Bataan (LHD 5) - Naval Cruise Book

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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

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, 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

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rregidor sitn ssoonaste secrete saliva tor water. At night, they would stop to rest I for only a few hours. In the book. Some Survived by Manny Lawton (his personal account of the march); the overnight stops were described as uneasy and tense ■ at best. Though we were outdoors, the air was fouled by human waste in and around the open pit latrine. It seemed that throughout the night half the group was milling around in search of water or the latrine. Those who tried to sleep were constantly being stepped on or stumbled over. In the morning, many did not wake. Gray ' s first stop was at a narrow-gauge railroad. The men were to be transported to a prison camp several kilometers away. It was like a miniature railroad, explained Gray. The cars are about half the size of a -egular railroad. We were packed in there so tight that :he Japanese guards would have to get in the car and jush and push on the door until it slammed shut. The men were jammed in the cars, standing up. We ;ouldn ' t move. There were no restroom facilities on the :rain, said Gray. Somebody would say, ' I ' m sorry about ;hat. I couldn ' t control it. ' We stayed there for a couple of lours until they got us all loaded up, and then we rode 12 . dlometers to another place where they made us get off. Some smothered to death, he remembered. ' We got out of that car and the dead fell from all around 12. There - .: ou. They had died standing up. After the men were unloaded, they began their narch to the prison camp. Along the way Filipino ladies A ' ould try to throw the prisoners food, rice rolled up in banana leaves. And one by one, the guards shot them iown. They killed them, and the babies, on the side of he road. Gray said. On the death march.. .I ' d see one iuard take a baby out of a woman ' s arms and throw it to mother and he would catch it on his bayonet and throw it o another one. Gray ' s voice rasped with emotion. So, we marched into this camp. When we got here, there was one faucet for thousands of us. It was i stream about Vi-inch wide. There was a constant line ? or water. They ' d all get a little bit of water and then et back in line. Twenty-four-hours a day. By that time, most of the men were in rags. Few of hem had shoes. After a few days at the camp, Gray - whose )nce husky frame wasn ' t showing emaciation at the same ate of his fellow soldiers - was put on burial detail. For 24 tours. We ' d dig a hole five or six-feet deep and a guard vas right behind you, pushing the bodies off your shoulder ito the hold. Some of the people weren ' t dead. They ould say to me, ' Don ' t leave me here. Don ' t leave me ere. ' But you couldn ' t do anything about it. And then the ards would cover them up. They covered them up, alive. You couldn ' t stand up to them because you were utnumbered. They would have put a bayonet in us and pushed is in there. We were too weak to fight them hand-to-hand. At night, the men were given lugao to eat. It as something like cornstarch, Gray said. It tasted terrible. But you ' d have to get it down some way. Some of the boys couldn ' t do that. They ' d gag. The days and nights blended into an endless, severe course in survival. Eventually, the prisoners were loaded up again, this time they were headed for Cabanatuan. I have no idea how long we stayed at that camp, admitted Gray. Time was running on by. My main objective was to get something to eat. By then, the rainy season had started. Every day, rain poured down on the men. The graves in which they buried hundreds of bodies began slowly filling with water. At night, you would hear the dogs howling, barking and fighting, Gray said. And you ' d get up the next morning and you ' d find arms here, legs there, heads, and this and that here and yonder. And we ' d have to gather it up and bury it again. One night, three men sneaked out to trade with the Filipino people. On the way back in, they were caught. The following morning, the guards brought all of the prisoners out of the barracks and marched the three men before them. They lined the three men up and had them dig their own graves. Then they had to kneel down. Their hands were tied behind them. They leaned over the hole and ...sssslllllkkkkk. The guards cut their heads off, with a saber. Cruelty was an epidemic. Several days after the men were executed; Gray was on his way to draw water. He passed one of the guards who motioned him over. He had this (human) head fixed up with a grass rope tied around it and attached to a bamboo pole. He reached down, picked up the pole and put it on my shoulder and shouted, ' March. ' I had to march up and down the barracks with that head on my shoulders. The brains were coming out of it and going down my back. I still see it at night. I have dreams about it all night. The prisoners endured life at Cabanatuan for many weeks and then were marched through Manila to be loaded on a ship en route to Davado, on the Island of Mindanao. We got there and they put us in this camp that was like Angola. They raised potatoes, pumpkins, coffee, bananas, and avocados. If you were lucky and got a good guard, you could go on detail and they would let you go out in the fields and eat. It was during Gray ' s stay at Davado that 10 American officers made their famous escape. One Sunday morning the officers went out to the field under the pretenses of getting some extra detail duties completed. That night, they didn ' t return. The guards counted prisoners until the early hours of the morning, but they were still missing 1 0. Where were those 10 men? The officers escaped to the jungle and eventually made their way back to the United States. Their accounts - which they later published in a book about their escape - were the first hard evidence the Americans had of the horrific mistreatment of the prisoners of war. After their escape, the gates were closed and guards accompanied the prisoners at all times. While Gray was working on road detail, he developed dry beriberi. His feet and legs turned red and burned like hot charcoal 223