Behind Japanese Lines (7 page)

This was typical of Japanese unpredictability. Any Westerner who had much to do with the Japanese was invariably struck by how their psychology differed from that of Occidentals, and by their abrupt changes of mood. One moment they would be calm, smiling, reasonable, even generous: the next, storming in some inexplicable rage and acting like savages. An American Jesuit who spent the war years at a college in Manila wrote a perceptive book about the Philippines under Japanese occupation. He ascribed the sudden shifts in mood among the Japanese to their lack of an underlying philosophy or fixed religious faith. Some of their philosophical and moral ideas came from Confucianism and Buddhism, which are more truly
attitudes toward existence
than religions in the Western sense; and some have been derived from Shintoism, which is basically a mixture of animism and ancestor worship without either a rational view of the cosmos or a moral code. Then, in modern times, this variegated ancient legacy has been overlaid lightly by a mixture of Christianity and rationalism, a combination that has never been entirely reconciled and digested in the West itself much less in the non-Western world. The vast divergences among all these traditions, not to speak of what resulted when they were muddled together, he thought, had produced fundamental instability in the Japanese character.
²
Needless to remind the reader, I never tried to analyze the Japanese at this level, but I can testify that they were extraordinarily capricious.

Examples of their unpredictability abounded during the first days of our captivity when everything was still wondrously disorganized. Robert Mailheau, a fellow survivor of the Death March, was once near a Japanese battery that suffered a direct hit from an artillery shell fired from Corregidor. The battery and its whole crew were blown to bits. Perhaps a hundred American and Filipino prisoners nearby let out a spontaneous cheer. While this was great for their morale momentarily, one would expect that it would have been followed by
some swift and terrible retribution. Yet, for whatever reason, the Japanese did nothing.

Where I was, a guard would sometimes stop us periodically and take one or more men out of a group to fix a stalled truck, drive pack animals somewhere, or do some other menial chore. Once while we were still in the extreme south of Bataan, I was picked, with half a dozen other men, to dig some foxholes. While we were busy at it, the heavy mortars on Corregidor opened up on us. All we American diggers hit the dirt at once, as we had been trained to do, but the Japanese just laughed at us and stood unconcernedly in the open, seemingly confident that none of the shells had their names on them. Apparently they had never heard the admonition that the shell to fear is not the one with your name on it but the one addressed “To whom it may concern.” Their bravado in such cases also helps to explain why Japanese casualties were so much higher than American.

Another time I was removed from the road and forced to help a Japanese company prepare a bivouac. Here one of the guards spoke to me in English. I asked him where he had learned the language. He said he had been trained in Yokohama to be a teacher of English. I then asked him which side he thought would win the war. He replied thoughtfully, without the customary Japanese menace or boasting, that he believed Japan would. He added that the training he had undergone in Japan was tougher than anything he had experienced so far in combat, so rough in fact that some of his fellow trainees had committed suicide rather than endure it. He said he hated the British, but about Americans he was silent. From this manner I guessed that he was opposed to the war and not sanguine about its ultimate outcome.

After a few days the guards got better control of things and our regimen became appreciably tougher. Instead of straggling in small groups or even alone, we were now marched in large groups, three abreast, on the left side of the road, so southward bound Japanese vehicles to our right would not be impeded. It was now, too, that the real atrocities began, at least where I was. Guards trotted up and down the columns clubbing men into line with rifle butts, stabbing laggards with their bayonets, and shooting or bayoneting to death anyone chronically unable to keep up, all this accompanied by a fusillade of verbal abuse. Our captors, who had been taught that to become a prisoner of war was a disgrace, repeatedly taunted us with accusations of cowardice and sneered at our inability to keep pace. Heartbreaking acts of savagery multiplied. One poor fellow behind me jumped into a stream as we crossed a bridge. A guard raised his rifle to
his shoulder and waited. As soon as the man surfaced, he was shot in the back. Another time I saw what was left of a human body after it had been run over by a tank on a hard-surfaced roadbed. It looked like a wet sack. I saw many men bayoneted and then abandoned to suffer a slow, agonizing death in the dust. I watched a general being clubbed until he was a bloody, unrecognizable mess. As for myself, I was clubbed many times for no reason other than sheer malice.

So we stumbled along, mile after mile, through heat and dust, tortured by hunger, thirst, diseases, and the accumulated effects of three months on short rations. The popping of .25-caliber Japanese rifles grew more frequent as more and more men proved unable to maintain the pace of the march. After a while nobody even looked back to see who had been shot this time. Only once did I see a Japanese officer so much as reprimand a guard for brutality. In that case the guard had deliberately crushed the glasses of a man whom I happened to know, a forty-five-year-old sergeant, William T. Moore. The officer grabbed the guard and knocked him down with a blow from his fist—one of the commonest modes of enforcing discipline in the Japanese army.

Night was, if anything, worse than daytime. We would simply be herded into a field and enclosed with barbed wire. It resembled nothing as much as putting cattle into a corral, save that our plight was sorrier. Since it was near the end of the dry season, the fields were mere bare ground and dust, without grass. Here thousands of men, without food or water, were packed in so closely that one could not shift his body without causing discomfort to others. Worse, there were no toilets, and by now maybe a third of us had dysentery. There we lay in mind-numbing squalor, soaked in our own body wastes and those of others, waiting for dawn to resume the man-killing march.

Judging from what I have heard and read since World War II, our captors must have handled the distribution of food more humanely in other parts of the march than where I was. Bob Mailheau says that on a couple of occasions he and a few others simply walked up to a Japanese cook and made motions indicating that they were hungry, after which they were given some rice. I was not so lucky. I was fed a little rice on the day I was put to work digging foxholes. For seven days after that the Japanese offered us no food at all in regular chow lines. All of us would have died had not the general disorganization that prevailed for three or four days enabled us to scrounge a little food in various ways. When the guards were few and otherwise occupied, we could sometimes dig up a few
camotes
(Philippine sweet potatoes) in fields. Now and then a friendly Filipino would furtively hand or toss
us something from along the roadside. Once in a while a person could grab something edible off a bush or tree along the road. It is possible that an individual Japanese guard might have handed me a rice ball on an occasion or two, though I don't remember it. I did go three days in one stretch with no food at all, and later as a guerrilla also went three or four days without food on a few occasions. The sensation is odd. The first day one is hungry, the second much more hungry, and the third ravenous, but on the fourth day the process begins to reverse itself.

Lack of water was worse than lack of food. Though we passed many artesian wells and clear streams, the guards would rarely allow us to fill our canteens. The only places from which they let us drink freely were muddy, slime-covered carabao wallows, probably because it afforded them an opportunity to humiliate us.

Just why the Japanese should have treated us with such unrelieved and unnecessary brutality has been the subject of much learned and unlearned conjecture since 1945. Some have ascribed it mostly to Japanese administrative incapacity and unpreparedness, and to the foulups that are inseparable from war; some have attributed it to sheer Japanese savagery, regarding it as proof that the Nipponese are not yet civilized; some have seen it as Japanese retribution for the racial discrimination to which they have been subjected by white people, noting in particular how the Japanese never missed a chance to humiliate Americans in the presence of Filipinos; others have charged it to the samurai tradition in the Japanese army and to the brutality of its training methods; still others have claimed that it was due merely to the guards on the Death March being the dregs of the Japanese army. People with considerable knowledge of Japanese history and culture have maintained that, while Japan has drawn abreast of the Western world in science and technology, it is still centuries behind in the development of humanitarian attitudes. It has even been suggested that the cruelty of the Japanese on the Death March and in prison camps was due to nothing more complex than a desire to avenge their own heavy casualties in the Bataan campaign and to work off their frustration at having been compelled to postpone their projected invasion of Australia.
³

I believe there is some substance in every one of these explanations. Even so, I think the most important factor was different, and simpler. Most of the guards seemed to me to be ignorant farm boys, no doubt irritated by our inability to understand and respond quickly to commands given in Japanese, but at bottom concerned mostly to demonstrate how tough they were, to show off in front of their
buddies, to let everyone know that they were real men who shrank from nothing.

As the days passed, the horrors mounted. By now virtually every prisoner had been stripped of everything he owned save the tattered clothes on his back. Anyone found with Japanese money, photographs, or souvenirs in his possession was executed. The guards appeared to assume that such items must have been taken off dead Japanese soldiers. Beheading was the favorite mode of execution, and the guards began to show us posters graphically illustrating our fate should we be caught attempting to escape. A typical poster showed a Japanese soldier, both hands on the handle of a samurai sword moments after it had passed through the neck of a kneeling prisoner. As I trudged along, rage and hatred welled up from the depths of my soul and engulfed me. I resolved to escape, or die trying.

Had I been cool and rational, I might have weighed my prospects somewhat as follows: though my regular weight was 150-160 pounds, I was now down around 100, perhaps even less. Already starved, beset with malaria that produced alternating chills and fever in 100-degree temperatures, without water most of the time, and with no idea where I was going, I thought my chances of surviving much longer on the march so slim that there seemed little to lose by trying to escape. All along the road I had seen brave and compassionate Filipinos of both sexes and all ages risk their lives to slip food to prisoners. Surely some Filipinos would help me if only I could get away. Moreover, the Japanese did not know my name, as became apparent when it never appeared on an official prisoner of war list. I suppose I gave them a false name, though I don't remember doing so. I do recall telling them I was in the quartermaster corps, hoping that they would be less likely to hate me. On the opposite side of the ledger were such considerations as these: I knew nothing of the geography of Luzon, and I would be setting off, without food, money, or medicine, amid a people of whom I knew little, whose language I could not speak, and who might easily turn me back to my captors to be tortured and killed.

But the truth is, I never calmly weighed such pros and cons at all. By now I had witnessed so many atrocious deeds that I was consumed with a venomous black hatred for everything Japanese. Now I understood why some men had refused to surrender and had fled instead into the forbidding jungle that covered the Zambales Mountains or had set off, weak as they were, to swim three miles through shark-infested waters to Corregidor. I grew determined not to die as a prisoner, not to fall in the dust and be run through with a bayonet
because I could not stand the pace of the march, not to be shot in the head in some jungle with my hands tied behind my back. I must try to escape, no matter how long the chance, for only if I got away would I ever have a chance to avenge myself on my tormentors.

Once this entirely emotional resolution became fixed, I then did begin to plan rationally. With great care I watched both sides of the road, and the guards. As we approached a bridge over a small stream near Dinalupihan on the north border of Bataan province, I saw my chance. We were nearing a deep ditch covered with dense foliage. I slipped from the right marching column to the center, then to the left. When a guard looked away I dove head first over the bank into the ditch. There I lay rigid, terrified that the pounding of my heart must be so loud that the guards on the road above could hear it. But they did not, and as the footsteps faded away I heard an American voice say something like, “Don't look. Do you want to get him shot?”

When the detachment of prisoners above me had passed on, I crawled a short way along the ditch and discovered two others like myself. I touched one of them on the leg. He was too frightened to move. Only when I spoke softly did he look around. He was Corp. Walter D. Chatham, Jr., of the air corps. Ahead of him, lying flat on his face, was a Captain Jones from the artillery. My arrival must have scared them half to death.

Like myself, Walter Chatham should have been killed several times by now. He had gone through the Bataan campaign and had started the Death March from Mariveles at the extreme southern tip of the Bataan peninsula. Near Cabcaben Field, a few miles northwest, an artillery shell from Corregidor, intended for the enemy, had landed in the middle of the group in which he was walking, blowing bodies in all directions. A few days later Walter, by now staggering from hunger, thirst, and fatigue, had grabbed hold of a bridge to keep from falling only to have a Japanese guard unconcernedly flip him over into a ravine some forty feet below. Miraculously, he had landed between two huge boulders and was not seriously injured. Two other Japanese soon came by from under the bridge, but they were headed for an artesian well to get water and ignored him. Eventually Walter clambered back up onto the road and managed to keep moving for another five days until he and Captain Jones had leaped over the bank into the same ditch I chose, maybe ten minutes before I did.