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A history known, but not felt
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A history known, but not felt
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Content
A HISTORY KNOWN, BUT NOT FELT
by
Tom Pfingsten
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOURTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)
May 2010
Copyright 2010 Tom Pfingsten
i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ii
Introduction: Col. Rafael Estrada 1
Chapter 1: Months from invasion to surrender 8
Chapter 2: An aging, vanishing battalion 10
Chapter 3: ‘Born in war’ 13
Chapter 4: ‘Old guys from the old war’ 20
Chapter 5: ‘Deliver us from evil’ 24
Bibliography 28
ii
ABSTRACT
The Philippines—Of the approximately 46,000 Filipino soldiers who survived the Bataan
Death March in April 1942, 1,000 were still alive at the beginning of 2010. Spread
throughout the Philippines, these men were in their late 80s or early 90s, and many of
them were not interested in remembering the pain and abuse they endured at the hands of
the Japanese army so many years ago. Old age and a growing cultural distance from the
events of World War II have made the death march little more than historical trivia in this
island nation of 98 million people. A historian, a nonprofit director and the son of a death
march survivor explain why this trend worries them, and why, without history books to
tell the personal stories of death march survivors, their saga will be all but forgotten. In
this context of diminishing interest in the history of World War II, 91-year-old Col.
Rafael Estrada shares his story of forced marching in intense heat, without water, through
the fields of his own family’s sugar cane plantation.
1
INTRODUCTION
The Philippines
Like most veterans, Col. Rafael Estrada would rather not talk about the war, preferring
the gentle sounds of his suburban Manila neighborhood to the echo of misery endured
seven decades ago.
His aversion to retelling what he saw and felt during the Bataan Death March is not
because it’s painful to remember. The truth is he doesn’t want to sound like a bitter man.
And he doesn’t. Unlike those who keep their pain close at hand, Estrada, 91, is not
obsessed with the wrongs he endured on a hot, dusty road almost 70 years ago. A retired
shipping executive and a family man, he speaks with the calm air of one who has
embraced his pain and then put it out of his mind—at least until journalists come asking
for all the gory details. And he doesn’t like the word “atrocities.”
Estrada spends most of his time at home inside a quiet, upscale neighborhood in suburban
Manila. Huge tropical trees sprawl over the grounds of his estate and a vintage Cadillac
rests under a tarp in the driveway. From the back veranda, there is a commanding view of
the low-lying Marikina River and the eastern part of the city—and that is where, in
December 2009, Estrada carefully chose his memories of the death march, limiting
himself to the kinds of particulars available in the history books: Heat, thirst, walking,
thirst and walking, last-ditch camaraderie and more walking—near the end, walking even
through his own family’s sugar cane fields.
2
But what of the Japanese atrocities? Did he remember those?
During the death march? he asked, as if considering the notion for the first time. “Not in
my immediate…”
His voice trailed off, and perhaps he was remembering the comrades falling to the dust,
begging for water, receiving a bayonet in the back instead (Norman and Norman 2009).
1
Maybe he was remembering Ernesto Escaler, his best friend, who after the march was
carried out of the appalling conditions at prisoner of war camp because disease—malaria
or dysentery, he couldn’t remember —had done what the Japanese hohei
2
couldn’t:
broken the soldier’s spirit. Whatever haunting sights and sounds replayed behind
Estrada’s calm exterior during that December interview, the Colonel recovered quickly.
He would not indulge his visitors.
“What abuses would there be?” he shrugged. “You just walk, and if you die in the
process, they just push you to the side. You cannot attend to your dead—you just walk.”
By car, the Bataan Peninsula does not seem especially large. From Manila it takes two
hours to reach the city of Mariveles, where the death march started at the tip of Bataan.
Most of the landmarks can be seen in a day from the Old National Highway—the same
road, although now well-paved, on which captives marched north toward prison camp in
1942.
1
See page 175 in Norman and Norman 2009 for a description of the Japanese type 30 bayonet, its use and
significance during the death march.
2
Norman and Norman 2009, page 57: “Literally, ‘step-soldiers’ or ‘soldiers who walk.’”
3
But on foot, malnourished and thirsty, Bataan must have seemed impossibly vast: Sixty-
six miles from Mariveles to San Fernando, where the men were packed into boxcars for
the last part of the trip to Camp O’Donnell. It must have felt even longer in April, the
hottest month in the Philippines.
The nation of the Philippines is situated due east of Vietnam, a combined land mass
slightly larger than Arizona straddling a typhoon belt in the South China Sea. By April
1942, a mixed fighting force of Americans and Filipinos defending the Philippines had
been under siege for three months on Bataan, a 420-square-mile finger of rice fields,
green mountains and dense jungle (Young 1992).
3
On the east, between Bataan and the
capital, was Manila Bay, and the South China Sea stretched out to the west. Off the
southern shore lay Corregidor Island, a strategic dot of land from which American
cannons could sink Japanese ships trying to enter the bay. As part of the Allied effort
against the Axis midway through the war in Europe, the U.S. was trying to prevent Japan
from scooping up territory and resources that would later have to be won back. The
Philippine islands were the first place Japanese and American troops met in combat, and
Bataan was the epicenter.
Estrada still remembers the place where he was taken captive after the American
surrender on April 9, 1942. “Kilometer 182,” he said, nodding as he pronounced each
digit individually: one-eight-two.
3
See pages 14-15 in Young 1992 for an explanation of Bataan’s geography and roads at the time of the death
march.
4
Kilometer one-eight-two—that’s where Estrada, then a young lieutenant, carried a white
flag out to the Japanese commander, where he became a prisoner of war, and where he
started walking, a witness and participant in of one of the most infamous military
atrocities of World War II.
In the chronology of the war, Bataan immediately followed Pearl Harbor, which had
shocked and angered the American people just four months earlier, but it would be
almost two years before stories began to emerge of a “march of death” in a small U.S.
colony across the ocean. Because journalists had fled Bataan by the time of the surrender,
and because there were no humanitarian observers like there might be today, news of the
march was withheld until January 1944—a full 21 months later. On Jan. 28,1944, the
accounts began to pour in: “HORROR TALE BARED,” exclaimed The New York Times.
“3 Survivors Say Thirst Sent Men Crazy on ‘March of Death’” (Wood 1944).
As American and Filipino soldiers trudged north along the straight, partially paved
highway in Bataan, they were abused and deprived. Partly out of contempt and partly due
to inadequate preparation, the Japanese supply soldiers who were serving as guards along
the highway treated the captured army worse than a herd of livestock. Water was refused
most of the way, and marchers who lagged behind were routinely killed with a bullet or,
more commonly, a bayonet. When the men were allowed a rest, they were often made to
sit exposed in the 100-degree heat—a practice the captives took to calling the “sun
treatment” (Norman and Norman 2009).
5
These and other acts of cruelty would define the 10-day ordeal as an atrocity in the
history books and, perhaps more importantly, in the minds of contemporary Americans.
During the final days of World War II, Bataan became a byword in the American
vocabulary—evidence of Axis cruelty and depravity. And it became a motivating event,
just as Pearl Harbor had been, refueling anti-Japanese sentiment and prompting an eerily
prescient outcry: “Ruin Japan!” (Crider 1944).
Just where Kilometer 182 lies along the Old National Highway is anybody’s guess.
Today, the roadside markers throughout the main Philippine island of Luzon count
ascending kilometers starting at Luneta Park in downtown Manila, and they stop at
Mariveles about thirty kilometers shy of 182. But Estrada was emphatic and repetitive,
interrupting himself every few minutes to remind me about kilometer one-eight-two. I
was not about to doubt him, because it occurred to me as he spoke that a soldier will not
easily forget where he surrendered.
Indeed, he spent as much time talking about Kilometer 182 than he did about the pain or
the abuse or the trauma. It’s not unusual, this dilution of painful memories in the
retelling. Dr. Ricardo Trota Jose, a Manila history professor who has spent hundreds of
hours interviewing death march survivors, commonly found the old men attenuating their
stories, either out of humility or because the unfiltered memories are too much to bear
(Trota Jose 2009).
“I had my difficulty in getting some of them to talk—a number of them, in the beginning,
just gave me very general experiences, things you can read in books,” said Trota Jose,
6
who is considered to be the preeminent military historian in the Philippines. Speaking
with the quiet confidence of a devoted scholar, he echoed my own experience—most
Filipino veterans seemed unwilling to meet, or willing to meet but unable to express their
deepest wounds. With one rejection after another, I was fortunate to sit down with even
one survivor—Col. Estrada—and hear an hour’s worth of firsthand memories.
“I was talking with some of their children, and they said, ‘Our parents never told us about
the war,’” said Trota Jose. “So it’s only now that they get to know.”
It remains unclear how many prisoners died in the death march. “Only crude guesses can
be made,” wrote Bataan historian Donald Knox in 1981. Conservative estimates hold that
between 600 and 700 American soldiers perished, while anywhere between 5,000 and
10,000 Filipinos died. Along the way, thousands more escaped into the thick jungles and
mountain ranges, and fewer than 50,000 of the 64,000 Filipino soldiers who were
captured made it to Camp O’Donnell, where the men died in even higher ratios than they
had on the road (Knox 1981).
Manila never really gets cold, and in the warm December air three days before Christmas,
Estrada recounted bits and pieces of pain while his youngest son sat across the table.
Interjecting once in a while to jog his father’s memory, Ray Estrada, 46, had clearly
heard the stories. Still, the old Colonel withheld the most painful.
“However,” he offered in a rare moment of candor, “I tell you, the most cruel thing that
has happened to me, you will never, never know it. You will never feel it. To walk alone
7
from Kilometer 182 in Bataan to San Fernando Pampanga is something like 80
kilometers. You walk. And you cannot even get a drink under the sun.”
8
CHAPTER 1: MONTHS FROM INVASION TO SURRENDER
Ten hours after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese
military began bombing American bases in the Philippines, where a large force led by
Gen. Douglas MacArthur was caught off guard. On Dec. 8, while the wreckage was still
smoldering in Hawaii, the Japanese destroyed the U.S. air force on the ground in Luzon.
Two days later, the Navy abandoned the islands. MacArthur’s failure to scramble his
fighters and bombers, some 70 of which were destroyed in a matter of hours, tipped the
odds in favor of the Japanese before they ever landed, and has gone down in history as a
disgrace on the general’s record (Dunnigan and Nofi 1995).
4
Two weeks after the bombing started, 130,000 Filipino and American soldiers met the
first advances of Japan’s invasion force, the 14
th
Imperial Army, consisting of 43,000
well-trained Japanese foot soldiers, or hohei, many of whom were hardened during fierce
combat in China (Norman and Norman 2009).
Most of the 14
th
Army landed at Lingayen
Gulf, north of the Bataan Peninsula, and began to push southeast toward Manila. For
years, American military strategists had planned to meet such an invasion with a phased
withdrawal into Bataan, where the army would dig into the thick jungle and deny the use
of Manila Bay for up to six months (Miller 1949).
5
4
Historians generally regard the destruction of the American air force on the ground as one of MacArthur’s
greatest mistakes in defending the Philippines. See pages 15-17 in Dunnigan and Nofi 1995 for an overview of the first
battle for the Philippines and a brief evaluation of MacArthur’s early missteps. Also see Young 1992, pages 9-14, for
descriptions of U.S. air and naval losses in the Philippines.
5
For more on “War Plan Orange-3,” see Young 1992, page 1.
9
Instead, hordes of disoriented and dispirited men—a mixed processional of Filipinos and
Americans—dragged themselves south into Bataan and began the long wait: 99 days of
siege that left most of them malnourished and suffering from malaria or dysentery.
Combat was sporadic but intense, with both sides suffering thousands of casualties
between January and April. Supplies were woefully short, and as the situation worsened,
MacArthur left the country on March 11, vowing to return.
6
Less than a month later, on
April 9—the date in 1865 on which Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox during
the Civil War—Maj. Gen. Ned King, commander of the remaining forces in Bataan,
surrendered to the Japanese (Norman and Norman 2009). White flags went out across
battle lines all over Bataan, and one of them was in the hands of then-Lieutenant Estrada.
“I was the one carrying the white flag,” remembered Estrada. “Kilometer 182. Now I’m
very specific with that, I never forget that. ... There was one officer—I know he was an
officer because he was the only one with a saber. ... We even shook hands, and he spoke
broken English. So we just had a chat for about half an hour, then I said, ‘Let me bring
you to headquarters, because I’m only a [lieutenant].’ So I brought them up. Kilometer
182.”
The following day, Estrada was on the road with 76,000 other captives, Americans and
Filipinos, stumbling north toward the railway station in San Fernando.
7
6
See pages 114-115 in Norman and Norman 2009 for explanation of why the retreating army was undersupplied.
7
Norman and Norman estimate the number of American and Filipino men who started the death march to be
76,000, while Young places it at 75,000.
10
CHAPTER 2: AN AGING, VANISHING BATTALION
I tell you, the most cruel thing that has happened to me, you will never, never know it,
Estrada had said.
You will never feel it.
Cruel is one word to describe the Death March. War crime was used frequently after the
Japanese surrender in 1945 (Norman and Norman 2009).
Ghastly, barbarous, cold-blooded and merciless said The New York Times (Wood 1944).
HORROR, echoed the front page of the Los Angeles Times.
But the children of Bataan survivors and others who endured torture at the hands of the
Japanese have another word, tragedy, and they apply it not only to what their parents
experienced, but also to how their legacy is fading from the collective Filipino memory.
Of the 46,000 Filipino soldiers who endured the ruthless trek up the eastern coast of
Bataan to Camp O’Donnell,
8
by 2010 only a thousand were still alive—the equivalent of
a large battalion (Trota Jose 2009). They would be in their 80s, or older, and the vast
majority had already been laid to rest. Indeed, in a nation of 98 million, a mere 4 percent
were over the age of 65 (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 2010). Dispersed throughout
the 7,100 Philippine islands in their children’s homes or in hospice care, this aging
battalion was rapidly, but quietly, disappearing.
8
An official inscription at the Capas memorial shrine, which used to be Camp O’Donnell, cites 45,692 Filipinos
and 9,300 Americans as having reached the prison camp in April 1942 following the death march.
11
On a sunny December afternoon, Rafael Evangelista leaned over his desk at a nonprofit
veterans group called the Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor and lamented the passing
of a generation of heroes. The son of a Filipino doctor tortured by the Japanese for
treating guerillas in the mountains of Luzon, Evangelista said the ranks of his members,
known simply as “Defenders,” had dwindled to around 300. Many were bedridden.
“We never know … who’s going to show up at our Wednesday meetings,” said
Evangelista. “Remember their ages—the youngest is probably about 87, 89, and there are
some who are 97 years old. So most of them have outlived the longevity threshold.”
Evangelista’s office sits on top of the veteran’s complex at Camp Aguinaldo in Manila.
The Defenders have their own air-conditioned floor, and while young Filipino marines
march drills on the parade deck across the street, secretaries keep track of survivors and
organize ribbon-cuttings and socials. Once a year, on April 9—Bataan Day—the city
honors the few elderly men who represent a distant event in a long-ago war.
Meanwhile, dozens of shopping malls have gone up astride the blatant poverty in various
corners of Manila. Mobile technology and American music are wildly popular in a city
obsessed with trends and celebrity. In December 2009, billboards were advertising
Disney On Ice and the latest fight to feature the local hero, Manny Pacquiao—a Filipino
boxer also known as “Pacman the Destroyer.” Amidst the chaos and squalor of the capital
city, where a fifth of the nation’s population is concentrated, it only makes sense that the
hesitant musings of a generation of heroes surface just one day a year—and only then
symbolically.
12
Despite the efforts of Filipino leaders like Evangelista, the survivors of Bataan are being
forgotten in real time, footnoted even while a thousand of them remain.
“Pacquiao is such a great hero … even though he is merely a boxer because there is such
a shortage of heroes,” said Evangelista. “What we’d like to do is get the young people to
realize, hey, here you’ve got about 300 war heroes, and maybe you should learn their
stories. Be proud to be a country not simply because of Pacquiao—be proud of Pacquiao,
but there are people who contributed so much more.”
13
CHAPTER 3: ‘BORN IN WAR’
And you cannot even get a drink under the sun.
As the light faded over East Manila, Estrada was beginning to recall that march of death.
His voice rose and fell with each new scene, and he employed long pauses to choose
what he would describe next. His small frame tucked into a patio chair, the old man
gestured his way through a portfolio of painful memories that had clearly been sterilized
for public consumption. No bayonet stabbing; nothing of the “buzzard squads” killing
weak and thirsty stragglers. But at least he was describing some of what he remembered.
“And you cannot break from the line—if you break, they shoot you,” Estrada recalled.
“So we just kept on walking, and when the guard is far [ahead or behind], we could get
water from the canal. We stopped—they’d tell us, ‘Stop!’—so the whole column stops. I
remember very well, in Lubao, they gave us a bowl of rice. And we got water from the
canal. That’s it. Then walk, walk, and walk.”
The U.S. Army survival handbook says that the human body requires five gallons of
water a day while performing hard labor in 109-degree heat. The most that Estrada and
his companions were able to sneak in the course of a day was a sip—and sometimes not
even that.
“Lack of the required amount of water causes a rapid decline in an individual’s ability to
make decisions and to perform tasks efficiently,” the Army guidebook reads. If water is
14
scarce, the Army advises, “Find shade! Get out of the sun! Limit your movements!”
(United States Army 1992)
Such self-evident advice was not only unrealistic during the death march; when men tried
it, they were often beaten or killed. Keep walking was the word, according to Estrada, and
many fell along the way, victims of a variety of dehydration-related ills (Norman and
Norman 2009).
“A large loss of body water and salt causes heat exhaustion,” says the Army’s survival
handbook. “Symptoms are headache, mental confusion, irritability, excessive sweating,
weakness, dizziness, cramps, and pale, moist, cold (clammy) skin” (United States Army
1992).
In the final stage, heat stroke follows heat exhaustion: “The patient may die if not cooled
immediately. Symptoms are the lack of sweat, hot and dry skin, headache, dizziness, fast
pulse, nausea and vomiting, and mental confusion leading to unconsciousness” (United
States Army 1992).
Estrada himself was undoubtedly suffering somewhere along that spectrum of thirst, and
perhaps that is why his recollection of the march seemed limited to the footsteps, the
trudging onward. Whatever the case, his memories, seven decades in storage, proved
most vivid when they reached San Fernando, the city built off the northern point of
Manila Bay, where Bataan joins the rest of Luzon. There, after walking dozens of miles,
the captives were made to wait until they could be packed into boxcars for the last leg of
15
the journey to Capas (Norman and Norman 2009). Among other locations in San
Fernando where the Japanese penned up their filthy, malnourished prisoners were a few
cockfighting rings, large holes in the ground with grates over the top. Young Estrada was
placed in the bottom of one of these, awaiting his train to O’Donnell.
“That was about four or five o’clock in the evening, something like this. We were there,
seated, and the Japanese told us, ‘Nobody moves.’ So we were there, seated in the
cockpit, and somebody urinated on me up there,” he said matter-of-factly, motioning
above his head. He chuckled, genuinely amused.
“He could not move, so he urinated. Now that I come to think of it, it’s very funny. I was
there, he was urinating, and I could not move, because the Japanese really will shoot you,
you know?”
Along the route from Bataan to Camp O’Donnell lay some 20 miles of train tracks, and
instead of forcing their captives to continue walking, the Japanese army employed a
collection of boxcars to move the prisoners north to Capas. After the trains there would
be five more miles of walking to reach Camp O’Donnell. Much smaller than modern
boxcars, the 20-foot-long containers would normally carry forty men, but the Japanese
were jamming in more than a hundred, trying desperately to get an immense number of
prisoners to prison (Norman and Norman 2009).
After the scene in the cockfighting pit, Estrada and his comrades were crowded into a
small boxcar, too tight to sit or move. While the old Colonel did not elaborate on what it
16
was like inside the trains, hundreds of other death march survivors have recounted the
hell they experienced inside. “Our spirits rose. We were going to ride instead of more
marching,” recalled Cpl. Hubert Gater of the 200
th
Coast Artillery.
In a few minutes we all wished we had continued to march. The boxcars
had sat in the tropical sun with the doors closed. ... Into the oven we went
and, protest be damned, the doors were closed. The three hours that
followed are almost indescribable. Men fainting with no place to fall.
Those with dysentery had no control of themselves. As the car swayed, the
urine, the sweat, and the vomit rolled three inches deep back and forth
around and in our shoes (Knox 1981).
“They packed us in just as tight as you can be packed,” said Sgt. William Sniezko of the
31
st
Infantry. “In fact, I know there were people that never stood on the floor. They were
being held up by their friends. The ones in the back, where there wasn’t any air, passed
out” (Knox 1981).
Added PFC Jack Brady: “It seems to me that once in a while our train would stop, and
the Jap guards would open the doors so we could get some fresh air. Then is when we’d
get the dead ones out. If we could, we’d lift the corpses and pass them over to the door”
(Knox 1981).
Estrada said he remembered the heat, and the claustrophobia. But most of all, he
remembered emerging from that boxcar into familiar countryside.
“I said, ‘I wonder where we are going.’ And then, at about 12 noon, the wagon stopped,
then I looked around. ‘I know this place! This is Tarlac!’ That’s my place. So we all
17
jumped out, and (there were) about five or six who died inside, but we did not know
because we were so packed.”
Capas, where the train rides ended and the last bit of marching began, is sugar cane
country. And Estrada’s family owned one of the largest farms in the province of Tarlac.
The men had five last miles to walk, Capas to Camp O’Donnell, and along the way,
Estrada recalls, his family’s employees were beckoning from the shoulder, offering a
means of escape.
“When I was there, near our farm, and the farmers were giving me signals, and talking in
my dialect—‘Come, come! We will take care of you!’—if I did it by myself, I would
have been very safe,” he said.
But there had been a vow. Twelve students from Manila, Estrada among them, had
promised to do everything in their power to stay together. And they did: “So when I was
there, in Capas, near our farm, and all our tenants were there, giving me the signal, I was
just shaking my head,” Estrada remembered.
After two or three agonizing days without water—when men were losing their minds
because of thirst, when they had seen hundreds murdered on the road, when Estrada’s
fate as a prisoner of war was about to be finalized with barbed wire and pitiless guards—
he would not abandon his 12 sworn comrades, would not break away to hide in the tall
sugar cane. He kept walking. And today, when asked where he found the resolve, he
shrugs.
18
“The comradeship that is born in war is a very strong bond.”
But camaraderie cuts both ways. At O’Donnell, thousands of men who arrived with
advanced malaria perished within months. No one survived without leaving friends
behind in mass graves thinly covered with dark Philippine soil (Norman and Norman
2009).
“We had army blankets, so all we did was wrap them,” said Estrada. “We’d just carry the
dead. ... Start at about six in the morning; by ... the afternoon, you will reach the end,
where you will throw your dead. There’s no such thing as burial—we’d just throw them.
“The first thing is, there is a doctor already to make sure you are dead,” he added. “Then
they says, ‘He’s dead, throw it in the pit.’ Then the next one also, also in the pit. Then,
when it was full, fill it up. That’s it. That’s how my companions were buried.”
Remarkably, none of the 12 who made an oath to stay together died in the march or at
Camp O’Donnell—to the best of Estrada’s memory, all of the men survived the war. But
he lost plenty of other comrades, and it is the fate of those fallen friends which still brings
water to the old man’s eyes.
One of Estrada’s most painful memories takes place before the surrender and the march
and the boxcars and prison camp. During the initial days of the invasion, Estrada worked
in personnel, writing assignments and calling up reinforcements from the provinces. One
day, he heard that his best friend from college, a doctor, had been deployed with the
infantry.
19
“We were [like] brothers, just brothers. I found out he was there, assigned in the infantry,
with the troops. I said, ‘He’s a doctor, a graduating doctor—why put him in the infantry?
Call him now. Right now. Issue the order.’ The following morning, he was in my office.
And I said, ‘Why are you there, in the infantry? You’re a doctor.’ He said, ‘That’s where
they assigned me.’”
Estrada wouldn’t see his best friend sent off to the front lines. Wouldn’t stand for it. He
said, “No, right now you go! I will issue the order! You will be with the hospital.”
Tears in his eyes, Estrada clapped his hands.
“In about two or three days, the hospital was bombed and he was killed.”
20
CHAPTER 4: ‘OLD GUYS FROM THE OLD WAR’
Violence still visits the islands, but nothing like World War II. Nothing like Bataan.
Maybe the youth just can’t relate to what their grandparents endured. Maybe it wouldn’t
matter if they could.
“The kids are wondering when the next version of Rock Band is coming out,” said Ray
Estrada a few minutes after his father finished telling his story on that balmy December
evening. “It’s like, ‘I’m not going to focus on what happened some 60 years ago, 70
years ago.’”
Moments earlier, the old Colonel had risen slowly from his chair on the patio and walked
inside. There was no discernible limp, but his whole body was bent over and moved at its
own pace—the natural effects of old age, no doubt, but also as if in protest of what it had
endured in youth. As he disappeared into the house, I realized I had just witnessed an old
survivor pulling back the veil that has concealed unspeakable torment for seventy years.
It was an experience very few young Filipinos will ever have.
“The sacrifices made by this great generation [are] so detached from our day-to-day
lives,” Ray said regretfully. “I mean ... he is a living hero. But sometimes we just go,
‘Those are the old guys from the old war.’ Isn’t that true? ‘Just the old guys from the old
war reliving their past, their old glories.’ But if you really think about it, the sacrifices
they subjected themselves to so that we would be the country we are now—then it
suddenly kicks in.”
21
Evangelista, director of the Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, is convinced that
Filipino children need to know the stories from the old war.
“Many of them do not, in fact, realize that they’ve got heroes living in their midst,” he
said. “They are just aware about the death march, about Bataan and Corregidor, but the
implications, the individual stories, are not there.”
One reason for the lack of personal history is that only a few Filipino books and films
have been produced to tell the story of Bataan. The vast majority of what has been
written and filmed about the event was created in the U.S., even though Americans
represented only a fraction of those who made the march. With that in mind, Evangelista
commissioned Trota Jose to write a high school history book full of Filipino accounts of
the war in Bataan.
As a historian and university professor who has dedicated his career to recording the
memories of men like Estrada, Trota Jose is convinced that young Filipinos need to learn
from history in order to understand their culture. And he believes the hard facts in high
school history textbooks are inadequate to tell the whole story.
“I grew up with World War II in our backyard—you heard stories every time family
reunions were held. Everyone had their story about the war,” said Trota Jose. “And then,
as I grew up, I realized … the Filipino side was not well-represented, and there were so
many stories that were never written—they never came out in books.”
22
Researchers have used multimedia methods to capture some of the stories. For example,
Trota Jose has written and helped produce two documentaries about Bataan—a feature-
length film in 1985 and a 50-minute production in 2005. He said many of the subjects in
those two films have since passed away, making that footage the only spoken record of
their experiences during the death march.
His current project—the book commissioned by the Defenders—will eventually take its
place in the Philippine high school curriculum. But instead of the rigid, chronological
narration common to history textbooks, Trota Jose’s writing will reflect the personal pain
of a generation of Filipino warriors. That emotional memory, he said, is what has always
been missing from the texts that supply schoolchildren with their knowledge and opinions
of history.
“I think, the Bataan Death March, they’ll know that,” he said, pointing out that students
in the Philippines learn the facts and figures of World War II just as they do when
studying any other historical event. “But the fighting, the actual experiences of Bataan
veterans—that very few people know.”
The Estrada family, by nature of its lineage, is one exception.
“I always tell my kids, you know, ‘Spend some time with Grandpa,’” Ray said at the end
of our interview at his father’s estate. “Not just because he’s a soldier. They are a
different generation—their value sets, the virtues they hold dear are completely different
than what we hold dear these days.”
23
Confirming Trota Jose’s motivation for recording the personal experiences of Bataan
survivors, Estrada said most children will remember the facts, but little more.
“They know. They hear from their parents. But they don’t have any of the feelings. To
them, it’s just a story, just like reading a book.”
24
CHAPTER 5: ‘DELIVER US FROM EVIL’
It is an inevitable transition—real life into history, experience into ink, outrage lost in
translation from one generation to another. But can it be short-circuited? Can the cycle of
loss and forgetting be interrupted long enough to preserve a piece of the emotional
memory of an event like the death march?
If there was an answer, it would be in Bataan.
The freeway exit for San Fernando is an hour north of Manila, siphoning traffic off the
smooth new toll road into a city just awakening at 7 a.m. Away from the squalor and
smog of the capital, the countryside begins to turn beautiful, and the gruesome history of
San Fernando remains hidden behind a strange veneer of modernism superimposed on
what was not so long ago a small rice farming community.
Beyond San Fernando—where the men who survived the first leg of the death march
were herded into suffocating boxcars—lie the narrower streets of Lubao. This is where
the modern road merges with MacArthur Highway, also known as the Old National
Road. Also known, for about ten days in 1942, as hell.
The Philippines is an island chain, surrounded on all sides by ocean, moistened by near-
continual rainfall. But in April, when temperatures soar into the 100s with obscene
humidity, dehydration only needs an hour or two to take hold. After days? A deadly,
primal thirst. Hallucinations of waterfalls, men fanaticizing while they marched about the
taste of water, the feel of it, the smell.
25
The water in the rice paddies is undoubtedly the cleanest, shimmering around clumps of
green stalks, the season’s plantings. But a little stream in downtown Lubao is almost
completely hidden by the layer of litter resting on top like a carpet. Most water near the
road is not moving, and it all has a sickly green tint to it. Here and there are artisanal
wells gushing clear, cool water into a rice field. Torture for the men on the march to see.
The outskirts of Lubao are defined by the gaudy advertisements of roadside businesses: A
burger house next to a funeral home, a shop selling “secondhand lumber.” Men stack
watermelons under a palm-leaf shade structure and children make their way to school in
their navy blue uniforms. There’s a church with a big satellite dish on the back, a sand
quarry in the river by the Old National Road bridge, and little trash fires burning here and
there. Off the dirt shoulder are tiny internet cafes and tucked-away neighborhoods where
people emerge checking their makeup or looking harried, late for work. Ducks and
roosters pluck at the dirt; a kid drops his pants to relieve himself in his front yard.
As the Old National Highway passes out the south side of Lubao, yellow letters on a
maroon gate advertise a joint called “Double Happiness Restaurant.” Somewhere south of
the next town, Hermosa, a sign at a crossroads makes a simple request: “Please pray the
rosary.” Further south, a few miles outside of Mariveles, a series of church signs appear
beside the highway. The first one reads, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done.” The
last, “And deliver us from evil.”
In Mariveles, where the death march officially began, there is a small shrine with two
plaques and two flags—one American, one Filipino. But the place looks neglected, as if
26
folks rarely make the trip from Manila to see where it all started. The first of the white
kilometer markers that lead the way from Mariveles to Capas is damaged, the bottoms of
its double-zero tiles chipped off, and someone has pinched a wad of bubble gum into the
raised “H” of the word “MARCH” on the plaque.
Up on Mt. Samat, a peak about ten miles north of Mariveles where some of the fiercest
fighting took place in the battle for Bataan in ’42, things look a little better. A huge cross
towers above an open-air colonnade with endless inscriptions. The one that stands out
reads, OUR MISSION IS TO REMEMBER.
Further north, at a shrine built in 1996 to mark the final destination of the Bataan Death
March, are the ingredients to begin constructing a meager emotional idea of what that
infamous event was like. A black obelisk pierces the sky like the tip of a pencil, and
spread throughout the place are signs, plaques, reminders.
On the black stone wall encircling the Capas tower are words by a poet-soldier, Amador
T. Daguio, that summarize the humble attitude of many a survivor: “And when the world
shall wake again/From grim decay to growth and beauty,/Let no one ever know my
pain,/But I have done my humble duty.” The stone beneath his words is still warm at
sunset.
Elsewhere, an old boxcar sits beside a plaque explaining how men suffocated by the
dozens on the tracks between San Fernando and Capas, standing in their own filth
because dysentery had robbed their bodies of any control. A rope bridge stretches over a
27
river that was the prisoners’ only reliable source of water, and the black tower is visible
from every point in the sprawling compound.
So this was where Estrada ended up. Where he wrapped and carried his dead comrades,
dumped them into their communal graves. Somewhere on a piece of marble are words
uttered by Ned King, the field commander whose surrender set the death march in
motion.
Courage is a quality God has seen fit to
dispense with utmost care. The men of
Bataan were His chosen favorites.
I doubt Estrada would call it courage. Determination, maybe, or doing what had to be
done. But he would never presume to call himself a courageous man.
“When you are determined to see your family, you have the strength to walk,” Estrada
had said. “You don’t feel the heat, you don’t feel anything—even the hunger. You just
want, and the feeling is, ‘I want to see my family.’ And that is at all costs.”
28
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crider, John H. “Nation Aroused By Atrocities, Pledges To Avenge the Victims.” The
New York Times, January 29, 1944: 1, 2.
Dunnigan, James F., and Albert A. Nofi. Victory At Sea: World War II In the Pacific.
New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1995.
Estrada, Rafael. All references from interview with author at the subject’s home in
Manila, the Philippines, December 22, 2009.
Estrada, Ray. All references from interview with author at the home of subject’s father in
Manila, the Philippines, December 22, 2009.
Evangelista, Rafael. All references from interview with author at the Defenders of Bataan
and Corregidor, Camp Aguinaldo, in Manila, the Philippines, December 21, 2009.
Knox, Donald. Death March: The Survivors of Bataan. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1981.
Miller, Ernest B. Bataan Uncensored. Long Prairie: Hart Publications, 1949. As cited in
Norman and Norman 2009, page 42.
Norman, Michael, and Elizabeth M. Norman. Tears In the Darkness: The Story of the
Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Trota Jose, Ricardo. All references from interview with author at the Defenders of Bataan
and Corregidor, Camp Aguinaldo, in Manila, the Philippines, December 21, 2009.
United States Army. U.S. Army Survival Manual FM 21-76. Department of the Army,
1992.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. "Philippines." CIA - The World Factbook.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/rp.html (accessed
February 8, 2010).
Wood, Lewis. “5,200 Americans, Many More Filipinos Die of Starvation, Torture After
Bataan.” The New York Times, January 28, 1944: 1, 6.
Young, Donald J. The Battle of Bataan: A History of the 90 Day Siege and Eventual
Surrender of 75,000 Filipino and United States Troops to the Japanese in World War
II. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 1992.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Pfingsten, Tom
(author)
Core Title
A history known, but not felt
School
Annenberg School for Communication
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Specialized Journalism
Publication Date
05/21/2010
Defense Date
05/01/2010
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
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Tag
Bataan Death March,defenders of Bataan and Corregidor,Filipino war veterans,OAI-PMH Harvest,Rafael Estrada,World War II in the Pacific,World War II in the Philippines
Place Name
Bataan
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islands: Corregidor
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Philippines
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Language
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committee member
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Pfingsten, Tom
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Tags
Bataan Death March
defenders of Bataan and Corregidor
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World War II in the Pacific
World War II in the Philippines