trying to escape too, but where would he go? Into the malarial hills? The jungle? Wander around lost until some Jap patrol bagged him?)

Early afternoons were the worst. The blistering heat left him heavy legged. Concentrate, he told himself. Left, right, left, right. When the guards stopped the column for a rest, he’d fall into an instant sleep, like many of the others, only to be stomped awake by the heel of a hobnail boot.

 

THE PRISONERS were tekikokujin, the enemy, and the Japanese hated them.

Gabbing in the shade of a tree or gathered around a pot of boiling rice beside the road, the hohei in bivouac, waiting to go back into battle, jeered as the prisoners passed by. Kuda! they yelled, worthless dogs, then they pelted the marchers with rocks and gravel and handfuls of mud.

Sometimes a group of Japanese soldiers would drop what they were doing, form a long gauntlet on the road, and force a column of prisoners to run single file down the middle, shoving them back and forth and pummeling them so hard with ax handles and bamboo cudgels the prisoners could hear bones breaking.

One night on the road, Corporal Aaron Drake of Carlsbad, New Mexico, heard a commotion in the dark ahead of him, and a few minutes later the column came abreast of a burly hohei stripped to the waist, standing in the middle of the road slugging every man in line square in the face. (The blow that caught Drake, he thought, damn near fractured his cheekbone.)

The hohei were especially hard on the Philippine Scouts, the elite regiment of Filipinos that had mauled them in battle. The Scouts were known as dead shots, and someone in the Japanese chain of command reckoned that the best way to cull them from the ranks of their countrymen was to examine the trigger finger of every Filipino captive, and for a time Japanese guards made the sundalos extend their hands for inspection. When they found a man with a muscled forefinger—no doubt a carpenter, mechanic, pipe fitter, or anyone else who had made a living wielding a wrench, squeezing a pair of pliers, or gripping a hammer—they beat him bloody, beat him for being what he likely was not.44

 

______

 

IN THE AMERICAN COLUMNS were a number of officers forty and fifty years old. Those who had been in the field were accustomed to the hardships of combat and could keep up with the younger men, but those who had worked as rear-echelon adjutants or staff, plump majors and colonels, many of them, began to drop to the road or drift back toward the rear, the domain of the buzzard squads.

Zoeth Skinner couldn’t help himself. Ahead of him in the line of march was an aging, overweight officer struggling to keep up, a major from the Quartermaster Corps. Like all frontline troops who had gone hungry during the battle, Skinner was sure the quartermaster had been hoarding rations, and he hated the niggardly “bastards” with “a purple passion.”45

“Look at that old fart hobbling along,” he thought. The idiot had on dress shoes, for Christ’s sake.

Falling back and back again, the man was soon walking beside him. His eyes were bloodshot with anguish, and Skinner softened. What the hell, they were all suffering, he thought.

He offered to take one of the two musette bags the major had slung on his shoulders.

The bag was heavy. “You’re going to have to do something here,” Skinner told the officer.

When they stopped for a break, Skinner spilled out the contents.

“Okay, Major,” he said, “let’s see what the Christ you got in these goddamn musette bags you can’t live without.”

And there, among a pile of clothes and shoes and toiletries, was a marble desk set—two pens and a brass inkwell set in a piece of inch-thick stone a foot long, all mounted to a lead base.

“Sir, there’s got to be two pounds of lead in this friggin’ thing. This baby is going right now. I ain’t packing that thing another inch.”

The officer looked upset. “Jeez, that was given to me back in thirty-five and—”

“I don’t give a shit when or why you got it,” Skinner said. “You ain’t going to be doing any writing where we’re going.”

Sergeant James Baldassarre of Boston was walking with a couple of colonels named McConnell and Mangunsen. As they neared a town, McConnell staggered out of formation and up to a house hard by the road.⁴⁶

“Where you goin’, Colonel?” Baldassarre asked.

The man looked gone. “I can’t make the hike, Jimmy.”

“Let’s go, Colonel. You’ll be shot.”

“I’ve got to take a chance, Jimmy.”

And just as he started to mount the steps, a guard raised his rifle, pulled the trigger, and put a bullet in the colonel’s head.

A while later Baldassarre came upon the other colonel sitting in a drainage ditch, pulling off his shoes. His feet were sore, he told Baldassarre, so sore he could not manage another step.

A guard had spotted them and was running their way and Baldassarre, getting up to move, pleaded with Mangunsen to follow him, but the officer wouldn’t budge.

The round hit him in the chest. His eyes were still open when Baldassarre knelt down next to him.

“Keep going, Jimmy,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

 

THEY WALKED on rumors and expressions of hope: “When we get to Balanga, we’re gonna be put on ships to Manila, then traded for Jap prisoners, and we’ll be home by Christmas.” The promises were always empty: “Tonight you eat,” a guard told the men in John Coleman’s column as the formation approached the outskirts of Balanga, Bataan’s capital city.47

How often had they heard that before, some Jap guard pointing up the road toward the next town, pledging tabemono, tabemono, “food, food there,” only to find nothing waiting but more gray dust and the rank water of the wallows.

And yet, sure enough, when they reached Balanga, or Orani nine miles north, they saw feeding stations—cauldrons and wheelbarrows and oil drums filled with steaming rice, sometimes tea.

Corporal Bill Simmons of Commerce, Missouri, was asleep in a compound in Balanga, dreaming about food (a table of heaping platters and a large glass of ice water) when someone shouted, “Hey, I smell rice cooking.”⁴⁸

The men charged the pot “like wild starving animals,” then someone yelled “for some kind of organization,” and two men started ladling the porridge.

Men without mess kits lined up with anything they could find—old cans, palm and banana fronds, their helmets, their bare hands. (Richard Gordon offered his cupped hands to a guard serving from an iron pot, and the guard laughed as he slopped the scalding mush into Gordon’s naked palms.)49

Each man was given a cup of rice, a pinch of salt, and a half liter of tea. The rations were tasteless and too scanty to sate them, but to Simmons and his starving comrades even this bitter pittance “seemed like a Thanksgiving dinner.”

Many of the marchers—maybe a third of the men who passed through Balanga and Orani, maybe more—got no food at all, for the Japanese, chronically undersupplied, habitually unprepared, and stoically indifferent to the distress of men who were their sworn enemies, simply could not, or would not, feed them.⁵⁰

 

ON THE FOURTH or fifth day of the march, the Japanese appeared to abandon their original plan and were operating ad hoc. Many of the guards seemed confused now. Some marched their columns south, as if they had no sense of direction, then, realizing their mistake, turned them north again. Others kept re-forming their columns, as if shuffling men around would accomplish something. Orders were issued, countermanded, reissued.

There were simply too many horyo.

Balanga in particular was in chaos. Columns of prisoners converged on the city from two directions, the thousands who were marched up from the south, from Mariveles, and thousands more who were pushed across the East-West Road from the far side of the peninsula, from Bagac—in all 76,000 captives passing through a staging and rest depot set up to handle less than half that number.

In Balanga they at first left the prisoners standing around in the dusty streets, throngs of milling tatterdemalions staring with blank eyes at the rubble around them. Then guards began to confine the arriving columns in empty buildings or penned them up in barbed-wire enclosures and compounds on the outskirts of town. Soon it seemed as if every schoolyard, warehouse, granary, cockpit, tin pavilion, and factory shed in Balanga was bulging with Filipino and American POWs, and the fields and rice paddies outside of town began to resemble the stockyards of Kansas City or Chicago.

Guards packed the prisoners so tightly they had little room to sit or lie down. During the day they sat shoulder to shoulder with their knees to their chests, legs against the back of the man in front of them. At night they lay in the dirt elbow to elbow like canned fish.

For the first groups of men, the compounds were a respite from the road. But after several days, and many thousands of men, the overpopulated holding pens of Balanga and Orani had turned into cesspools, and a “noisome stench” greeted the weary, thirsty, and hungry prisoners who filed into them. Entering Balanga, Bernard FitzPatrick thought, “The whole town [smells] like a sewer.”51

Thousands of men were suffering from dysentery, and the ground where the prisoners were forced to sit and sleep became coated with layers of excrement, mucus, urine, and blood. Japanese sanitation units had dug slit-trench latrines, but so many men were sick that the open pits (some eight feet long, two feet wide, and four- to five feet deep) filled after a day or so and started to spill over the edges. Hundreds of men, meanwhile, never made it to the latrines; they stumbled into the compounds too enervated, too far gone to take another step. Helpless against the exigencies of the disease—the wrenching cramps and resistless urge to evacuate—they soiled themselves where they stood right through their clothing, then lay down half conscious in a pool of their own filth.

Bud Locke of Hooksett, New Hampshire, looked in vain for a clean spot to bed down for the night. “Before long,” he thought, “everyone [is going to be] a filthy, dust-covered, crap-smeared, stinking specimen of humanity.”⁵²

The compounds baked in the tropical sun and by midday the stench was so overpowering the men could taste it. Some heaved and retched, covering themselves in vomit. Others walked around hawking and spitting, as if they could expectorate the unspeakable taste that had settled on their tongues.

The stench brought the flies, of course, so many the air became dark with them. They swarmed the men who had fouled themselves and settled on the surface of the slit trenches. Colonel Ernest B. Miller entered a compound where the brimming trenches and surrounding scum wriggled with “a constantly moving sea of [gray] maggots.”⁵³

To many the degradation of those fetid pens was worse than any hunger or thirst. In one compound Murray Sneddon waded through “excreta of every type and kind.” Already men “had fallen to the ground and fallen asleep wherever they could stand the stench.” The next morning, rising with the sun, Sneddon noticed right away that “the foul-smelling mud had thoroughly penetrated” his uniform during the night. Getting to his feet he felt “some of the wetter ooze slowly flowing down inside [his] pants on [his] bare skin.” And as the guards came through to marshal the prisoners back on the road, he imagined himself a medieval leper “required to notify all of [his] approach by crying, ‘Unclean . . . unclean.’ ”54

Alvin Poweleit, a major from Kentucky who spoke Japanese, pointed to the compound his column was about to enter and told a guard, kii benjo,”big toilet.”

The guard laughed. kii jdan, he came back. “Big joke.”⁵⁵

 

FEET BLISTERED, muscles worn from walking, most men sought sleep right away, but a few, dysphoric from hunger and thirst, wandered aimlessly about the compound calling for food and water and trampling the recumbent comrades at their feet.

“Bastard!” the trodden would yell. “Watch where you’re walking, you son of a bitch.”

Here and there others huddled in small circles talking in whispers about what they’d witnessed on that day’s march: the sergeant crushed by a tank, the colonel bayonetted belly to back.

The nights were cool, and in their clammy, sweat-soaked rags the men shook and shivered. “Bone weary,” Bernard FitzPatrick “fell into sleep as into a coma.” The sick and injured, meanwhile, lay there babbling or hallucinating, flies grazing the length of them and feeding on their wounds. Most men moaned in their sleep, a night song of torment that continued till dawn when guards came rushing into the compound swinging their wooden spirit sticks and kicking the men awake with their hobnail boots to resume what Ray Hunt had come to see as the “man-killing march.”⁵⁶

“Bang! Bang!” the guards shouted. Get up! “Count off.”

Getting to their feet, they ached. The damp ground left Ed Dyess so stiff his leg muscles had “set like concrete” and he could hardly straighten himself to stand.

Looking around and taking stock, the men who survived the night began to count those who had not—ten, fifteen, thirty. (Dying in their sleep, the survivors agreed, was the only kindness any of them were likely to get.) Dead from dysentery, exhaustion, dehydration, and malaria, the bodies lay in heaps. Flies, roundworms, and maggots picked at their eyes and crawled in and out of their mouths and noses.

“Oh God,” said Lester Tenney, shuddering at the sight, “please have mercy on their poor souls.”57

 

IN MANY COMPOUNDS the Japanese left the bodies where they were, and it wasn’t long before they started to decompose. By the time the next group of prisoners arrived, the reek of these rotting grotesques had mingled with the stench from the swamped latrines, and the compounds became unbearable.

“For sure, I’m [going to] go mad,” Richard Gordon thought.⁵⁸

In other pens the prisoners were ordered to bury their dead, but as the gravediggers started to collect the inert figures from the muck, they discovered that many were still drawing breath, men too wasted to move or speak, the near dead, blank faced and empty eyed, unconscious and slipping away.

At a compound in Orani, a burial detail came upon three of these comatose souls and started to carry them to a nearby shed, a makeshift infirmary. A Japanese sergeant, standing next to a row of freshly dug graves, halted the litters, tipped the stretchers into the open holes, and ordered the prisoners digging the holes to bury these men along with the dead. Suddenly, one of unconscious men came to his senses, and when he realized what was happening to him, he reached up, grabbed the edge of hole with both hands, and pulled himself to his feet. One of the guards barked an order at one of the gravediggers, a Filipino, but the digger just stood there. Angry now, the guards put their bayonets to the Filipino’s throat, then, as Ed Dyess watched, the Filipino “brought his shovel down upon the head” of the man in the hole. The man toppled “backward to the bottom of the grave,” indifferent now to the dirt the diggers were throwing on top of him.⁵⁹

Captain Burt Bank of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was forced to bury a man alive, and so was Robert Levering. Bernard FitzPatrick watched two Americans inter an unconscious friend, and Murray Sneddon looked on as two of his comrades were forced to drag a delirious Filipino into a grave.

In Lester Tenney’s group, when two diggers refused to bury a malarial comrade alive, a guard shot one of them, then ordered the other man to bury the malaria patient together along with the man who’d just been shot. When he felt the dirt hit him, the sick man started screaming. Lester Tenney watched all this as long as he could, then he hid his face in his hands and threw up on himself. “Is this what I’m staying alive for?” he thought.60

 

NORTH AGAIN. Always north. No sense of time, no sense of place, no sense of purpose. On the road all that mattered was to keep moving, one foot in front of the other, left, right, left, until the guard yelled Yosu! “Stop!”

Even the strongest and most fit among them felt enfeebled, and as they marched from Balanga north to Orani, they stumbled along, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, the columns yawing to and fro in unison, automatons in slow step.

By midmorning the sun was on them again, baking their brains and filling their eyes with an aura. It was like “looking through a fog,” they said, or a veil of tears.

The heat left them dull witted, etherized. Men would find themselves passing through this town or that with no sense, no memory at all, of how they had gotten there. And these blackouts, these stupors, frightened them. Were they just sunstruck, hallucinating from the heat, or did the spells of catatonia suggest something much more serious?⁶¹

They dream-walked, many of them. Murray Sneddon shut his eyes and imagined himself on “a clean mattress with snow-white sheets.” Many a man envisioned a waterfall spilling over rocks or a cool green valley filled with wildflowers and meadowlarks.⁶²

Such drift was dangerous. A few cataleptics came to at the point of a Japanese bayonet. So some of the men played mind games to keep awake. Ernie Miller pictured a calendar and started checking off the days. January 1, 1942, January 2, always pausing to reflect on the holidays or days with special meaning. By the time he got to September 1, the sun was setting and that day’s walking was done. Lester Tenney concentrated on the image of his wife, Laura (he still had that photo tucked in his sock). Robert Levering had grown up on a farm in Ohio, and as he walked the blistering road, he imagined himself a boy again, following behind a plow, his bare feet enfolded “in the fresh, cool furrows.”⁶³

 

BEN STEELE would not allow himself to drift.

This was no nightmare with bugbears chasing him up the road. The beatings, shootings, and stabbings were real, and he knew he wasn’t going to wake from them.

Here was a blond-haired boy half collapsed on the shoulder, desperately trying to push himself to his knees, and here came a Jap to finish him. The boy groaned, that’s all, just groaned as the bastard stuck him in the back.

Turn away, Ben Steele thought. Turn away from the horror and hurt of it. Just another corpse by the side of the road.

No room for loathing or hate. A Jap spits in your face, so what? To hell with the bastard. Just keep walking, he told himself. “Make the best of it.”

Men were still clawing at him for water, but by the time he had reached Balanga, walked some thirty miles, he’d become selfish with his can.

Sure, he could sympathize with a guy and want to help him, but he’d been carrying that water all day, careful not to spill a drop of it, and the can held only enough to last a couple of hours.

“It’s survival of the fittest,” he thought. “You gotta look out for yourself.”

 

WHEN WAR CAME to Bataan, the tao, the local people, at first fled and scattered. Some wanted to stay close to their herds and crops and hid in the fields and fishponds until the shooting stopped and they could return to what was left of their homes. Thousands of others abandoned their barrios and fled south down the Old National Road to an “evacuation center” that the Americanos had set up at Mariveles. The rest of the people, townsfolk, most of them, packed what they could carry and headed for the hills. A few had a rough idea where they were going, but by and large the rugged hill country was terra incognita, and they soon became lost.64

“The Japanese are there, walk this way.”

“No, compadres, you will run into the Hapón if you go that way.”

So they just kept hiking, kept climbing into the wooded hills, until they were sure they were safe. They built lean-tos or sought shelter in caves and under outcroppings. In the morning half-light they came out of hiding to cook a meal over a campfire, then slipped back into their warrens until dark when they could emerge again and sit together in a circle, staring at the stars and the explosions that were lighting up the night.

In the hills they had little to eat—banana stalks and papaya leaves cut into strips and boiled, and rice, dirty rice, they made into lugao, a kind of watery gruel. They got sick in the hills, dysentery at first, then malaria. The little ones suffered the most. At first they were colicky, then listless, then still, very still. Their parents cried over the bodies (quietly), said prayers, wrapped them in rags, and buried them there. No funeral Mass, no burning incense, no stone to mark the grave. Bahalâ na, they told themselves, come what may they would leave it to God.

The thousands of refugees who had fled south to the evacuation center at Mariveles fared no better. Their crowded camp was in the open and they were bombed by the Japanese. So many were killed (how many no one could say), it took four days to gather the dead. After surrender the Japanese ordered the refugees out. Go home, they said. Walk north, north up the Old National Road.

The road was crowded. Long columns of prisoners, sundalos, on one side, a steady stream of refugees on the other. The parade of people was so long, Rosalina Cruz could not see either its beginning or end.

Ay! Susmariosep! Oh, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, she said, crossing herself. There were so many of them.

When war came to her home on Bataan, Rosalina Almario Cruz was sixteen years old and pregnant. She and her young husband lived with her family (her father, mother, brother, and five sisters) in Bagac, a seaside town on Bataan’s west coast. Her father and husband were away when the shooting started and were cut off from home, so Rosalina’s mother, following the lead of her neighbors, took her family into the hills, then a few weeks later led them south to the evacuation center. Now they were walking north toward Orani, thirty-three miles up the Old National Road, there to find a boat that might take them to Manila and the rest of their kin.

For the most part the Japanese ignored the refugees. They were allowed to stop at will, eat if they had food, drink from the artesian wells, nap in a field off the road.

Six months pregnant and weak from malaria, Rosalina Cruz found the walking hard, but her misery seemed small compared to the suffering of the sundalos marching beside her. She could not look at the stumbling line of prisoners across from her without being overcome by a feeling of tenderness. She had never seen men so low, so miserable, the tattered clothes, the sad eyes.

“I pity their suffering,” she thought.

And they in turn pitied her, the pretty young girl holding her belly and gasping for breath as she walked.

“Can you make it?” they would say. “It must be so hard for you.”

When she was able, which is to say when the guards were not watching, she would pour some water from an earthen jar into a coconut shell and slip it to one of the men begging for a drink.

She was very afraid doing this, for the guards had no feelings at all. They stabbed the soldiers who fell. Whenever she saw a guard running up to a man who’d gone down, she would look away and say to herself, “I should not remember this.” She knew they might stab her too, but she could not stop herself from filling the coconut shell and passing it to one thirsty man after another.

“Please! Please, can you give us something to drink?”

“Ay, Diyos!” How could she refuse?

After a while, the Americans began to hand things back, or toss them at her—jewelry, money, anything of value they had managed to hide from their swag-seeking captors. At first Rosalina Cruz could not imagine what they were doing and was afraid to pick up the rings and gold chains and wads of pesos. Then she thought, “I guess they are throwing those things because they think they will not be needing those things anymore.” And that only deepened her áwa, her pity for them. “They think they will be killed,” she told herself. So when an American soldier, a pleasant but sad-looking man, tossed his bankbook at her feet, Rosalina Cruz bent down and picked it up and brushed it off.

She said nothing to the man but made sure he could see she had hold of the little ledger, the record of his life savings, and hoped he saw that she meant to keep it safe.

 

WITHIN A DAY of the surrender, word spread across Luzon that the Japanese were marching Filipino and American prisoners of war up the Old National Road out of Bataan and through Pampanga Province to the railhead at San Fernando. Now from provinces near and far, Filipino kith and kin began to make their way to Bataan and take up positions along the road, hoping for a glimpse or perhaps a word with their soldier.

In the neighborhood of Batac in the town of Abucay, Armando Pabustan, nine years old, stood next to his mother, Rosalina Maxali, behind a long iron fence that fronted the Batac Elementary School, a white one-story building next to the road. They’d gotten there early, an hour before dawn, to wait in the cool and dark. Now with the light came the columns of men.

The boy was hoping that his father, Damian Pabustan, a soldier in the Philippine Army, had survived the fighting and was among the long lines of soldiers passing in front of him.

His mother told him to watch carefully. There were so many men, all wearing the same thing, all dirty and tired. They would have to study each face, note each man’s way of walking. They would have to hope, and they would have to pray.

They kept coming, the men, one group of sundalos after another. They were so payát, thin and haggard, hanging on to one another as they walked, the guards punching, kicking, and beating them.

Whenever Armando looked at his mother, she was crying, and the boy became convinced his father was dead, but he continued to search among the faces coming up the road. And then, Ay! Ay! There was his father in the middle of a column of soldiers.

He crossed the yard, rushed through the gate, and threw himself into his father’s embrace. His tatay felt thin. He must be sick, the boy thought.

“Where is your mother, Armando?”

The boy pointed toward the fence.

“You must get away from here now,” his father said. “Go back to your mother.”

But he did not want to go. He was holding his father around the waist, hugging him, and he would not let go.

“Have you eaten anything, Father?”

“I haven’t had any food or water for three days.”

His father glanced at the fence again.

“Go over to your mother,” he said.

But the boy wouldn’t move.

A guard who’d been watching came over to break them apart, and Armando buried his face in his father’s midriff. Suddenly he felt a pain in his back, the toe of the hobnail boot. And here came a second guard, grabbing at him, catching the scruff of his shirt, pulling him from his father and tossing him to the road.

Kora! Kora! the guards shouted, shoving his father back into line.

“Take good care of your mother,” his father yelled back to him.

Then the column of men moved on, past the fence, past the school, down the road out of Abucay, out of sight.

 

THERE WERE THOUSANDS of them waiting, townsfolk from the dusty burgs and barrios along the Old National Road, waiting to do whatever they could for the men slogging their way north.65

They filled tins and earthen pots with water; they made rice balls stuffed with meat and vegetables and wrapped them in banana leaves; they boiled eggs and picked fruit and collected panocha, small cones of dark brown sugar.

They set the water beside the road and at first tried to hand the victuals to the soldiers as they passed by. Soon the guards had had enough of this, and they started to beat the people off with clubs and rifle butts, so the people started tossing their treats into the columns.

In Lubao, where there were a number of two-story buildings, people packed the upper windows and rooftops and showered the soldiers with hunks of bread and rice balls and cookies and chocolate bars. Enraged by the disruption, the guards stomped the food into the dirt and beat the prisoners who stooped to retrieve it, but there were too many tao and too few hohei to stop them.

From the side of the road children would dash into the columns, shove something into a soldier’s hand—a banana leaf full of rice, a small melon, a sugar cookie—and dash off before the guards could kick or club them. After a while some of the guards relented; as long as the columns kept moving they let the men shag what they could.

North of Orani, Bernard FitzPatrick spotted a Chinese man in a dark ch’i-fu standing beside the road with his arms crossed, hands hidden in the robe’s wide sleeves. Now and then, when the guards were not looking, the man would pull something from a sleeve, a sugar cake or banana, press it surreptitiously into a prisoner’s hand, nod a greeting, then fold his arms again and wait for the next column to come along.

As FitzPatrick’s formation passed into Pampanga Province, a small boy gave him a piece of sugarcane and an old Filipino handed him some panocha.

“Vaya con Diyos, compadre,” the old one said.⁶⁶

 

RICHARD GORDON loved the army—the good order and discipline, the clean white sheets, starched uniforms, and stacks of pancakes at morning chow. He felt more at home in a barracks than he ever had growing up in a tenement in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, but now, dragging himself along in a ragged column of defeated men, he began to think that the “training” he had gotten coming of age in Manhattan’s gritty Irish ghetto might keep him alive in the dog-eat-dog world of the prisoner of war.67

By the third day of the march Gordon noticed that his comrades had lost all respect for authority. At a well or water hole, if an American officer tried to organize things and ensure every man a drink, the officer was either ignored or knocked down in the rush. He wasn’t part of an army anymore, Richard Gordon told himself, he was a member of a mob. Gone was the close society that had given him so much comfort. Now when he watched soldiers fighting over a filthy scrap in the road or clawing one another to get a drink, he was embarrassed for them.

Perhaps it was this feeling that moved him one morning to take a chance and leave the line of march to answer the appeal of an aging colonel calling out from a stretcher beside the road.

The colonel was desperate: his legs were broken, he said, and his litter bearers had abandoned him the night before. He’d survived the night, but he knew the buzzard squads would be out in the morning, so at first light he started pleading with the passing columns for help.

“Please!” he yelled from his litter. “Please, someone!”

Hundreds of soldiers had passed him by, he said, pretending not to hear or see him.

“Come on fellas,” Richard Gordon was yelling now. “Come on, some of you Joes, gimme a hand.”

But each time a man started to leave the column and head toward Gordon and the litter, the other marchers jeered him. Had they come to hate their officers that much? Gordon wondered.

He kept up his pleading and finally found a volunteer, then another and a third.

Their load was bearable at first, but the stretcher became heavier and heavier, and by noon the four sweating Samaritans were imploring others to spell them.

That night, after they had settled down in a compound, two of Gordon’s helpers snuck off. The next day he found replacements, but that night, Gordon’s second with the colonel, they too abandoned him.

Gordon was tired. That afternoon he’d almost passed out carrying the colonel, and now, in the early morning dark, he was worried about his own health, his own chances. Sometime before first light, his conscience surrendered to his instinct to survive, and Richard Gordon walked away from the stretcher before the colonel awoke, slipping into an anonymous mass of men moving slowly toward the road.

 

TO KEEP HIMSELF GOING, to make sure he didn’t fall back to the buzzard squad, Zoeth Skinner tried to distract himself by counting the dead, the corpses that were accumulating in the drainage ditches and along the shoulders of the road.68

“Nine.”

“Eighteen.”

“Thirty-two.”

At first he thought himself demented (“fifty-four . . . one hundred and seven”), but he kept counting anyway (“two hundred and twenty-six . . . four hundred and fifteen”).

He counted Filipinos and he counted Americans. Sometimes he recognized a patch or an emblem on a uniform and made note of the unit. Here was an artilleryman sprawled in the gravel, there in a wallow was a Philippine Scout.

Once in a while he noted a man’s injuries—how many bullet holes in the chest or stab wounds in the back.

Somewhere before or just after Balanga, his grim census reached a thousand.

“Holy shit!” he said to himself, “You better stop this crap or you’re going to go wacko.”

 

SO MANY were dropping to the road, Ben Steele thought, it was better to stay aloof, not to get close to anyone, but north of Layac Junction, about fifty miles into the march, he lost his resolve and befriended a march mate.

They had talked a bit while walking, talked about where they’d been, where they might be headed, what might happen when they got there. Talking made the walking easier, the heat a little less intense. That night sitting together in a compound they chatted some more, and Ben Steele felt better for the company.

Next afternoon on the road, he noticed his new friend beginning to wobble, and a mile or two later the man’s legs gave out and down he went, grabbing for Ben Steele’s leg as he hit the ground.

“Come on, Ben! Help me.”

He and another man hauled the dropout to his feet and started to drag him along between them down the road. They hadn’t gone far before a guard rushed up and screamed at them to let the invalid go. His helper obeyed, but for reasons beyond all understanding, Ben Steele hung on to the man, and the next thing he knew his buttocks were on fire.

The guard’s blade had penetrated to the pelvis. Blood was beginning to course down Ben Steele’s leg and flies were starting to swarm the wound.

He looked at the man he was holding, hoped he’d understand, then let him sink slowly to the road at the guard’s feet.

“No!” the man said. “No. Please. Help me, please.”

 

AS A TRANSIT CENTER, San Fernando, sixty-six miles from Mariveles, had always been a busy city, known for its gaudy Easter and Christmas festivals and as the location of the large Pampanga Sugar Company. Coming up the Old National Road from Guagua and Bacalor, the long columns of exhausted prisoners could see the sugar company’s tall red-brick smokestacks rising in the distance, and, knowing that familiar landmark, some began to spread the word that at last they had reached their destination. Here, they’d been told, they would be put on trains and hauled off to prison camp.

The first columns arrived on April 13, the others across the two weeks that followed. Without enough trains and guards, the Japanese supply and transportation officers in charge of the movement of prisoners were overwhelmed by the logistics and the staggering number of men, and San Fernando, their final collection point, was soon a shambles.

As in Balanga, men were being held like livestock in barbed-wire pens all over town, even in the side streets. Some were fed and fed again; others got nothing, not even a mouthful. If there was a schedule, it wasn’t apparent; one column of men might be put on train as soon they entered the city, while other groups languished for forty-eight hours or more in their foul enclosures. Most men had walked at least fifty miles.

 

On average they had covered the distance in five to seven days, days of depredation and duress. They were weak and sick and had reached their limit.

For the Japanese support troops and staff officers billeted in San Fernando, the parade of men shuffling through the city was quite a spectacle, and Imperial soldiers turned out in large numbers to gawk and ogle at their trophies.

“They’re staring at us like animals in a zoo,” Ben Steele thought.

Meanwhile large crowds of Filipino civilians gathered along the streets, searching the passing columns for their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers.

As the prisoners waited in the holding compounds to entrain, they began to exchange stories, lurid catalogs of what they had seen on their long, brutal march north.

Here, for example, was a Filipino soldier talking about a massacre he said he had witnessed while hiding in the jungle. Hundreds of men, he said, prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs, had been bayonetted to death in a secluded spot near the Pantingan River. Impossible, thought doctor Alvin Poweleit, and yet there was something “sincere” in the man’s voice, something authentic.69

A week or so later, Captain Pedro L. Felix, bleeding from bayonet wounds and shaking with malaria, appeared at his family’s house in Manila. Felix, a staff officer with the 91st Division, Philippine Army, said he’d been in hiding and on the run since April 12, the day the Japanese massacred hundreds of his comrades at the Pantingan River.

 

ON APRIL 11, what was left of the 91st Division and two other units surrendered near Bagac on Bataan’s west coast, and the Japanese ordered them to begin moving east, on their own, along a dirt road, Trail 8, across the middle of the peninsula toward Balanga. On the morning of April 12, the prisoners, roughly fifteen hundred Filipino officers and men (their American advisers were left behind, Felix said), came to the Pantingan River and were taken into custody by Japanese infantry from the 65th Brigade encamped there. The Japanese used the prisoners as laborers to help repair a small wooden bridge, then they marched them across the river and up a series of switchbacks into the dark green foothills of Mount Samat, stopping, finally, about a mile and a half above the river at the intersection of Trail 8 and another jungle road. Here, spread out in the rough terrain, were more clusters of Japanese troops.70

Just then, about noon, a Japanese army command car came up Trail 8 and stopped about thirty yards from where the hundreds of prisoners were being held. An officer alighted, big brass, Felix thought, judging from the obeisance paid him, and one of the Japanese soldiers standing among the prisoners told Pedro Felix that the officer was in fact the commander of the 65th Brigade, General Akira Nara.

The general called a conference, and all the Japanese officers in the area—the four in charge of the prisoners and others from the infantry units encamped along the trail—gathered around him. When the meeting was over, the general left, and almost immediately the Japanese began dividing the prisoners into two groups, officers and NCOs in one group, privates in the other. The privates, roughly eleven hundred men, were told to start walking east on Trail 8 toward Balanga. The Filipino officers and noncoms, meanwhile, some four hundred men, were formed into three columns, then more Japanese soldiers appeared, carrying strands of telephone wire.

They bound each man’s hands behind his back, then leashed one prisoner to the next, creating chains of men. The chains, fifteen to thirty men in each, were marched to the edge of a ravine. The first chain was told to face the ravine; the other rows of men were lined up to the rear. Standing behind the first chain of prisoners were Japanese soldiers with fixed bayonets, as well as officers and noncoms with their swords drawn, waiting.

A Japanese civilian who spoke Tagalog stepped forward to address the prisoners.

Mag kaibigan, pasensya kayo. Kung kayo ay nagsurrender agad, hindi namin kayo papatayin. Ngunit maraming napinsala sa amin. Kaya pasiensia kayo. Kung mayroon kayong gustong hingin, magsabi lang kayo.

 

Dear friends, pardon us. If you had surrendered early, we would not be killing you. But we suffered heavy casualties. So just pardon us. If you have any last wish before we kill you, just tell us.

Some men asked for a cigarette, some for food and water. Many begged for their lives.

Pedro Felix, the last man in the first row facing the ravine, asked to be executed by rifle shot or machine gun fire. At least, he said, “kill us facing front,” facing their executioners.

The Japanese refused.

Then an officer gave a signal.

From his position on the extreme left, Pedro Felix glanced down the line and saw three heads go flying.

He took a deep breath and held it.

The first thrust caught him in the right shoulder. The second came out his front. He dropped to his knees and fell on his side. The third stab hit his backbone, a thud. The fourth was like the second, through and through.

He was tumbling now—the chain of men had been pushed over the side—and came to rest halfway down the slope. He tried to lie still, dead still. Japanese soldiers were prowling the slope, finishing off anyone who moved.

Felix bit his lip and tried to hold his breath. Lashed to him on the right was Luciano Jacinto, a young lieutenant. His compadre was writhing and kicking, and in his death throes he flipped the lower part of his body on top of Felix, shielding him from the buzzard squads prowling the slope.

That night Felix slid out from under the corpse, raised his head a little, and looked around. It was quiet. He was alone, he thought, alone among the dead.

His pain at that point was unbearable. Why keep suffering? he asked himself. And he started to push his face into the soft earth of the slope. He pushed until he was exhausted, then gasping, rolled over, took a deep breath, and rested.

He had more strength than he’d realized, perhaps enough to get away, and he began to think how he might free himself from the chain of dead men.

He wriggled this way and that, and after much effort was able to get the connecting strand of wire to fall across his mouth so he could gnaw it. Three hours later he had finally chewed himself free, but his hands were still bound behind his back.

During his chewing he thought he had heard someone groaning, and now he called out in the dark.

Ano, buhay ka pa? Nakakalag ka na ba? Anyone still alive? Have you freed yourself?

“I’m alive,” a voice came back.

His name was de Venecia, a lieutenant. A big man, he’d been bayonetted eleven times. He was weak but able to free Felix, who then freed him.

Both men were thirsty, and Felix crawled among the corpses, checking canteens, but could not find a drink, so he and de Venecia decided to leave the killing ground to look for water.

Too weak to stand, they dragged themselves backward on their buttocks along the bottom of the ravine. Soon de Venecia stopped.

“I can’t go any farther,” he told Felix. “Leave me here. If you reach Manila, contact my family.”

Felix built a fire—at least he could make the dying man warm—then set out again. Sometime before dawn he reached the banks of the Pantingan River and happened upon three more survivors. In the days that followed, the four men made their way north, then east across Mount Samat to Pilar, where a Filipino doctor dressed their wounds. From there Felix joined a group of Bataanese refugees on their way to the relative safety of Bulacan Province. And on April 24, dressed like a peasant and riding in a horse-drawn calesa, he arrived in the Malate section of Manila, his home. He had returned from the dead, he told his family. And then he began his astonishing story.

 

PRIVATE YOSHIAKI NAGAI, a hostler with the 122nd Infantry, had come down with malaria, and by the morning of April 10 was so sick he had to hold on to his horse’s harness to keep himself standing. Teeth clenched, head pounding, his face dripping sweat, he finally stumbled into the regimental bivouac along the Pantingan River and collapsed. A friend put a cool cloth on his forehead and he soon fell into a deep sleep.71

The next morning his squad leader sent him to the regimental surgeon, who gave him a shot of quinine. He slept well that night, but in the morning when he tried to raise himself and join his comrades in their breakfast circle, he still could not keep his feet.

Small groups of Filipino and American soldiers had been giving themselves up since the afternoon of April 9, and now more and more of them were beginning to appear along the Pantingan River. No one had ever seen anything like it, not even the men who had fought in China.

“What a lot of prisoners coming out,” they said.

To Nagai these horyo looked hungry and “worn out”—gaunt, bearded men, some groggy and reeling in the heat, most carrying backpacks or gunnysacks on their shoulders. Down the trails and out of the bush they came, dropping their loads and raising their hands, one after another, so many it seemed like they’d never stop.

These miserable horyo, Nagai thought, were a sure sign of victory.

“We have won,” the hohei told one another. “We have won the battle.”

The more they reflected on their good fortune, the more, naturally, they began to think of those comrades whose luck had run out. The Summer Brigade had taken heavy casualties, and hundreds of wooden boxes and cans of nakigara, “remains,” were waiting to be sent home. Now, here, with their hands up, were the ones responsible for all that loss, all that mourning.

Here were the men who had “rained” bullets and shells on them day after day. America had fought with its factories, Nagai thought, Japan with its “flesh and blood.”

Living so long with danger had changed him, he thought, changed his comrades, too. Looking at the horyo emerging from the hills he felt more than kirai, simple scorn. He found himself filled with dai-kirai, hatred.

For months he had hated the enemy in the abstract, the enemy as evil. Now, by the Pantingan River, he hated them in the particular.

Here were the very men who had made his life so hot, so hard, so damn miserable. Hai, yes, he knew the rules, he’d read the Senjinkun, the military code—“do not punish them if they yield”—but he thought, “How can we stick to the rules?” Comrades had been killed, good Matsuyama boys butchered.

“How can I forgive them so easily?” he asked himself.

Besides, these horyo had disgraced themselves. In the middle of a battle they had laid down their arms and raised their hands, a shameless act for any soldier. Should such men be received with respect? What did they think they were going to get, “a welcome, a bath, a rest?”

He wanted revenge, assumed his comrades felt the same way. They had been trained to “destroy” the enemy to exterminate him. Well, here he was.

And just then, sometime after breakfast, the word came down, no one knew exactly from whom or where. It spread from platoon to platoon, company to company, upriver and down, then among the men camping in the hills.

Korosu no da, “We are going to kill them,” kill them all.

Well, this was just “a continuation” of the two sides “killing each other,” Nagai thought, not an epilogue to the battle but an extension of it. If there was a difference between fighting and butchery, he didn’t see it. And neither did most of his comrades.

They cared nothing (knew nothing, most of them) of international treaties and conventions protecting prisoners’ lives and rights.

Rights? Horyo didn’t have rights. Their lives belonged to the Imperial Army now, and the Imperial Army wanted its due.

“We are going to stab them to death,” the hohei were told. “And soldiers from each company should be in on it.”

It wasn’t an order, exactly. More like an opportunity. The prisoners were going to be killed, this was something that had to be done, and it would be agreeable, harmonious, if a few men from every unit in the regiment took part in the work.

Some men volunteered right away, but a number held back.

“I don’t feel like stabbing those who put their hands up,” they said.

“Just do it once,” their comrades came back.

Kekk da, “No thanks,” the dissenters said.

“Then we will go.”

And off they went. A short time later, several returned, looking bewildered and asking to be relieved.

“It’s too much for me,” some said. “Let me change with someone.”

Yoshiaki Nagai wanted to take part in the killing. He had been at battle for ninety-nine days and “every day” had “started and ended with madness.” It was always kill or be killed. He had reached a point, he thought, where he could kill “without feeling anything.”

“I would really like to go and join my comrades and help kill the prisoners,” he told himself, but he was still weak with chills and fever and could barely stand up. Never mind. At least he could watch, bear witness to their work.

He crawled to the trail above the ravines and “like a toad clinging to the roadside” found a place where he “could see everything.”

The killing began right after breakfast. The prisoners were gathered at a secluded spot on the trail, divided into files of fifteen to thirty men, then they were marched a mile or so to the killing site, a section of trail along a precipice above a ravine. Between the staging spot and killing ground was a ridge, so the remaining prisoners could not see or hear what was happening to each file of men after it had been marched away.

At the ravine the first file was made to sit on the ground next to the precipice, facing the void. A soldier held each prisoner tightly by the scruff of the neck. Behind stood other soldiers, the executioners, with rifles and bayonets and swords. At a signal, the soldiers released their grip and the executioners drove their blades home, aiming at a point from behind where they guessed they might skewer the heart. When they were done, they kicked the dead and dying into the ravine, and another file of prisoners was marched into place.

When the second line of prisoners saw the blood on the trail and the bodies below, they grew restive, and as soon as the soldiers loosened their grip on them, they leaped into the ravine. Some tumbled and bounced down the steep slope, breaking their bones; others crashed directly on the bed of rocks below.

“They had to give it a try,” Nagai thought, watching from a distance. “They knew they would be killed.”

After that the lines of prisoners were made to face away from the ravine, and after they were stabbed or beheaded on the trail, the soldiers picked them up by their arms and legs and ichi, ni, san, “one, two, three,” flung them into the gorge.

Now and then Yoshiaki Nagai noticed an American in the group; the white men were sunburned (the color of pomegranates, he thought) and easy to pick out. One of them, perhaps a young officer, Nagai guessed, had been bayonetted only once and was still alive, flailing about in agony, facedown on the trail. He looked “like a frog swimming in water,” Nagai thought. A hohei standing nearby, apparently seething with vengeance, stepped forward and hoisted a large rock above his head.

“Look at this!” he said.

Then, yelling his dead commander’s name, he smashed the wounded American in the head, cracking the man’s skull.

By late afternoon Nagai was too sick with fever to keep watching, and he crawled back down to the company bivouac to rest. The executioners had been working in shifts—slaughter, it turned out, was hard work—and they would return to the bivouac to eat, drink, and trade stories.

“I killed seven,” one said.

“Seven? That is nothing. I killed twelve.”

The afternoon gave way to evening, the evening to night. Lying there, looking up at the moon, Nagai could hear the shouts of the executioners up on the trail (“Yaah!” they yelled with each thrust) and the screams of the captives echoing in the valley.

“It’s still going on,” said the men in bivouac, sitting around their fires.

The next morning most of the regiment moved out. As they climbed the trail from the river, their line of march took them past the execution site.

The ravine was filled with the dead.

“They are piled up to the edge of the road,” Nagai noted. “If I sat on the edge and stretched out my arm, I could touch them. I think there must be a thousand.”

His head was “splitting” and he was dizzy, and his platoon commander let him ride in the back of a truck. As they passed the headquarters area, he watched a formation of hohei performing a ceremony to break camp and mark the victory. They stood at attention, then presented arms while a bugler sounded the call to colors.

Yoshiaki Nagai thought the trumpet had an especially “bright sound” that morning. It echoed off the mountains and through the hills.

“We won,” he told himself. “We won.”72

 

PRIVATE ISAMU MURAKAMI thought his father—a farmer, fisherman, and logger—a most unusual man, at least for the times. Other parents seeing their sons off to war told them, “Don’t come back alive” or “Go and die for your country.” But his father hated the war and blamed the military for putting the country on a path to defeat and ruin, and the day Isamu, his oldest, reported to the Fifth Light Machine Gun Company, 122nd Infantry for embarkation overseas, his father had tears in eyes.⁷³

“Don’t volunteer for anything,” his father said, sobbing. Isamu had never before seen his father cry. “Just come back.”

Isamu Murakami thought of himself as a good soldier who hated the army and the war, and on April 9 when the guns fell silent, he was elated, but surveying the corpses scattered around him, tekihei, “enemy soldiers,” as well as hohei, his moment of exultation flew away like a startled bird and all that was left was simple relief.

“How,” he wondered, “did I manage to survive?”

Maybe it was his destiny, or just luck. He couldn’t say. Then, looking around again, another thought occurred to him.

“Why” he asked himself, “did we have to have this war?”

He was thirsty and wandered down to the Pantingan River to get a drink. Upstream he saw some Filipino soldiers getting water. Obviously they had yet to surrender. He watched them for a moment, decided to leave them alone.

“I’m thirsty and they’re thirsty too,” he told himself. “I’m not going to report that I saw them.”

The regiment bivouacked along the Pantingan and awaited new orders. One day passed, then another. They cleaned their gear and bathed in the river and cooked rice for their midday meal. On the third day, Isamu Murakami and four other men got word that the company commander wanted to see them.

The officer explained that each company had been ordered to send five men to a spot above the river for “special duty,” men who had excelled in bayonet training.

A lieutenant came to fetch the group, led them up the hill and into the jungle to a section of trail above a ravine. Assembled there were many many horyo, hundreds, in fact, Filipinos mostly, but a handful of Americans, too. Some of the prisoners were blindfolded and tied with rope, some with wire.

Isamu Murakami sensed that something ominous was about to take place and did not like it. Several other men there were uneasy as well.

“What are we going to do?” one of them asked.

“Shobun” an officer said. They were going to “kill them.”

Then the officer called Murakami’s name, told him to step forward.

Isamu hesitated.

“Just kill one and then you can go back to your unit,” his company sergeant said.

Isamu just stood there.

The sergeant tried again.

“There are lots of officers here from other units,” he said softly. “Their men are killing the prisoners and our company commander wants to show them that our men can do this, too. You should do this as quickly as possible, just one and you can go back.” Then the company sergeant said, “Or you will be killed by the company commander.”

The officer was growing impatient and barked at the sergeant.

“Why don’t you tell your men to do it quickly? This is the order of the emperor!”

Isamu Murakami thought, “I have no choice.”

In training he had stabbed large dolls stuffed with straw, but this—this was different.

He stepped forward with his rifle at the ready. The man in front of him was a Filipino, face pale, eyes filled with fear.

Isamu Murakami tightened his grip on the rifle, flexed his knees, and thrust the weapon forward (“Yaah!”) at a point where he imagined the man’s heart was.

He heard a kind of click or snap, like a stick breaking. He guessed he’d hit a rib, so he twisted the blade, hard, finished the stroke, and yanked the bayonet free.

The Filipino sank to his knees, blood pouring from the wound.

“Owatta!” Isamu shouted, almost defiantly. “I’m finished!”

“Kere!” The major yelled back. “Kick him down!”

Murakami put his heel on the figure twitching in the dirt and shoved it over the side and into the ravine.

“Follow him,” the officer told the next man, and so it went, man after man down the line.

With each thrust there was a scream, then an echo in the hills. And when the ravine began to fill with bodies, it too issued a complaint, a chorus of moaning and crying.

“Why do I have to do things like this?” Isamu Murakami thought.

He toweled the blood from his clothes, wiped his weapon clean, and tossed the towel into the ravine.

“You can go,” the officer said.

He ran. He ran as fast as he could, and when he looked back over his shoulder he saw many of the others running as well, as if someone or something was chasing them from the killing ground.

Back at the bivouac he chanted a prayer for the man he had killed, for all the murdered men moaning and crying in the valley, but the prayer didn’t work. That night the dead came to him in a dream, one after another.

“Don’t come only to me,” he told them, “but if you want, please appear in front of the emperor and ask the emperor how he would feel if he had been ordered to stab you.”

 

KILL THE PRISONERS? thought Private First Class Takesada Shigeta, a machine gunner with the 1st Battalion, 122nd Infantry It didn’t make sense.74

“Why do we have to kill those who come out of the jungle with their hands up?” he asked himself. “The battle is over. This is not a situation of kill or be killed.”

On April 12 at the Pantingan River, the men of the 122nd Infantry Regiment were given an unusually large ration of sake, in fact all they could drink. Not long after the ration was issued, they were told that their unit was going to kill prisoners of war.

“Those who want to kill the prisoners,” a noncom said, “just go ahead. Kill the ones you want. Kill as many as you want.”

The men who volunteered for this duty tried to convince the others to join them.

“These prisoners aren’t real prisoners,” the volunteers argued. “They’re not yet imprisoned so we can’t call them prisoners. It would be hard for us to kill the prisoners in a camp, but these men are still the enemy and we’re still in the middle of a war. We have to kill them.”

The killing began in the late morning. All along the river and at bivouacs in the hills, working parties of executioners were assembled and marched to the spot. From all the coming and going along the river, Takesada Shigeta got the impression the executions were taking place at several spots, and several hundred hohei were taking part.

Though it was not put to them that way, the men assumed they were acting on orders.

“Someone must have given an order,” Takesada Shigeta thought. “The regimental commander, someone. Someone must have said something. Without an order we would not be killing the prisoners.”

They worked through the morning and into the afternoon, worked in shifts, drinking and killing, drinking and killing.

Takesada Shigeta stayed in camp by the river and watched the killing parties leave and return, men sweating and thirsty and covered in blood.

“I killed only one. No more than that,” one man said,

“I killed six,” another said.

By early afternoon the sake barrel was half empty.

“Drink and go!” they yelled,

“All right, I’ll go!” a man said.

Takesada Shigeta wanted no part of it.

He thought, “It was good enough to have the enemy surrender.”

And others apparently agreed.

“I don’t want to kill them, either,” he heard more than one man say.

As the afternoon wore on, however, some of the executioners began to resent this display of individuality, and one of them started to pester Shigeta. Soon he was nose to nose with the man, shouting and yelling. And now their sergeant was stepping between them.

He should either go to the killing site, the sergeant told Shigeta, or take his machine gun to the hill above the ravine and make sure none of the bodies at the bottom tried to escape or crawl away.

Takesada Shigeta asked his good friend, Kozo Hattori, who had also recused himself from the killing, to join him.

“Let’s go up or else we have to kill them,” he said.

When they finally reached their position on the hill, they looked down and were struck dumb.

The ravine was filling with bodies, and issuing from the pit was a sound neither of them would soon forget, cries of agony echoing in the valley and off the hills. Neither man had ever heard anything like it—a chorus of moaning, pain, and lament that never seemed to stop.

The day was hot and humid, and with a light wind blowing in their direction it wasn’t long before the smell of blood, a thick and frightening fragrance, reached the two hohei sitting on the hill.

At first they just watched. The prisoners were led forward five and six at a time to a spot on the road just above the ravine. Some wore blindfolds, rags and towels knotted behind their heads. Others just stared straight ahead, facing their executioners.

Takesada Shigeta thought, “Imagine standing in front of the prisoner and watching his eyes at the very moment you pierce him with your bayonet.”

After a while of looking down on all this, he went into a kind of trance.

Again and again he told himself the same thing, “The battle is over . . . The battle is over.”

At length the two men realized that the sergeant who had sent them up the hill would wonder why they had not yet fired their machine guns, so just before dark they loosed some short bursts at the empty slope opposite them, but the firing only made the moaning in the valley sound louder, and this unsettled them even more and they stopped.

The killing went on till dark. By the time Takesada Shigeta and Kozo Hattori were called down from the hill, the battalion had packed up and was beginning to move out, north, to a bivouac by the Abo-Abo River.

Sitting around their campfires that night at the new position, none of the men spoke of the slaughter.

“They were all in high spirits a few hours ago,” Takesada Shigeta thought. “They were saying, ‘I killed this many or I killed that many.’ Now none of them are willing to talk because it wasn’t an honorable deed.”

He still felt numb, felt nothing, really, neither pity nor fear. The next day the 122nd gathered the remains of its dead for cremation and shipment home. The day after that the unit prepared to move off the peninsula and take up its next assignment.

Takesada Shigeta was sure he had put the Pantingan River behind him, but that night, unable to sleep, he “meditated deeply” on the blood-soaked trail in the jungle and the valley full of bodies below. At length he closed his eyes but could not sleep. An eerie noise began to nag at him, a chorus of moaning and crying he knew would never stop.