Bataan (LHD 5) - Naval Cruise Book

Page 225 text:

, kards of Bataan ' s 60th Anniversary Pearl Harbor. Although it had gone undetected, or ignored, oy the enlisted men, the mood among the officers was changing. Even when it was announced that some 300 men were being added and that the Ordnance Company Was being divided into three separate companies, no one Found it unusual. We didn ' t know what was taking place. It was all Greek to us, Gray said. We were still having a good time. We weren ' t worried about the war - it was only in Europe hen. In the midst of training, Gray ' s company received notice ;hat they were being moved to he Philippines. To Gray, who lad never been out of the United States and hardly across the Mississippi River, this was the quintessence of the life of the vorldly enlisted man. They left Savannah in style - aboard the SS Calvin Coolidge, :i cruise boat. I had a stateroom ill to myself, admitted the Recently promoted Sergeant. But there was another lign that something was remiss - Talfway from Hawaii to the Philippines, the sister ships that vere following with the ordnance :ompany ' s airplanes suddenly urned around. We were on deck me day and saw them all turn outh, Gray :xplained. We didn ' t know what was happening. We started traveling in a zigzag motion, and it vas all-lights-out at night. Something was up. Every me of us had a loaded .45 on our hip, but we didn ' t ;now what was going on. On Thanksgiving Day 1 94 1 , just 17 days before he bombing of Pearl Harbor, they landed on the ' hilippine Islands at Luzon. When we got there, we would go to Manila at light, to the honky-tonks and dance - but we still had a 45 on our hips. One night something happened that made Gray nd everyone else in his company understand. We were out on the town one Saturday night, and he MPs suddenly came in and said, ' Every soldier- head for our barracks! The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor! ' Man, we all headed for the barracks. When we ;ot there, some of the men didn ' t even know what was iappening. It took a couple of hours for everyone to be cow He com oudI - wake up, and then the officers had to get their orders. By daylight, we had loaded up all of the bombs and small-arm ammunition at Douglas Field. Although their actions were timely - it was still too little, too late. By the time they arrived at Clark Field it was under attack and everything that could fly was being destroyed. Gray ' s company headed back to Nichols Field in Manila, away from flying shrapnel as the Philippine Islands came under heavy attack by Japanese forces. Despite the fact that enlisted men viewed the attack on the Island as sudden. their superiors had anticipated it. Author E. Bartlett Kerr explained in his book, Surrender and Survival: The Experience of the American POWs in the Pacific 1941- 1945, that the American military had prepared long and hard for a Japanese attack. The American plan for defending the Philippines was called War Plan Orange-3 (orange was a color code for Japan; other potential enemies were assigned other colors). Officials stated in the plan that they anticipated a Japanese attack on Luzon, which was the principal island of the Philippine group. Luzon was important because it provided a base from which Japanese forces could seize the port city of Manila, which had a modern, strategically located harbor. The U. S. Plan recognized the superior military prowess of the Japanese forces. Part of the strategy called for abandoning Manila to the enemy and then withdrawing to lines on the Bataan Peninsula, an area dominated by jungles and mountains on the West Side of Manila Bay. The American troops on Bataan would provide land protection to nearby Corregidor and the three other heavily fortified islands whose guns protected the sea approaches to Manila Bay. The plan called for Bataan and Corregidor to be defended to the last extremity. Ideally, this would buy enough time to send an American fleet to steam out of Pearl Harbor, meet and defeat the Japanese fleet, and then proceed to the relief of the Philippine defense forces. It sounded good in theory, but it was a plan that few officers - if any - believed in. The salient fact ignored by the plan was that there simply were not sufficient troops and equipment to defend the Philippines for more than six months. Perhaps no one knew this better than the troops holed up in the Bataan jungle, waiting for the bombing to stop. After a week passed, they received grim orders. Gray and his company 221

Page 224 text:

USS B ATA AN Honors Battling Bgi During World War II, U. S. forces under General Douglas Mac Arthur retreated to Bataan Peninsula, on Luzon Island in the Philippines, after Manila fell to Japanese forces. In April 1942, some 12,000 American and 64,000 Philippine soldiers surrendered to Japanese forces in Mariveles, a town on the Bataan Peninsula. It was the largest surrender of U. S. forces in his- tory. Some Americans retreated further to Corregidor, an island off the southern end of the peninsula, hut they, too, surrendered in May 1942 after fierce resistance. The Japanese forced their U. S. and Philippine prisoners to march to north- ern Luzon under extremely desperate conditions; some 10,000 died and the march earned notoriety as the Bataan Death March. In February 1945, U. S. forces re-conquered Bataan. Today, the area of the Peninsula overlooking Manila Bay to the East is a Philippine national shrine. (Front: The Facts on File Encyclopedia of the 20th Century.) Sgt. J. S. Gray, US. Army Air Corps Bataan Death March Survivor If you have read the history of the Bataan Death March, you may already know of some of what the Battling Bastards of Bataan went through. You will know because historians have recorded it - but no one except for those who lived it can ever imagine the continuous chain of horror that they lived through. Still with us today are those who wal ked the seemingly endless march to disease-laden camps, only to be packed like human sardines in railroad cars then crammed inside dark cargo holds to be shipped to yet another prison camp. Most will tell you their story; others will tell you only what they think you should hear.. .or can handle. When they finish, I can promise you that you will never forget it. This year marks the 60th anniversary of their walk into living hell. This ship, their ship, and crew pays tribute to the them with the following true-life story of one of these survivors. Although just one man, his story is not unique. 1 lis story played out the same for thousands of those who walked the miles with him. It is not possible to list them all here, but il is lining that his story be told because it accurately reflects the story of Camp Donru ' ll c.- n.is ON FOOT I : — i - Hermosa OianiC ON FOOT .. BATAAN PENINSULA Marivetos San Fornando . us com . j they « :Philipp ineverb E Ml) OManil.i Cabcaben . kp so many others. This is the story of J. S. Gray, a survivor. Thi: year he will celebrate his 83 rd birthday with his wife, Alyne, at hi; home in Baton Rouge. Seven years ago, he told a newspape reporter Jeannie Smith about his ordeal. The following art ' excerpts of that story. Back in 1939 I would think that a 20-year-old who stoo 6 ' 2 and weighing in at 202 pounds would be considerec formidable, but that was not the case with J.S. He considerec himself a farm boy who was bored and wanted to get out fron behind the plow. He wanted to go somewhere other than up ant down the same rows of the same field. His decision to get of the farm and get out of Jonesville, La., brought him to the door of the nearest recruiting station. Gray and a friend hitched a rid to Barksdale Air Field and enlisted in what was then the Army Air Corps. By the end of the two-year mark, Gray was a corporal 1 thought this was a pretty good place to be, he admitted I got a $5-a-month raise. It was $21 a month when 1 starte out. I made an allotment to Mama for S5 each month, and tha went to her all through the war, Gray said, proudly. Gray ' s next assignment was as an Ordnanceman i Savannah, Ga., at Hunter Field. The accommodations were little less desirable. Gray and the men in his company lived i tents. In those days, we handled amis, ammunition, bomb and all of that for all of the airplanes, Gray explained. We di the synchronizing for all of the guns and planes. The company underwent extensive training, whic lasted until the Fall of 1941 shortly before the bombing c 220

Page 226 text:

of Ordnancemen were to continue their service as infantrymen. With that, they were sent to the front. Within 24 hours, Japanese forces made a land invasion of the Philippines. From that point, any semblance of order disintegrated. It was mass pandemonium. No one knew what to do or how to do it. ..or anything else, admitted Gray. We would go back and forth to the front, through the lines, sometimes behind the lines, and then we ' d have to fight our way out. There were approximately 1 2.000 Americans and 64,000 Filipinos fighting in the area. Japanese General Masaharu Homma was effectively driving them into the southernmost tip of the peninsula, and pushing their backs into the sea. After fighting in the jungle for two weeks, their rations were cut in half. Two weeks later, rations were halved again. And, two weeks later, they were halved again. After that, they began eating whatever they could find in the jungle - iguanas, monkeys, and a rice paddy here and there. We went on like that for a while, recalled Gray. Then we started losing weight. We were past scared. We had eaten all of the horses, the mules and the dogs. Then there was the daily rumor.. .The Americans are on their way. Their boat just landed. Just hold out. Hold out. March 11th brought the final blow. Under presidential orders, General Douglas McArthur left Corregidor for Australia. Despite the fact that he issued his famous, I shall return, the American troops lost their last sliver of hope. Things went from bad to worse. Thousands of men had dysentery or malaria and nothing to eat. The hospitals were full. As long as a man could walk, he went back to the front to fight. This was our last stand. We fought until we couldn ' t do anything more, remembered Gray. We kept moving back, moving back and finally, we were at the sea. We were backed up at the sea. Gray was asked to gather the ordnance ' s ammunition. He set it up in dumps and blew them up the day before they surrendered. It was the final punctuation of a bitter string of events. On April 9, 1942, the men marched up to the battle line to surrender. There were six Japanese soldiers lined up across the road. There was jungle on one side, water on the other. They searched us and took everything they could get off us, said Gray. The ones in the front of the line passed word back to us that they were even taking dog tags, so I pulled up the innersole of my shoes and put a dog tag under each innersole. 222 odI) i La ' . somen i aibled o Gra emenw ■pane: ■ That ' s the only thing that I went to the Philippines wit that 1 got back to the States with. According to Billy Keith in Days of Anguish, Day of Hope, Japanese intelligence had originally calculated tha there would be 20,000 prisoners instead of the 80,000 tota they captured. The guards were frantic as they tried to herd thousands of men into groups of 300. There was nothing to do but to try to march them into camps as soor as possible. For some, the march would last for weeks. With dog tags in place. Gray started the infamou: Bataan Death March. You could look at Corregidor sitting right out there in the bay, he remembered. As soon as they ' c fire at Corregidor, a scout on Corregidor would pick up tha flash of the gun and there would comt 16 inches (of projectile) back at us. It wouk sound like a train coming through there Imagine what a 16-inch projectile tumblim in the air sounds like. There would bt somebody who would get killed and we couldn ' t go see about them. No one knows the exact number o: soldiers on the march. It is estimated tha there were 64,000 or 65,000 marchersi Likewise, the number of survivors i indeterminable. There were thousands o ' us. The line was miles long. There wen guards on each side of us about every 1( yards, and each one had his bayonet on th gun. If you picked up anybody to help hin walk, they would snatch him up and take hin out of the line and kill him right there in fron of you. That was going on all the time. Th Filipinos would try to throw us food and the would kill every single one of them. And it was hot. In an interview published in Donali Knox ' s Death March, Pvt. Leon Beck described the hea in these terms: ...the weather was hot, hot, hot. Th sun comes up hot, and it goes down hot, and it stays ho all night long. It was just plain hell hot, the humidity wa ' high, and the dust was everywhere, trucks movin, alongside, raising more dust and confusion. There were no restrooms and no one was allowe ' to stop. The human waste on the road mingled with th blood from the feet of the many barefoot marchers Dysentery was rampant. We were filthy dirty. With mes all over us and walking through it, Gray remembered. Th further you got on the walk, the more Americans, Japanes and Filipinos you saw laying on the side of the road, dead. Gray was given a half-cup of water in a cantee each night along with a chlorine tablet to kill the germ: It tasted like chlorine, Gray grimaced. It was horrible. By the end of the first day, they had marched some 2 miles. After the fourth day, time began to lose meaning. Foo water and staying alive were the top priorities. Gra .-, Soi - to the .: in ii uleav i He ■t ' G i lake a ' So, •ft.TI ti in ] remembered sucking pebbles or a button from his shirt t 1 K ■Knethfi