The Battling Bastards of Bataan

The Battling Bastards of Bataan They were starving, sick. Many were untrained. Their weapons were obsolete. And their top general lived elsewhere. Bataan’s defenders were truly on their own. By Richard Sassaman Major Marshall Hurt was not having a good morning. Around midnight, he and Colonel Everett Williams, both bachelors on Major General Edward King’s staff, had volunteered to try to find a Japanese officer who would accept the surrender of King’s 75,000 American and Filipino defenders of the Bataan peninsula. The next hours of the Battle of Bataan were filled with noise and confusion. “The roads were jammed with soldiers who had abandoned arms and equipment in their frantic haste to escape from the advancing Japanese infantry and armored columns and the strafing planes overhead,” wrote Louis Morton in his book The Fall of the Philippines (1953). At 2 a.m. on April 9, 1942, Filipino and American troops who had been trapped on the Bataan peninsula of the Philippines’ Luzon island for three months began exploding their TNT storehouses and hundreds of thousands of rounds of small-arms ammunition and artillery shells to keep them out of Japanese hands. Adding to the chaos, just before midnight a severe earthquake had rumbled through the area. Leaving at 3:30 a.m., on a schedule they hoped would put them on the front lines about dawn, the two officers headed north on Bataan’s East Road against a tide of what Hurt later described as “crouching, demoralized, beaten foot soldiers” fleeing south. Their route led “past blown-up tanks, burning trucks, broken guns.” Their car soon became useless. Williams hopped on the back of a motorcycle and rode off, leaving Hurt to make his way on foot. When the two reunited, Williams somehow had commandeered another jeep, along with a driver, and they tried again. Except for “the chattering teeth of our driver,” Hurt said, things were quiet—until they crossed into enemy territory and several dozen Japanese soldiers rushed at them, screaming. Waving a white flag made from a bed sheet, while avoiding raised Japanese bayonets, the officers used sign language to explain their mission. They were taken to Major General Kameichiro Nagano, commander of the Japanese 21st Infantry Division, who agreed to meet King if Hurt would go back and get him. Escorted part of the way by Japanese tanks, Hurt returned to headquarters around 9 a.m., then immediately headed north again with King—wearing his last clean uniform—and two other aides in a pair of jeeps prominently displaying white flags. Still, every 200 yards or so, Morton wrote, King’s small group “was forced to jump hastily from the vehicles and seek cover in a ditch or behind a tree” from Japanese planes who “came in at very low altitude, [and] sprayed the road with their machine guns or dropped a string of small bombs.” Before long “the general’s uniform was as disheveled as those he had left behind,” and it took the men two hours to drive three miles. Few things had gone right in 1942 for the defenders of Bataan, and now they were finding it almost impossible even to surrender. The last month of 1941 had been almost as bad, beginning on December 8 with a surprise Japanese bombing raid on Clark Field, Luzon, 60 miles northwest of Manila. That raid had been as shocking and destructive as the attack nine hours earlier at Pearl Harbor (Hawaii and Luzon are on opposite sides of the International Date Line). The Allied war plan for the defense of the Philippines, codenamed Orange, called for a strategic retreat across Manila Bay to Bataan, where, protected by superior air power, the Allies could hold out until reinforcements arrived from Hawaii. But with the losses of planes on Luzon and ships at Pearl Harbor within several hours of each other, the plan had no hope of success. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) since July, overestimated his Filipino soldiers and underestimated the Japanese. He wanted to try a more aggressive defensive strategy to stop the invaders on the island’s beaches. When that failed dismally, with Filipinos fleeing the battle, he switched back to the Orange plan on December 23 and got his men to safety on Bataan, while moving USAFFE headquarters to the fortress island of Corregidor a few miles offshore. Unfortunately, most of the army’s supplies and food, which had been dispersed from central storage to forces on the beaches, had to be left behind during the hasty retreat. Without food, air cover, or much hope of reinforcement, the American and Filipino servicemen had moved onto Bataan, in the words of one Japanese officer, “like a cat entering a sack.” Essentially, the battle was already over except for the shooting. The 75,000 defenders of Bataan, while technically part of the US Army, were three- quarters Filipino. Unfortun-ately, with the exception of the highly skilled scouts of the Philippine Division, the bulk of the soldiers were untrained, unequipped, and (as the fighting at the beaches had showed) uninterested in hanging around once a battle started. “These people, you could be with them and the next thing you’d be by yourself,” one private said. A corporal added, “The native infantry had a bad case of the runs. They had a million excuses” to leave the front lines. While retreating, he said, they would pass holding up two fingers in a V for Victory gesture. Americans referred to the gesture as “V for Vacate.” A division commander reported that the native troops did only two things well: “one, when an officer appeared, to yell attention in a loud voice, jump up and salute; the other, to demand three meals per day.” Communication between the troops was difficult. “Over sixty-five dialects are spoken in the Islands,” wrote Morton. “In many units there was a serious language barrier, not only between the American instructors and the Filipinos but also among the Filipinos. The enlisted men of one division spoke the Bicolanian dialect, their Philippine officers usually spoke Tagalog, and the Americans spoke neither.” To make matters worse, the Filipinos’ weapons and munitions dated from World War I. Only one in three mortar shells would explode, and maybe one in five of the hand grenades. Many rifles had broken extractors, so after each bullet was fired, the shell case had to be pushed out of the gun with a piece of bamboo. The more modern M-1 rifles “became highly undependable” when dirty, said one private. “We got tired of pulling the trigger and having nothing happen.” One more misfortune for the defenders of Bataan was the weather. It was the dry season in the Philippines, and the lack of rain, choking dust storms, temperatures usually above 90 degrees, and near 100-percent humidity made for an unpleasant environment even when the enemy wasn’t attacking, especially when combined with the tropical snakes, rats, and swarming insects. The Japanese entered Manila on January 2, their invasion mostly unopposed. Things had gone so well for Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, head of the Japanese 14th Army, that he became overconfident and started making mistakes. Intelligence reports indicated that only a ragged army of 25,000 remained to defend Bataan, so Homma allowed 15,000 of his finest troops, the 48th Division, to be transferred to the Dutch East Indies. Their replacements, the 6,600 men of the 65th Brigade, were an untested, poorly trained reserve unit. Homma also had a new opponent to fight—the peninsula itself, more than 75 percent impenetrable jungle. “Bataan is ideally suited for defensive warfare,” Morton wrote. “It is jungled and mountainous, cut by numerous streams and deep ravines, and has only two roads adequate for motor vehicles.” The peninsula was a breeding ground for numerous diseases—malaria, dysentery, typhoid, dengue fever—that attacked both sides without prejudice. By January 7, the Allied main defense line had been thrown up from Mauban on the west coast to Abucay on the east, anchored in the middle by the 4,222-foot-high extinct volcano Mt. Natib. The terrain around Natib was so rugged that the Allies left a five-mile gap in the center of their line, thinking the Japanese could never get through. When the Japanese finally did slog through several weeks later, the Allies retreated and reformed across a narrower section of the peninsula, from Bagac on the west to Orion on the east. Battle forces moved slowly forward and back—not unlike the trench warfare of World War I. In one instance, Philippine scouts fought for four days to gain 40 yards of territory. It was hard even to tell the armies apart. Donald Young wrote in his book The Battle of Bataan (1992) that the Japanese 141st Infantry was attacked by soldiers of the Japanese 9th Infantry, who, “after seven days in the Natib forest, like a blind, hungry rattlesnake, were striking at anything that moved.” On January 22, as the Bagac-Orion line was being established, the Japanese also launched an invasion down the west coast of Bataan. Ordered to converge on Caibobo Point, behind enemy lines, the 1,200 men—mostly seasick, sailing in overcrowded barges in the dark, without proper maps—became separated into two groups. One group landed 7 miles south of its target, and the other, 10. Most of the defenders onshore, under the command of Brigadier General Clyde Selleck, had no infantry training. They included airmen with no planes to fly, members of a naval battalion without ships to sail, and former native policemen.

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