Survivors commemorate 74th anniversary of Bataan Death March

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Survivors commemorate 74th anniversary of Bataan Death March
By Robert Nott
The Santa Fe New Mexican (Tribune News Service)
Published: April 10, 2016

     http://www.stripes.com/news/us/survivors-commemorate-74th-anniversary-of-bataan-death-march-1.403755

bataan   
"This picture, captured from the Japanese, shows American prisoners using improvised litters to carry those of their comrades who, from the lack of food or water on the march from Bataan, fell along the road." Philippines, May 1942. "At the time of its release, this photo was identified as dead and wounded being carried by fellow prisoners during the Bataan Death March in April 1942 ... Subsequent information from military archivists, the National Archives and Records Administration, and surviving prisoners, strongly suggests that this photo may actually depict a burial detail at Camp O'Donnell.
 

Ralph Rodriguez says he’s not a hero. He doesn’t even want to talk about his wartime experiences of battling the Japanese and surviving the Bataan Death March.

“But I do it because I need to help people remember,” said Rodriquez, 98, following Saturday’s ceremony honoring Bataan Death March survivors who are still living, as well as those who have died since April 1942, when U.S. military commanders stationed on the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines surrendered to the Japanese.

“It’s not fun to really suffer or be tortured,” the Albuquerque man said.

Rodriquez was one of about 100 people, mostly military personnel, who attended the event near the Bataan Memorial Building on Galisteo Street to mark the 74th anniversary of a journey “too painful to remember, too tragic to not.”

While 74 may seen an odd anniversary to mark — unlike next year’s milestone 75th — time is thinning the ranks of the Bataan survivors. Each year, their numbers dwindle a little more — nine have died since last April’s ceremony. Nine others died the year before that. Every anniversary of the march is significant.

Veterans groups in the state estimate that just 20 survivors of the Bataan Death March are still living, eight in New Mexico. The youngest of them would be about 90.

Just three showed up for Saturday’s event — Rodriguez, William Overmier, 97, and Atilano “Al” David, 95.

From December 1941 to April 1942, some 1,800 New Mexico soldiers fought alongside Filipinos to repel Japanese invaders on the Bataan peninsula. On April 9, Bataan’s military commanders surrendered.

The American and Filipino defenders were either killed, captured or forced to march 65 miles through the jungle. Japanese soldiers used their bayonets and bullets along the way to kill the weak, wounded and defiant ones.

Those who survived the march ended up in prisoner-of-war camps where violence, malnutrition and disease took their toll. By the war’s end, just 900 New Mexico soldiers were alive to return home.

David, a native Filipino who moved to the United States in the mid-1950s, was one of the luckier ones.

Weak from a combat wound and suffering from malaria, he knew he faced a risk of being bayoneted or beheaded. And had he made it to a concentration camp, he said, he would not have lasted long. But two of his military buddies who had been carrying him made a decision that saved his life: When Japanese guards were not looking, they pushed David through some deep jungle brush, and the marchers passed him by.

With the aid of local Filipinos, he had recovered within a month and was battling alongside Filipino guerrilla fighters in the jungles, ambushing Japanese supply convoys.

On the day the American military surrendered to the Japanese, he said, “We were crying. I was crying.” Despite being ill-equipped and surviving on one bowl of rice a week, however, many Americans and Filipinos wanted to fight on, he said.

The Bataan battle, he said, was a combination of horror, chaos and death. He recounted with a tone of sorrow how he and some other soldiers had mistakenly shot down an American B-17 bomber, killing its crew, in the thick of battle.

“What can you say about something like that? Sadness,” he said.

Before the Americans surrendered, David felt like the defenders didn’t have a chance. “If we had had reinforcements, the proper equipment and air cover, we could have blown them all away,” he said. “We had no air cover, ineffective weapons and untrained soldiers. The Navy abandoned us. We were doomed from the start.

“We were waiting for Superman and Captain Marvel to win the war for us.”

Still, David avoided the grisly fate that many of his comrades met during or after the march.

For years, he resented the Japanese, who, he said, treated the Filipino prisoners much worse than their American counterparts. One day in the mid-1950s, he found himself shaking with rage when he saw a Japanese man on the subway in New York City.

“Something came over me. I wanted to do something violent to him. Strangle him. But I overcame it.”

Now, he said, he bears no ill will toward the Japanese: “We cannot generalize a nation.”

David just completed a memoir of his wartime experiences called End of the Trail. He hopes it can be published before the 75th anniversary of the march next year.

At 95, his mind is still sharp, though he relies on a wheelchair to get around. But there are still things he won’t talk about regarding Bataan and the war.

“War is an insult to humanity,” he said.

And, like Rodriguez, he says it’s not the soldiers who are the heroes. It’s their families, the ones who wait at home for them to return.

Or suffer when they don’t come back at all.

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Aging veterans remember torment of Bataan Death March
 
This picture, captured from the Japanese, shows American prisoners using improvised litters to carry those of their comrades who, from the lack of food or water on the march from Bataan, fell along the road." Philippines, May 1942.

http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/aging-veterans-remember-torment-of-bataan-death-march-1.285410
   
National Archives
By Carolyn Jones
San Francisco Chronicle (MCT)
Published: May 26, 2014

 

It's been 72 years since the Bataan Death March. Pedro Pineda, 94, thinks he might be ready to start talking about it.

"Here is something I cannot forget," he said last week while meeting with fellow veterans in a San Francisco apartment. "During this march, we had a short rest by an artesian well. We were so thirsty. But the Japanese sentries changed their mind, and told us to go back. On the way back, they bayoneted this guy ...

"Oh my gosh, I saw that," he said, tears rolling down his cheeks and his fists clenched. "I never talked about it. But it happened. I saw it."

Pineda, a retired cardio technician from Daly City, isn't the only one who rarely speaks of the infamous World War II massacre in the Philippines, a scorching, 63-mile trek Japanese soldiers forced upon 78,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war following the Battle of Bataan. The incident is rarely taught in schools and is often overlooked in war retrospectives, in part because it was among the worst defeats in U.S. military history and in part because of the sheer horror of what the soldiers endured.

But a Berkeley woman is trying to change that. Cecelia Gaerlan has launched a nonprofit, Bataan Legacy, to educate younger generations about the sacrifices and courage of Bataan soldiers. She visits schools, lobbies for Bataan to be included in textbooks, and on Monday is hosting a reunion for Bataan survivors at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco.

"These soldiers gave so much, but people just don't know. That's the double tragedy of Bataan," said Gaerlan, whose father, Luis, 94, is a Bataan survivor. "These men are now in their 90s. Time is of the essence."

MacArthur's plan

The Bataan Death March was in April 1942, four months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. As a U.S. territory, the Philippines was an early and central player in the war's Pacific Theater, and thousands of Filipino soldiers fought the Japanese under the leadership of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

With much of Southeast Asia under attack by the Japanese, MacArthur's plan was to hold tough on the Bataan peninsula and, after the arrival of supplies and reinforcements, attack north from there. But the Japanese blockaded Bataan, and thousands of American and Filipino troops were left stranded without food or medicine. After a three-month siege in which 10,000 American and Filipino troops died, the U.S. surrendered.

The Japanese then marched the prisoners of war - who were severely weakened from hunger and malaria - across the jungle to an internment camp. During the march, Japanese soldiers executed, bayoneted and tortured thousands of prisoners.

To survive, the prisoners ate grass, maggots, worms and crickets. They sucked water off guava leaves. How they survived is a mystery, still.

"I don't know why we lived. Luck? Something," Pineda said.

Internment camp

Proculo Bualat, 96, of San Francisco survived, then went on to endure months at the internment camp, where he worked burying the bodies of his cohorts, and then three years performing slave labor in a manganese mine before escaping.

He's almost never spoken of those years, his wife Johanna said, but a few memories have stayed with him: that once, while on burial detail, he almost shoveled dirt over a soldier who was still alive; and that the worms that infested a deep wound on his leg probably kept him alive, because they kept away infection.

Bualat went on to serve more than 20 years in the U.S. Army before finally retiring as a mechanic with the U.S. Postal Service.

David Tejada, 91, of Daly City started talking about his Bataan experiences a few years ago, after he sought treatment through the Veterans Administration for post-traumatic stress disorder. Talking to other veterans has been enormously helpful, he said.

He saw pregnant women bayoneted, girls raped, friends and relatives executed, and countless others starved to death. But it's not those incidents that gave him nightmares in later years, or what drove him to seek help.

It was a brief incident on a boxcar at the end of the march. He was jammed on the train with more than 100 other men, packed so tightly and in such excruciating heat that many died on the train, wedged among their fellow prisoners. The train slowed for a minute, and a woman ran over with a basket of cooked chicken. She gave it to Tejada and said, "Can you give this to my son?"

"I grabbed it and 100 other guys also grabbed it," he said, his face wincing at the memory. "I took two pieces and gave the rest to the group. I never gave it to her son. I didn't even know who her son was. But I felt so guilty - I thought maybe he died because I never found him. I had nightmares about that for 40 years.

"But then the psychologist at the VA said I didn't need to feel guilty any more," he said. "He said I probably saved my own life. ... I think we all just wanted to survive."