Behind Japanese Lines by Ray C. Hunt, Bernard Norling Page A
Authors: Ray C. Hunt, Bernard Norling
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heightened the animosity of both toward their brutal conquerors.
For many reasons, there will never be anything better than general estimates of how many died on the march. Nobody among either captors or captives attempted to keep records. Thousands of Filipinos and a much smaller number of Americans managed to escape during the march, but nobody knows how many of them died alone in the mountains and jungle, or how many of the Filipinos made it home and quietly became civilians again. Thousands of both peoples died in OâDonnell and Cabanatuan prison camps after the march was over, but it is impossible to distinguish between those who expired from the belated effects of the Death March and those who perished from the cruel regimen in the camps themselves. 1
More than forty years after the event my own memory of it is as inexact as the guesses that have been made about casualties. I was weak, sick, and confused then, and my predominant impression was that the rest of the world was as muddled as myself. Discipline hadbroken down completely in the last days before the surrender. Men either milled about aimlessly or sprawled in the dust like dogs, too tired to move.
When the Japanese found us thus, they seemed only slightly better organized than we were. Moreover, armies have always found it difficult to handle prisoners of war, especially large numbers of them. The Japanese had expected to have to deal with about 25,000 military prisoners around May 1. Now, suddenly, three weeks earlier, they had at least three times that many on their hands, with perhaps a quarter of these civilians. No proper preparations had been made to deal with such numbers. At least as important, the Philippine campaign had already taken much longer than the high command in Tokyo had anticipated, so the minds of General Homma, the Japanese commanding officer on Bataan, and his subordinates, were primarily on the rapid reduction of Corregidor, which blocked the entrance to Manila Bay and compelled postponement of their plan to invade Australia. The disposition of prisoners they regarded as a minor matter. Various portions of the task were given over to several different Japanese officers, no one of whom coordinated the activities of the others.
In this atmosphere, just short of chaos, one group of prisoners would start walking from a certain place one day, another group would set out from somewhere else ten hours later, still another from a third locale the next day, and so on. As we tramped along the only road up the east coast of Bataan, we were joined at irregular intervals by small bands of men coming down jungle trails to surrender, and continually impeded by a steady stream of Japanese tanks, trucks, and soldiers pouring southward to begin the assault on Corregidor. These southbound Japanese took up much of the road, kicked up a horrendous cloud of dust that seemed to hang forever in the humid heat, and frequently struck at the heads of staggering prisoners with their rifle butts or bamboo sticks. Thus, when I say that I donât know how long I was on the Death March it indicates more than personal loss of memory; it was symptomatic of the whole enterprise. In the most straightforward sense, I endured twelve days: we surrendered on April 9 and I escaped on April 21; but I donât remember how many of those days I actually spent marching down the road accompanied by Japanese guards: seven or eight most likely, possibly ten.
Because we prisoners were scattered along so many miles of road and had started the trek in so many different places at different times, the experiences of a given group were often considerably different from those of others; hence the widely varying accounts of survivors.To me, the first days of the march were distinctly easier than those that followed. We started off in what army wits used to call âa column of bunchesâ: small groups of soldiers and Filipino civilians, mingled indiscriminately, sauntering
For many reasons, there will never be anything better than general estimates of how many died on the march. Nobody among either captors or captives attempted to keep records. Thousands of Filipinos and a much smaller number of Americans managed to escape during the march, but nobody knows how many of them died alone in the mountains and jungle, or how many of the Filipinos made it home and quietly became civilians again. Thousands of both peoples died in OâDonnell and Cabanatuan prison camps after the march was over, but it is impossible to distinguish between those who expired from the belated effects of the Death March and those who perished from the cruel regimen in the camps themselves. 1
More than forty years after the event my own memory of it is as inexact as the guesses that have been made about casualties. I was weak, sick, and confused then, and my predominant impression was that the rest of the world was as muddled as myself. Discipline hadbroken down completely in the last days before the surrender. Men either milled about aimlessly or sprawled in the dust like dogs, too tired to move.
When the Japanese found us thus, they seemed only slightly better organized than we were. Moreover, armies have always found it difficult to handle prisoners of war, especially large numbers of them. The Japanese had expected to have to deal with about 25,000 military prisoners around May 1. Now, suddenly, three weeks earlier, they had at least three times that many on their hands, with perhaps a quarter of these civilians. No proper preparations had been made to deal with such numbers. At least as important, the Philippine campaign had already taken much longer than the high command in Tokyo had anticipated, so the minds of General Homma, the Japanese commanding officer on Bataan, and his subordinates, were primarily on the rapid reduction of Corregidor, which blocked the entrance to Manila Bay and compelled postponement of their plan to invade Australia. The disposition of prisoners they regarded as a minor matter. Various portions of the task were given over to several different Japanese officers, no one of whom coordinated the activities of the others.
In this atmosphere, just short of chaos, one group of prisoners would start walking from a certain place one day, another group would set out from somewhere else ten hours later, still another from a third locale the next day, and so on. As we tramped along the only road up the east coast of Bataan, we were joined at irregular intervals by small bands of men coming down jungle trails to surrender, and continually impeded by a steady stream of Japanese tanks, trucks, and soldiers pouring southward to begin the assault on Corregidor. These southbound Japanese took up much of the road, kicked up a horrendous cloud of dust that seemed to hang forever in the humid heat, and frequently struck at the heads of staggering prisoners with their rifle butts or bamboo sticks. Thus, when I say that I donât know how long I was on the Death March it indicates more than personal loss of memory; it was symptomatic of the whole enterprise. In the most straightforward sense, I endured twelve days: we surrendered on April 9 and I escaped on April 21; but I donât remember how many of those days I actually spent marching down the road accompanied by Japanese guards: seven or eight most likely, possibly ten.
Because we prisoners were scattered along so many miles of road and had started the trek in so many different places at different times, the experiences of a given group were often considerably different from those of others; hence the widely varying accounts of survivors.To me, the first days of the march were distinctly easier than those that followed. We started off in what army wits used to call âa column of bunchesâ: small groups of soldiers and Filipino civilians, mingled indiscriminately, sauntering
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