Fall of Bataan / Death March

While New Mexicans at home did what they could with their fear and anxiety, what came to be known as the Bataan Death March began on April 10 almost immediately after the Japanese assembled approximately 78,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war in the large fields outside of Mariveles, a small town at the far south of Bataan.[i] The Japanese planned to place all the prisoners sixty miles north on the Luzon plains, in an old Philippine army camp called O’Donnell near San Fernando. For the Japanese, it was a logistical nightmare. There were far more prisoners than they had anticipated, and they knew they had to move all of them before they could begin their final assault on Corregidor, the island fortress within the Bataan Harbor where American forces were still holding on (including as many as a hundred New Mexican).

An estimated quarter of the New Mexican prisoners of war would ride to O’Donnell on the few available trucks, including Bill Overmeir of Albuquerque, Dow Bond of Taos and Winston Shillito of Silver City.[ii] But for the rest, the Japanese determined that a forced 60-mile march was the only way to move them. The Japanese lacked food and medicine for their prisoners, but repeatedly denied prisoners’ access to water sources. Almost immediately, Japanese guards began arbitrarily beating prisoners, and robbing them of their possessions. Informing the Japanese ethics regarding the treatment of prisoners of war was the Bushido code, which saw surrender as highly dishonorable and only worthy of contempt.[iii] Bataan veterans, however, recall varying experiences depending on where they began the march, and exactly which Japanese unit was guarding them (those Japanese troops who had fought in China were considerably more cruel). The march was not one event but rather a series of separate marches.[iv] Veterans like Tony Reyna and Ben Skardon, for example, remember the heat and starvation but do not immediately recall witnessing extreme acts of cruelty on the march, while others, like Julio Barela, Lorenzo Banegas, William Dyess, Manuel Armijo, and hundreds of others provide eyewitness accounts of torture and outright murder.

There were several starting points along the march and historians have struggled to determine the exact number who took part or who died on the march. Except for a few accounts of New Mexicans being shot or killed on the march, historians do not know how many New Mexicans died on the march.[v] The chaos following surrender and the destruction of records, as well as the many, virtually faceless deaths on the march, made the numbers hard to track. Rosters were reassembled, often by memory, by officers later in the prison camps. Most historians and official military accounts estimate 11,700 Americans and as many as 65,000 Filipinos began the 65-mile march from the Bataan Peninsula to San Fernando. Of those, between 600 and 700 Americans and between 5,000 and 10,000 Filipinos died on the march.[vi]

The causes of death were many, from malaria and dysentery to starvation and sheer exhaustion.  Other deaths were indescribably horrific and violent. Many Filipinos were beheaded by sword-yielding Japanese officers, and Americans and Filipinos suffered the “sun treatment,” hours where they were bound and forced to look toward the sun. Falling out meant death. There were firing squads implemented arbitrarily, and there are hundreds of eyewitness accounts of beatings and other cruelty.[vii] The Japanese captors taunted many of the POWs, dangling food or water within reach before knocking the men back with a bayonet thrust or rifle butt. Las Crucen Julio Barela recalled:

“In the eyes of the Japanese, we were cowards to have surrendered as they believed that taking your own life was a far better fate. We were beaten, slapped, pushed, tortured and yelled at while we marched. I was struck on the back of the head with the butt of the rifle of one of my captors. I remembered thinking of my mother and how she would suffer if I died. So I balanced as much as I could so as not to fall. Once an American soldier would fall he would be stabbed with the bayonet or shot. Several of my comrades fell from fatigue on top of illness and would not go on. They were immediately killed. All the time I thought I would be next.”[viii] 

The Japanese denied water to their prisoners of war, even though springs were located all along the road. Men driven mad by thirst plunged into disease-infested mud pits, only to be shot or beaten. Among several horrific acts he witnessed, Manuel Armijo recalled seeing an American general bludgeoned to death by Japanese guards, “and two other Americans were murdered that night just for getting water. They had the empty canteens on them when we marched by their bodies in the morning.”[ix] Those who survived the first days soon came down with any number of diseases, from pellagra to dysentery. Some received food the first night, but it was little more than a ball of rice, at best. Many went without any food or water for the days it took to complete the march.[x]  

Dow Bond, who along with New Mexico ex-POWs Mike Pulice, Winston Shillito, and Bill Overmeir, was one of hundreds of New Mexicans who did not participate in the death march, witnessed the conditions. “I rode out on a Japanese truck and I saw the results of the Death March. The men were really in terrible physical condition. Dehydrated, stripped of all their personal belongings. Five of our men never regained their sanity. I was lucky.”[xi] By the second day, the worn and battered men, many of them marching the dusty roads in their bare feet, began to fall. As they did, those standing close would help. The Baldonado brothers Juan and Pepe, from Carrizozo, at times physically supported each other as they marched.[xii] The march became a matter of survival of the fittest, though there are many accounts of lives being saved by selfless acts.

While some were killed trying to go for water or to escape into the jungle, others were lucky and able to get away, and perhaps a hundred men escaped across Manila Bay to Corregidor.[xiii] But there was little hope on Corregidor. About 5,000 Americans were barricaded within the Malinta Tunnel, or defending the beachhead, and the sense or doom and abandonment prevailed.

Meanwhile, upon arrival in San Fernando the survivors of the Death March were packed into cramped boxcars and taken by train five miles. The cars could perhaps comfortably hold thirty, but most held more than a hundred. Those too weak to go further died in the boxcars, overcome by the heat. Survivors were then forcibly marched another five miles to Camp O’Donnell.[xiv] Many were spared the trip in the boxcars, either riding in trucks the whole way, or marching there along a different route. Those who were glad the march was over found no relief at Camp O’Donnell, a place whose death toll became so high the Japanese eventually were forced to close it down within a few months. A campground designed for fewer than five thousand people, and equipped with only one water faucet, O’Donnell was now packed with fifty thousand diseased and starved American and Filipino prisoners of war.

[i] Morton,450-452.

[ii] Cave, 174. Winston Shillito completed the memorial march in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999, saying he did it for his comrades.

[iii] Shockley, 77; Cave 112. Demonstrating the Japanese soldiers’ view of surrender, when American forces retook Corregidor in late 1944 and 1945, only a few dozen Japanese surrendered while thousands killed themselves in a variety of ways.

[iv] Cave, 176.

[v] Reynaldo Gonzalez, a captain in the 200^th CA from Lemitar, was killed by a Japanese firing squad on the second day of the death march. Cave, 188.

[vi] Cave, 176; Olsen, 13.

[vii] Dorothy Cave’s book Beyond Courage makes use of 600 hours worth of interviews or letters of more than a hundred and twenty New Mexican ex-POWs. All of these men have numerous stories of separate incidents of beatings, torture, and random violence. Also see Dyess, Bataan survivor Manny Lawton’s Some Survived, or testimony of ex-prisoners of war given before the War Crimes Tribunal, September 1946.

[viii] Las Cruces Sun-News. “History of Bataan”. In special Bataan edition, April 2002.

[ix] Quoted in Cave, 181.

[x] Numerous accounts in Cave, Dyess, Lawton, Griffin, and Rogers.

[xi] Santa Fe New Mexican, April 7, 1967. 1-2. Bond returned to the Philippines in 1967 along with thirty other New Mexican Bataan veterans for the dedication of the Mt. Samat War Memorial on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Bataan.

[xii]  Artist Kelly S. Hestir recreated this scene sixty years later in a memorial in Las Cruces partially funded by federal money which was lobbied for by their nephew J. Joe Martinez

[xiii] Martinez would receive the Purple Heart for this injury in 2003.

[xiv] Dyess, 94-95; Cave 187.

Submitted by Christopher Schurtz, grandson of Paul Shurtz, who died at Bataan