War Stories II (13 page)

SERGEANT RICHARD GORDON, US ARMY
Camp O'Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
May 1942

The day after the surrender, the Japanese got us up at the crack of dawn and started marching us north, in groups of about 300 at a time. It was
every man for himself. A lieutenant colonel had been wounded and he was unable to stand. They put him on a stretcher and asked for volunteers to carry him. I was one of four who carried that man all day long. We kept asking for relief, because it was hot and getting hotter. No one came near us to relieve us. When we put that man down that night we went in four different directions, because we knew that the next day, if we were still on the detail, we would not physically be able to make that march.

I think that the Japanese made sure they didn't let units march together. Units are much more difficult to control than a loose group of prisoners. Generally speaking, they didn't allow that to happen, and just broke up our military units.

One loose group of 300 would lead the first day, and another group would lead the next. We wondered how the Japanese would treat us. What they had done in China had been played on newsreels almost nightly in Manila theaters. We saw what they did to Chinese women and soldiers—raping, beheading, shooting—so we knew what they were capable of. But naively, we didn't think that we would have to suffer that inhumane treatment as Americans. But we did.

When General King had tried to arrange to use our own vehicles to transport us out of the Bataan area, the Japanese refused.

They gave us no food at all. Some may have gotten a rice bowl somewhere, but not in my case. They would not let you break ranks to go for water. They would allow stops for water, but they were few and far between. So as a result, men would break ranks and go to some stagnant pool on the side of the road and begin to drink. And the Japanese would yell, get them back in ranks—or if they wouldn't get in ranks fast enough, they shot them.

In my case, training was the difference between my survival and perhaps not surviving, because I had been trained in how to preserve water. I had one canteen, and I would put a little of that water in my mouth, swish it around, get a little trickle down my throat, and spit the rest back into my canteen. Hardly Emily Post etiquette, but an effective way to keep what water you had.

But most of these men came overseas untrained and not acclimated to the Philippine climate. They couldn't tolerate it. The sun in the Philippines is incredibly hot, especially at noontime. And every day at noon on that march, the Japanese would stop us. Every time they stopped they conducted a shakedown. We were all warned before the surrender, just before we were all captured, to have nothing on us that was Japanese. We were told not even to keep some of the propaganda leaflets that they dropped on Bataan, which [they felt] showed that you had ignored their offer of surrender. But many of us had money we had taken off dead Japanese soldiers during the fighting. In my case I had a diary that some Japanese writer had kept. I got rid of it real quick—even before the surrender. If they caught you with something like that, there was an immediate execution.

Each time we stopped on the march, the Japanese put us into an open field with no shade, no trees around, and made you take your hats off and sit there all through their lunch hour. That was deliberate. It made you lethargic, to the point that you were in a stupor. That way you couldn't run away.

I saw a young American soldier who passed out from trying to walk in that heat. He just collapsed where he was, close to the road. A Japanese tank, moving south as we moved north, deliberately ran over him. And behind that tank, the other tanks swerved to run over him.

A Filipino soldier in the column ahead of us was alongside the road as our column passed. He was on his knees and I watched as a Japanese soldier beheaded him. I don't know why.

I saw a Japanese soldier beat a woman with the butt of a rifle because she was trying to hand food to one of the prisoners.

We marched like this for—in my case—eight days. They knew we were dying for food and water, and they weren't going to let us have it.

At the end of the eight days, we arrived at a huge metal warehouse that had held thousands of sacks of rice. But it was empty when we got there. The Japanese pushed us inside that warehouse, as many prisoners as they possibly could squeeze in. We were standing like the subway at rush hour.

When we were all inside they shut the windows and door. The sun beat down on that place and men died in the night because of the heat and closeness, and from being ill to begin with.

The next morning when they opened the door for us to come out, there were a lot of dead men left behind. The Japanese took those people and threw them into a big open hole, poured gasoline on them, and set fire to them.

We were marched further up the road to a town called San Fernando, where they had trains with boxcars waiting for us. They shoved as many people into those boxcars as they could get inside, standing up, with no room to move. Every now and then, some would die, but we were packed in so tight, they couldn't fall down. We finally ended that train ride, and when we got out of those cars, there were dead men in every car. Once again, the Japanese piled them off to the side and set fire to them.

When we got to our destination we started marching again. Men were dehydrated from being in that warehouse, in the boxcars, and being forced to sit in the noonday heat, and many more of them died.

If we had known it was going to be eight days of inhumane treatment and abuse, with so many dying or executed, I think there might have been an attempt at mass escape, despite the risk. But no one had any idea how long it was going to take, because the Japanese kept telling us, “Just a little way up the road we will stop for food and water.” It was a lie, of course, but they kept telling us that, like bait dangling in front of you. Those things never materialized.

The Japanese marched us to a place called Camp O'Donnell, which was to be our first prison camp. We had to stand in the hot sun and wait about an hour or so, until the camp commander came out. He gave us the full, ten-course description of what would happen if we tried to escape. We were searched, and if they found anything they didn't like, those people were executed on the spot.

The conditions at Camp O'Donnell were indescribable. We were assigned to certain barracks, and we found ourselves with a single water
pipe for 3,000 men. Men went without water even in that prison camp, many of them too weak or sick to wait in line for hours for a drink.

We thought that when we got to O'Donnell that our lot in life had improved, only to find ourselves in the Black Hole of Calcutta. I was ordered to burial duty, and after a while you couldn't even recognize the corpse you were taking out. So I could very easily have buried my friends and never known it.

CORPORAL RALPH RODRIGUEZ, JR., US ARMY
Camp O'Donnell POW Camp
Luzon, Philippines
May 1942

Before the surrender I packed my medic's bag with a couple of bottles of paregoric and a good-sized bottle of iodine. And those are the two things that I used throughout the Death March. I put iodine in the water and the paregoric to give out because it numbs pain a little and helps if you have diarrhea. It also has alcohol in it, and it builds you up a little bit.

I barely got through the areas where they stood you one against the other. I guess from lack of air or something, I passed out. A lot of the men hadn't eaten for at least two, three days or more. You can't march very far in a hundred degrees, much less half-starved. On the first night, there were some people ahead of us—the airfield was full of people. During the evening, late, we started coming across men who were sitting down or couldn't move, or were lying down sick, asking for help. Right away the medics started to try to help them out, but as soon as you start helping them, here come the Japs with their bayonets.

The Japanese struck the butt of the rifle in one man's face, broke all his teeth and nose and everything. I saw the Japanese pursue one who got behind a fruit stand and he shot him, and then he came up cleaning his bayonet.

One time they made us run—maybe because they were just mean. God was with us, for after making us run, they stopped us about two, three o'clock in the morning. We lay down alongside the road. I couldn't find any comfortable spot to lie down, because it looked like a bunch of rocks. But the “rocks” happened to be turnips. And we all ate turnips. I ate my share of them after cleaning the dust off a little bit.