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Transnational Bataan Memories TRANSNATIONAL BATAAN MEMORIES: TEXT, FILM, MONUMENT, AND COMMEMORATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN STUDIES DECEMBER 2012 By Miguel B. Llora Dissertation Committee: Robert Perkinson, Chairperson Vernadette Gonzalez William Chapman Kathy Ferguson Yuma Totani Keywords: Bataan Death March, Public History, text, film, monuments, commemoration ii Copyright by Miguel B. Llora 2012 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank all my committee members for helping me navigate through the complex yet pleasurable process of undertaking research and writing a dissertation. My PhD experience provided me the context to gain a more profound insight into the world in which I live. In the process of writing this manuscript, I also developed a deeper understanding of myself. I also deeply appreciate the assistance of several colleagues, friends, and family who are too numerous to list. I appreciate their constant support and will forever be in their debt. Thanks and peace. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation is a study of the politics of historical commemoration relating to the Bataan Death March. I began by looking for abandonment but instead I found struggles for visibility. To explain this diverse set of moves, this dissertation deploys a theoretical framework and a range of research methods that enables analysis of disparate subjects such as war memoirs, films, memorials, and commemorative events. Therefore, each chapter in this dissertation looks at a different yet interrelated struggle for visibility. This dissertation is unique because it gives voice to competing publics, it looks at the stakes they have in creating monuments of historical remembrance, and it acknowledges their competing reasons for producing their version of history. My research is historical, archival, and ethnographic and thus consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies. Prisoners of War or POWs write memoirs in order to be recognized. Movies internally contradict themselves as a challenge to a preferred reading. Survivors construct monuments as a means of transforming space and to save a dying legacy. Finally, old and new generations both ritualize events and reenact battles to remind themselves and others of their past. The official narrative of Bataan is set through the development of key works written for the various branches of the armed forces that function as diaries of military operation. In these works, the experience of the POWs is absent. By writing personal recollections POWs become part of a discourse where once they were not included. Moreover, American veterans and expatriates not just write and build their new visibilities, they also perform them. Thus, this study shines a light on discourses that change the learning landscape and impacts what is visible. v TABLE OF CONTENTS COPYRIGHT .............................................................................................................................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................ iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................ v INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................................................1 Bataan’s Alternative Archive ...................................................................................................................8 CHAPTER 1 TEXTUAL BATAAN: FOUNDATIONS OF COMMEMORATION ............................23 The Military History: Hiding Broken Bodies in Heroism....................................................................26 The Bataan Death March: Exposing Broken Bodies in Anguish ........................................................42 The Dyess Report: The Government, the Public and Unfinished Business........................................44 The Expendables: The Subaltern Assault on the Citadel of History ..................................................57 CHAPTER 2 CELLULOID BATAAN: CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS AND LEGACIES.....73 Back to Bataan (1945): Renewing Colonization by Denying Partnership ..........................................78 The Great Raid (2005): Renewing Partnalism by Changing History ..................................................96 CHAPTER 3 SPATIAL BATAAN: REDISTRIBUTING MEMORIAL CAPAS...............................108 Memorializing War in the Philippines: Filipinos Seeking a Space of Their Own ...........................115 Memorializing War in the Philippines: Americans Seeking a Space of Their Own........................151 CHAPTER 4 GLOBAL BATAAN: INTERNATIONAL ARAW NG KAGITINGAN ......................169 Kagitingan and the Araw at the Dambana: The Palimpsests of Time..............................................175 Expatriate Commemoration: New Visibilities and Rituals in Sacred Sites......................................198 Fighting on in New Mexico: Camaraderie, Monuments, and Marathons........................................205 International Bataan: Mabuhay from Corregidor, Aloha from Hawai‘i.........................................216 CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................................................222 BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................................................................................236 1 INTRODUCTION The Battle of Bataan was one of the most intense chapters of the larger story of Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia. After a long engagement, on April 9, 1942, the combined American and Filipino forces in Bataan laid down their arms in surrender to the Japanese Army.1 The final capitulation of Corregidor and the Philippine Islands occurred on May 6, 1942. The Bataan surrender was the largest of its kind by an American force in the twentieth century.2 Approximately seventy thousand Filipino and American combatants surrendered and became prisoners of war (POWs). Suffering from illness, injuries, and deprivation, they walked fifty-five miles from Mariveles in the south of the Bataan peninsula to San Fernando in the province of Pampanga. While some rode in boxcars for the final eight miles, most had to march the entire distance. Only an estimated fifty-four thousand completed what became known as the Bataan Death March. The loss in Bataan, the Death March, and the subsequent handover of the Philippines to Japan was a catastrophe for the Americans.3 The Philippines had been a colony of the United States since 1898. The Americans, beginning as early as 1902, had developed Corregidor Island and parts of the Bataan peninsula into a military reservation, giving the Japanese cause for concern. The Japanese attacked the Philippines on December 8, 1941. Victory would let them secure 1 For details see: John W. Whitman’s Bataan: Our Last Ditch: The Bataan Campaign, 1942 (1990), Richard C. Mallonee’s Battle for Bataan: An Eyewitness Account (1997), William H. Bartsch’cs 8 December 1941: MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor (2003), Gordon L. Rottman’s Japanese Army in World War II: Conquest of the Pacific 1941–42 (2005), and John Burton’s Fortnight of Infamy: The Collapse of Allied Airpower West of Pearl Harbor (2006). 2 Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman, Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (New York: Picador, 2009), 4. 3 Hugh Ambrose, The Pacific: Hell Was an Ocean Away (New York: NAL Caliber, 2010), 438. 2 their flanks as well as control crucial resources in the Pacific.4 The Americans were caught off guard,5 but the combined Philippine and American forces, despite the odds, did manage to crucially delay the Japanese conquest in the Pacific.6 In part because the sites of the Bataan Death March are located outside the continental United States, they have been neglected in official U.S. state-run commemoration. The Bataan sites are spaces of defeat and of memories of horror, and, most importantly, they remind veterans of their abandonment by the highest levels of government. From the POWs’ perspective, Bataan Death March’s memorializing is conspicuously absent, despite its historical significance. In addition, however, the POWs had no place in the triumphalist narrative of the Bataan Death March, which emphasizes joint sacrifice and Allied victory. In the hegemonic narrative developed in a variety of government reports, the POWs were absent. Despite the resilience of an official narrative that occludes Bataan, the Death March is noticeably present in public history. In contrast to state-run commemoration, “public history describes the many and diverse ways in which history is put to work in the world.”7 Veterans from both the U.S. and the Philippines have sought redress from marginalization through their own participation in public history, including building monuments and the performance of ritual events. With the POWs leading the way, stakeholders who are seeking new visibilities and recognition beyond the margins are the driving force behind the public history and thus the resulting public commemoration of 4 Saburo Hayashi and Alvin Coox, Kogun: The Japanese
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