Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 10

DECATUR SUNDAY HERALD AND REVIEW Decatur, Illinois, Sunday, March 26, 1967 For Japan: A Badge of Shame Bataan Death March Became Victory in Defeat By Richard F. Newcomb Of the Associated Press We're 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! 10 BUYS im mm fMM 1 1 1 Start of death march after surrender of Battaan bound, pause on march the night of April 8. His orders were not to surrender, but he refused to accept the alternative slaughter. With full knowledge of his orders, and with full re sponsibility for his action, he sent two of his men forward be fore dawn on April 9, looking for Gen. Homma.

They never found him, and the "surrender" went wrong from the start. Col. Everett C. Williams and Maj. Marshall Hurt fought their way north over roads jammed with Japanese and Filipino soldiers and vehicles.

Finally they abandoned the Jeep and walked forward, waving a sheet, The general asked his staff officers to come to his tent at midnight, and by 2 a.m. his decision had been taken: He would surrender all forces under his command on Bataan. Thus began, quite unexpectedly for both sides, the infamous March of Death. For the United States it was a national humiliation, and yet a victory within defeat. For Japan, a badge of shame before the civilized world.

Maj. Gen. Edward P. King a 57-year-old Atlantan with 37 years in the United States Army, had looked upon the night of April 8, 1942, as an end, not a beginning. That very night his quartermaster had told him there was one more half-ration of food and it would be distributed the next morning, if possible.

With Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma's final offensive in full drive there was no assurance that tomorrow would come. "We have no further means of organized resistance," Gen. King told his officers.

Cram-; med together in the Bataan Peninsula were more than 100,000 people, nearly 30,000 of them Filipino civilians. This was the last stand; only Bataan and Corregidor were left. Allied fortunes in the Pacific had reached their nadir. The American fleet had been crippled at Pearl Harbor, the garrison at Wake Island had capitulated. Hong Kong had surrendered Christmas Day, Singapore had fallen and the Japanese hordes were sweeping across the Netherlands East Indies toward Australia.

Japanese bombers already had heavily bombed Darwin. Lonely Watch On Bataan and Corregidor, the lonely men and women, Filipino and American alike, watched the sea with falling hopes. Where were the ships, the ships with arms and food from mighty America? They did not come, and in time the defenders came to know that they would not come. They felt alone bitter, deserted. The battling bastards of Bataan.

President Manuel Quezon and other Philippine officials had left Corregidor by submarine, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur departed on March 11. "I shall return," he had said, but the prospects looked dim. And now Gen. Homma's 14th Imperial Army held Manila and the entire rim of Manila Bay, one of the finest harbors in the Orient This had been MacArthur's strategy, to hold Bataan and Cor Moweaqua, Warrensburg Veterans Area Death March Survivors Say Memories Best Forgotten By Special Purchase! i a- 5 4 $35 to $55 29m and beauty 3 3 1 Second Floor I American soldiers, hand EDITOR'S NOTE Twenty-five years ago thousands of Americans and Filipinos made what history now calls the Bataan Death March.

It began April 9, 1942, and its brutality and horrors set the civilized world against Japan. surrender was accomplished. All Bataan was chaos. The 14th Army was driving hard lor the heights of Mariveles, anxious to site its artillery. The mass of Americans and Filipinos, no longer an organized force, were trying to get out of the peninsula.

Nearly 200,000 people were now in the tiny triangle of lower Bataan an advancing army, a defeated army, and thousands of civilians. Gen. Homma had one objective, to get close to Corregidor and smash it as soon as possible. To be sure, he had a plan for his captives, but it quickly went awry. In the first place, he had not expected Bataan to fall until the end of April.

In the second place, his bag of prisoners was twice the size he estimated. He had barely enough food, medicine and transport for his own army; for the prisoners he had virtually none. It can be said, too, that he had no idea his enemy was so nearly played out. He was not prepared for the thousands of sick in the hospitals, for the other thousands hardly able to walk, and for the thousands who had no food and expected him to feed them. As a general at war, Homma wanted the peninsula cleared of the enemy.

It was, and Homma took care not to inquire how it was, done. Wanton Killing It was done, for the most part, with great disorganization, cruelty, and wanton killing. For most of the Americans and Filipinos, it was done by foot, with great suffering. The first survivors began to walk out of Bataan the morning of April 9. None knew where they were going, but it was to Camp O'Donnell, 65 miles to the north.

Sixty-five miles is not a long march for a soldier in good condition. These men were not. The killing began immediately, but without pattern. Around Mariveles, a Japanese officer raised his heavy sword and brought it crashing down on the shoulder of an American captain, splitting his trunk to the navel. Anyone caught with Japanese money was assumed to have taken it from a Japanese he bad killed.

More than one coin collector paid with his life, by bayonet, club, sword or pistol. Up near Bagac, on a trail over the mountains to the east coast, nearly 400 men of the 19th Philippine Army Division were marched into the woods, tied together and beheaded with sabres. "We are doing this because many of 'our soldiers died fighting against you," said the Japanese interpreter. But this was only the beginning. Most of the killing and dying was done on the road out.

Gen. Homma's order said the prisoners should be treated in "a friendly spirit." A few were, but for the great majority it was nothing less than hell. The Japanese plan had called for food at every way stop, there was none. The sun shone mercilessly every day, and until they were in the presence of Maj. Gen.

Kameichiro Nagano. He agreed to meet Gen. King near Lomao, and sent Maj. Hurt to get him. Gen.

King, wearing his last clean uniform, left his headquarters at 9 a.m., but it was nearly noon before he could reach Lamao. He and three of his staff officers were ordered to sit at a table in front of a farm house. A black Cadillac drove up and out stepped Col. Motoo Nakayama, Gen. Homma's operations officer.

"You are Gen. Wainwright?" taken to Cabanatuan," Peontek recalls. "From Cabanatuan, we marched to Camp O'Donnell There was more water on the second part of the march, but there still wasn't enough, and we had to drink from the ditch es along the road," he continued. From the march and the stay in the Japanese Drison carrros. Peontek contracted more than a dozen diseases including yel low laundice.

diarrhea, dvsen tery, beri-beri and malaria. Peontek was freed Jan. 30, 1945, when a team of rangers and guerillas raided the camp at Cabanatuan and released a mixed group of 511 prisoners 'Best Forgotten' "It was a long time ago and it's best forgotten," he said used to dream about it, and that was bad enough." George Lindig was also troubled by nightmares about his experience on the march and the three and one half years he spent in Japanese pris on camps. "I tried to write some articles about it after I was out, but I had to stop," he said. "I had bad dreams about Japanese be ing everywhere.

I nearly broke my wife's jaw one night." Lindig was a private with the 33rd Quartermasters Corps un til just before the march. Early fighting left only three men from the unit's 119-man complement. He was then transfered to the PhiliDDine Air DeDot and named supplies to the front un til tne surrender. During that time he was promoted to corporal. "I had malaria attacks for two days before the surrender and hadn't had anything to eat or arinK in mat time," he re calls.

"I didn't eet anvthine on the march either. Every time we saw a wen, we ran to drink. Marched in Heat "They marched us along in the heat of the day, and our throats and lips were swollen from dryness. "We drank the rainwater in the ditch, and one time we were so thirsty we drank from a pool where three bodies lay." Lindig was in a coma for 13 days at Camp O'Donnell suffer ing from malaria, dysentery, and beri-beri. He later served on the work crews at Cabanatuan and at Camp Fukouka in Japan.

He was freed Sept. 2, 1945, after he demanded, through his interpreter. March Starts When King said he was not, Nakayama shouted, "Go and get Wainwright!" Homma had sent Nakayama to take the surrender of Bataan, Corregidor and Wainwright. Col. Nakayama was sure his general would not take kindly to anything less, and he became furious.

He refused to accept King's surrender, demanded his sword, settled for a pistol, and left. No paper was signed, in fact no 'the fall of the Japanese home land. Lindig suffered more than 20 diseases and injuries during his three and one half years of imprisonment, including injuries to both legs, a hearing defect, pel lagra, pleurisy, trench mouth, scurvy, scabies and tuberculos' is. He was awarded the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster and the Purple Heart. He was given a disability release from the Decatur plant of the Caterpillar Tractor Co.

in March, 1966, and now receives a veteran's disability pension and Social security benefits. "I made every inch of that march, and I'm still paying for it," he said. "N1 If George Lindig there was no water. Men drank from the carabao wallows, and were shot down or bayoneted for breaking ranks. Buried Alive They were forced to run, when they could hardly walk Japanese soldiers in passing trucks beat them with bamboo wands.

The prisoners were stripped of all personal belongings, even canteens. If a man fell by the wayside, he was left in the road, to be squashed by trucks rushing to the front. In some cases the defeated were forced to bury their dead by the roadside. More than one man was buried alive, moaning through the dirt. The way stops were sheer horror.

You could tell the approach by the smell of rotting corpses. In the towns, the men were held overnight in sheds, pens, corrals or in the open, crowded together in styles left by the preceding groups of prisoners. And always the revolting stench. The last nine miles, from Ca-pas to O'Donnell, were slightly easier only because the men were out of the battle zone, and the weakest among them had already expired. The Filipino had the best chance, melting into the crowds in the towns and striking out for the hills.

But many Americans made it, too, joining the growing guerrilla forces that harried the Japanese until the end of the war. Nobody knows how many died on the death march. Gen. King estimated later that 9,300 Amer icans had reached O'Donnell by the end of May, and that be tween 600 and 650 Americans died on the march. For the Fill pinos, probably 10,000 died on the march, and another 6,000 escaped.

Prison Years But even O'Donnell was not the end. In the first seven weeks there, another 1,600 Americans died, and 10 times that many Filipinos. Those who lived faced another 3 years in prison camps, from the southern Phil' ippines all the way to Man churia. And for thousands of them, death was only delayed. Many perished in agony in the holds of unmarked prison ships, sent to the bottom by American bombers.

The chronology of all this was not quick and clear to Americans at home. It was nearly tw years before the public in the United States learned of "the March of Death." With stunning suddenness, the Army and Navy made a joint announcement the night of Jan. 27, 1944. It was that 5,200 Americans from Bataan and Corregidor had died after the death march. The announcement said 2,200 Americans had died at Camp Donnell in April and May 1942, and 3,000 more at the camp at Cabanatuan through October 1942.

Gen. Homma went on trial in January 1946 in a bombed-out dance hall in Manila. Six feet tall, every inch a soldier, he sat straight in his chair. He under stood English perfectly. He had been a military student in Eng land in 1918, served as a British observer in France.

The military tribunal sent Gen. Homma to a firing squad instead. He was executed at Los Banos April 3, 1946, four years to the day that he had opened his Good Friday offensive. FAMOUS NAME 'KNITS I' 3 Regular 1990 i le a By Kurt Hahn Of the Herald and Review Two Central Illinois veterans remember April 9, 1942 more vividly than most people. That is the day they started stumbling toward Camp O'Donnell on the first leg of the Bataan Death March.

Henry W. Peontek of Moweaqua was a private with the 31st Infantry; George Lindig of Warrensburg was a corporal attached to the Philippine Air Depot. Peontek remembers the march well he receives veterans dis ability benefits for the diseases and injuries he suffered on the march and during the three years he spent in Japanese prison camps. "The march was to Camp jjonneu. They marched us to Bilibid where we were packed like sardines into boxcars and 3 i filter Henry W.

Peontek if I A ii it Hi fet 1 incredibly low priced, but you'll recognize the famous label. Select from many lovely styles One piece, Two piece, and three-piece fashions. The very favorite in styles and colors. regidor until the last. "He might have the bottle, but I had the True, but Gen.

Homma was under orders to pull the cork, and quickly. His final drive began on Good Friday, April 3 that with 80,000 soldiers. By the night of the 8th be had reached a line below Bagac on the west coast and Orion on the east. Only 10 miles left to Mari-veles, and then his artillery could blast Corregidor, two miles across the water. In the 10-mile triangle left to Gen.

King were 12,000 American officers and enlisted men, mostly Army; some 66,000 Philippine army men, 6,000 Filipino civilians, employes of the Army, and about 20,000 refugees, many of them women and children who had slipped behind the lines, seeking protectian from the invaders. Rations Short The flies and mosquitoes were terrible. From early February, food rations had dropped steadily, from half rations, to one third, then to whatever the country provided. The carabao (water buffalo) were eaten first, more than a thousand of them, then all 250 horses and finally even the 48 mules of the 26th Cavalry Regiment. After that came dog and monkey meat, even python and iguana.

"Iguana is fair, monkey I do not wrote Col. Richard C. Mallonee. Quinine for prevention of malaria was stopped at the end of February; by April 1 the hospitals had a week's supply, only for those near death. The hospitals and aid stations had patients.

That is what Gen. King faced i 3 Knit Dresses.