A Road of Endless Horror: The Bataan Death March

On January 31st, 2016, Pueblo Indian elder Tony Reyna blew out the candles on his birthday cake with help from his grandchildren. Later, guests sang traditional Pueblo songs, songs that Reyna had helped pass down. He was 100 years old; it was a milestone birthday. But what made this celebration even more extraordinary was that Reyna was one of the few living survivors of the Bataan Death March, a horrific event which took place 74 years prior. After enduring the Death March and three and a half years as a prisoner of war, Reyna lived to be one of the oldest survivors of an atrocity that left lasting scars for thousands of people across borders and decades.

Jungle Warfare

The United States seized the Philippines as a colony after it defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Prior to World War II, the U.S. used its military presence in the Philippines for colonial control. Alongside Philippine forces, American soldiers primarily fought against pro-independence Filipino rebels.

This changed on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, an American naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii. Following the bombing, the United States officially entered World War II. The day after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese then began to bomb the Philippines. Given the Philippines’ close proximity to Japan, the islands became a primary battleground in the Pacific Theater. But the U.S. and Filipino forces were unprepared and ill-equipped to defend themselves against the Japanese. The Philippines’ capital of Manila fell before New Year’s Eve, and the Allied forces split in two. One half, led by General Edward King, retreated into the jungles of the Bataan Peninsula. The other half was led to the island fortress of Corregidor by General Douglas MacArthur.

After fighting through the winter and into the spring, the Allied forces on Bataan were almost out of food and ammunition, and tens of thousands of soldiers had already been killed or wounded. With his troops facing widespread sickness and starvation, General King surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942. It was the largest defeat of the U.S. Army in 80 years. But defeat was just the beginning. If General King had expected his men to be treated in accordance with international law for prisoners of war (POWs), he was gravely mistaken.

Walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death

The Bataan Death March began on April 9, 1942. It was the forced transfer of roughly 75,000 American and Filipino POWs. The prisoners were forced to march over 110 km (approximately 65 miles). The journey took an untold number of lives. Estimates of Filipino deaths range from 5,000 to 18,000, and the number of American deaths is estimated between 500 and 650.

Because the Japanese defeated the Allied forces sooner than they had anticipated, they were not prepared, logistically and materially, to sustain tens of thousands of POWs. So at the outset of the Bataan Death March, the Japanese decided to reduce the number of prisoners by executing hundreds of Filipino officers.

Richard Gordon, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, recalled to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) what he witnessed when he was captured. “I passed my battalion commander, Major James Ivy, and he had been tied to a tree and he was stripped to the waist and he was just covered with bayonet holes,” Gordon said. “He had been bayoneted by many, many bayonets. And that’s when I knew we had some troubles on our hands. We were in for deep trouble.”

The prisoners were ordered to make the 65-mile march up the Bataan Peninsula to the captured Camp O’Donnell, which had been turned into a forced-labor and concentration camp. Wounded prisoners were summarily executed; those who could not get up in the morning were buried alive or beaten to death. Their fellow prisoners were forced to bury them. Those who straggled, broke ranks, fell, or simply refused to go on were shot, stabbed, bayoneted, and even beheaded.

The conditions along the journey were horrifying. In an interview with PBS, one of the march’s survivors, Leon Beck described some of these conditions:

“At night, they put us in barbed wire enclosures, just a single string of barbed wire around the trees and they’d herd you in there. There was no latrine facilities, you defecated right where you were and it got pretty bad and stinky come morning and you couldn’t walk around. You had to stay there. Because of the mess, everybody was sick with malaria and dysentery.”

When the POWs finally reached the railyards at San Fernando after walking for over a week and crossing 65 miles of jungle and muddy roads, thousands had been killed, either by neglect or murder. The survivors were then loaded onto boxcars that became ovens in the heat. Over 100 men would be cramped into a car designed for 40. Thousands more would die standing up on the way to Camp O’Donnell.

Beck was one of a small number of prisoners who escaped. “I just rolled off of the road and got into the edge of the river and there’s a lot of palmetto brush and weeds and one thing or another growing,” Beck remembers. “As soon as the group marched on past me, and got a ways down the road, and out of sight and there wasn’t anything in sight, coming up the road, I went up, swam and waded across that river and got out into a cut rice field.”

Beck joined a number of Filipino and American soldiers who managed to escape or evade capture. These soldiers would fight against the Japanese for the next three years as guerilla fighters until the Philippines was liberated in 1945.

Others had to endure until the very end of the war. Ben Skardon, who survived the Death March, was taken back to Japan on a “hell ship,” the name American prisoners gave to the Japanese prison ships. The ships were not marked as prisoner transport — a deliberate ploy to get the Allies to sink and kill their own captured soldiers. The ship Skardon was on was bombed, and instead of being rescued by the Allies, he was picked up at sea by the Japanese, who then put him on another “hell ship” bound for Japan. The second ship was also bombed, and his friend died in his arms from a wound sustained in the bombing. He recalled a captured chaplain saying to him, “‘Son, you’re going to have to turn him loose.’ And I said, ‘No sir, no sir.’ I could not believe he was dead.” Skardon was then placed on a third “hell ship” where another comrade of his froze to death while they huddled together for warmth. Skardon survived months more of captivity before being liberated following the surrender of Japan in August 1945.

The prisoners who survived the Death March would be used as slave labor, contrary to the rules of warfare regarding the treatment of POWs, and tens of thousands more would die at the hands of the Japanese Army. The death rate for American POWs in Japanese prison camps in the Philippines was a staggering 30% compared to a 3% death rate for Nazi, Italian, and Japanese POWs held by the Americans.

Following the war, Allied war crimes tribunals worked to bring many of the perpetrators of Japanese war crimes to justice in the same manner as the Nuremberg trials against Nazi Germany. Furthermore, after the Allied occupation of Japan, a new constitution was written and Japan adopted a democratic government.

Lasting Scars

Jason Reblando traveled to the Philippines in 2015 as a Fulbright Fellow. He intended to photograph families of Filipinos who worked overseas for extended periods of time. While there he saw one of the 138 historical markers commemorating the path of the Bataan Death March and decided to change his focus. “As I was documenting the route of the Bataan Death March, I couldn’t help but reflect upon the heat and the terror that the American and Filipino prisoners of war must have experienced,” he told CommonLit. Through his research, Reblando gained a deeper understanding of the lasting effects of the Death March on the Philippines today. “Like many countries who experienced the horrors of World War II, the Philippine landscape is scarred with tragedy, and I feel like it is part of the national identity,” Reblando said. On April 9th, the Death March is remembered on a national holiday called the Day of Valor. “On this day of remembrance, community members participate in historical reenactments and build parade floats that commemorate not only the Death March, but various battles in the Philippines,” Reblando explained.

Reblando encouraged people to remember the Bataan Death March as a story of individual humans. “I think it’s important for society to recognize the courage and resilience of those who survived the Bataan Death March and honor those who perished,” Reblando said. “I think it’s not only important to remember that the victims of the Death March were everyday people who summoned the strength to suffer through wartime atrocities, but it’s also important to realize that the perpetrators of the Death March were also everyday people who were capable of performing unspeakable acts. One can only hope that we will learn from the past.”

Phillip Coon, a Muscogee Nation survivor of the Bataan Death March, is one of those everyday people. After the Death March, Coon was sent to Japan and endured forced labor at the Kosaka POW camp. In a 2013 ceremony held on the former grounds of Kosaka, the Japanese government formally apologized to Coon and other veterans for their treatment during the war. Soon after, Coon was awarded the Prisoner of War Medal, a Bronze Star, and the Combat Infantryman Badge. He died a few months later at 95 years old.

When Tony Reyna returned to New Mexico he was one of 11 Death March survivors from the Taos Pueblo community. Once back in the United States, he faced new challenges. “I went to the bank, but they weren’t interested in loans to Indians because they had nothing in the way of security,” he told Indian Country Today in 2013. But Reyna persisted. He opened a store which he ran for decades. He fought to protect Pueblo traditions and served as governor of the Taos Pueblo for two terms. On his 100th birthday, the New Mexico state legislature designated February 1st, “Tony Reyna Day” in honor of the veteran. He passed away peacefully on December 4, 2016. Looking back on his experience of the Bataan Death March, he put it in simple terms for the Los Alamos Monitor. “We survived because we were determined to survive.”