The March
Prisoner's March
(Death of a Friend)
"So you are dead. The easy words contain
No sense of loss, no sorrow, no despair.
Thus hunger, thirst, fatigue, combine to drain
All feeling from our hearts. The endless glare,
The brutal heat, anesthetize the mind.
I cannot mourn you now. I lift my load,
The suffering column moves. I leave behind
Only another corpse, beside the road."
Lieutnant Henry G. Lee
Before General King surrendered his troops he asked, "Will my men be treated well?" and the Japanese officer replied "We are not savages." But, when the Japanese saw the 78,000 starved and diseased men come out of the jungle they were stunned. The Japanese had not prepared for this large number of prisoners to be fed and transported to the camps; they had only expected 25,000 prisoners in good physical condition. Over the course of the next week the men were marched unmercilessly to Camp O'Donnell.
Before the men set out to the prison camp they were searched by the Japanese. The guards would take anything of value from the soldiers. If the guards found anything with the words "made in Japan" on it the poor soldier would be bayonetted instantly. The temperature during the march measured in the mid 90s with 100% humidity. Water was plentiful along the march with a well every couple of miles, but the Japanese guards would not let any of the men have a drink, and if they broke rank to get to the water they were either shot or beheaded. If any of the men along the march fell behind they were bayonetted and eventually the men learned to carry their sick comrades. Also, the men learned to fight for the spots on the inside of the marching columns, as the guards would beat the men on the outside. It also seemed that the taller men were beaten more often, probably due to the resentment of the shorter Japanese soldiers. Sometimes, Japanese soldiers passing by the marchers in trucks would stick their bayonets out of the windows beheading any prisoners close by. Thankfully most of the deaths were commited singly and the only mass slaughter happened on the last day of the march when the Japanese shot a group of 400 Filipino soldiers for no apparent reason.
When they reached San Fernando the prisoners where loaded into cramped and hot railcars. At this point the prisoners believed that the hardest part of their plight was over. They were wrong. The metal railcars heated up like an oven in the blaring Philipine sun. The cars stank from the waste on the floor from those who suffered from dysentary and the railcars were too cramped to sit down. "If you died, you died standing up,"remembers march survivor Jim Bogart.
