Behind Japanese Lines by Ray C. Hunt, Bernard Norling

mostly a P-40, load it with thirty-pound fragmentation bombs, and look for some Japanese troops who were reported to be near the Bataan airstrip. If he was unable to find them, he was to return and land. If he found them, he was to bomb them and then flyon to Cebu about three hundred miles south. Jack dropped his bombs, rocked his wings to us on the ground, and headed south. Capt. O.L. Lunde also flew south in a Seversky P-35 with another pilot stuffed into the baggage compartment. Dyess then ordered Capt. Hank Thorne and Lt. Ben Brown into the remaining P-35, one on the other’s lap in the pilot’s seat, with another pilot in the baggage compartment. They also headed south. We in the ground crew then changed a cylinder in the last plane, a beat-up collection of scraps that had originally been an old civilian Ballanca. Aboard it were Lieutenants Barneke, Robb, Coleman, Short, and Boelens, and General Mac-Arthur’s propaganda chief, Carlos P Romulo. The overloaded relic barely got off the runway, flew right over the heads of Japanese troops advancing down the main road on the east side of Bataan, and was able to limp across the strait to Corregidor only when those on board threw all their baggage into Manila Bay. It was the end of the line.
    Most of us then retreated a short distance south to Mariveles Bay. There we threw away the firing pins from our rifles, stacked the neutered arms, and awaited the arrival of the new rulers of Luzon. I was bewildered. I had never gotten much information about anything pertaining to the war in my three months on Bataan. For a much longer time than was reasonable, I had expected that we would eventually be rescued, mostly, no doubt, because I wanted so badly to believe it. Like so many Americans, in uniform and out, I had simply assumed that no matter what the situation the United States was bound to prevail in the end. The thought of old-time regulars near retirement and fuzzy-cheeked pilots, not to speak of myself, becoming prisoners of the Japanese, had simply never entered my consciousness. It was also to be the last time I was to see most of the men in my outfit. Ed Dyess, then a captain, was to survive an incredible array of hardships and escape from a prison camp on Mindanao, only to die in a training mishap in California a few months afterward. Lt. Sam Grashio survived and escaped with Dyess, and I regained contact with him years after the war; but most of the others were gone for good.
    Though I did not know it at the time, when General King surrendered the American army on Bataan on April 9 some American officers complied to the letter, others encouraged their men to escape into the hills, and still others looked away and left the decision to each individual. Most of us around Mariveles had no choice. We did not relish the idea of capitulating, and we did not know what to expect, but the Japanese were all around us. We could only watch their dive bombers blast away at Corregidor, and wait.
    The last free action of the U.S. command was in some ways a grimly appropriate finale to the campaign. They broke out the few remaining food stores and told us to eat whatever we wanted. After being starved for so long we stuffed on corned beef, canned peaches, and hard shell Christmas candy—and promptly came down with diarrhea.

Chapter Three
The Bataan Death March
    By now (1986) there is nothing new that even a survivor can say about the Bataan Death March. The travail of some 75,000-80,000 beaten, bewildered, sick, and hungry Americans and Filipinos who were bullied, badgered, taunted, stabbed, starved, and shot by their Japanese captors on a hellish march of some eighty miles in stifling tropical heat has long since passed into history as one of the most spectacular and revolting atrocities of World War II. It was also one of the most important events of the Pacific war, for the shared sufferings of Americans and Filipinos strengthened the bond between the two peoples and