#52. Remembering the Bataan Death March

Episode 45 – Marines Compilation – Episode Script

This episode goes live one day before the 82nd anniversary of the surrender of Bataan Peninsula on April 9, 1942. All the men captured on that and the following few days were forced on to the Bataan Death March – which led to an unthinkable number of deaths due to exhaustion, dehydration, hunger, and disease.
So, to remember that day and honor the men who experienced it, I’m going to share some stories about the Bataan Death March from previous Left Behind episodes.

Stenzler, Spears, Gallagher (Episode 27)
The American and Filipino forces officially stopped fighting and surrendered themselves starting on April 9, 1942. However, some men had been captured in the previous days. Among those men were Captain Jim Gallagher and privates Samuel Stenzler and Frank Spears.
These three men have become, in some ways, the faces of the Bataan Death March – since a photograph of them as prisoners is one of the most iconic Death March photos. Thing is, though, this picture was taken before the Death March even began.
But actually, one of these men – Capt. Jim Gallagher, who was a sports writer from Philly -- didn’t even make it that far. He died the very same day the iconic photo was taken. A few years after the war, one of his fellow POWs wrote a letter to Jim’s father. I’m including it here, because it offers a glimpse at what sick POWs faced on the march.
[Hamburger] “Around 7 a.m. [on April 8] we were lined up prepared to march. [Captain Gallagher] and I were placed in front of the column to set the pace. We marched all day until about 5 p.m. … we were placed under a large Mango tree and the Japs gave us some hot tea and a small sack of cakes for each two men.
“Capt. Gallagher and I split one bag which had 34 small cakes. He insisted I take them all as he didn't care to eat. He was pretty much weakened after the day's march without food, most likely not having any food the previous day. While we were sitting there he went out [of] his head for a few seconds. I asked him what was the matter and he replied, "I wish I knew." From all appearances he was full of malaria.
"At the start of the march Jim appeared as normal as any of us. We were all somewhat weakened and hungry. He didn't mention anything about feeling badly and seemed OK until at the end of the march that evening.
“After we had rested around an hour we were placed on trucks and were taken to Balanga, capitol of Bataan. We were locked up in the basement of a large dwelling and kept there all nite. There were about a hundred Filipinos and one more American there when we arrived. During that evening and early the next morning [Capt. Gallagher] passed out several times. I had some aromatic spirits of ammonia which I held under his nose which seemed to revive him. We had a few quinine tablets which he also took.
“The next morning [April 9] the Japs fed us some rice and canned fish, but [Gallagher] wouldn't eat; he appeared to be too exhausted.
"After breakfast we loaded on trucks and left for Orani. Capt. Gallagher had to be lifted in [to] the truck.
"We detrucked at Orani and were taken in a building, formerly a public market, and were required to fill out some blank forms. During that period, around an hour, Jim was lying on his back [and seemed to be asleep] and Frank Spear was trying to take care of him.”
“When we were ordered back on the trucks [Gallagher] couldn't get up, so Frank Spear picked him up with a fireman's carry and started for the truck. At this time the Japs ordered Spear to take him across the road and into a small shack.
“Spear came back just before the trucks pulled out, about ten minutes. He sat down beside me and told me that Capt. Gallagher died in that shack and that he searched him and took his billfold and identification tags. I told Spear he should leave one of the tags on him so he could be identified later, but just then the trucks pulled out and it was too late. Spear later told me he turned in the tags and billfold to an army chaplain….
"When I last saw him on Spears' back I noticed his face was real purple and remarked that he needed medical attention, but under the conditions none was available. In my opinion, [Capt. Gallagher’s] death was due to malaria, malnutrition and exhaustion...[He] died about 12 noon April 9, 1942."
If you haven’t had a chance to listen to this full episode (#27), I highly recommend it – and actually it’s one of the most downloaded Left Behind Episode. In it you’ll learn what happened to the other two men – as well as Pvt. Frank Spears mysterious origins.

Ray Hunt
While the episode about Jim Gallagher and the iconic Bataan Death March photo is one of the most listened to, one of my absolute favorite Left Behind episodes hasn’t been discovered by nearly enough people. This one is about a handsome, mischievous Air Corps man named Ray Hunt – who escaped the Bataan Death March then joined, and eventually led, a guerilla group.
His story is so cool.
The Bataan Death March “officially” – I put officially in quotes because it wasn’t an organized event with a starting point per say, POWs joined the march as it made its way northward. But the first men who took part in the march started from the town of Mariveles on the southern tip of Bataan peninsula. Ray Hunt was one of those men.
After several days and 50 miles of marching, Hunt was at the end of what he could withstand. And, almost on an in-the-moment whim, he decided to escape.
Here’s a clip about that escape:

[Narrator] The sweltering heat beat upon 22-year-old Ray Hunt, blazing at him from the merciless sun above, reflecting up from the dusty, rocky ground, and coming from all sides through the relentless humidity. The heat had followed him for 10 days as he trudged mile after mile up the eastern side of Bataan Peninsula. Dust and dirt, kicked up by previous marching groups, filled the air, choking him and sticking to his sweat-drenched body.
His tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth, which hadn’t seen water that day, and intense hunger gnawed at his stomach, as he attempted to keep pace with the rest of the group, marching in three columns on the road’s left side.
The classically tall, dark, and handsome young Air Corps man from St. Louis, with eyes that creased in a mischievous glint when his wide smile revealed perfect, gleaming teeth, now resembled a walking skeleton. His uniform – what was left of it anyway – hung off his dysentery and beriberi ravaged body.
Rage and hatred had grown with every footfall of the 50 miles Hunt had already traversed. Rage at the cruelty and death he’d witnessed over the past 10 days. Anger toward the captors who inflicted brutality that, just days before, he could not have even imagined.
Looking up from the ground, Hunt noticed a bridge ahead. Below it, a deep ditch. If only…
Glancing toward the guard at the group’s front, then to the one at back, Hunt moved to the middle marching column. After a second glance, he slipped into the left column.
The ditch became ever closer with every step the advancing group took. And then they were upon it.
The guard looked away, and Ray Hunt dove, headfirst, into that deep roadside ditch. Grasses moved under his fall, falling back in place to hide him from the guards.
[Soldier] “Don’t look!”
[Narrator] He heard an American marching above him hiss to another, who had obviously witnessed Hunt’s dive.
[Soldier] “Do you want to get him shot?”
[Narrator] But no shot came. The guards had not seen the leap. The marching columns passed over the bridge, their footsteps fading into the distance, and the dust settling once again to the ground.
Ray Hunt slowly moved himself forward, crawling along the bottom of the ditch away from the road before another marching group passed over him.
He’d escaped the march, at least for now. But he had to get to safety, to food, and to water.
And then…he’d get his revenge … or die trying.

Hunt had done the impossible. But he was extremely sick. After spending several months recuperating under care of Filipino civilians, he created a small guerilla group to spread misinformation. Then he joined that group with a larger guerilla group that was in contact with US Pacific Command in Australia. He went on to lead several raids, including some that paved the way for the US re-invasion of The Philippines in 1945. Seriously, you’ve got to listen to this episode. It’s number 28 and I’ve put the link in the show description.

Aldrich Brothers
When Ray Hunt and the other marchers from Mariveles reached Cabcaben air strip along the northbound Bataan road, they were joined by several thousand additional POWs who had assembled there on April 9, and had been waiting there for a few days. Among those men were 2 men of the New Mexico 200th Coast Artillery – brothers Jack and Robert Aldrich.
Here’s a bit about their capture at Cabcaben airfield on April 9.

[Narrator] Jack Aldrich had reached Cabcaben Airfield. He was among the last of the 200th to get there.

The next morning, April 9, rumors started spreading: Gen. Ed King was surrendering Bataan. A Jeep trailing a white flag and carrying two of Gen King’s surrender emissaries had passed by Jack Aldrich around sunrise as he awoke at the airfield. (Episode 25 covers the details of Gen. King’s surrender.) Then Japanese aircraft dropped 2 bombs on the Cabcaben airfield as the 200th artillery men dove for foxholes.
Although the men had seen it coming, surrender was a shock. American servicemen couldn’t believe that the Stars and Stripes wouldn’t prevail. Battle-hardened men openly cried in humiliation. Some, including Jack Aldrich, still wanted to fight:
[Jack] “We were prepared to sell ourselves dearly that day. The Japs didn’t know how lucky they were when King surrendered! And we were sure that even if they did surrender us, it would only be a month at most before the Yanks would be in there.”
[Narrator] But surrender had happened and now Jack, Bobby, and the rest of the 200th Coastal Artillery were Prisoners of War.
The scene at Cabcaben airfield soon became chaotic, as hundreds, even thousands, of American and Filipino servicemen continued to pour out of the jungles. Japanese tanks, trucks, and soldiers soon arrived. The Japanese lined up the American and Filipino soldiers, and one POW remembered:
[POW] “They had pistols ready, and I expected to be shot. But they started with stealing jewelry, watches, cigarettes -- anything of value.”
[Narrator] Another shared that a Japanese soldier
[POW2] “made me open my mouth and looked at my teeth. He held a pair of pliers. I saw him pulling the teeth of several American soldiers. The pliers had blood all over them.”
[Narrator] The Japanese soldier was looking for gold fillings – but this POW’s were probably too small to be worth anything, and the soldier didn’t take the man’s teeth, instead kicking him and shoving him aside to continue the gold-tooth quest.
After looting the POWs, the Japanese herded the American prisoners into a field for the night – with no food and no water.
[skip ahead in the episode]
The next day, the prisoners from Mariveles arrived. Some 35,000 POWs left the southernmost town on Bataan, about 9 miles west of Cabcaben Field, on April 10. Historians Michael and Elizabeth Norman wrote:
[Norman] “During the first few days of walking there were so many men on the road, one bunch following closely behind another, they appeared a procession without end, prisoners as far as the eye could see, mile after mile of tired, filthy, bedraggled men, heads bowed, feet dragging, through the ankle-deep dust.”
[Narrator] The Aldrich brothers started their march from Cabcaben airfield, thereby missing the first 9 or so miles and ultimately having a slightly shorter march then the men who set out from Mariveles. All along the route, groups of Filipino and American prisoners, caught in the jungle and other areas on Bataan, joined the march.
From Cabcaban airfield, the main National Road went north, following the eastern Bataan coast.
They marched in groups, 3-4 columns per group, 100-800 men per column. Guards with 15-inch bayonets attached to their rifles accompanied each group, urging stragglers forward with jabs in their back or butt. Jack Aldrich recalled:
[Jack] “We were denied food and water, and made to march at a gait that kept the Japs with us at a dogtrot. When they were replaced by guards on bicycles, we were pushed faster. And that was when the hot sun and the lack of water and food began to take its toll, and guys already weakened by disease and hunger [from the Bataan campaign], began to fall by the side of the road.”
[Narrator] Fallen men were bayonetted and left for dead. One marcher witnessed a fellow prisoner fall to the ground. A guard kicked him and ordered him to stand, but, when the young man got only to his knees before collapsing again, the guard kicked him harder, then placed his bayonet to the fallen man’s throat, pushed it in, then jerked the blade free. The young prisoner lay still, bleeding out in the dirt.
Such scenes played out hundreds of times as the march continued. Another POW recalled:
[POW 2] “I remember one boy who was ill and stopped on the march. He was ordered back into line by a guard. The boy tried to explain to the guard by pointing at his stomach. The guard shot him in the stomach.”
[Narrator] A few men, however, escaped such treatment:
[POW] “I got to the side of the road and fell, holding my stomach. Here came a Jap with his bayonet. I moved quick. That bayonet slashed down. I got up and ran, stomach or not, and he came after me hollering. I ran till I got in the middle of that column.”
[Narrator] Soldiers in Japanese truck-and-troop convoys coming the opposite direction from the marchers would hit the prisoners with rifle butts or bamboo sticks. A survivor later recalled to a newspaper:
[Newspaper] “A guard came down the line vindictively striking prisoners with a rifle butt. The man directly in front of [me] was severely beaten because he was still wearing his helmet while most of the marchers were bare headed.”

The brothers survived the march and then Camp O’Donnel, but then they were separated and taken to Japan – each thinking the other was dead. This beautiful episode (number 29) is about the blood that binds us and the trials that forge our strength.

Lester Tenney
Lester Tenney was a young Chicago boy who joined the US armored (tank) division in hopes of serving a “one and done” year in the military. Unfortunately, around the time his 1 year was up, the unit was called into active duty in The Philippines.
He, too, was captured on Bataan, and later wrote a book about his war-time experiences. In it, he described his time of the Bataan Death March, which I shared in episode #2.

[Narrator] Lester Tenney was now a prisoner of war, and despite Japan’s initial assurances that POWs would be treated kindly, on of his captors smashed Tenney’s nose in with the butt end of a rifle on the day of surrender.
And then he went on the 60-mile Bataan Death March through the hot, wild Philippine landscape with barely enough food and water to remain on his feet.
To encourage himself, he made little goals: Make it to that line of mango trees. Make it to the bend in the road. Make it to that water buffalo. He would later recall:
[Tenney] “You had to stand on your own two feet and you had to keep moving. If you fell down, you died. If you had to go to the bathroom, you died. If you had a malaria attack, you died. The Japanese would just kill you, period. You had to stay on your feet. …. If you looked at a Japanese soldier the wrong way, he would beat the hell out of you.”
[Narrator] He didn’t stop, but he nearly didn’t finish the march when a guard on horseback slashed Tenney in the back with a sword. He, however, was even lucky in that.
At one point, Tenney observed a POW who was sick and disoriented and couldn’t stand. A Japanese guard knocked him out, then ordered two POWs to dig a shallow grave for him. When they refused, one was shot in the head. Two more POWs were ordered to dig 2 graves – one for the dead POW and one for the knocked-out POW. Tenney later told Parade Magazine reporter Peter Maas that he heard “the original prisoner moaning as he was being covered with dirt.”

Tenney was liberated in a Japan POW camp – then spent much of his retirement years campaigning for ex-POW remembrance and compensation. His is a remarkable story of redemption and forgiveness.

Pantingan River Massacre
Some Allies never made it to the Bataan Death March. One such group was a unit of Filipino servicemen from the Philippine Army. Their Japanese captors separated the unit’s officers from enlisted men, then killed all of the officers. This episode (number 31) is a difficult, but important story that is all but forgotten in the annals of WW2 history.
The leaders who ordered the massacre were later tried for war crimes. Here’s a snippet from an examination of one of the survivors:

[Lt. Raff] “Will you state your name, age, and nationality?”
[Pedro] “Pedro L. Felix, 32 years old, Filipino.”
[raff] “What is your present rank and assignment?
[Pedro] “Captain, Inspector General Service, Philippine Army.”
[Raff] “Now, in April of 1942, were you a member of the Philippine Army forces that surrendered to Japanese Imperial Forces on Bataan?”
[Pedro] “Yes, sir.”
[Raff] “About how many men were with you at the time of surrender?”
[Pedro] “I figure in my particular regiment we were about 1500 men – officers and men.”
[Raff] “After surrender, you say the men got into trucks and started towards the destination designated by the Japanese?”
[Pedro] “Yes, sir. We reached as far as the Pantingan River.”
[Raff] “What happened when you reached the Pantingan River?”
[Pedro] “We were stopped by Japanese soldiers who ordered us to get off our vehicles. The Japanese soldiers sorted out the enlisted men from the officers. They then allowed the privates to continue the march towards Balanga.”
[Raff] “About how many officers and noncommissioned offers were left when the privates were taken away?”
[Pedro] “There were anywhere from 350 to 400 officers and noncommissioned officers left.”
[Raff] “And what happened?”
[Pedro] “We were formed into columns of four men and Japanese soldiers started tying our hands behind us with telephone wire, each man connected, tied one behind the other.”
[Raff] “Go on, continue with what occurred at that time.”
[Pedro] “We were marched in those columns of four to a ravine and were made to face toward the bottom of the ravine. There was a Japanese interpreter who spoke to us in Tagalog. He gave statements which can be translated this way: ‘My friends, you have to be patient, This is your fate. Had you surrendered earlier, maybe we would not kill you.’”
[Raff] “And then what happened, Captain?”
[Pedro] “They made us sit on the ground. Just before executing us, the Jap soldiers around us stuck a cigarette into our mouths and lighted them for us. But on the given signal by the Jap officer in charge, they started bayonetting.”

Norman Thenell and Richard Watt
The Bataan Death March ended in the town of San Fernando, which was at the extreme northern end of the Bataan Peninsula (actually, it’s probably not even considered part of the peninsula.) The men who had left Mariveles had marched around 60 miles (but exact distances are reported differently in many sources. So, I just say “around 60 miles.”)
The men were then packed like sardines into airless, metal boxcars and trained even farther north. Men who died in those boxcars remained in a standing position, since there was no place to lay them. Men sick with dysentery, defecated where they stood crammed up next to the other POWs in the metal box.
At the end of the train ride, the men entered Camp O’Donnell. They were sick, exhausted, starving and dehydrated. Here’s the experience of one seemingly friendless young man, from episode 32, which details life at Camp O’Donnell:

[Narrator] A XX-year-old American prisoner of war stumbled through the Camp O’Donnel POW camp – searching for water.
In desperation, he prayed for help to find something to drink.
He’d been in camp only a couple of days – long, torturous days filled with malaria attacks that shook his body violently with shills, followed by sweating that left him dehydration.
He needed water … now.
There was a water spigot in camp. He could see it. He could also see the half-mile long line of POWs waiting to fill their canteens. That one spigot was the water source for more than 14,000 prisoners, and the snaking line often was 2,000 men long. These POWs could wait a good 20 hours for their chance at a drink.
The young POW stood in that line for a good 8 hours, enduring the hot Philippine day. Then the camp’s Japanese authorities shut down the water pump that fed the spigot. He walked away, more dehydrated and with less energy than before getting in line.
He tried to sleep, but the wooden bunks with no matting dug into his back and hips, making rest impossible.
He begged his bunkmates to share their water.
[Ben] “Please, just a sip. What’s the hell’s the matter with you?”
[Narrator] Finally, someone offered him a couple sips from the canteen, but eyed him carefully while warning:
[Bunkmate] “Just a swallow or two, fella.”
[Narrator] His malaria worsened, and he fainted in the middle of camp, coming to only to find himself laying facedown in dirt with other POWs walking right over him. No compassion for yet another fallen soldier.
He crawled to the officer’s barracks. The men inside had water, he could hear the clank of canteens – and there was a rumor that the officers had 5-gallon cans of water. The young POW rested on the ground, his back against a wall under the officer’s window. He yelled with the strength he could muster:
[Ben] “Please, I need water. Can I have a drink. Please.”
[Narrator] No answer came. Could they even hear him? The POW passed out, came to, passed out again.
He awoke in the late afternoon and waited for dark before dragging his malaria-ridden and dehydrated body back to his barracks. There, finally, he saw a friendly face.
[Friend] “You look awful,”
[Narrator] That face told him.
[Ben] “I’m sick.”
[Narrator] The young POW replied. The friend left, returning soon with a few gulps of water and a quinine tablet. The young man took both with gratitude, and finally fell asleep.

This week, as we go about out daily routines, I hope we can remember and honor the men who endured the unthinkable war crime we now call the Bataan Death March, which, if I’m being honest, is slipping too quickly away from the public awareness.

That’s Left Behind the Scenes for today. Be sure to like and subscribe to that you’re the first to know when I drop next week’s episode – about the fate of the West Point Class of 1940 during WW2 in The Philippines.
Have a fantastic week.

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