Philippine Scouts - Prisoners of War

Prisoners of War

The Battle of Bataan ended on April 9, 1942, when Major General Edward P. King, Jr., surrendered rather than see any more of his starving, diseased men slaughtered by the advancing enemy. At that point 70,000 men became Prisoners of War: about 16,000 Americans and 54,000 Filipinos. Japanese soldiers marched the emaciated Scouts, American soldiers, and Philippine Army men sixty-five miles up the Bataan Peninsula's East Road on the notorious "March of Death," the Bataan Death March. During the March, Japanese guards shot or bayoneted between 7,000 and 10,000 men who fell, attempted to escape, or just stopped to quench their thirst at roadside spigots or puddles. They also beat and sometimes killed Filipino civilians who attempted to give food and water to the POWs, and at times flashed the "V" for "Victory" hand-gesture to the defeated soldiers along the length of the Death March. The March ended at the railroad head in San Fernando, Pampanga province. There the POWs were forced into overcrowded "40 and 10" railroad cars, which only had enough room for them to sit down in shifts on the final leg of the trip to Capas, Tarlac province. At Capas they were herded into Camp O'Donnell, a former Philippine Army training camp, which was to be their prison camp.

At Camp O'Donnell the Japanese crammed all 60,000 survivors into a Philippine Army camp designed to accommodate 10,000 men. There, the Japanese commander greeted each new group of arrivals with the discouraging "Goddamn you to Hell" speech in his native language, and assured the men that they were "captives," not Prisoners of War, and would be treated as such. There was little running water, sparse food, no medical care, and only slit trenches for sanitation. The heat was intolerable, flies rose out of the latrines and covered the prisoner’s food, and malaria, dysentery, beriberi and a host of other diseases swept through the crowds of men. They began to die at the rate of four hundred per day.

From September through December 1942, the Japanese gradually paroled the surviving Philippine Scouts and other Filipino soldiers to their families and to the mayors of their hometowns. But by the time Camp O'Donnell closed in January 1943, after eight months of operation, 26,000 of the 50,000 Filipino Prisoners of War had died there.

The Japanese transferred the American prisoners to Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija province, where conditions were only marginally better. But as U.S. forces pulled closer to the Philippines in 1944, they evacuated the healthiest American prisoners to Japan and Manchuria, for use as slave laborers. Thousands of men were crammed into the dark holds of cargo ships so tightly that they could not sit or lay down. Again, food and water were scarce, sanitary facilities were non-existent, and the heat in the closed holds of the ships was unbearable. Men suffocated to death standing up. The Japanese ships were unmarked and some of them were torpedoed by American submarines. More of the men died of malnutrition and exposure in the work camps. By the time Japan surrendered and the U.S. and Filipino Army liberated the Bataan Prisoners of War, two-thirds of the American prisoners had died in Japanese custody.