"Bataan"
An Epic Poem

Some sixty years ago, these veterans,
as fit, assured, adventurous young men,
shipped out of San Francisco for the East,
their posting to America's most prized
possession overseas, the Philippines.
Twelve units of the National Guard arrived
at bases on the main island, Luzon;
civilian soldiers, newly federalized;
cooks from New York, Chicago businessmen,
New England farm boys, miners, lumberjacks
from Oregon, and from New Mexico
Hispanics, Zunis, Pueblos, Navajos.
On evenings free of duty, and weekends,
men headed for Manila, where the way
of life was Spanish, slow and elegant.
They rode cheap pony carts, swam in the sea,
sent postcards home, chased women, drank in bars.
The Philippine Division officers,
in smart white uniforms, played polo, danced,
drank cocktails at their club. The peaceful nights
were redolent with bougainvillea scent
mixed with the smell of water buffalo.

But, in the Asian north, the Japanese
had been at war since 1931,
seizing Manchuria, then moving south
to take Nanking, Tsingtao, Hankow, Canton.
Code-breakers, diplomats, and army staff
knew that the days of peace were running out.
The Japanese will make the Philippines
the target of a multi-prong attack,
the officers were told. On red alert
the troops moved out to man the AA guns
around the US bases, Nielsen, Clark,
Del Carmen, Nichols Fields.

And then word came: Pearl Harbor has been bombed!
The war will last a month, men said, the Japs
can't see at night, can't fight, can't match our boys.
At Clark they cheered to see planes overhead.
Communication lines were sabotaged,
no warning came, the planes were Japanese.
While all the US pilots were at lunch
string after string of bombs came down, and then
the Zeroes dived and strafed all that was left.
Half of the brand new Flying Fortresses,
B-17s, were wiped out on the ground,
trucks, hangers, and supplies went up in smoke,
the Naval base at Cavite was smashed,
the big oil dump at Sangley Point blew up.
At twenty thousand feet, the Japanese
were out of range; the ancient US guns
leaked oil, grew hot, seized up, the muzzles burst,
and half the shells, from World War I, were duds.
As for the few P-40 fighter planes
still fit to fly, they had no oxygen,
maneuvered slowly, and had guns that jammed.

The Japanese invasion force, their tanks,
planes, landing craft, and infantry all proved
in ten years' battle in the Asian war,
advanced toward Manila from the north.
A second army landed to the south.
American and Filipino troops
fought back, dug in, withdrew, dug in again.
The US strategy had been withdrawal
and then evacuation, but the ships
intended to embark the troops, now lay
with the Pacific Fleet beneath the sea.
"Hold on," wired Washington, "We're sending help,
thousands of troops, hundreds of ships and planes."
Men watched from cliffs with high-power telescopes
to spot the rescue ships. Such hope was false;
the government had known right from the start
it had to sacrifice the Philippines.

Day after day, the bombing never stopped.
The troops fell back to new defensive lines.
Gas and oil dumps were fired. Mountains of food,
stockpiles of ammunition, medicine,
were left behind as they retreated south;
south to the mountainous peninsula,
Bataan, their rugged, last defensive hope,
tipped by the island fortress of Corregidor.

The Japanese had planned two months to take
the Philippines. The obstinate defense
had now held out three months. The last few ships
pulled out of Subic Bay. The President
ordered McArthur to depart. He left
Corregidor in March, by PT boat.
"I shall return," he said. He left behind
ten thousand starved, exhausted countrymen,
and sixty thousand Filipino troops.
All ships attempting to bring in supplies
were sunk or captured by the Japanese.
The Quartermaster Corps built bakeries,
sent out the local fishermen at night,
boiled seawater for salt, and commandeered
the horses of the cavalry for meat.
Rations were cut in half, then cut again.
Men ate iguanas, monkeys, snakes, and rats,
took rice and candy from dead enemy;
their dreams and fantasies were all of food.

Ammo and gasoline were giving out.
The quinine was all gone. Field hospitals
ran out of ether, blood, and medicine;
to operate, men held the patient down.
At Easter services, the chaplains gave
the host to red-eyed, bearded troops; some made
their first communion, and some their last.
Malaria, typhoid, and dysentery
were everywhere. All ranks, all services,
all specialties now fought as infantry,
voicing their plight in their ironic hymn:
"We are the battling bastards of Bataan,
no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
no pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
and nobody gives a damn."

Two Japanese battalions stormed ashore
behind their lines, attempting to outflank
the desperate defenders, cut them off.
A force of airmen, sailors, and marines
threw back the Japanese, in hand to hand
combat against their rifles, bayonets,
and swords in jungle so compact it hid
a sniper at ten feet, and bamboo stalks
deflected fire. Then Philippino Scouts
pursued the Japanese back to the sea
and blasted them from caves with dynamite.

But still, along the twenty miles of front,
a desperate line of foxholes and barbed wire
that ran from coast to coast across Bataan,
the Japanese came on. Relentlessly,
the gaunt Americans were driven back,
down to the tip of the peninsula.
The Japanese poured in fresh troops and tanks,
backed by more bombers and artillery.
Incessantly, the Zeroes bombed and strafed
the narrow space still held by the defense.
The walking wounded left the hospitals,
put on tin hats, re-joined the battle lines,
and fought with fevers of a hundred four.
Everything now was ruined or aflame.
The Japanese dropped messages that said,
"Give up or be destroyed." And they fought on.

Nurses were ordered to Corregidor,
and most of them escaped by submarine
and plane to safety in Australia.
Some soldiers joined guerillas in the hills.
Base hospitals came under mortar fire.
All of the food and ammunition gone,
the front began to break. On April 9th,
the last defenders backed up to the sea,
surrender orders came from General King.
"You're not surrendering," he told his troops.
"You did not yield. I am surrendering you."
The soldiers wept as they destroyed the guns.
Then they came out, in ones and twos, or groups,
unarmed, hands up, or carrying white flags.
The worst defeat in US history:
an army of ten thousand fighting men
thrown on the mercy of the Rising Sun.

The Japanese commander charged his troops
to treat their captives with humanity.
Atop their rattling tanks, flushed with success,
the dust-grimed front-line soldiers smiled and waved.
But as the disarmed prisoners made their way
toward the rear, they met the service troops.
Lined up and searched, their valuables were seized,
their mouths were probed, gold teeth pulled out with pliers,
and swollen fingers cut off for their rings.
All those on whom guards found a coin, a pen
a watch made in Japan, implying they
had robbed dead Japanese, were killed at once.

Then came the march, the Death March from Bataan,
or, as they called it at the time, the hike,
four days or more to the O'Donnell camp:
a ragged army of defeated men,
haggard, unshaved, in tattered uniforms,
some without boots, all of them starved or sick.
The Japanese lashed out from passing trucks
with canes and rifle butts. Along the road
discarded packs, canteens, and helmets lay
beside the bodies of unburied men.
The columns would be stopped and forced to stand
or sit for long hours in the sun. Sun stroke
made men delirious, then comatose,
and then they died. Each time a column moved
it left some dead and moribund behind.
The marchers breathed the suffocating dust
in temperatures that hit a hundred five.
The guards would halt the squads by running streams
or village wells, and let nobody drink.
Crazy with thirst, a man broke ranks, dropped down
beside a stream, and drank. A guard ran up,
unsheathed his sword, and split the soldier's head
from scalp to chin.

The wounded were the first to fall. Two men
would help a third, his arms around their necks.
He'd feel them staggering. Go on, he'd say,
leave me, I'm done; and they would know they held
their comrade's life between the two of them.
All those who fell were shot or clubbed to death,
beheaded, pushed into the path of tanks,
or cruelly finished off by bayonet.
In one shakedown, three officers were found
with Nippon currency. Guards made them dig
their grave, shot them, then ordered a detail
to cover them. One wasn't dead, but tried
repeatedly to climb out from the hole.
A comrade in the burial detail
in mercy, swung a spade and smashed his skull.
Some lost their minds. Some found their own release.
Along a cliff-top path, a young Marine
stopped for a moment, poised himself, then made
a perfect dive down to the rocks below.
 

Day after day they walked. In villages,
civilians watched this pilgrimage of pain,
placed water by the road, tossed candy, food,
or gave a hidden V for Victory sign.
Tears in her timid eyes, a pregnant girl
offered a rice ball to a starving man.
A guard dashed up and bayoneted her;
two other laughing guards unsheathed their knives,
cut out the fetus, waving it aloft.

 Some prisoners marched four days, some six, some more,
before they reached the railway terminus
at San Fernando, sixty miles away.
There, they were crowded into steel boxcars
that heated up like ovens in the sun.
The next two hours were purgatorial;
men died of suffocation where they stood.
In the few days of the Bataan Death March
more than a thousand US prisoners died.
Those who survived, in rags, with bloody feet,
at last got to O'Donnell prison camp.
The commandant delivered a tirade.
"Japan and the United States have been
and always will be bitter enemies.
You think you have escaped. The lucky ones
are those already dead. My only interest
is in how many of you die each day."

And they began to die. Two spigots served
nine thousand men. A slop of watery rice,
replete with maggots, was their daily food.
In months, most men resembled skeletons.
In crowded huts at night, bedbugs and lice
tormented them. Flies were so numerous
that they weighed down the branches of the trees.
Some dysenteric men, too weak to stand,
fell in the straddle trenches and were drowned.
The guards wore masks against the lethal stench.
Men died from typhus and malaria,
pellagra, jaundice, dengue, jungle sores.
Dry beri-beri stabbed their feet with pains
like electricity. Wet beri-beri
swelled up their testicles like volleyballs.
The moribund were taken to a hut
they called St. Peter's Ward, whence few returned.
Many a man who knew death was at hand
would ask his friends: Just tell them how it was.

Exhausted burial crews could not keep up.
Monsoons washed up the corpses from the graves,
and dogs dug up the bones and chewed on them.
For trivial infractions, or for none,
men would be bayoneted, shot, strung up,
beheaded, chained out in the sun to die.
A water hose pushed down a prisoner's throat
blew up intestines like a gross balloon,
then guards jumped on his swollen abdomen
until it burst. Many were those who found
life had become more terrible than death.
They sat down with a melancholy stare;
withdrawn and hopeless, they'd be dead in hours.

 In two months, fifteen hundred soldiers died
at Camp O'Donnell, then the place was closed,
the Filipino prisoners were released,
the others moved to Cabanatuan,
which housed those captured at Corregidor.
The heads of Filipinos, spiked on poles
stood by the entrance gate. In their new camp
the life expectancy was nineteen days;
that was before diphtheria arrived.
The local Filipino bishop came
with serum, which the Japanese refused.
For weeks, men watched their brothers suffocate
from mucus in their throats. The 'Zero Ward'
was full of terminal malaria,
whole huts were crammed with those who'd lost their minds.
And yet God help the man who wandered off,
confused, in fever or delirium
from any work detail outside the wire;
his mutilated corpse would be displayed
next day in mortal warning to the camp.
The food was scarce and indigestible;
some men refused to eat and starved to death,
and some cut short their lives by trading rice
for cigarettes. Some gambled with their food,
and if they lost, they died. And some risked death
by smuggling medicine into the camp,
or sacrificed their food or drugs for those
in greater need, in unrecorded acts
of selflessness that left no witnesses.
At Christmas, Red Cross parcels were allowed.
A little extra food, some medicine,
much more, the recognition that someone
remembered them, put new heart in the men;
the death-rate at long last began to fall.

 So they hung on. Accountants, laborers,
shade-tree mechanics, men who'd known hard times,
before the war seized and consumed their youth,
knowing their nation's armies would return.

The war began to turn. The Emperor's ships
were sunk at Midway and the Coral Sea,
his forces vanquished on the Solomons
and then pushed back, Pacific isle by isle.
In August '42, the Japanese,
their factories starved of workers by the war,
began to move their prisoners to Japan.
More than a dozen ships transported them,
weak with disease, crammed into fetid holds,
and tossed about like ballast in typhoons.
They got an ounce of moldy rice a day,
a cup of water, forty, fifty, days.
With hatches closed, the heat was terrible.
Some drank seawater. Men who had endured
the worst indignities till now, went mad,
bit into others' throats and drank their blood.
Doctors and medics worked until they died;
the dead lay where they fell, and decomposed.
In such extremity, chaplains would try
to still the cries by saying the Lord's Prayer,
and in the stinking air some men drew breath
and hoarsely sang God Bless America.

The hell-ships were unmarked, and US planes
and submarines mistook them for troop ships.
When the Shinyo Maru was sunk, some men
contrived to clamber out and swim for shore.
From motor boats, machine guns at each end,
the Japanese fired at them as they swam.
Two men concealed themselves beneath debris;
a guard attacked them with his bayonet,
they caught him, held him under till he drowned.
A few made it from ships to friendly shores
and joined Chinese guerrilla bands.
Less than a third of the Americans
who were transported from the Philippines
survived the two-month passage to Japan.
 

Arriving, they were herded through the streets
where they were stoned and beaten by the crowds.
The captives worked as slaves, on roads, on docks,
in factories, in mines and railway yards,
dying from rock falls, overwork, disease.
Feeding blast furnaces in smelting plants
men perished from the heat; working outdoors
in arctic temperatures, they froze to death.
Whenever possible, they sabotaged
machines, put sand in bearings or broke tools,
dropped valuable components in the sea
or quietly kicked them into wet cement.
Now they began more frequently to see
the silver wings of Superfortresses
as Air Force pilots targeted Japan.
They'd stand and watch the bombs fall on their camp
and yell out, "Burn it! Burn it to the ground!"
 

By 1944, America
was pressing forward strongly on all fronts,
anxious to liberate the camps that held
a hundred thousand Allied prisoners.
Some Japanese authorities resolved
that they would leave no witnesses alive.
On August 1st, an order was sent out
to all the camp commandants on Taiwan
for "final disposition" of the camps
as soon as urgent action was required.
"It is the aim," it read, "to let no one
escape, to kill them all, whether by bombs,
decapitation, drowning, poisonous gas."

 14th December 1944
on Palawan, the Philippines:
at the Puerto Princesa Prison Camp
one hundred fifty POWs
employed as slaves, had built a landing strip
which US bombers pounded frequently
from bases not six hundred miles away.
Although no planes were seen, at 1:00 PM
the air raid warning went. Guards drove the men
into the shelters, trenches roofed with logs.
Troops suddenly ran up with buckets full
of aviation fuel. They flung it in
the entrances and then ignited it.
The air filled with explosions and the screams
of dying men, the smell of burning flesh.
Those captives who got out were shot by guards,
but still, six men, their clothes on fire, escaped,
jumped down the cliffs, swam out to sea, were saved
by Filipinos, made it back alive
to US bases, where they told their tale.

 McArthur did return, wading ashore
at Leyte in October '44.
In January, his forces reached Luzon,
four separate landings aimed to execute
a pincer movement on the capital.
North of Manila lay the prison camp
of Cabernatuan. Most healthy men
had been dispatched as labor to Japan;
the camp held just five hundred officers
including doctors, amputees, and those
too sick to be shipped out. The army knew
the fate these could expect as it advanced.
While Philippine guerillas blocked the roads
against attack on each side of the camp,
one hundred twenty Rangers walked two days
beyond their lines. At dusk, they stealthily
crept to the camp perimeter, and opened fire.
The guards were cut to pieces. Rangers burst
into the barrack huts. "We're Yanks!" they yelled,
"You're free! Head for the gate!" The prisoners, sick,
confused, as pale as ghosts, stunned by the noise,
night-blinded from the lack of vitamins,
thinking this was the massacre they'd feared,
ran round in circles, and hid under beds.
The Rangers looked like giants, carrying
strange guns, with unfamiliar uniforms.
They picked the prisoners up, many of them
just skin and bones, not more than eighty pounds,
and carried them. The truth began to dawn.
"Thank you! Thank you!" They sobbed.
"Thank God you've come!
We thought the US had forgotten us."
With bullets humming overhead
the freed men headed out, the weaker ones
were borne in farm carts pulled by buffaloes.
The Rangers passed out smokes, ripped up their shirts
for bandages, gave barefoot men their boots.
"We thought that they were gods," one prisoner said.
Their liberation gave the sick new strength,
and, singing as they went, some marched all night.
Then trucks and army ambulances came
from the advancing lines to carry them.
Crowds of GIs stood by the road to cheer.
They passed a tank flying the Stars and Stripes
and struggled to their feet, to the salute,
and wept from open hearts, and without shame.

The European war came to an end
in May. In late June, Okinawa fell.
The Superfortresses, B-29s,
destroyed town after town. In Tokyo
close to a hundred thousand died by fire.
Sometimes American slave laborers
were killed by US bombs in these attacks,
and all the rest were dying day by day
from overwork, low rations, and abuse;
men in their twenties now looked twice their age.
Few of the Indians from New Mexico,
Apaches, Pueblos, Zunis, Navahos,
survived the bitter months of slavery.
In grief or agony, you need to speak
with people of your tribe, in your own tongue;
they died of great and crushing loneliness.
The prisoners knew they could not last a year;
what kept them going was not love but hate,
and humor, even at the cost of blows.
When ordered by a commandant to shout
Banzai! each time the Rising Sun was raised
they all yelled out in unison, Bullshit!
 

And still Japan refused surrender terms,
but built more kamikaze boats and planes,
and organized a huge militia force
of twenty million people, armed with spears.
The army strategists in Washington
concluded the invasion of Japan
would take two years and cost a million men,
and all the POWs would die,
as well as many million Japanese.

Meanwhile, the brightest dawn in history
(or darkest, for the future of mankind)
burst on the desert of New Mexico;
July 16th, the first atomic bomb
exploded in a fireball that was seen
a hundred miles away. Once more, Japan
was offered terms; once more they were refused.
Aircraft dropped leaflets on the target towns
advising people to evacuate.
At 8:15 AM on August 6th,
one bomb razed Hiroshima to the ground.
But still no answer came from Tokyo.
On August 9th, slave laborers across
the bay from Nagasaki felt a shock
and saw a brilliant shivering white light,
and then the mushroom cloud above the town.
Some realized what this meant, began to hug
each other and to scream, We're going home!
One hundred fifty thousand victims died
in these attacks, and with them died the war.
The Emperor spoke: the prisoners saw their guards
bow to the radio. The suffering
must end, he said. The cabinet concurred.
A coup attempt by die-hard officers
was crushed. Camp commandants relayed the news
to the American COs. "Now that
hostilities have ceased, let us be friends."
A colonel summoned the Americans
"The war is over." There was silence, then
a voice called out, "Well, tell us which side won!"
Men cheered and sang, embraced each other, wept,
or knelt in some quiet place and gave God thanks.

Guards slipped away. When inmates raided stores,
they found Red Cross supplies of medicine
and food withheld for years. B-29s
dropped parachutes with fifty-gallon drums
of fruit and chocolate, whisky, medicine;
a case of peaches hit and killed one man.
They ate until they vomited, then ate
and vomited again. The parachutes,
red, white, and blue, were remade into flags.
The Rising Sun came down, the Stars and Stripes
went up. US recovery teams arrived
to supervise the closing of the camps.
Trains were procured to take the men to ports,
where bands played "When the Saints Go Marching in."
They boarded navy ships, their clothes were burned,
their skin deloused, their parasites killed off,
their wounds and maladies attended to
by nurses who resembled goddesses.
Food was available all day. Men drank
milk by the jug, ate ice cream by the quart,
wolfed cans of Spam, doubled their weight in weeks.
And yet they still hid apples under shirts,
and bread crusts under blankets in their bunks.

So they returned. To army hospitals,
to cities and small towns, where families
awaited them. Some found their parents dead,
or wives remarried, sweethearts disappeared.
But home towns welcomed them with big parades,
and pretty girls would kiss them in the street.
The hospitals all looked the other way
when nurses dated them or brought them booze.
The doctors thought that few would last ten years.

Reunions past, the mothers and the wives
studied the faces of the men they loved
and found they could no longer read the eyes.
Few men could talk of what they'd undergone.
Soft mattresses gave them insomnia,
and when they slept, nightmares would waken them.
They suffered from depression and fatigue,
and sudden rages scared their families.
Good jobs were hard to find; the end of war
had filled the States with stronger, fitter men.
They only found with fellow alumni
of their 'Far Eastern University'
true empathy and lifelong brotherhood.
They knew that they would go again, the day
their country called. But they would not, next time,
be taken by the enemy alive.

The last war's victories were past; defeats
such as Bataan were best forgotten now.
After their trials, nine hundred Japanese
were executed for atrocities.
Others, as guilty but more fortunate,
did well in business and in public life.
Exigencies of Cold War politics
meant that Japan was last year's enemy.
 

What of the last survivors of Bataan?
Some of them died in mental hospital.
Some died of ills from their imprisonment.
Some died by their own hand, some on Skid Row.
But looking at the rest, executives,
physicians, sergeants, priests, you wouldn't guess
the purgatory these men had endured.
And so, with grace, and, most remarkable,
a signal absence of vindictiveness,
the few survivors reached a calm old age.

At twelve noon, on the White Sands Missile Base,
the temperature is ninety-three degrees.
Three thousand marchers are strung out along
the sandy twenty-five mile desert route.
The walkers have been on the trail six hours,
they breathe the dust raised by six thousand feet,
and shirts and BDUs are dark with sweat.
Hat brims are down, and silence has replaced
the conversations of the first few hours.
As miles go by, a few of them begin
to feel they march in company with ghosts,
a shadow army of those men who died
in battle, in the hell-ships, in the camps.
It's burning afternoon when they attain
the finish line. And there, two veterans
white-haired and dignified, congratulate
each of them as they pass. Two of the few.

It may be no great thing, to walk all day
beneath the hot sun of New Mexico
in safety, fit and healthy and well-fed.
And yet the moment's solemn, as they meet
these two old soldiers, and shake hands with them.
They have today helped shore up memory
against indifference and oblivion,
and honored, as is right, in dust and sweat
the heroes of Bataan.
 
 
 

David Pratt 55 John St. Kingston Ontario Canada K7K 1S8 613-531-4190 dpratt1939@hotmail.com

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